ROLLUP - VCs Abandoning Ethereum | Macy's & NFL NFTs | ConstitutionDAO vs Citadel | Binance Arbitrum

Thanksgiving 2021 ------ 📣 OPOLIS | YOUR CRYPTO CAREER https://bankless.cc/Opolis ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/ ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum 🍵 MATCHA | DECENTRALIZED EXCHANGE AGGREGATOR https://bankless.cc/Matcha 🔐 LEDGER | SECURE YOUR ASSETS https://bankless.cc/Ledger 🧙‍♀️ ALCHEMIX | SELF-PAYING LOANS http://bankless.cc/Alchemix ------ Topics Covered: 0:00 Intro https://bankless.cc/Opolis 4:30 Markets 4:43 BTC Price 5:08 ETH Price 6:55 ETH/BTC Ratio 8:08 DeFi Action 9:55 Layer 2 Beat 11:45 EIP-1559 https://twitter.com/christine_dkim/status/1461345650365415424?t=KlU78KsQvHl0fG4jqUZHiQ&s=19 https://twitter.com/christine_dkim/status/1461345650365415424?t=KlU78KsQvHl0fG4jqUZHiQ&s=19 1M ETH Burnt https://twitter.com/evan_van_ness/status/1463489678649303044?s=21 15:20 Hash Rate https://twitter.com/econoar/status/1462076989980889094 16:32 Gas Fees 17:59 Axie Ronin https://cryptoslate.com/1-8-billion-moved-to-ronin-dex-from-ethereum-in-2-weeks 19:14 Ethereum Scale https://ethtps.info/ 22:55 SAND https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/the-sandbox 24:40 Turkish Lyra https://twitter.com/SadafJadran/status/1463387742759374848?s=20 28:00 RELEASES 29:00 Binance & Arbitrum https://twitter.com/binance/status/1461565999832973313?s=20 31:29 DeFrag https://defrag.fi/ 32:43 Reputation DAO https://twitter.com/ReputationDAO/status/1461147989611663361?s=20 34:20 Lattice Metamask https://twitter.com/ConsenSys/status/1463224325864148995?s=20 36:18 Aave Arc https://twitter.com/AaveAave/status/1461321606895124482 38:38 Zapper Mobile Tease https://twitter.com/sebaudet26/status/1463340665769639940 RAISES 39:00 Gemini Metaverse https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeldelcastillo/2021/11/18/gemini-raises-400-million-to-protect-the-metaverse-from-meta-facebook/?sh=37acaa675f57 40:05 Royal https://twitter.com/3LAU/status/1462856758095876097?s=20 43:43 Moonpay https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/124980/moonpay-raise 44:14 Jobs https://pallet.xyz/list/bankless/jobs 45:30 NEWS 45:55 Crypto Twitter Drama https://twitter.com/zhusu/status/1462216210116853762?s=20 47:10 New EIP https://www.reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/r0yy6c/why_calldata_gas_cost_reduction_is_crucial_for/ 51:35 Citadel CEO Constitution https://www.wsj.com/articles/citadel-ceo-ken-griffin-outbid-a-group-of-crypto-investors-for-copy-of-u-s-constitution-11637352087 54:20 Polygon Uniswap Proposal https://twitter.com/MihailoBjelic/status/1461847683195449349 55:55 Infinite Machine Movie https://twitter.com/CamiRusso/status/1463522018066931716?s=20 56:22 Tokemaki https://twitter.com/TokenReactor/status/1463320665008705539?s=20 57:25 NFL NFTs https://twitter.com/coindesk/status/1461410656465346568?s=21 58:43 TIME NFT Show https://twitter.com/robotosnft/status/1463161775344525327?s=21 1:00:03 Macy’s NFT Parade https://www.theblockcrypto.com/linked/124909/macys-launches-parade-inspired-nft-collection-for-charity 1:01:54 El Salvador Bitcoin City https://www.reuters.com/markets/rates-bonds/el-salvador-plans-first-bitcoin-city-backed-by-bitcoin-bonds-2021-11-21/ 1:02:55 IMF https://www.theblockcrypto.com/linked/125106/imf-says-el-salvador-shouldnt-be-using-bitcoin-as-legal-currency 1:04:59 Mining Photos https://pomp.substack.com/p/10-epic-bitcoin-mining-photos 1:08:24 OBJ BTC https://www.foxla.com/sports/rams-wr-odell-beckham-jr-to-receive-full-salary-in-bitcoin 1:08:47 Citigroup New Hires https://www.theblockcrypto.com/linked/125051/citigroup-hires 1:10:32 Tether FUD https://twitter.com/jacoboracle/status/1463299431080632325?s=21 1:11:26 Quick News Takes Powell: https://www.theblockcrypto.com/linked/125000/biden-re-nominates-powell-as-fed-chair-with-brainard-as-vice-chair PoolTogether: https://twitter.com/Dogetoshi/status/1463280832907464708 BinanceChain: https://twitter.com/EdgarArout/status/1461393012395843591?t=AWNzxEqItXzE_RQMaMpygA&s=19 https://twitter.com/EdgarArout/status/1461393012395843591?t=AWNzxEqItXzE_RQMaMpygA&s=19 1:15:00 TAKES 1:17:00 Abandoning Ethereum https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/abandoning-ethereum 1:46:06 Opportunity https://twitter.com/cyounessi1/status/1462240406662438922?s=21 1:47:07 Cars vs Carriages https://twitter.com/epolynya/status/1462832369853874176?s=20 1:47:32 Pivotal https://twitter.com/TrustlessState/status/1463015187275935748?s=20 1:52:37 What David’s Excited About 1:53:45 What Ryan’s Excited About 1:55:37 MEME of the Week https://twitter.com/BanklessHQ/status/1462795120839901184?s=20 ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/bankless-disclosures

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

• 0:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  Hey Bankless Nation. This is the fourth week of November. It's Thanksgiving week if you are in the US listening. David, Happy Thanksgiving, man. How you doing?

• 0:14David Hoffman?

  Oh, Happy Thanksgiving to you. I'm doing absolutely fantastic. By the time listeners are listening to this, I will be home in Seattle with my family and my super cute nephew. And if you guys haven't noticed, this weekly roll up is coming to you a day early because of Thanksgiving. So Happy Thursday, but still get your coffee because we have a bunch to do in this Thursday Bankless Weekly Roll Up.

• 0:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's right. If you're eating some turkey with your family and stuff, then just put on the Bankless Podcast. Get them up to speed on crypto. They'll thank you later, okay?

• 0:41David Hoffman?

  Yeah, earbuds in, family out, weekly roll up on. Let's do this.

• 0:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, you know, on Thanksgiving, you're gonna have some Thanksgiving crypto conversations, right? Are you gonna have a few? Do you have any extended family?

• 0:52David Hoffman?

  It's inevitable. It's inevitable.

• 0:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah?

• 0:54David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I always tell...

• 0:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  What do they ask you?

• 0:55David Hoffman?

  I always tell the same story. And like, a lot of people resonate with this story. My sister hates it that like, every time she like, runs into me at some sort of gathering, like, I'm talking about crypto. But here's how this works, right? Like, so like, family gathering, 20 people, 30 people, maybe there's a party in the backyard, I don't know. And they're like, "All right, David, like, what do you do?" And I go, "Oh, I work in..." Like, well, first off, here's how this goes. I ask them what they do, and then they give me some like, normal job. And I'm like, "Okay, I get it. Like, marketing. Like, I know, I know what that is." And then they ask me what I do. And I'm like, "Oh, I work in crypto." And then, of course, they have a bajillion questions. And then my sister comes over, hears her like, little brother talking about crypto. It's like, "Oh, David's always talking about crypto." I'm like, "They asked me. They asked me. It's not me."

• 1:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, but let me ask you. Let me ask you. I'm gonna play your sister's devil's advocate here. Do you ask them what they do in order for them to ask you what you do so that you can tell them about crypto, sir?

• 1:48David Hoffman?

  Maybe subconsciously, but not intentionally.

• 1:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  When they ask you, are you excited that they've just asked you the question? And how do you lead into it? Like, where do you even start? That's where I have such a hard time.

• 2:01David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I always...

• 2:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like, "Let me tell you about the history of money. Do you know the gold standard? Let's start there."

• 2:07David Hoffman?

  So what's crypto? It's like, "All right, well, in 1973, Nixon went off the gold standard."

• 2:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, man, too much fun. All right, guys, we've got a jam packed schedule for you, of course. We're going to talk about VCs abandoning Ethereum, at least the fund managers. There was some crypto Twitter drama over the weekend, David. I know you saw it.

• 2:26David Hoffman?

  An oversupply of drama.

• 2:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  You were a part of it. Yeah, absolutely. We're going to talk about that, too. Also, the Constitution. Last week, we talked about purchasing the Constitution. We were rugged by a fund manager, though.

• 2:37David Hoffman?

  The worst of worst fund managers.

• 2:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  The same guy who rugged us on GME. We're going to talk about that, too. It didn't happen, unfortunately. Macy's NFT Day Parade. They're going to put some NFTs as floats, I believe. Also, the NFL going to Polygon. That's an interesting story, too. So lots to uncover, even in this short Thanksgiving week. David, before we get into it, man, we got to talk a little bit about Opus. I love what Opus is doing because it is empowering the new worker, the self-sovereign worker. What is Opus up to, David, and why are we sharing this?

• 3:09David Hoffman?

  Yeah, Opus is a DAO for DAOs. So if you want to work for a DAO, be a self-sovereign worker that manages your own, works life balance and work for a DAO, that's fantastic. A problem with that is what about healthcare? What about things like payroll? What about stability? And Opus is a DAO to help bring stability for the DAO worker, the self-sovereign worker. So Opus is itself a DAO. It's kind of a co-op. And when you join Opus, you join in a healthcare group, a group of people that all are given health insurance by the same organization. And you guys, you split the risks, split the payments, and it's a

• 3:48David Hoffman?

  way to get healthcare for everyone in the co-op. And just like every other DAO, using the Opus product gives you ownership in the Opus DAO. So if you sign up today, or not today, but also today, but also before the 1st of January 2022, so the end of the year, you will get a 1,000 work token, that's the Opus token, bonus, along with 1,000 bank token, that's a bankless DAO token, if you join Opus by January 1st. So click on the link in the show notes to get started getting your health insurance through Opus.

• 4:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think that's a bankless.cc slash opala. So many people, David, they're like, I'd quit a job today if I had health benefits. Well, now you can get those and it's not just health. They also can pay in crypto. They provide payroll. They'll help you with taxes. It's the whole gamut. I know this is for our US listeners because we have particular trouble when it comes to healthcare. But maybe they'll be expanding beyond that as well. Anyway, all right, David, let's talk about the market. What is happening in the market this week? I'm going to flip to our Bitcoin chart to tell us more.

• 4:51David Hoffman?

  A little quiet in the market this week. Bitcoin took a little bit of a tumble. Started the week at around $60,000. Is currently clocking in at $56,600. Overall down about 5% on the week. But in terms of, you know, grand scheme of things, not really too much action there.

• 5:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  No big deal. Okay. How about ETH price going into Thanksgiving holidays? Are we going to be bragging to our, our family and friends? I don't know.

• 5:14David Hoffman?

  Yeah, a little bit flat on the week. We started the week at, uh, where did we start the week at? 40,000 ish dollars, hit a high of $44,000.

• 5:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  To me, 4,000. I'll take you down by.

• 5:27David Hoffman?

  4,400. Excuse me. Yeah.

• 5:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  That'd be nice someday. Hey, a year from now, that will be the, the roll up report.

• 5:34David Hoffman?

  Yeah, sometimes I forget to stop looking into the future. $4,232 is where the Ether price is. So a little bit up on the week. Ether doing a really good job keeping his head above 4,000. It dipped below for 4,000 for a moment two days ago. But has really fought hard against staying below 4,000. There's also a story of the DXY, the dollar index gaining a lot of strength.

• 5:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  Getting strong.

• 5:59David Hoffman?

  Yeah. And so there's, the traders are talking about Bitcoin weakness in the face of dollar strength. I have my own takes there, which we will unpack later in the show. But Ether had a very strong performance against what is overall a slightly down market this week.

• 6:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, family questions, Thanksgiving questions. David, what crypto should I buy? How do you answer that one?

• 6:17David Hoffman?

  Ether.

• 6:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  And is it too late to buy, sir?

• 6:20David Hoffman?

  Absolutely not.

• 6:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Look, okay, a year ago at this time, you're having that conversation with your family. It would have been a better time to buy $737 is the price Ether was trading. Well, that was, that was January 1st. I wonder if I, oh, that's, that's a year to date. Let me do the one, one year. My God, it's even

• 6:39David Hoffman?

  500, yeah, 600.

• 6:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  $600, $500, somewhere in that, that range. Better time to buy, still not a bad time to buy if you're holding for the long run, I suppose. Of course, none of this is financial advice, right, David?

• 6:52David Hoffman?

  Absolutely not.

• 6:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  I'm sure you qualify.

• 6:54David Hoffman?

  Why would you think that?

• 6:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  Ether Bitcoin ratio, what's happening there?

• 6:57David Hoffman?

  Yeah, up on, up on the week, we started, we ended last week around 0.7. We are at 0.074, hit a peak of almost 0.076, which if you zoom out for like maybe the six month time horizon, Ryan, we are approaching like a very, the end of where Ether BTC ratio has been at its local high in the last year. So it hit the high earlier this year at 0.08-ish. And we've been bouncing between 0.08 and 0.06 for like the last six months. And we, there's not much room left before we establish new highs on local timeframes. Yeah, look at that, look at that.

• 7:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  We are, we are not having that fourth quarter weakness that Ether generally has. Like Bitcoin, I mean, traditionally in bullish markets, Bitcoin has a killer fourth quarter. And then Ether kind of languishes, but that's not happening. They're, you know, they're both kind of doing okay and Ether is definitely keeping up, more than keeping up.

• 7:53David Hoffman?

  There's very little precedent for Ether having any sort of price discovery above this level. So like, we keep on going higher, like we don't really know what happens next. And so a lot of people are speculating, oh, where, where is this going to go?

• 8:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  I feel like this number was the exact same last week when we talked. This is total locked value in DeFi. This is the DeFi pulse. We're above $100 billion, $106 billion. So just kind of hanging there seems similar to last week. How about our DeFi tokens? DeFi index tracks that. What are we looking at this week?

• 8:29David Hoffman?

  A little bit down on the week. DPI started the week at $355, ending the week at $348.

• 8:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, let's talk a bit more about indexes. This is the bed index. So this is a third Bitcoin, a third Ether and a third DPI. All of them put together. What are we looking at on the week?

• 8:49David Hoffman?

  Also slightly down on the week. Started the week at 172, currently clocking in at 165.

• 8:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's a good recommendation, right? So if you're talking to your family and friends, right? A third, a third, a third. Just buy the bed index. Sleep comfy at night. That's, that's what we say here on Bankless.

