144 - Web3 Is Going Great!! with Molly White

✨ DEBRIEF | Unpacking the Episode: https://shows.banklesshq.com/p/debrief-molly-white After many episodes, we finally brought on a crypto skeptic, Molly White! We brought Molly on to take us out of our crypto bubble, to challenge our assumptions, and to steelman the anti-crypto argument. Molly White is an engineer, public goods contributor, and an extremely articulate crypto critic. She also runs the web3 skeptic website: https://web3isgoinggreat.com/ In today’s episode, Molly gives us her central claim on why web3 isn’t actually going so great, why she thinks tokens make everything worse, and why—despite acknowledging some of the good—Molly believes crypto is a net negative to the world…and probably will be in the near future. P. S. Keep in mind, this episode was recorded on October 7, 2022 — way before any of the FTX meltdown occurred this past week. ------ 📣 Earnifi | Check For Your Unclaimed Airdrops, POAPs, & NFTs https://bankless.cc/earnifi ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/?utm_source=banklessshowsyt 🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/ ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum ❎ ACROSS | BRIDGE TO LAYER 2 https://bankless.cc/Across 