• 9:05David Hoffman?

  Yeah, they're always looking for something on Coinbase though. So Coinbase, if you could go ahead and list bed, that'd be fantastic. Otherwise I'll just have to keep on recommending Ether.

• 9:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  You know what though? They're actually what they really want. You know, like what I found a lot of people I talked to is like, they don't actually want to know about Ether. They want to know about the next Ether.

• 9:24David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 9:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's kind of their question.

• 9:25David Hoffman?

  It's always the questions. Like every time I like meet someone and I tell them I'm into crypto, like half the time it's like, all right, what's the next token I should buy? I'm like, well, wait a second. Have you bought Bitcoin or Ether? And they're like, no.

• 9:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 9:37David Hoffman?

  I'm like, why are you asking me about the next token? You haven't even started, you haven't even found the starting line.

• 9:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, you're not even into your crypto monies yet.

• 9:43David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 9:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like learn your ABCs first before you start spelling things.

• 9:47David Hoffman?

  Get out of here.

• 9:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  Man, you and I should have Thanksgiving together sometime.

• 9:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  Good conversations. All right. Layer two beat. This is good, man. This is very good. It keeps going up.

• 10:01David Hoffman?

  Keeps going up, up only.

• 10:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  Layer two beat for people. We sometimes cover this in the market section. This is the amount of value locked inside of Ethereum rollups and Ethereum layer twos. I should broaden that, not, not just roll up, but Ethereum layer twos. We are at 6.5 billion and it keeps going up. And David, after our conversation with Starkware, like, look, man, this is the, I will keep saying this, this is the chart to watch in 2022. Okay, this is the new DeFi pulse type of chart that's just going to keep going up and up and up and rocketing up as rollups and layer two becomes saturated and it's, you know, it's already pretty healthy at 6.5 billion.

• 10:44David Hoffman?

  Yeah, up 20% on the week, clocking at 6.5 billion. Yeah, there's some big winners this week. Bopin Network, don't actually know what that is, clocking at number two, up 180% in total TVL on the week. So brand new L2, apparently it's an optimistic rollup. Didn't know about that one. Another big winner this week is Loopring, up 25% in TVL. Immutable X, up almost 50% in TVL to $237 million. Diversify, up 23% at $59 million. Some big winners, some big movers this week.

• 11:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, absolutely. We'll continue monitoring this. It's still super early days.

• 11:18David Hoffman?

  Before you move on, check out the ETH number. So we're looking at the dollar number. Let's check out the ETH supply in.

• 11:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, okay. You can do that?

• 11:24David Hoffman?

  Yeah, ETH, all-time high, all-time high. That's what really matters. Yeah, so if you measure it in ETH, you get the noise of the market.

• 11:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  Is this denominated in ETH or is this just ETH?

• 11:33David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 11:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, so this is, this could be stablecoins, it could be other value, but it's just denominated in ETH. Is that correct?

• 11:38David Hoffman?

  ETH equivalent. Yes, you're right. Yes, you're right. Oh, yes.

• 11:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Got it. Okay, so we're just changing the denomination here, but this is still cool. A lot of ETH over there, too. Let's talk EIP 1559. I mean, how many months has it been now? Let's see.

• 11:51David Hoffman?

  It's been specifically 105 days.

• 11:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  Thank you, sir. That was very precise.

• 11:56David Hoffman?

  Actually, actually, that was on the 18th, so it's actually been roughly 112 or 111 days.

• 12:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, well, how we know that is Christine Kim, who is an analyst at Galaxy. She is looking at Ethereum's fee market upgrade. I love, by the way, that analysts now, kind of like Wall Street-esque, I know that Galaxy is a crypto fund, but they're also like Wall Street plugged in, okay? Now, real analysts are looking at EIP 1559, looking at Ether as a bond. And what does she have to say to us? David, you want to talk about some of these tweets?

• 12:29David Hoffman?

  Yeah, she's got some great charts. The first one, she says, "Since activation, EIP 1559 has saved users a total of $844 million through base fee refunds." And so what this means is that if you overpay for your transaction because you just wanted to go in, but you, EIP 1559 actually returns you the amount that you've overpaid above and beyond base fee. So this is people learning to wrap their heads around from the previous form of transaction types to the new form of transaction types. Actually baking in how much a transaction costs into the protocol saves people money because they don't have to overestimate it.

• 13:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Stacking these wins. Win number one for users is saving money.

• 13:07David Hoffman?

  Yeah. Second one, "The average cost of sending a transaction on Ethereum has continued to climb, tripling in dollar terms and doubling in native units since the activation of EIP 1559." This is going in parallel with the increased demand for Ethereum block space. EIP 1559 does not increase price, increase gas fees, but it just so happens that-

• 13:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  It doesn't alleviate them.

• 13:30David Hoffman?

  It doesn't, yeah, it doesn't alleviate them, but it just so happens that once EIP 1559 was implemented, the NFT markets really took off, as well as DeFi markets as well. So, demand for gas since EIP 1559 has only gone up.

• 13:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, not a win there, but like, it's kind of neutral. Well, what's the next one?

• 13:45David Hoffman?

  It's a win for Ether as hard money. Yeah.

• 13:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  True.

• 13:48David Hoffman?

  Third one, "Despite lower earnings from transaction fees, total miner revenue in dollar terms has increased 33%. So miners have actually been making all-time highs in dollar revenue."

• 14:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  I thought they were going to leave the market, David.

• 14:02David Hoffman?

  Oh, yeah, yeah. That was the narrative, right. That's what they said. That's what they said. "They're going to kill our business," but nope. Yeah, all-time high miner revenue, even after EIP 1559.

• 14:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, God bless the miners. Hope you guys are investing in Ether so that you can become stakers. What's this next one, David?

• 14:17David Hoffman?

  56 of all new coins issued on Ethereum have been offset, aka burnt, by the amount of ETH burnt through base fees.

• 14:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  56%, right?

• 14:25David Hoffman?

  56%, yeah. So, we are, as a result of EIP 1559, Ether issuance has been reduced by 56%, almost more than half. Crazy.

• 14:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  Is that, that's a happening? Did we just get a happening?

• 14:37David Hoffman?

  An accidental happening. Yeah.

• 14:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, cool. Accidental. That's awesome. And she writes more. There's an entire research paper here that you can go look at. But once again, super cool to see analysts diving into that, seeing this on the charts. Yeah, great data. Also, David, we just passed a major milestone. All right. Over 1 million ETH has now been burnt since EIP 1559. This happened Tuesday, I believe. So earlier this week, huge milestone, a million ETH. That's like 1% ish, just less than 1% of all ETH supply has now been burnt. What?

• 15:11David Hoffman?

  Yep.

• 15:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  1% man, it's crazy.

• 15:14David Hoffman?

  It's like 0.8%, but yeah, pretty, pretty close.

• 15:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  We're getting close. Well, we could celebrate again when it actually hits 1%. This is Eric Connor.

• 15:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  What's he say?

• 15:23David Hoffman?

  Ethereum network hash rate all time high. There is, has never been more hashes produced per second on Ethereum than right now. It's been up and up and up, basically since forever. And even with EIP 1559, the Ethereum network security is at all time highs. This definitely has to do with the increasing ETH price, right? As ETH price goes up, there's more minor incentive. And yeah, so Ethereum also never, has never been more secure.

• 15:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, I think the lesson there is don't believe the FUD. I mean, this might be a recurring lesson in this, in this conversation. It's like, there are some concerns, of course. I'm not saying everything is always rosy, right? Like there are some reasons to be bearish. There's, you know, some technologies that will take longer. But oftentimes, David, people get trapped by FUD type narratives. You remember when everyone was saying pre-EIP 1559 first would never come? Then when it, when it was obvious that it would come, that it was too risky, would destroy the network, miners would leave.

• 16:21David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 16:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Gas fees would shoot up. Yeah, user experience would be terrible. Like, none of these things happened. It's just narrative battles. We're going to do a major narrative battle in a second. But here's a pro tip on gas fees. Want to save on some gas fees this holiday season? Then you should plan your transactions, not during business hours. All right. So like, don't do this Monday, Tuesday. Yeah, don't do US East Coast ish Pacific. Time business hours, do it on Saturdays. Saturdays at like 3am it looks like, or Sundays even better, like 3am Eastern time. This is a chart that shows average base fees by time of day in the East Coast time zone. And when things are more expensive, that's, that's, that's the yellow color.

• 17:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  And when things are cheaper, that's purple. And it's kind of showing us when the cheapest time period to get transactions through.

• 17:13David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so it looks, yeah, looking like Saturday and Sunday, much quieter. Wednesday is a bad day to make transactions, but also specifically noon at Eastern time.

• 17:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  Worst day.

• 17:24David Hoffman?

  Do not, do not send your transactions then.

• 17:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, midweek.

• 17:27David Hoffman?

  Right, between midnight and 9am on Mondays, Eastern time is a great time to do it. Same times throughout on Saturday and Sunday. Anytime after noon till like, you know, 5pm Eastern time on a weekday, probably should just wait.

• 17:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Uh oh, this is looking like banker hours, David. Are we in trouble here? I thought this was bankless. People doing all their DeFi banking during like workout.

• 17:50David Hoffman?

  People are at work, like being distracted and just like, oh, I could just make some, yeah, right. Buy NFTs instead of doing my work, that's what's going on.

• 17:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, who knows? It's helpful though. It's super cool. You can see all that too. Um, let's talk about Ronin. This is Axie Infinity. I think it's a bull case for Axie Infinity, to be honest, right? It's like, um, they've had a lot of, it's, it's been an incredible year for Axie in general. People are wondering, like, what's the next catalyst for them? Well, it's really cool that they're turning their sidechain, their Ronin sidechain, which maybe in the future becomes a rollup. They're turning that basically into like a mini Axie, um, banking system, right? So now they just rolled out an economy, right? They just rolled out a decentralized exchange. Uh, 1.8 billion dollars moved to the Ronin Decentralized Exchange over the past two weeks. This thing is still brand new.

• 18:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  What else we got? 1.3 billion in total locked value over the last 30 days. 7.5 billion in volume, just crushing it, man. People trading axes, trading assets, and it's become sort of a, a banking layer. I bet this is how millions of people were, will find their ways into DeFi. This might be for a lot of people, their first banking experience. Might be Ronin Sidechain, DeFi, you know, using MetaMask or something. Uh, super cool to see that.

• 19:07David Hoffman?

  Hundred percent, yeah. No, Axie proving out to be a sustainable economy, not a flash in the pan. Really cool.

• 19:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  My God, I think I fell in love with this website.

• 19:15David Hoffman?

  This graphic is phenomenal.

• 19:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  What is this?

• 19:18David Hoffman?

  Okay, so this is ETHTPS.info, ETHTPS.info. And it's a great way to visualize the transactions per second of the overall Ethereum ecosystem.

• 19:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  In real time?

• 19:30David Hoffman?

  In real time, yeah, in real time. So currently clocking in at 122 transactions per second. And then if you also hit that button, exclude sidechains, you can go back and forth between including true rollups that have the same assurances of Ethereum versus also having sidechains. So if you want to count just the rollups, Ethereum is clocking in at 5.28 transactions per second. If you include sidechains, it's up to like 122. But this is not the theoretical maximum. This is actually Ethereum as being used as a system, right? The actual transactions that are going through. So this actually changes. Oh, the true rollup throughput just jumped up to 16.15 transactions per second. So this must be updating every single block. Really cool visualization.

• 20:16David Hoffman?

  And so as we were watching like L2 beat go up in TVL, we're also going to be watching the squares on the right side grow and grow in size. For the audio listeners, we're seeing a big, big blob that is Ethereum with some smaller squares on the side. That's Arbitrum, Optimism, ZK Sync, ZK Swap, Immutable X, Loop Ring, all the layer twos. As those two things build out, we're going to see those get larger and Ethereum shrink and the transactions per second go up, right? And yeah, it's really cool visualization.

• 20:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Here's the big lesson too, David, is that if you want to measure the transactions per second of Ethereum, you can't just take main chain, like the 10 to 15 transactions per second. Increasingly, you're going to have to take the entire ecosystem that is secured by Ethereum. So that will be mainnet plus all of the rollups. And that will give you the real transactions per second time. That is Ethereum scalability strategy. So as you said, I expect in the future, this purple to be like just a small sliver.

• 21:17David Hoffman?

  Exactly.

• 21:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  And so much more activity.

• 21:20David Hoffman?

  Just the settlement layer, right?

• 21:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. website, I bet we'll include this in the future in the roll up as well.

• 21:26David Hoffman?

  Before you go on, Ryan, we should talk about the theoretical max, right?

• 21:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, yeah, let's get there.

• 21:30David Hoffman?

  Arbitrum and optimism actually get used more and more and more, and they also open up and unconstrain their layer twos. The theoretical theoretical max of these things are insane, right? Like, right now, people are using Arbitrum a little bit, right? Clocking in at 49 transactions per second with a theoretical max of 40,000 per second. Optimism.

• 21:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's the max recorded, right?

• 21:51David Hoffman?

  No, the theoretical max. Oh, yeah, that's the max recorded, yeah, so.

• 21:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's 49, right?

• 21:55David Hoffman?

  It's 49, right. Optimism has only clocked in at 2.4 max transactions per second recorded. But again, this is because people are just beginning to use these things. Immutable doing 28.3 transactions per second. Like, we actually need people to actually go on and start to use these things to really, like, rev up how many TPS they can actually do. But like, theoretical max of Arbitrum, 40, 40K. Theoretical max of optimism, 20K. ZK swap, 10K. Immutable X, 9K. Like, the theoretical max on these things is, like, the ceiling is, there's so much capacity. There's so much capacity.

• 22:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  Getting close to the hundreds of thousands.

• 22:30David Hoffman?

  Right, and we just need more and more people to actually just be moving and moving their apps, moving their money, moving their value onto these layer twos, which is why we should be probably following this alongside with layer 2B on a probably recurring basis. I think we should be doing that.

• 22:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  Do you want to make that executive decision now, David? Okay, we're doing that.

• 22:47David Hoffman?

  It's done.

• 22:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's done.

• 22:48David Hoffman?

  Governance, bankless governance.

• 22:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  Governance vote, do I have to sign on chain anywhere?

• 22:51David Hoffman?

  Not at all.

• 22:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Are we a DAO, David?

• 22:53David Hoffman?

  A DAO of two?

• 22:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  Is that the token vote? All right, let's talk about the Metaverse, too, and in particular, we want to talk about Sand. They just had a crazy token surge. Adidas is teasing a partnership with Sand. This is built partially on Polygon, I believe, partially on Ethereum. I think we should get them on the show at some point, but like, what is going on with their token, dude?

• 23:14David Hoffman?

  Oh, my God, it's way higher than it was yesterday. My gosh. Yeah, so I remember looking at this token, doing some due diligence on a bankless show forever ago, and I saw it was like clocking in.

• 23:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  And buying it?

• 23:24David Hoffman?

  Like, and not buying it, yeah. I saw it was a dollar, I was like, oh, interesting, okay. Yeah, as is tradition, right? So like, three weeks ago, saw it as a, at a dollar, currently clocking. In at over $7 hit an all time high of $7.81. Definitely should have bought that. But the obvious trade after like Facebook reman- rebranded to Meta was to buy all the Metaverse tokens, Sand being one of them. So definitely, they're also the, the organization that Snoop Dogg is helping promo. So they, they got him on board and now apparently also Adidas.

• 23:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  These valuations getting frothy though, sir. I mean, like, look, we just jumped to $7 billion for this thing for Sand.

• 24:02David Hoffman?

  I mean, I don't know, Ryan. How valuable is the Metaverse?

• 24:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  I, I, I did, but this sounds so much like a dot com thing to me that I just gotta be like, how valuable is the internet, sir? And that's why you should buy pets.com, right?

• 24:16David Hoffman?

  Are you, are you gonna be but the dot com bubble while we go through the dot com?

• 24:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  I'm not saying, I'm not saying like I'm embarrassed or anything. I'm just saying like, one difference is like for, to me, Axie Infinity, these guys are crushing it on the revenue. Like I see some of those fundamentals. I don't know much about Sand, so maybe I need to do my due diligence. Maybe I should have done that 30 days ago.

• 24:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, let's talk about this too.

• 24:41David Hoffman?

  Opposite direction.

• 24:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, this is a, this is a sad chart. So when I see a chart like this, I just think like Bitconnect, I think, um, you know, scam, I think someone rugged us, but this is not a cryptocurrency. What chart are we looking at here?

• 24:54David Hoffman?

  We are looking at the Turkish Lyra currency, the currency of Turkey versus the US dollar. So back in February, you could get 13 and a half, almost 14 cents for one Turkish Lyra. And today you can get 7.8 cents for a Turkish Lyra, which I mean, okay, that's like losing about half of its value. In crypto, that's nothing. In global fiat currencies, that's a big deal. Like going from February to where we are at the end of November, losing half of your value. That's a really big deal. Uh, so yeah, the, we were watching the, the, I'm not gonna say hyperinflation, but I'm gonna put it into people's brains. We are watching the rapid inflation of the lira currency as it, as it relates to the dollar.

• 25:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  And it's sad because like unlike, unlike the, the Bitconnects that, you know, go to zero. So this, this affects.

• 25:45David Hoffman?

  Economies, businesses, people, yes.

• 25:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Millions of people's lives, right?

• 25:48David Hoffman?

  When currencies fail, economies shut down.

• 25:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, and it causes like real economic hardship for people. It causes political instability. It's sad. It's a sad thing to happen. And yeah, I guess like imagine being, having your funds in the lira and having a savings account of like a thousand dollars, right? A year ago and now it's just, you didn't do anything.

• 26:13David Hoffman?

  Not even like nine months ago, yeah.

• 26:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  Nine months ago, now it's worth five hundred dollars.

• 26:16David Hoffman?

  Imagine how hard it is for people to like save up a thousand dollars, not, not living in America. And then that thousand dollars gets cut like kneecap of, now it's five hundred dollars. Like, so you think of all the time that just got deleted. Like if it takes you a year to save up a thousand dollars and then it now it's five hundred dollars, you just like lost a half of a year's worth of labor. Money is a battery of your time and energy. When you, when you go to work, you spend eight hours a day toiling and then you take your paycheck. That is tokenized time and energy. When misallocated or this bad monetary policy loses the value of the dollar, they're these, these central bank operators are playing with your time and energy that you've saved up.

• 26:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Stealing from you.

• 26:58David Hoffman?

  Hmm, stealing from you.

• 27:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  And it, it, look, it's just sad, right? It's like, I, I feel, you know, very blessed. Like on bankless, we get to talk about all the shenanigans going on in crypto. We get to talk about the numbers. We get to talk about NFTs. We get to talk about the fun stuff. But it's important to zoom out and realize why we're here, right? This is a better financial system for the world. Like it's not fair and it shouldn't be the case that your money, you live, just, just because of the, the area you grew up in, your geographic, national jurisdiction, that you should have this kind of money system in place and it's the default, right? That, that's sad. And this is the reason we're in crypto is to, is to create a better money system for the world.

• 27:41David Hoffman?

  Sadly, I think this is going to be the first of many fiat currencies to pop in this decade.

• 27:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, very sad. Guys, we are, we've got a lot to be thankful for. We've got a lot of news. We've got some releases coming up next. Before we get to those, we want to thank the sponsors that made this show possible.

• 27:57David Hoffman?

  Arbitrum is an Ethereum scaling solution that's going to completely change how we use DeFi and NFTs. And now, it's live and has over 100 projects deployed. Gas fees on Ethereum L1 suck. Too many people want to use Ethereum, and it doesn't have enough capacity for all of us. And that's why teams like Arbitrum have been hard at work developing Layer 2 solutions that makes transactions on Ethereum cheap and instant. Arbitrum increases Ethereum's throughput by orders of magnitude at a fraction of the cost of what we are used to paying. When interacting with Arbitrum, you can get the performance of a centralized exchange while tapping into Ethereum's level of security and decentralization. This is why people are calling this Ethereum's broadband moment, where we get to add performance onto decentralization and security. If you're a developer and you want to save on gas costs

• 28:40David Hoffman?

  and overall make a better user experience, go to developers offchainlabs.com to get started building on Arbitrum. And if you're a user, keep an eye out for your favorite DeFi apps being built on Arbitrum. Many DeFi applications on the Ethereum L1 are migrating over to Layer 2s like Arbitrum, and some are even skipping over the Layer 1s entirely and deploying directly on Layer 2. There's so many apps coming online to Arbitrum, so go to bridge.arbitrum.io now and start bridging over your ETH or any of the tokens listed, and start having the DeFi or NFT experience that you've always wanted. Alchemix is one of the coolest new DeFi apps on the scene. It introduces self-paying loans, allowing you to spend and save at the same time. Deposit the DAI stablecoin into the Alchemix Vault in order to get an advance on the interest it generates.

• 29:25David Hoffman?

  Borrow up to 50% of the total amount of your deposited DAI in the form of Al USD stablecoin. Here's the craziest part: The loan pays itself back, and you cannot be liquidated. Unlock your asset's potential in the ultimate DeFi savings account. And brand new to Alchemix is the ETH Vault, where you can deposit ETH into the application, borrow Al ETH against your deposits, while having your advance gradually paid back over time. V2 is rapidly approaching, which will allow for even more collateral types plus a variety of yield strategies to choose from. Harness the power of Alchemix at alchemix.fi. That's A-L-C-H-E-M-I-X dot F-I.

• 30:08David Hoffman?

  Follow Alchemix on Twitter at @AlchemixFI and join the Discord to keep up to date with Alchemix V2 and to get involved in governance.

• 30:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  Hey guys, we are back with the hot releases of the week. Gotta start here. Binance is starting its integration with Arbitrum 1. They have opened Layer 2 ETH deposits to Arbitrum. I think you can also, you know, push, push, it's a bridge basically to Arbitrum where you can bridge ETH back or in forth from Binance. So this kind of provides a fiat on-ramp. So you put fiat in Binance, convert it to ETH, and then get ETH on the other side into Arbitrum. It's the first, I think, big crypto exchange to do something like this, and I expect many others to follow in its place. What are your thoughts?

• 30:54David Hoffman?

  Yeah, this is huge. This is putting users where they're meant to be users, right? Users need to use Layer 2s. Like, use goes on Layer 2s.

• 31:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  You got some rhymes. You got some flow there, dude.

• 31:05David Hoffman?

  Yeah. And Arbitrum is a great Layer 2. Binance now allowing people to take their money and put it directly on Arbitrum where the apps are that the users can use and not having to pay the L1 gas fees. This is the future of Ethereum. Binance leaving the charge. A little bit surprising. Coinbase, where you at Coinbase?

• 31:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, Coinbase. Let's do it. Let's get on that. All right, let's talk about DeFrag.

• 31:31David Hoffman?

  DeFrag, yeah.

• 31:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  Instant liquidity for your NFTs. What's this mean?

• 31:34David Hoffman?

  Yeah, collateralized NFTs. We know that this is for this product, I mean, I'm guessing, is going to be absolutely used by all the NFTers out there, being able to collateralize the value of your NFTs and get a loan against them. Definitely some degen behavior, but probably a pretty important primitive for DeFi.

• 31:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  Would you, would you ever collateralize your CryptoPunk and like buy a car or something?

• 31:54David Hoffman?

  I'm very, very worried that a lot of people are gonna collateralize their Punks, and they're gonna lose their Punks that way.

• 32:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Get liquidated on a Punk?

• 32:01David Hoffman?

  Get liquidated on a Punk. I'd be very worried about that.

• 32:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Remember the stories of, you know, 2018 where people were getting like liquidated on their ETH positions on Maker that they took out in 2017? Imagine losing a Punk that way.

• 32:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, hey, is that you, David?

• 32:16David Hoffman?

  Just a few times.

• 32:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, well, it's only a couple of times. You're back, though. You're back stronger than ever. DeFrag, interestingly enough, is built by one of the co-founders of Zapper as well, Noter.

• 32:29David Hoffman?

  No way.

• 32:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  So, yeah, interesting project. It's not quite available yet, but there are some ways you can get involved. There's something called a mathematician. And, yeah, anyway, this is a gamenting story. Go check this out if you're interested in more about that. What is this? Reputation DAO?

• 32:45David Hoffman?

  Yeah, Reputation DAO is a Oracle reputation product, is what they say. So Ryan has said this a number of times. The cool thing about DeFi is you can right-click View Source, which is kind of a metaphor. You can't really right-click View Source, but you can go to websites like DeFi Pulse or Dune Analytics and actually look under the hood at what are the assets? What is the balance sheet of all of these DeFi apps, like Compound Maker DAO, etc.? That's the beauty of a transparent, openless, permissionless financial system. Reputation DAO is taking the same concept, the ability to vet and audit instantaneously and permissionlessly, not just to DeFi apps, but to also for Oracles. Oracles are an increasingly important component of the DeFi world. We need to understand the prices of things.

• 33:28David Hoffman?

  And Reputation DAO is a way to audit the performance, security of Oracles. And they have partnered with Tracer DAO, which Tracer DAO is a financials products DAO that needs to consume Oracles to produce financial products. So the combination of Tracer DAO and Reputation DAO have produced probably perhaps a new level of Oracle security, making our Oracles and therefore DeFi more and more secure.

• 33:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I think this is really important because not all Oracles are created equal, right? Some have worse security assurances than others. And so you really need the transparency there. You need the abilities, like not just what's the price of this asset, but like what, where did the price come from? And how is that secured? I expect we'll see many Oracle attacks in the future. And, you know, we need this kind of transparency if we're going to continue to de-risk DeFi, which is what we're all after. Speaking of de-risking things, you want to Risk your cold storage. Actually, it's not cold storage. I guess it's warm storage. But Lattice is now integrated with MetaMask. Lattice is a hardware wallet that we've talked

• 34:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  about on Bankless. We wrote some articles about this earlier in the year on the Lattice 1 hardware wallet. It's a little bit different than a ledger. So it's actually like a device that kind of sits on your desk, has these cards that you can plug into it, and it's incredibly tamper resistant. Alright, so if you're ever worried about, you know, somebody, like, I guess, grabbing your USB stick ledger sort of thing and taking that and, you know, getting in.

• 35:02David Hoffman?

  That's a possible thing, by the way.

• 35:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  It is a possible thing, man. That's another podcast.

• 35:08David Hoffman?

  Physical attack on a hardware wallet. That's a possible thing to do.

• 35:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's really not possible with the Lattice 1. This is like, this is like the Fort Knox of wallet security. Anyway.

• 35:17David Hoffman?

  I call it the Gringotts Fault.

• 35:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  Gringotts Fault, okay, that's better. For your Harry Potter gold, they've integrated with MetaMask, which is a long time coming. And so now you can use your Lattice wallet with MetaMask quite seamlessly. It's fantastic that this is happening.

• 35:31David Hoffman?

  Yep, just increasing the potential security of your crypto assets. The cool thing about a Lattice is that you actually have to be physically around the thing in order to approve a transaction. Kind of like, very much like a ledger, but the idea is like your Lattice, it's like, big enough where like, you're not taking it with you like on an airplane. Like, that thing sits in your home. It's kind of like, it goes next to your, like, your Amazon Alexa, right? And so like, you can go to your MetaMask, do something in DeFi, press the approve button on your MetaMask, then you've got to go over to your Lattice and then press the approve button there. There's a number of other very cool things that can happen.

• 36:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Human readable transactions, which are really cool.

• 36:07David Hoffman?

  I think both Ryan and I definitely believe that this is kind of the future of hardware wallets. They just need more and more of these integrations to just become more and more usable. And so this is that story here.

• 36:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, absolutely. They'll all get better over time. Speaking of getting better, Aave, long time coming. Aave Ark was like their institutional product. Now here it is, I believe, Fireblocks has started up by providing services to all of Fireblocks institutional clients in Aave Ark. That's pretty cool to see. Anything you want to add here, David?

• 36:38David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I want to add a take. I was on the Index Co-op podcast and people were talking, asking me about, is this just like taking the old traditional banking system and like now DeFi is just becoming permissioned and because you have to do KYC to get into Aave Ark and now like the institutions have their own like gated silo where it can't play. Yeah, it's whitelisting. And so my answer to that is like, well, like, you know, is DeFi just becoming the same system that it already was? And the answer is no, it's actually flipped on its head. The world of DeFi is the more powerful version of what's going on here. Ark, Ark by Aave is a constrained version of DeFi. Everyone in there is a known entity. All the institutions can know who the other institutions are so that they can be compliant. But it's like the, it's like the

• 37:22David Hoffman?

  DeFi on training wheels. It's like the DeFi but protection. The real DeFi, the wild DeFi is the DeFi with all of the power where you don't need KYC, you don't need like to, and so all of the cool aspects of DeFi are the things that are able to be used by individuals. It's the constrained part of DeFi that is being given to the institutions because they need to be compliant, which is the inverse of the relationship that we have in traditional finance where traditional finance is just like, all right, here's your Robinhood and your bank account, kids. There you go. But like all of the cool financial products are behind the scenes that you have to have a bunch of money to get into like Goldman Sachs. And so this relationship is inverted in DeFi.

• 38:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I think that's a good take. And like, you know, in general, you can build permission systems on top of permissionless systems, right? But the inverse isn't true. You can't build permissionless systems on top of permission systems, right? And so this is just a permission system being built on top of the substrate of a permissionless financial system. And that's the correct order of operations because we don't lose the permissionless aspect of it.

• 38:27David Hoffman?

  Yeah. Yeah. In the old world, the bankers laugh at the individuals because we can't have access to the cool fun DeFi products. But in DeFi, we laugh at the institutions because we built the damn thing.

• 38:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's right. All right. What's this, David? This is, uh, my God, is this a screenshot of the future Zapper?

• 38:45David Hoffman?

  Mobile app.

• 38:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Mobile app?

• 38:47David Hoffman?

  Zapper, Zapper coming to mobile, getting teased. Yeah. So not an actual release there, just a little bit of a release of a release.

• 38:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  Very good. Tease. That is coming, guys. The tools are getting better. The user experiences are getting better. It's all happening. Uh, David, let's switch from releases, talk to some raises. Our friends at Gemini, the Winklevoss twins, they just raised $400 million. What are they doing? They're building a metaverse outside of Facebook's Walt Garden. I like that because, you know, Winklevoss versus, versus Facebook, who doesn't love that story? Winklevoss versus, uh, Zuck, doing this in the metaverse. Quite a big raise. Um, there was a rumor that Gemini was going to IPO at some point in time. I don't think this means that that's off the table. Now their valuation is $7.1 billion, though,

• 39:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  according to this next raise. Uh, so yeah, pretty interesting stuff. I know Gemini is just doing all sorts of things beyond its exchange. Any other thoughts here?

• 39:42David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I just actually learned by reading this article that Gemini, the actual official company name is called Gemini Space Station. That's pretty cool.

• 39:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  What?

• 39:49David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I zoom up a little bit.

• 39:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  Has it always been called that?

• 39:52David Hoffman?

  The parent, New York parent company, Gemini Space Station LLC valued at $7.1 billion. Yeah. Winklevoss, take it back to the Zuck. Let's do this.

• 40:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Let's do this.

• 40:02David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 40:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  Round two.

• 40:03David Hoffman?

  Fight.

• 40:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  What about this? David, uh, taking it to the music industry. So this is Royal. Now, we had Blau on, Justin Blau, who is a DJ, you know, fantastic artist in and of himself, also an entrepreneur. And he's starting this Royal company to bring tokenized music and actually providing royalties, attaching royalties to that. This is kind of a

• 40:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  I guess a regulatory difficulty more than a technical difficulty. They just raised $55 million in a series A led by A16Z to bring the music industry to crypto, artists to crypto. Really cool.

• 40:44David Hoffman?

  Crypto to the artists, the same, same, same. They also the lineup of music investors is also pretty impressive. The Chainsmokers, KGO, NAS, Logic, Disclosure. Oh, and also Coinbase. Yeah, so like not only A16Z, but a fantastic lineup of really good artists.

• 40:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  But just picture how cool markets will get when rather than just having like a Spotify style user interface, like you can like, look at the up and coming artists whom you love, like you just love their music and you're like, dude, no brainer. I'm making a bet on this artist specifically and their like ability to generate future cash flows. I'm going to hit the buy button, right? It just turns, we've talked about this before, but it turns the music industry into a market. It's like a stock market. We can bet on different artists and it puts the artists in charge, in control, right? Because they are the ones actually producing the music. It's not the, the studios and the go betweens and the middlemen. Cool model if this can take off and be successful.

• 41:39David Hoffman?

  Yeah, and this is just the theme of Ethereum at large, right? Producing a financial market around everything to unlock the power of finance for the individual. Maybe there's some, some people out there is like, well, like if you put money behind everything, everything loses its meaning. I think it's the inverse. Like you actually can, can create meaning by putting financial markets behind everything, teaching people how to actually be a financial participant, because that education is very much needed in the world. And if you just put like, stock market is not for everyone, but what about the music market? Like if you're a music person, you do you want to like start to speculate on the music market? Maybe that's for you. Or like we're already doing the art market with NFTs. And this is a great educational tool to teach people about personal finances inside of the context that they are interested in.

• 42:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  Do you ever find it somewhat ironic that like the way out of the crony capitalist system that we're in is actually

• 42:30David Hoffman?

  More capitalism.

• 42:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  More capitalism. Like hyper capitalism, but like I'm not talking, so some people hear capitalism and they get just this terrible exploiting workers. And I understand that, right? Because, but like this is individual self sovereign capitalism. This is like, this is like, think of, think of this as the form of capitalism as going to your farmer's market, right? We have all of these local businesses, these individuals coming together with their crafts, with their products, pricing this, like that's, that's what we're talking about here. We're not talking about big corporate machine suppressing the worker and every man and exploiting them. Okay, that's a system we want to break out of, but the way to break out of it is probably this way.

• 43:14David Hoffman?

  Right. Yeah, people confuse capitalism with monopolies, right? The, the lack of existence of financial markets around music is because the music industry has captured it and not allowed it to happen, right? And so this is the, the birth of a whole entire new field that is fairer capitalism, right? The, the best way to fight, it's literally fighting fire with fire, like removing bad capitalism and replacing it with good capitalism.

• 43:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I do think it's really important, the way forward. Crypto payment service Moonpay, they just raised 555 million from Tiger and another firm. So this is another fiat on ramp, David. I don't know if you have anything else to say about this, other than

• 43:58David Hoffman?

  A 3.4 billion dollar valuation. Yeah, the company was previously bootstrapped and profitable, generating a hundred million dollars in revenue so far this year, which is pretty, pretty good numbers.

• 44:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  Lovely. Guys, with these valuations out there, with all these raises going on, it's about time you considered a job in crypto.

• 44:17David Hoffman?

  Nice, nice.

• 44:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like that segue?

• 44:19David Hoffman?

  That was perfect.

• 44:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Seriously though, get a job in crypto.

• 44:23David Hoffman?

  Every time you hear about a raise, that could be your money because that goes to hiring people. That could be you.

• 44:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  They're not keeping it in a bank account. They're not investing in crypto. They're investing it in the growth of their companies, growth of their protocols. What do we got this week? We have a community ecosystem lead at DYDX, the foundation, a foundation based in Switzerland, by the way. Really cool stuff. Bitwise, asset managers, one of our favorites in the space from an asset management perspective. They want an NFT specialist. They need a smart contract, research analysts, Web3 analysts. They need a governance specialist. Imagine putting those job positions on your resume. Dexguru needs a head of growth, technical lead at Drafly, an accountant at Smart DeFi, a product manager at Smart DeFi as well. Get that head of Ethereum research position down with Immutable, head of tokens at Immutable

• 45:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  as well. Dexable needs a community manager, a lead engineer at hats.finance, community manager at E Agronom. Can you manage a community? You could probably do it at E Agronom, CTO at E Agronom as well, senior backend engineer, Smart DeFi, blockchain technical CTO as well. At Merit, I'm out of breath, dude. There's a ton more. Just go check out the Bankless job boards, bankless.pallet.xyz/jobs. Hit subscribe and you can get these in your inbox as well. And you'll hear about these again next week.

• 45:48David Hoffman?

  Bet you will.

• 45:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  Unless you get a job and then you can ignore this part. You can just fast forward. David, let's get to the news, though. We've got some big news items. Let's start here. This is the tweet that was heard around the world.

• 46:02David Hoffman?

  Around crypto trader, yeah.

• 46:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, that's true. Maybe I'm overstating things. The abandoning Ethereum tweet. Do you want to read this out?

• 46:10David Hoffman?

  Yeah, this is from Su Zu of Three Arrows Capital. We've had him on the podcast before. Su says, "Yes, I've abandoned Ethereum despite supporting it in the past. Yes, Ethereum has abandoned its users despite supporting them in the past. The idea of sitting around jerking off, watching the burn and concocting purity tests while zero newcomers can afford the chain is gross." As you can imagine, this was a very inflammatory tweet. This was not the start of the drama. This was probably the middle of it. The story actually started earlier than this tweet. This tweet was a reaction to like the earlier spats that happened. And we're going to recap all of it later on in this show.

• 46:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  I'm feeling attacked, David. The idea of sitting around jerking off, watching the burn. Is that what we were doing earlier in the market section of the show?

• 46:53David Hoffman?

  Yeah, he's talking about us. He's talking about us.

• 46:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's not all we're doing, okay?

• 46:57David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 46:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like, we're talking about Ethereum scalability. We spent a whole bunch of time during this show talking about like Layer 2 and increasing transactions per second. A lot more to say about that. One of the things I think the Ethereum community is doing is possibly a reaction? Maybe not. Maybe this wasn't due to the shit, like the Twitter storms last weekend. Maybe this was unrelated. Maybe this is related more to gas fees. But there is an EIP proposal to reduce something called the call data function. The gas price for the call data function on Ethereum. And this would be, this would require a fork of some kind in the future. But the net of this would be, it would make rollups five times more efficient.

• 47:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  So five times less expensive in terms of gas fees. Rollups use their bottleneck, their constraint from a gas perspective is this call data function. So the idea here that's being proposed is that in the relatively near future, we're talking the next three to six months, an Ethereum network upgrade is pushed out. This could happen prior to the merge and would not necessarily delay the merge, but it might delay it by a week or two, a month. It's a relatively small upgrade, but it could have a big effect on rollups. And what's interesting here is like, the whole idea is that Ethereum is almost like, you know, gas fees are taxes, right?

• 48:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  And so like, just like nation-state economies, when you want to encourage some sort of behavior and discourage another, use taxes to that, for that, right? It's like, you want people to have more kids, you reduce the taxes on kids. If you want people to have fewer kids, maybe you decrease the tax reductions, right? It's like, you can control all of these things. And this is Ethereum as a network, through their tax policy maybe, saying, "We want to incent transaction activity on..." Rollups by what? By reducing taxes, by making rollup activity actually cheaper and increasing scalability that way. That's why I think this is such an interesting proposal, but there are more dynamics to this and there's definitely some controversy back and forth. What are your thoughts on this?

• 49:11David Hoffman?

  Yeah, it's not an open and shut case. Apparently this also adds a bunch of state bloat to the Ethereum L1, which produces its own problems. There's always trade offs everywhere. It's not like we have this magical thing in the back of our pocket that we can just reduce gas fees on the layer two and have it just be, oh, I forgot about this thing that we had. Like, no, there's balances here. So this is currently going through discussion. But it is aligned with the whole rollup centric roadmap of Ethereum where we prioritize transactions on L2 and de-prioritize transactions on layer one.

• 49:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is kind of interesting and here's what I feel like could be next. I know we're going to talk about this more. But what could be next is what we've seen is the ETH community, the Ethereum community really push back against this Ethereum is a bad and it gets users sentiment coming from zoo, from zoo. And I think this is causing people to actually look deeper into Ethereum scalability versus the unsustainability of some of the alternative layer ones and the approaches they're pursuing. I think it's also like causing the Ethereum community to take a look at these gas tweaks, right? So like increasing, reducing rollup fees by 5X in the future.

• 50:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  What I think this could cause, David, is like other layer ones to start bleeding against ETH as well. And what's interesting, I think about, you know, 3Rs capital is they're just traders. So if that starts to happen, if there's a momentum shift, right? If suddenly, you know, the AVAs of the world and the souls of the world start bleeding into ETH, they'll get ahead of that. They'll rotate right back into ETH. And I think what's funny is they'll start claiming credit for all of the above, right?

• 50:52David Hoffman?

  We've seen that happen before. Yeah. Pierre Richard, who was doing the whole ETH supply gate thing, like as soon as like, oh, you can't actually measure the ETH supply. And then a bunch of ETH devs took time out of their day to write a script for Calculated for measuring the ETH supply. And then Pierre Richard took credit was like, look, I made Ethereum better by like complaining about it on Twitter. Yeah. So this has happened before.

• 51:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 51:16David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 51:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is the Streisand effect, right? This is like, um, you know, if you, if you want the technical community to do something, you just start like complaining.

• 51:23David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 51:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  About it, or you like blast it and you get really loud and they, they, they get so angry that they're going to react and, and try to immediately fix it.

• 51:30David Hoffman?

  Anyways, we, we, we gotta package that up for, for the.

• 51:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, you're right.

• 51:33David Hoffman?

  The show that happens later. So stay tuned for that.

• 51:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  Uh, what happened with the constitution doubt, David? This, this met an interesting end.

• 51:40David Hoffman?

  Yeah, we have a brand new internet villain. Uh, he was already an internet villain beforehand because Citadel, the Citadel CEO of Citadel is the hedge fund firm that called up Robinhood and told them to stop trading. This guy, Ken, Ken Griffith, I think Kenneth, Kenneth Griffin, uh, says, uh, I bought, well, he, he didn't say this. He bought the constitution. So, uh, the constitution doubt raised like $40 million to buy the constitution. Kenneth Griffiths, uh, paid, raised $42 million from himself to buy the constitution and then he bought it. Uh, yeah. Uh, so this one hedge fund VC guy bought, uh, the constitution instead of 17,000 members inside of a doubt.

• 52:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, the irony.

• 52:20David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 52:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like, how could this story end this way? I was, were you watching the Sotheby's auction at all?

• 52:25David Hoffman?

  I was, I was.

• 52:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay.

• 52:26David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 52:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I was watching it in real time and it was kind of interesting. Like it was thrilling to see. I'd never watched an auction all the way through. And then like got to 40 million and somebody on one phone, somebody on another, apparently it was Ken Griffin's people and versus the DAO's people. And they were just bidding up like a million at a time. And suddenly the DAO kind of ran out of its cash reserve. And it's interesting because all of that was transparent, right? So like.

• 52:50David Hoffman?

  If, if Ken was paying attention, he knew exactly how much the DAO.

• 52:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  The max bid.

• 52:55David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 52:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. And so you said it, but, but the end of the day is the people's document, the constitution went from one rich individual to another. Rather than the 17, 18,000 people in the DAO.

• 53:09David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 53:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  Which is quite interesting.

• 53:11David Hoffman?

  Granted, a DAO has never proven that it's able to take care of like historical document, right? And so like that. is also an experiment is this is like a custody of a very important document.

• 53:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, they wouldn't want to screw that up.

• 53:22David Hoffman?

  Yeah, that's kind of an interesting experiment. I'm not sure if we want to run that right now.

• 53:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, yeah, it was interesting. Anyway, but I think one of the most interesting byproducts was at Sotheby's. You saw ETH listed with US dollars, pounds, euros, yen, all of the major currencies of the world as a denomination for bidding. And this is anti-pro saying ETH is money. And this is a picture of Sotheby's auction, all the currencies bidding on this fantastic art piece for $2.5 million. And you could buy it in ETH.

• 53:56David Hoffman?

  Uh huh. You know what stands out to me on this one is like the denominations of everything like US dollar 2.5 million, British pound 1.8 million, Japanese, what's the Japanese currency? I don't know. Is it yen? Yeah, Japanese yen, $285 million.

• 54:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  Million yen.

• 54:15David Hoffman?

  Million yen, excuse me. ETH 619. Like, this is the difference between scarcity and not scarcity.

• 54:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  And it will be like 50 ETH potentially in a few years.

• 54:28David Hoffman?

  It's absolutely crazy. Like, you can literally see the money printer here. Like, all these fiat currencies with really, really high numbers have a money printer behind them. Ether, the really, really low number, has a money burner behind it.

• 54:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wow, that's hilarious. I'd never thought about that. Makes you wonder why you'd ever spend ETH, though. Which is another question about money. David, what's this?

• 54:51David Hoffman?

  Mihilo of the Polygon team goes on Twitter, says, Dear Uniswap community, we have submitted a proposal to deploy Uniswap V3 to Polygon. We firmly believe that this is the right moment for this deployment to happen for the reason explained in this proposal. Looking forward to your questions and feedback. This has now since gone up to Snapshot Vote. Ryan, let's take a peek at the Snapshot Vote and see where that vote stands. Do the Uniswap uni token holders want Uniswap V3 on Polygon? On the yes side, we have 256,000 uni tokens voting yes. On the no side, we have 101. That's it.

• 55:31David Hoffman?

  Clocking in at 99.96% saying yes, we want Uniswap V3 on Polygon. Unless some massive whale comes in with a really strong opinion about why it should be no, looks like Uniswap V3 will be deployed to Polygon.

• 55:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's funny. It's interesting the community's voted, but like, why not, right? Isn't this good for uni token holders? Yeah, not surprising the vote went that way, but that's interesting to see. What is Kami up to these days? The Infinite Machine, it's a book on my bookshelf back there. It's a fantastic book about the birth of Ethereum. It's becoming a movie?

• 56:04David Hoffman?

  Yeah, look at that. Yeah, Kami Russo says on Twitter, "The Infinite Machine is becoming a movie. The Ethereum movie will of course be produced together with the Ethereum community. NFTs will fund production and enable its audience to become participants." Kami Russo, congratulations, turning a book into a movie. Love it, love it.

• 56:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Book into a movie. What's TokenMac doing? Okay, this is ZeroXMackey, who's been on the podcast before. He's formerly one of the chefs behind Sushi.

• 56:31David Hoffman?

  Took up the reins as the first guy.

• 56:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  Chief chef?

• 56:35David Hoffman?

  Who's the guy that rugged?

• 56:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  Chef Nomi?

• 56:37David Hoffman?

  Chef Nomi, yeah. He rugged the original sushi product in DeFi Summer. ZeroXMackey took up the reins, became a very beloved community member, very like important developer behind the sushi product. About a month ago, stepped away from a lead dev role at SushiSwap and now got picked up as TokenMac's new chief strategy advisor. TokenMackey is apparently his new name. "Will be our emissary to the greater DeFi facilitating DAO governance proposals, integrations and expansions." Congratulations TokenMac, very awesome acquisition of talent. Congratulations Mackey for moving on to new horizons. If you want to learn what TokenMac is, we have a fantastic Meet the Nation with them on the Bankless YouTube.

• 57:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, absolutely. It's TokenMackey becomes TokenMackey. I love that transition. Let's talk NFT stuff, David. This is the first one. The NFL is experimenting with NFTs in a partnership with Ticketmaster, and they're deploying this on Polygon.

• 57:36David Hoffman?

  Crazy, crazy.

• 57:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Really crazy.

• 57:38David Hoffman?

  What a world, what a world.

• 57:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's just an experiment at this point in time, but that's how these things start. It's just experiments, right? It's like just, and Polygon's a great place to test it. If you're going to test something, you want to test it on like a sidechain of some sort, right? Where transaction fees are low, where there's No like high gas barriers to entry, fantastic place to test things. You know, this is not going to be the end of things because the NBA has a fantastic strategy for NFTs partnership with Coinbase. They've also done some things, obviously with Flow, NBA Top Shots, right? And the NFL is going to be like, we have all of these fans. Again, it's the same question. It's like

• 58:17David Hoffman?

  They're already buying merch.

• 58:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, we have all of these fans. They're already buying stuff. Why don't we get them to buy digital stuff? It's as simple as the conversation is. And so that's what they're doing. They're starting with a Polygon and that is pretty big news, I think.

• 58:32David Hoffman?

  Yeah, the sub caption is the league is exploring NFT ticketing through the launch of its virtual commemorative ticket collection on the Polygon blockchain. TBD on what that actually means.

• 58:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, first of many, though, first of many experiments, including Time, and they are all in on crypto, it seems. What's this?

• 58:49David Hoffman?

  Time Studios, Time Magazine, the Emmy Award winning TV studio is partnering with Pablo Stanley. I'm not sure who that is, to create an original series based on robots. So there is a robot profile picture NFT project that's being spun up by Time to develop animated children's series based on the Robotos animation. So these are NFTs of a children's TV show that's about robots? And there's going to be over 10,000 NFTs? Yeah, spun up by Time Magazine.

• 59:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Sell some NFTs to the kids.

• 59:18David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 59:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  Hey, you know what? It's so funny how like Times Square has basically become the place to like put your NFT, hasn't it?

• 59:25David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 59:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 59:25David Hoffman?

  Get the advertisement, get the Coke advertisements out of there and the NFT like advertisements in there.

• 59:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Why do people do this? Is it just like legitimacy? It's just like fun legitimacy?

• 59:34David Hoffman?

  Yeah, it's a big flex.

• 59:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  I want to go, I want to go to Times Square and see this.

• 59:38David Hoffman?

  Yeah. You want to put your turtle on Times Square, Ryan? Is that what you want to do?

• 59:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  How much would that cost me?

• 59:42David Hoffman?

  A lot, more than your turtle. Let me tell you that.

• 59:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, but it's net accretive to the turtle community, so maybe I'm willing to fund that public good, huh? More people need to learn about turtles.

• 59:52David Hoffman?

  That would be hilarious if you put the turtle on Times Square.

• 59:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  No, that's not me. Maybe I'll put a big logo of Bankless on Times Square one day.

• 59:59David Hoffman?

  That, yes, yes, let's do that. Let's do that, yeah.

• 1:00:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Macy's launches a parade-inspired NFT collection for charity. So Macy's Day floats coming out tomorrow. I'll watch the Macy's Day parade sometimes in the mornings. They're doing NFTs now as floats. What's going on?

• 1:00:17David Hoffman?

  Macy's will launch NFTs in two phases. First, it's holding an auction for a set of 10 unique collectibles based on parade balloons throughout the decades. The auction for these begin at midnight Eastern time, November 19th, and will run through the 30th, and then around 10 a.m. Eastern time on November 25th. That is tomorrow. Today, for you, the listener, during the Macy's Day Thanksgiving parade, people will be able to claim one of 9,500 free NFTs and also enter a sweepstakes to win $10,000. NFTs being mainstreamed. This is the story. That's the story here.

• 1:00:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's so funny. The reason we included this story is because it's mainstream in a way that DeFi could never be mainstreamed. It's back to our example last week of Jimmy Fallon, Bored Apes, right? You know, getting people on Jimmy Fallon is far more interesting than God Bless Them, Kane Warwick, for instance, or like Stani from Ave, okay? Because this is like pop culture stuff. It's just invading. It's the Trojan horse into mainstream.

• 1:01:13David Hoffman?

  Macy says the NFTs, which are ERC 721 tokens, are carbon neutral. It's working with the NFT platform Sweet, which is built on the Polygon blockchain. So two things here, built on Polygon. Love it. Also, again, mainstream media focusing on the carbon neutrality of these things, which lends you, like, they kind of need to pay attention to that because that's a big narrative. The, yeah, for all the obvious reasons. So let it be known, the greater world cares about carbon neutrality.

• 1:01:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  Don't tell them that Polygon is also economically settled by Ethereum Burns Gas, which is right now proof of work-backed. Don't tell them that.

• 1:01:49David Hoffman?

  Well, one day.

• 1:01:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  A footnote?

• 1:01:51David Hoffman?

  One day.

• 1:01:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  We'll be changing that soon, but Bitcoin has no plans to change from proof of work. That's for sure. Let's talk about some Bitcoin news. El Salvador is planning its first Bitcoin city backed by Bitcoin bonds. Apparently, the Bitcoin city is going to be located close to a volcano so that the, you know, geothermal activity. Can create energy to fund Bitcoin mining facilities? What is happening in El Salvador? They're going all in, aren't they?

• 1:02:22David Hoffman?

  Yeah, they've kind of feel like the Michael Saylor, but like a country. So yeah, they are issuing bonds, bonds. I actually don't know the diamonds here. They're issuing like $6 billion worth of bonds in order to foster this city that's around the Bitcoin mining volcano. So yeah, really just doubling down on the whole like Bitcoin branding thing.

• 1:02:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's kind of, it's kind of strange, isn't it?

• 1:02:43David Hoffman?

  It's a little strange.

• 1:02:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like Bitcoin, volcano, city, bonds.

• 1:02:47David Hoffman?

  Yeah, El Salvador. Yeah, dictator leader, like, yeah.

• 1:02:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's a bit strange, but Bitcoin is very excited about this. Maybe this is, the IMF is not excited about it.

• 1:02:58David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  IMF is warning El Salvador of Bitcoin related risks in this new statement. The IMF is of course International Monetary Fund. This is a collection of bankers. These are the global banker elites. And what do they say? Direct quote, "Given Bitcoin's high price volatility, its use as a legal tender entails significant risk to consumer protection, financial integrity and financial stability." You can just picture a banker kind of waving their finger at El Salvador. "Its use also gives rise to financial contingent liabilities." That sounds like a threat. "Because of these risks, Bitcoin should not be used as legal tender." Stamp your feet. You know what? The IMF doesn't realize that the IMF doesn't get to decide what money is.

• 1:03:42David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 1:03:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, they still think that they do. And that to me is, is interesting, right?

• 1:03:48David Hoffman?

  Using the whole volatility FUD to talk, to just, you know, undermine the legitimacy of Bitcoin.

• 1:03:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  Trying to strong arm El Salvador into not using Bitcoin, which is interesting, using volatility FUD. And this is just the start, right? It's like, if you see more countries start to adopt, put cryptocurrencies on their, on their balance sheets, man, what's IMF going to do?

• 1:04:12David Hoffman?

  Right. I can see like the, the archetype of El Salvador just responding to the IMF. You know what I'm going to do now? I'm going to use Bitcoin even harder.

• 1:04:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's a little bit like that. I just get a crack out of these legacy institutions thinking they get to decide what money is. The people do. This is what Chris Giancarlo said. This is a social, money is a social contract. It's a bottom up phenomenon. It's not a top down phenomenon. If you think it is, I guess you're gonna go like inflate your currency way. It's like it's not gonna work out well for you.

• 1:04:42David Hoffman?

  And the IMF used my favorite euphemism, consumer protection. They're kind of really meaning incumbent protection. That's what the IMF does.

• 1:04:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, like, they should be worried about, about fiat. They should be worried about,

• 1:04:55David Hoffman?

  Circus Lyra blowing up. Yeah, whoops.

• 1:04:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. This is interesting. This is 10 epic Bitcoin mining photos from Anthony Papilliano's newsletter. And we just included this because it's such an interesting, I think, contrast, right? It's like, I feel like lately, David, Bitcoin is almost bifurcated from the rest of crypto, right? It's like, the rest of crypto having these battles between Ethereum and alternative layer ones over like scalability and talking about DeFi, talking about NFTs. It's like a different world. And over here is like Bitcoin, and they're talking about volcano cities and El Salvador. And here's a picture of like 10 epic Bitcoin mining photos.

• 1:05:35David Hoffman?

  They are epic. They are very epic.

• 1:05:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  I guess, isn't it like, uh, I don't know, are like factories epic?

• 1:05:42David Hoffman?

  Size of these things.

• 1:05:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  They're big. They're gigantic. But like, when I see these pictures personally, my reaction is like, hmm, are these necessary? Like, I just like, when we have proof of stake, this looks like waste to me.

• 1:05:57David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 1:05:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  Personally.

• 1:05:58David Hoffman?

  Totally.

• 1:05:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  And it's, yeah.

• 1:06:00David Hoffman?

  I think Bitcoiners, they see these facilities all over the world, like big facility in China, big facility in Norway, big facility in Montana. And they see the, they see decentralization, right? They see hardcore investment into Bitcoin, into energy production all over the world, and they see decentralization. Can I, can I show you my, my equivalent, my equivalent to a Bitcoin mining farm, but for proof of stake?

• 1:06:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. Do you have a picture?

• 1:06:28David Hoffman?

  Here it is.

• 1:06:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  Can you show me?

• 1:06:29David Hoffman?

  This is my equivalent.

• 1:06:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  MacBook Pro?

• 1:06:33David Hoffman?

  Here's go for the juxtaposition. Go down to one of like the big mining operations.

• 1:06:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is my favorite one because this looks like.

• 1:06:39David Hoffman?

  Yeah, okay. Here's here's my equivalent for proof of stake. It's right here in my hands. I'm holding it up.

• 1:06:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's your capital?

• 1:06:46David Hoffman?

  It's got a battery. Yeah.

• 1:06:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, that's your that's your that's your validator. That's your mining equipment, basically.

• 1:06:52David Hoffman?

  For the listeners, I'm holding it in my MacBook Air.

• 1:06:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. Well, okay, so like we're staking right now on Rocketpool.

• 1:06:59David Hoffman?

  Yep.

• 1:06:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  From a Raspberry Pi.

• 1:07:01David Hoffman?

  Yep.

• 1:07:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's running running ETH nodes and a validator, right? It's like like Bankless is doing that.

• 1:07:06David Hoffman?

  Right, yeah, so like the two versions of the future are ahead of us. Like one is these big and maybe they can they can coexist over the long term. I don't really think so. But like one is these big, big mining farms all over the world, like connected to some sort of energy source. Bitcoiners will say like the the mining incentivizes the energy production and that's that's cool. And then so like, you know, big, these big, big facilities versus the proof of stake, which is everyone's got their like their home laptop staking on Ethereum. It's using the idle resources of your computer in the background, like and it's everywhere all over the world. The tokens don't actually exist anywhere, unlike the Bitcoin mining units, the ASICs. They and so like if this computer, if I drop this computer and it breaks, I can just like, you know, move the tokens to a different computer. It doesn't actually exist physically in the world.

• 1:07:50David Hoffman?

  Like, what version seems more futuristic to you? They both seem very futuristic, but they also look like very different futures.

• 1:07:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  They do, right? It's like the these ASICs that we're looking at, these like, you know, data centers full of these ASICs, these specialized mining computers, basically. You know, Ether is just a virtual ASIC.

• 1:08:10David Hoffman?

  Yep.

• 1:08:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's just a virtualized version of an ASIC when you stake it. Yeah, and I'm just struck lately, David, by like the bifurcation kind of narratives, like crypto is kind of split into into two pieces.

• 1:08:21David Hoffman?

  Two cultures.

• 1:08:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Two cultures, tale of two cultures here. This is interesting, too. I feel like every week another athlete is deciding to take their salary in Bitcoin. So this is Odell Beckham Jr. from the Rams taking a salary in Bitcoin. Yeah, I guess we'll see more of that, too.

• 1:08:39David Hoffman?

  That's the story.

• 1:08:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's the story. That's what was going on in Bitcoin. Felt a little different than what's going on the rest of the crypto space, particularly this week. But what's going on the regulatory front is Citigroup is appointing a new head of digital assets.

• 1:08:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's eyeing 100 new hires as well on digital assets. So the banks come to the table as we knew they would, a little bit late, but realizing you have to get on this crypto thing before it eats their lunch. Any thoughts here?

• 1:09:07David Hoffman?

  Yeah, where are they gonna find 100 really good crypto hires?

• 1:09:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, they don't have to be really good, sir.

• 1:09:14David Hoffman?

  Like they're, they're like-

• 1:09:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  They could just be not very good.

• 1:09:17David Hoffman?

  Well, that's kind of what I'm saying, right? Like, if you want to have good crypto, like, products, you need to hire crypto native people. Otherwise, like, how can you advise on where the product should be built? Where are they gonna find 100 qualified crypto people? Look at our jobs board. Like, those are the coolest crypto jobs of all time. Like, people are gonna go there first before they go to Citigroup. Like, "Oh, I'm super passionate about crypto. I want to help build out the world of crypto. Where should I go? Citigroup?"

• 1:09:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  I don't think it's these positions are gonna attract the crypto natives, right? I think these positions are gonna attract the, you know, corporate people who are interested in kind of the next big thing, right?

• 1:09:53David Hoffman?

  The products that are, that are going to be determined by the people that they hire, right? So if they don't hire crypto natives, then the products that come out as a result of these things are gonna be different.

• 1:10:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  I am so skeptical that crypto banks are gonna be able to actually develop any interesting crypto products. One exception, so far, this exception to the rule has been Fidelity, in my mind.

• 1:10:14David Hoffman?

  Correct, yeah.

• 1:10:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  Which is like, they're crushing it, but they started as crypto native believers like six years ago.

• 1:10:21David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 1:10:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, we'll see what happens, but they're definitely coming to the table. I expect we'll see a lot of acquisitions, personally. So I think these banks will acquire crypto companies as their way forward. TetherFud, what's this?

• 1:10:34David Hoffman?

  TetherFud, yeah. Things are heating up for Tether. The US Senate sent a letter requesting immediate information about their backing's redemption process and activities due to several market integrity concerns. Tether has been given 10 days to respond. Tether has been probed like this before and has come out on the other side of these things, like, completely clean. But I feel like this is just gonna keep on happening until the end of time.

• 1:10:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  The Senate.

• 1:10:57David Hoffman?

  This is coming from the committee on banking, housing and urban affairs. The same committee that did that whole like cryptocurrencies. What are they even good for?

• 1:11:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is probably one of their action items, right? It's like, we gotta investigate that tether thing. Yeah, another, another week more tether fud. It's, it's held up. The thing about tether though is you don't know what's behind it, right? Because it's not, you can't view source. You can't like open source codes, not DeFi. So I understand the concerns. I just like, not a big deal in my mind. What's Biden doing? Okay. Oh, this is a, I guess maybe a quick drive by is Powell is named as the Fed chair again. So reappointed as the Fed chair. So I think the existing policy is going to continue into the future.

• 1:11:40David Hoffman?

  The, I think this, the general gist that I've gotten about this news is that like people are just going, the Fed is going to likely continue to be warm towards money printing. I think that's, that's the gist that I've gotten.

• 1:11:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, absolutely. It doesn't look like a restrictive policy. What's this, David?

• 1:11:56David Hoffman?

  Somebody is suing Pool Together because the Pool Together branded as a no loss lottery. Well, the guy lost money because of gas fees. So this guy is suing Pool Together because he didn't get his money back because of gas fees. And so he sent in $25 of USDC, received 25 tickets of USDC and pulled together, and then had a gas payment of $161. Therefore, the person is effectively paying $186 for $25 in Pool Together lottery tickets and is now suing Pool Together for being a no loss lottery, but having, but having to pay the gas fees. Like it's completely nonsensical.

• 1:12:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  But don't you, like, isn't this only worth like whatever he paid? Even the best case he wins, he gets $200 back? This is like small claims court stuff. This is weird. We need like Judge Judy for crypto.

• 1:12:45David Hoffman?

  I have my conspiracies about this.

• 1:12:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  What's your conspiracy?

• 1:12:49David Hoffman?

  Oh, it's, it's a great news story to advertise how high gas fees, how high gas fees on Ethereum are.

• 1:12:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  Here, here's another one. I don't know if you saw this, it's, it's kind of buried in the thread here. He's gravely, this is from the, the, the actual notice here. He's gravely concerned that the cryptocurrency ecosystem, which requires the use of enormous amounts of electricity, is accelerating climate change and allowing people to evade financial regulations and scam customers.

• 1:13:15David Hoffman?

  God, what a fucking asshole.

• 1:13:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, it's like, but another like conspiracy theory would be

• 1:13:22David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 1:13:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  This entire thing was just built to

• 1:13:25David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 1:13:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Actually say that last sentence there. Which is like cryptocurrency is bad, destroying the climate, allowing people to evade financial regulations and scam consumers. That might be the reason for this case, not the $200 or $25 and

• 1:13:40David Hoffman?

  Eric Connor.

• 1:13:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  He lost.

• 1:13:41David Hoffman?

  Eric Connor follows up this thread saying, he should sue the CEO of Ethereum. He should do that. He should do that.

• 1:13:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Last thing for news, David, Binance Smart Chain validators are threatening to dump the chain and move on. I don't know if you've read this thread on GitHub, but it is an absolute shit show, dude.

• 1:13:58David Hoffman?

  Yeah, it's pretty bad.

• 1:13:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  They are upset. What's happening?

• 1:14:01David Hoffman?

  Yeah, somebody who is apparently a VSC validators goes in the GitHub for Binance Smart Chain says, guys, seriously WTF? This is a blockchain with supposedly billions of value, yet it is governed and developed like the project of a stoned teenager. I've rarely seen some things handled so unprofessionally. There is no code review, patches are simply committed in most cases, even without a proper description of what they do or what problem they're trying to solve. There doesn't appear to be any reasonable testing in place. Every update seems to make things worse. There's zero responding to bug reports. Hundreds of people report non-syncing nodes or nodes falling out of sync. Response from the developer zero. There's a list of other complaints. Apparently, Binance Smart Chain is not treating their, their smart chain as the billion dollar network that it is.

• 1:14:44David Hoffman?

  And, you know, it's apparently the validators are very upset about it.

• 1:14:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, fork of Geth, and then they're just like increasing

• 1:14:51David Hoffman?

  Lazy fork of Geth.

• 1:14:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Limits until the thing falls over, right?

• 1:14:54David Hoffman?

  I've heard this story before.

• 1:14:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  Falling over. Yeah, absolutely. We've got more to say.

• 1:14:58David Hoffman?

  It's happened a few times.

• 1:14:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  We've got more to say, and we're going to come back with the takes. And I think we're going to start with this, this Twitter drama again, this abandoning Ethereum thread. Got to pick back up on that, give our thoughts, give some takes around the Twitter sphere as well. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible.

• 1:15:15David Hoffman?

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• 1:15:58David Hoffman?

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• 1:16:43David Hoffman?

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• 1:17:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, guys, we are back with the takes of the week. Let's start here where we left off in the news. There was this tweet abandoning Ethereum, Ethereum abandoning its users. This is Suzu from A16Z. David, do you want to just set the stage? Like, what was the context for this before we give some of our takes and then the takes from around the community?

• 1:17:42David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so Suzu is kind of like the starting, like really started this whole thing off. But Suzu is a member of 3 Hours Capital. We've had 3 Hours Capital on the show before, right? During like the peak of the May run, where Ether was like breaking all time highs into the $4,000 range and there was like the whole like flippity narrative. Had them on the show. 3 Hours Capital, they are traders. They trade on narratives. They make big, big moves over like maybe a couple of months to half a year to a year-long time, time horizon moves. And they just, they just trade and trade Bitcoin dominance.

• 1:18:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  And they're really good at it.

• 1:18:16David Hoffman?

  They're really good at it.

• 1:18:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  They've been doing it for a long time.

• 1:18:19David Hoffman?

  Yes, yeah, they, they move markets. They literally have billions and billions of dollars. And so people, people pay attention to what these guys say because, you know, when you're, whoever's got a billion dollars like captures a bunch of attention, especially when they have the track record that they do. Lately, since the last like maybe six months or so, they have heavily been promoing Avalanche on Twitter. And this is what they do. This is the classic, like this is what a lot of people do in this industry and not even inside this industry, especially in this industry, but also even in the legacy industry. People, funds do this, hedge funds do this, Goldman Sachs does this. They fill and then they shill. What that means is that they fill their bags and then they talk about their, like they, Goldman Sachs will like take a position in something and then they'll publish some like price targets. It's really them just like pumping their bags, right?

• 1:19:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  You remember when Cuban came on, Mark Cuban, he was like, get long then get loud.

• 1:19:09David Hoffman?

  Yes.

• 1:19:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's his mantra for investing, same thing.

• 1:19:11David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so this is, this is a common activity. It's, it's annoying to some people in the industry because some people have different time horizons than like trades over three months to a year. Some people are looking at this industry 10-year long time horizons and so trading in the short term is just meaningless. And that actually is, I think, the juxtap, really the through line behind all of the drama that happened. Here's Ryan Selkis summed it up. People thinking Five months out arguing with people thinking five years out, the story of most debates on crypto Twitter. So really that kind of frames this whole conversation. Meanwhile, Suzu Kyle Davies really like pumping the hell out of Avalanche. The the kind of the idea, the a conspiracy about why they're doing this is that they missed the Solana run.

• 1:19:54David Hoffman?

  Yet they saw Avalanche as like the next obvious target for a similar run on the heels of Solana. And so started like pumping pumping really Avalanche really, really hard.

• 1:20:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  And if they get loud, they can kind of make it a self fulfilling prophecy. They can kind of make it happen if they get enough people to believe it.

• 1:20:11David Hoffman?

  Yeah, like Suzu has like half a million followers on Twitter. Kyle Davies has a couple hundred thousand as well. People pay attention to these things and they have consistently been pumping Solana Avalanche. And like the Ethereum community like tolerates this sort of behavior. Like they know, like a lot of people like they don't like it, but like this is part of the game. They understand that traders gonna trade. It's different when a lot of especially a lot of these ETH killers start actively flooding Ethereum with just straight up false information and misinformation. And then also start to attacking some of the actual like purpose and meaning of the builders and what they're building. And that is what happened here. Kane from Kane Warwick started off, kind of started this thing off saying,

• 1:20:52David Hoffman?

  "A lot of people I respected earlier in this cycle have sold out in pursuit of profit maximalism, chasing opportunistic gains at the expense of their reputation. Remember this, when they all come flooding back to the Ethereum ecosystem once L2 scaling becomes inevitable." So Kane isn't just talking just about Theros Capital. He's talking about just the cohort of people that do this, right?

• 1:21:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  And to be fair, didn't name Theros Capital at all, just saying this in general.

• 1:21:17David Hoffman?

  Just saying in general, like this, this is relevant to Theros Capital, but is relevant to a lot of people in this space who trade on narratives and not on fundamentals. And that's another dividing line between like the debates, like people who trade on narratives or people who trade on fundamentals. And so while I, in the article, I say, what happens next is that Suzu responds to this tweet claiming hypocrisy due to Kane Warwick selling a position of his SNX tokens to purchase $50 million of real estate in Australia. Across two different properties, I believe. And so we have this billionaire trader who's like doing the whole filled and chill thing, being critiqued by Kane Warwick, who is not a billionaire, but might be kind of close, definitely upwards of 500 million.

• 1:22:00David Hoffman?

  And these two like very wealthy people going after it, one claiming that the other one is like dishonest and illegitimate, right? And, and so Kyle, Suzu, if you want to scroll up a little bit, Ryan. Suzu says, "You literally chose the worst scaling solution possible for your users to defend your own ETH bags, therefore making your own community actually poor. Now you have the audacity to insult anyone not as ETH-tarded as you. Good for you," is what Suzu said to Kane. So very spicy.

• 1:22:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Is that good for you? Is that go F yourself?

• 1:22:34David Hoffman?

  Oh, that's go F yourself. That's go F yourself.

• 1:22:37David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I kind of made that up on the spot. I didn't really know what it was. Go F yourself. Yeah, okay. And then Kane responds to Sue. "The fact that you can't see the distinction between hedging your exposure to crypto in an alternative asset and turning into the shill of a competing L1 is bizarre. I know you're smarter than this, so I'm assuming this is just an emotional response." And so like that was just, that was day one of fighting. A lot of like, there was many, many threads, a lot of like other conversations that happened as a result of this, many people in the comments.

• 1:23:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  Everyone has to weigh in on this.

• 1:23:06David Hoffman?

  Everyone's got to weigh in. Yeah. That was just day one. Day two, a little bit over 24 hours later, this is last Saturday. Suzu tweets out, "Yes, I have abandoned Ethereum despite supporting it in the past. Yes, Ethereum has abandoned its users despite, despite supporting them in the past. The idea of sitting around jerking off while watching the burn and concocting purity tests while zero newcomers can afford the chain is gross." And these are some strong words where Ethereum has abandoned its users. That goes to the heart of so many ETH devs, both on the L1 and on all the L2 research that has been going on. The whole, the whole concept of rollups is something that was funded by the Ethereum Foundation to independent researchers to figure out the scaling problem.

• 1:23:51David Hoffman?

  And Suzu's coming in and saying Ethereum has abandoned its users. Because it refuses to juice up the L1 in order to compromise on decentralization, in order to actually create scale enough to fit everyone.

• 1:24:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  Which begs the question, what does abandoning users actually mean, right? It's like, are you, by centralizing the thing, is that the worst abandonment of users?

• 1:24:11David Hoffman?

  Yes. In my, in my mind, abandoning decentralization is the abandonment of the individual, because decentralization and individuals go hand in hand. That's a topic for a different day.

• 1:24:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  But you also said something.

• 1:24:23David Hoffman?

  Oh, I actually kind of did say that, so maybe that's a topic for right now.

• 1:24:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's relevant.

• 1:24:26David Hoffman?

  So I follow up with this, to this Suzu tweet, saying, Suzu, abandoning decentralization is the biggest sin that you can commit in this space. It's easier to fix fees than it is to fix decentralization. A lot of people didn't really like that sin word, however, I did choose it extremely precisely. But that is a kind of a larger elaboration point, which I won't go into here. I definitely got my fair share of flack for this tweet, because people were throwing poo left and right on these Twitter threads.

• 1:24:54David Hoffman?

  And the, but the majority of the critiques was that I was making the assumption that anything that's not Ethereum is, quote, "not decentralized", and that I'm co-opting the word decentralization to only mean Ethereum. Well, the thing is, Avalanche is a blockchain that is absolutely, it's a fork of gas, and it's just pushing the limits, it's just like juicing up how much throughput that you can actually have on the chain, to the point where like, if they add any more, the chain falls apart, and they know this, because they have had to cap the number of validators that can validate the chain, because if there's too many nodes, not enough nodes can sync up to the chain, and it causes the, the chain to just fork off and not be able to have consensus. Literally, the network topples over. We saw the same exact phenomenon happen with Solana, when it went down for 17 hours.

• 1:25:38David Hoffman?

  Like, it got too juiced, and then they, the network just froze, because they just pushed it to the limits too much.

• 1:25:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, we were just talking earlier about Binance Smart Chain, right? All the issues that validators are having with Binance Smart Chain is because, like, big blocks, and it becomes more centralized and possible to run until the entire thing, not only centralizes, but then falls over.

• 1:25:58David Hoffman?

  Right. So the, all these same ETH killer chains, what they are really doing is they are just pushing the limits on network throughput. Up to the point of instability and then not going actually any further, right? Just like almost unstable, but not quite.

• 1:26:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes, not all of them get to that point of instability, but all of them like get to the point where, yeah, your MacBook Pro can no longer run an actual non-validating node, right? It has to be in a data center, it has to be a big, strong B-Feet machine. And they say that's okay, they say that's fine. And Ethereum says, no, that's not fine. That is centralization, that is the exact thing that we're fighting. That is the old system. We want a more decentralized system here.

• 1:26:39David Hoffman?

  Yeah, it really goes, and I'm gonna make a video or something about this later, but like it really goes like, is the network separating its participants into two classes of citizens? The people that can validate the system and the people that are just users of that system? Because that is like, there's a lot to unpack there. But let's go, but let's go back through the story. And I kind of add some context in this, in this post that I put out on Monday. The Ethereum community is known for its inclusiveness, inclusivity and its openness. The culture, this culture of inclusivity came out as a reaction to the closed-mindedness and maximalism fostering of Bitcoin culture that eventually pushed Vitalik out of Bitcoin and many, many other future Ethereum's out of Bitcoin circles. And ultimately, those people ended up gravitating towards Ethereum

• 1:27:23David Hoffman?

  because Ethereum was a reaction to the lack of inclusivity of Bitcoin. This openness and acceptance of Ethereum is a very important part of Ethereum culture, but it's also a double-edged sword. Bitcoiners have learned to make very firm, hard-line stances where Ethereum's have been more willing and accepting and trusting of new ideas, new people and new efforts. This has allowed Ethereum as a community to grow, but it also lets wolves come in wearing sheep clothing. In 2018 to 2020, Ethereum did not have a spine. During this time, Bitcoiners actually set the narrative of what Ethereum was. And Ethereum as a community was just a complete pushover. It's actually Ryan here that made this big flag in the ground, I think around 2019, saying ETH is money. Yo, fun fact, Ryan Sean Adams made the ETH is money meme.

• 1:28:09David Hoffman?

  Because it was a reaction, because all the Bitcoiners like ETH isn't money, Bitcoin's money. And like, and we started like, no, ETH is money. And we actually started to grow a spine as a reaction to all the Bitcoin or FUD that happened with Ethereum.

• 1:28:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  And now it says, sell the bees, by the way.

• 1:28:22David Hoffman?

  Now it's on.

• 1:28:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Sell the bees, ETH is money.

• 1:28:24David Hoffman?

  And so this this culture that we've had, Ethereum actually standing up for himself is completely different now. And this is what happened in reaction to Suzu's tweet. We have Hayden Adams saying, "No issue with L1s that prioritize immediate scaling over decentralization. Many users want this." But this is a really bad take, incredibly insulting to everyone working on ETH2 and Layer 2s, especially from someone who has gained extraordinary wealth off the backs of Ethereum builders. Ethereum's capital is a massive investor in Starkware, who we just had on the show, and they are working on scaling Ethereum. So like this whole narrative shenanigans on Twitter is just like such short.

• 1:28:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Not just Three Hours Capital, too.

• 1:29:02David Hoffman?

  Multicoin.

• 1:29:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Arthur, yeah.

• 1:29:04David Hoffman?

  Defiance Capital.

• 1:29:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  Defiance Capital. It's like, it's like, Defiance Capital was a big investor in Synthetix in the early days and made like a lot of money on their DeFi bets with Synthetix.

• 1:29:15David Hoffman?

  Right. Carry on. Defiance Capital is a capital firm that was bankrolled by Three Hours Capital. Sazil Anthony Sazano says, "Ethereans were born in the FUD, molded by it. We survived a brutal bear market and came out stronger than ever. We're not going to sit back and let bullshit be spread around Ethereum. We're going to fight back with everything you've got." DC Investor says, "Project teams, I strongly recommend you stop giving allocations on your cap table to funds who don't give a flying F about the ecosystem you are building in or the goals you are trying to achieve. Money is plentiful in this space. You always have the option." In the last tweet here, Eric Connor, "I loved how fired up crypto Twitter gets when the Ethereum community actually decides to defend itself. Every day Ethereum killers

• 1:29:57David Hoffman?

  just shit misinformation on Ethereum. Sometimes you have to defend. Sell us your ETH at $4,400, then go F off." And like, the interesting thing that I think is really cool about this story is what I'm calling the critique chain. This is the pattern that we see going on right now. The Ethereum community is critiquing the Ethereum killers in the same way that Bitcoiners critiqued Ethereum back in the day. A centralized blockchain that only a few people could run nodes on, early insiders got an outsized allocation of funds, building an ecosystem on empty promises. These are the same critiques, but now it's just different communities pointing these critiques at other different communities. So it makes sense. When Avalanche and Solana community looks towards the Ethereum community and sees the same things that Ethereum see in Bitcoin, the incumbent chain wants to spin the narrative

• 1:30:42David Hoffman?

  that every other chain is as centralized as a VC chain, the disruptive chain wants to spin the narrative of the lazy, lost plot elitists who no longer care about the values they originally purported. These critiques just get passed down the line, right? So what is actually true?

• 1:30:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, so all of this, here's the critique, David. All of what you just said, it sounds like you're an ETH maxi. That's what they would say. They would say, "You are like doing the same thing that Bitcoin maximalists did previously in saying, 'The only money is Bitcoin, the only chain is Bitcoin, everything else is just like a shitcoin, everything else is garbage,' right?" Now, you're saying that Ethereum's way is the only way. Is this what you're saying? And like Ethereum equals decentralization, both are the same, but like, these other chains are redefining what decentralization actually means, and your view is too narrow. You are an Ethereum maxim. So what do you say to that critique?

• 1:31:37David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so what I say to that critique is there are twofold. There's two things that are really, really important about our network. Who's got all of the tokens and who can run the chain? Those are the two like variables that are really important when it comes to decentralization. And so, what is actually true about this? Someone is right in these criticisms about like, "You've gone too far down the centralization spectrum." And so, I think that Bitcoiners, Bitcoin maxis are wrong about Ethereum. They say like, "Ethereum's got this pre-mine, it had all these insiders." The Ethereum pre-sale was an open, permissionless, censorship-resistant, non-KYC pre-sale

• 1:32:17David Hoffman?

  that sold 60 million of the 72 total million Ether to over 9,000 participants on day one and raised $14 million for funding. Of that 12 million that was left over, half went to the Ethereum Foundation to fund developments, and that has, part of that EF, like, it just pays client teams, pays for research. It gave Starkware a $4 million grant to fund ZK Rollup technology, which now powers immutable, so rare D Y D X, and which Three Hours Capital is an investor in. And so like a lot of these, the half of the 12 million that wasn't sold to the public went to funding operations like this. The other half went to like the Ethereum co-founders and early contributors like Vitalik,

• 1:33:01David Hoffman?

  Joe Lubin, Mahaly, a bunch of other people.

• 1:33:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  This sounds like distant past, though. Like, somebody could argue like, okay, you know, so what? It's distant past, like, what, you know, replace, I guess, distribution. Distribution is less, is more concentrated with a Solana or Avalanche or Layer One, but it'll get less, it'll get more distributed over time, right? It's like, eventually, some of these people who made a lot of money are gonna actually sell, and it'll just get more decentralized. And everything you just talked about, for a lot of people, they weren't there in those early days. So they didn't benefit from the crowd sale or any of the upside, right? So like, what about that? Are you just, I mean, you're just saying that the centralization line starts, stops at Ethereum, right?

• 1:33:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  The decentralization line stops at Ethereum. These people are saying, no, it's actually, we could go a little further. We go to Avalanche, we could go to Solana, and that, that's fine.

• 1:34:01David Hoffman?

  Right. So on the spectrum of things, like Solana and Avalanche are way more decentralized than like your typical commercial bank. Like, they are on the decentralization spectrum. But the difference between the Ethereum pre-sale and the VC-backed Avalanche and Solana chains is that the, the genesis event for the Solana tokens and Avalanche tokens was only given to insider VCs, right? And so where the Ethereum pre-sale was open and permissionless, the, actually having upside to the very beginnings of this network was reserved for already heavily financially capitalized investors. You saw the, the people on the All In Podcast, the four billionaires who like are on this big flex fest, talking about their massive Solana bags and how they made a billion dollars. That was, it wasn't open to the public.

• 1:34:44David Hoffman?

  And the first impressions for these chains are really, really important because they create the culture downstream. And so this is also where the actual system design of of the blockchains also impacts this where the centralization of the difficulty of running a node also restricts who can actually verify the chain. And so these things tilt towards centralization over time. Only a few people were able to have early access to the tokens. Only a few people can run the chain. And so the the centralization is double is twofold, right? There's too many people to with early bag holders owning the bags. And then there's too few people that can actually validate the chain. One of the beautiful things about Ethereum's

• 1:35:25David Hoffman?

  version of proof of stake and also having a proof of work phase prior to that is that there's been this massive distribution event because everyone can run the chain. I started off with mining Ethereum. That my first ether that I ever got, I got from mining. It's myself as an individual because I have the power to do that because of the design of the network of Ethereum. That is not true for Avalanche. That's not true for Solana. You need to have very significant beefy hardware. You need to have knowledge with how to run a system like this because it's complicated. And then you also need to have a significant supply of the tokens in order to stake on these delegated proof of stake systems. And so it's really about what culture are you instilling in your chain from day one? Are you instilling a culture of

• 1:36:08David Hoffman?

  decentralization? Or are you instilling a culture of pumping the bags of the insiders and restricting the ability for the average individual to run a node or to have access to the upside? And so this is the difference that like, and I don't ever want to like tell someone that they can't go use these systems. This is not a conversation about the users. If you are a user of Avalanche and if you're a user of Solana and you are happy, that is great. We are not talking about you. We are talking about the people that are building these systems and are not thinking about the long term consequences of decentralization in five to 10 to 50 years.

• 1:36:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. So here's the thing, David. It's like it's for me, it's not even.

• 1:36:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's not even that these other chains exist on another point of the decentralization spectrum. Like, that is totally fine. I think we should have, we have, we should have a rich spectrum of, you know, centralized things, you know, side chains and crypto banks, exchanges, you know, more fintech type of chains. And then we should have things like a decentralized Bitcoin and Ethereum, kind of on the other end of the spectrum. What kills me is like the decentralization theater, right? It's the pretending to be a thing that you're not. It's a world where you're pretending there are no trade-offs. It's a world with, in Suze's original tweet, where it's like, Avalanche cares about users because it has low gas fees right now, and Ethereum doesn't because it has high gas fees right now, right?

• 1:37:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Without acknowledging or recognizing the trade-offs. It's the deception that kills me. Yes. Okay, it's like the deception. The deception in order to pump a narrative. And that's why crypto Twitter blew up. It was the deception. Yeah, the deception. And deception in pursuit of bag pumping, in pursuit of wealth, right? From people who are already exceptionally wealthy. The wealthiest people in crypto, yeah. Have done exceptionally well. And it's just, this gets back to like, why we're here, and the responsibility that we have, right? As early settlers in these strange new lands. Like, we're here first, and I feel very strongly that we have a responsibility to future generations, to get this whole thing right, because we have one shot at it, okay? It could be five years, 10 years come to pass. Like, I think crypto is inevitable.

• 1:38:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  Blockchain, like, this whole thing is inevitable. What's not inevitable is that on the other side of this, we have a decentralized, open, permissionless money system. That part is not inevitable. What could very much happen is, on the other side of this crypto transformation, we make a whole bunch of new bankers super wealthy. And they're just new bankers, that, again, control the masses, you know, clamp things down.

• 1:38:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  And extract, become rent extractors, right? That's not, I, so I think the people in this space who are here now actually should be held to a higher standard. Right? And like, they should acknowledge and accept the responsibility. I get if you're like, if you're a trader, you're just here, you're trying to make money, you're a profit maximalist. That's okay too. Like, we need profit maximalists in this space too. You, you know, you're a mercenary, okay? There are settlers, there are mercenaries, you're a mercenary, that's fine.

• 1:39:09David Hoffman?

  You keep markets efficient, that's a valuable contribution.

• 1:39:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's valuable, but like, acknowledge you're a mercenary. Don't try to pretend you're a settler and like, actually be a mercenary. That's what pisses me off, and I think that's why this tweet, you know, caught, caught fire, right? So it's like, it's not, it's, it's not really about the users, is it? And yeah, that's, that's, that's why I think this tweaked a lot of people.

• 1:39:33David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so Su is trying to brand himself as like, oh, I care about the users. And Ethereum people don't because I'm promoting Avalanche, which actually has a blockchain that has cheap fees. Also, in the, in the last like, week or so, Avalanche usage has actually gone up to where a Uniswap trade costs $20. I saw, I saw a Uniswap trade cost $20. A lot of these things have cheap fees because they're not being used, right? And so like, not only is there deception about like, the intentions, but it's also just straight up deception as, as the actual innovations that are happening on these chains. You don't get to just call the fact that you spun up a chain and it has had empty blocks for the last two years, innovation because there's cheap fees. And this, Hozu had a really good take about this, where he said, "Truth be told,

• 1:40:15David Hoffman?

  other than choosing different points on the decentralization cost spectrum, what 10x useful improvements have other Layer Ones made in the last four years?" And so a lot of frustration out of the Ethereum community is that Avalanche, again, which is just a fork of Geth. We already have Geth, Avalanche forked it, juiced up the block sizes, and then called it innovation, right? And, and sure, there is demand for that, especially when Ethereum fees are like $200 to do anything on the Layer One. Of course, there's going to be demand for that. But what you don't get to say is that you haven't compromised on decentralization and you care about users. Uh, and the caring about users at point is Really, really important point because if you are not able to run your node,

• 1:40:55David Hoffman?

  you are the product. It's the same thing with Facebook and the whole web two paradigm. If you are the product, like the users are the product. And so if you can't run a node, you are some banker's product. And that is the difference between a fully decentralized system where users are self sovereign and everyone is equal versus a compromised system where only a few people can run a node and it's not you.

• 1:41:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, and you know, I'd remind people because the retort to that is like, well, most people don't run their own nodes, do they? When they press a button on MetaMask, right? It's like, no, they don't, but they have the option to.

• 1:41:29David Hoffman?

  Having the option is incredibly important. Having the option to leave the system or to verify the system for yourself, make sure that you have the same amount of power that everyone else has.

• 1:41:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right. It's like, I don't, I don't vote in every single election. Like, I try to vote in all the major elections, but I don't vote in every single election. But having the ability to vote in elections is the thing I want preserved in my governance protocols, right? If you can't run a vote, you have, if you can't run a node, non-validating node, you have no vote. You have no ability to say which, which block is valid and which is not, you know, which, which upgrade is valid and which is not, and it removes power from the user base.

• 1:42:09David Hoffman?

  Anatoly, the CEO of Solana, said that Solana is objectively decentralized, which is already an oxymoron because you can't actually measure decentralization. Therefore, you can't objectively be decentralized. It's always subjective at the end of the day. But then Paul and I are response to this claim that Solana is objectively decentralized, saying, ah, yes, objective decentralization, like giving half of the token supply to insiders, creating a delegated proof of state consensus mechanism so that they can rule over it and making it so expensive that it's not a trustless network with only validators and a few users running nodes to defend against validator attacks. Like, this is the difference between the network topology of Ethereum and the network of the topology of some of a chain that has just juiced up the validator so that not everyone can run the node.

• 1:42:53David Hoffman?

  And then there was a lot of Ethereum developer pushback against the whole abandoning the users thing. And the thing with the thing, the power about layer twos is that if you want to compromise on decentralization, you can do that on a layer two. And you can literally port the Avalanche blockchain, the Solana blockchain, onto a layer two and then retain all the decentralization compromises that you've already made and even be able to have an even more cheap and more throughput environment, yet you also still get the decentral and security that Ethereum has prioritized. And so this is also something that really frustrates Ethereum people is that like you have this, this side chain of Avalanche where you can port from Ethereum to the Avalanche L1 using a bridge.

• 1:43:37David Hoffman?

  But that bridge could have been turned into a cryptographically secure roll up and have Avalanche be rolled up on Ethereum and have that be much more secure and retain decentralization. But they didn't do that because pumping L1 tokens is way easier, especially when you just give them to people like give the tokens to three hours capital at the genesis of the, of the whole entire chain in order to get this like pay for the mercenaries that like bootstrap this fake community around it. Same thing that happened to Solana, like if you can't generate a community yourself, give your tokens to, to multi coin capital, they'll do it for you. Right? And so this is kind of where a lot of Ethereum people get frustrated. It's like you're compromising on decentralization when you could have just been done a roll

• 1:44:20David Hoffman?

  up and you're making it an L1 because you need people to invest in your chain and because the community wasn't going to do it anyways in the first place. Like this is where a significant amount of frustration for me comes from too.

• 1:44:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I do think there's a lot of it. I, you know, I want to be careful though, because like I think that one thing that I don't think you're saying is that these other chains don't have like communities or users or this sort of thing, right?

• 1:44:43David Hoffman?

  They didn't first, they didn't lead with that.

• 1:44:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:46David Hoffman?

  The communities came after.

• 1:44:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  There's like a question of like, Yeah, so, you know, many of these chains have, you know, developers, they have activity, they have a lot of things that are getting built on them.

• 1:44:57David Hoffman?

  Yes.

• 1:44:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, Solana has a fantastic wallet, for example, the Phantom Wallet, which is, you know, arguably a better wallet experience than what Ethereum has today. Like, there's some stuff getting built out in these chains, right? It's like, whether the asset justifies everything that's getting built out or not is maybe a different question. And so, like, from a user perspective, I think, going back to that point, it's like, users should feel free to use whatever solution they feel like. Go use Robinhood if you want, go use Coinbase if you want, go use a sidechain, go use Polygon, go use Avalanche, go use Solana if you want, just use whatever you want. So like, there's no judgment here.

• 1:45:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  The wrath, I think, is coming from people who are just exploiting retail investors on short-run narratives that they actually know don't have sustainable longevity. And they're fudding projects that are taking the slower, more difficult decentralized route. That's where it goes off course, right? That's where people get frustrated. And I, you know, I hope that comes through. So like, let's, uh, let's talk about some other reactions, uh, from the community. So what is Cyrus saying here?

• 1:46:11David Hoffman?

  Yeah, Cyrus says, "Demand for cryptocurrency has greatly outpaced the technology, given the macro climate. VCs and other financial opportunists have found a way to monetize this imbalance by chilling centralized chains to satiate the demand from retail. To save face, they claim that they are offering experimental alternatives with credible decentralization plans, dubious, ETH maxies, as a combination of A, true passion for decentralization, and B, their bags are fighting back against this narrative. When ETH, or even BTC for that matter, given its status as the only other reasonably decentralized coin, finally scales, literally every single one of the opportunists will be back. This is all short-term monetization planned due to the difficulties in actually scaling this tech. I'm skeptical anyone actually thinks these centralized chains are the future.

• 1:46:56David Hoffman?

  If they do end up being fully decentralized, then I guess the Ethereum community was wrong. Place your short and long-term bets accordingly."

• 1:47:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's a very rational take, I think.

• 1:47:04David Hoffman?

  That's a great summary of what just happened, yeah.

• 1:47:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  Here's another one.

• 1:47:07David Hoffman?

  Paulini, crypto Twitter is like an equestrian club from 1885. A bunch of spoiled, and I don't even know that word.

• 1:47:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Irrascible.

• 1:47:16David Hoffman?

  Irrascible brats squabbling over whose horse is the fastest. Meanwhile, a gentleman called Carl Benz was building this contraption called the automobile. He's referring to ZK rollups.

• 1:47:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  Irrascible brats, that's in the 1885 terminology there.

• 1:47:31David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  What about this take? This is you.

• 1:47:33David Hoffman?

  This is the one to round it all out. And I say, we are fortunate to be alive during a pivotal moment in human history. The choices we make here and now will have outsized impact upon future generations that use these systems. We must knowingly take on this responsibility. And I think this is something that really divides crypto into two camps. It's people that understand that the choices we make will have impacts upon our kids, and our kids' kids, and our kids' kids' kids. And so we need to make sure that we make the right choices for them today, because these things will ossify. Little did I know, when I signed up for Facebook in high school, that Facebook would be causing civil wars, like 10, 15, 20 years down the line. Or swaying the actual election of the United States of America.

• 1:48:16David Hoffman?

  I didn't know that when I signed up for Facebook. But this is, and my favorite quote from the Cypherpunks manifesto, is that cypherpunks understand that the code they write impacts the people that use it. And so we need to make sure, we have a very small window of opportunity to actually make sure that these systems that we are designing are people first now, and for forever. And there's a lot of people who, the profit maxis out there that are trading, they're doing whatever they're gonna do. It's the profit maxis that trade on, try to make this their narrative too, while they apply it to their bags that don't actually resemble this narrative. They know that this is true. They know that the decisions we make are critically important right now.

• 1:49:00David Hoffman?

  And then they say that they are making those same choices on something that's actually compromised and actually decentralized. That is inexcusable in my mind.

• 1:49:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, do you know what's funny is, I, you know, I write this in a newsletter, a bankless newsletter, it's supposed to be sort of a crypto investor newsletter, and this is supposed to be a crypto investor podcast. But we are not actually profit maximalists.

• 1:49:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  We're not, which is like sacrilege to say in some circles. I think somebody like at Three Hours Capital, you know, Suzu's like, uh, why aren't you profit maximalist? You should be.

• 1:49:32David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 1:49:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right? But it's like, there are things that are more important than making money in this space. And one of the things that I think we care deeply about and Bankless keeps cares deeply about is that we actually create a bankless money system for the world. That's a decentralized property rights system for the metaverse, right? This is our opportunity and so close. Like if we get it right, there's literally, it's like literally a fork in the road. We get it right, we've got a fantastic future ahead of us. If we get it wrong, well, it's going to be a repeat of the broken kleptocratic system that we see in the physical world, except in the metaverse. It might be even worse than the metaverse, right? So like,

• 1:50:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  I feel a tremendous amount of responsibility to get this right. And it's like, people are going to get super wealthy along the way. Like, you're going to do great holding these ideals, right? Because you're here early, you're building the future, you're not going to be as wealthy as the pure profit maximalist, but like, how do you measure wealth?

• 1:50:34David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 1:50:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  It goes back to how do you measure wealth? Is it just about your, your, you know, net worth? Is that the only measure of wealth? Or you actually care about like, the systems that you're building and the economic value that you create for the world around you? It's incredibly important. This is like back to, you know, it's more like the 1780s than, you know, the 1980s or the 1990s, right? Because we're creating a constitution here. We're creating a governance protocol. And it's incredibly important that we get the balance of power, the decentralization, right? Because people are literally going to be living on top of the systems that we're building today into the future. So we're not profit maximalist.

• 1:51:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  And I, you know, I don't make apologies for that. I think, you know, the Bankless program is like more rewarding than just profit maximalism. Like, you'll do fine. I think people historically have done really well, uh, you know, on Bankless and on this journey, but it's not optimized for making the most money possible at all times in the market.

• 1:51:37David Hoffman?

  There's a, crypto is a reaction to. The current status quo, it's a reaction to the 2008 crisis, it's a reaction to the incumbency. And it's because people feel disenfranchised and left out of the system that they feel more and more aligned with crypto because crypto is more inclusive. If we, the goals of making a decentralized system that is benefits our kids is, is, I'm not, I'm not a profit maxi, but I want the most amount of wealth to be created over the long term. I want my kids to be able to have financial upsides from the crypto industry. And I want their kids to also have financial upsides on the crypto industry.

• 1:52:17David Hoffman?

  But if we create another system that the population has a reaction to because of the incumbents and because of the, the capture, then this system is going to break down. And so this is about focusing on decentralization now means that our kids can prosper and our kids' kids can prosper in a fair and equitable system.

• 1:52:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Man, let's get to it, the end. What are you excited about this week?

• 1:52:40David Hoffman?

  Oh gosh, that was, that was long. Yeah, let's get, let's get looking forward into the future. I'm excited about all the future conferences that are coming. Right after Thanksgiving, I'm going to Miami for Art Basel, hanging out with the optimism team there, as well as Nate Muller, the artist that I bought all those NFTs from that I've been looking at right on my, my new TV NFT display thing, right over my shoulder, really, really cool. So for that, and then I go straight to Puerto Rico for Metaverso for Puerto Rico Blockchain Week, also for the Pleaser Dow Retreat, that's going to be fantastic. In 2022, we got ETH Denver coming in February, that ETH Denver's home is going to be amazing. Bankless live podcast, maybe, maybe. And then right after that, in May, in Permissionless in Florida,

• 1:53:21David Hoffman?

  where we are throwing the, the Bankless event with the Permissionless team, excuse me, with the Blockworks team throwing the Permissionless Conference, where Ryan and I meet for the first time. There's a lot of cool, cool events on the horizon, so I'm looking forward to all of them.

• 1:53:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, that's awesome, man. You're counting me out for ETH Denver. I haven't quite decided. I might go. I still might go. I don't know. We'll see. It's pretty cold, though.

• 1:53:41David Hoffman?

  It is very cold. I'll believe it when I see it.

• 1:53:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  You know me, I guess.

• 1:53:45David Hoffman?

  All right, Ron, what are you excited about?

• 1:53:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  I'm excited about Starkware. We had a fantastic conversation with them earlier this week, and people don't realize how close general purpose

• 1:53:59David Hoffman?

  ZK rollup chains are, right?

• 1:54:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's like I thought this was a year away, you know, maybe two years away. I've heard estimates that this is like, you know, three to five years away. It feels like it's imminent, okay? Starknet is going to ship next week. This is like an optimism or an arbitrage. It's a little bit different in some ways. You can't directly port your contracts. It's not quite as Ethereum native, but it's similar in a lot of ways. And transaction speeds are going to be fast. The more transactions, the more applications, the lower the gas fees go. And it's like, it's like right here, okay? So when you see the metaverse on it, we're going to see gaming application. We're going to see NFTs on it. We're going to see entire composable DeFi money Legos. And it's here.

• 1:54:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's going to start, I think, relatively small, like in the next month or two. But six months from now, I think the crypto world's going to look completely different because we will have these ZK rollup chains that are at least as big, if not bigger, than many of the layer one rollups that are out here. So I personally didn't realize this was so close. Like, I knew optimistic rollups were here. They're fantastic. They're a great solution. Now we've got ZK rollups with Starkware coming out too. And then we also had a conversation with Polygon, who's doing some really cool stuff with ZK Tech. I'm sure we'll have ZK Sync, the Matter Labs folks on here soon.

• 1:55:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  But I really feel like 2022 is going to be a huge year for rollups and for scalability.

• 1:55:33David Hoffman?

  That's I'm also excited about all those things.

• 1:55:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  I know you are. All right, let's get to the meat of the week.

• 1:55:38David Hoffman?

  Volcano cities. So this is a tweet out of Bankless HQ. We got two people fighting in the grass. One's labeled Ethereum, one's labeled Ethereum killers. Then we have somebody posing in front of them, looking like, yo, look at these idiots fighting behind. And that's Bitcoin, Bitcoin in their volcano cities. Yeah, that's that's that was crypto Twitter this week, for sure.

• 1:55:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's so funny, they were not Bitcoiners were not even worried about all of the drama on crypto Twitter between Ethereum and the ETH killers at all. They're just happy with the the the mining news and volcano cities and everything that's going on in the Bitcoin space. I think that about sums it up, man.

• 1:56:14David Hoffman?

  Absolutely. All right, everyone. Thank you for spending your Thanksgiving, Thanksgiving morning. Yeah, Thanksgiving morning with us, and I hope you guys have a ton of fun with your families. You don't always have to talk about crypto, but if you do, remind them about the values of decentralization.

• 1:56:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  Absolutely, and remind them to tune into Bankless. Happy Thanksgiving from us to you. We've got so much to be thankful for this year. Let me end with the risks and disclaimers. ETH is risky, Bitcoin is risky, you could definitely 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.

• 1:56:47David 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, podcast, and community as a Bankless Premium subscriber to get the most out of your Bankless experience. You'll get access to our market analysis, our alpha leaks, and exclusive content, and even the Bankless token for airdrops, raffles, and unlocks. If you're interested in crypto, the Bankless community is where you want to be. Click the link in the description to become a Bankless Premium subscriber today. Also, don't forget to subscribe to the channel for in-depth interviews with industry leaders,

• 1:57:28David 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.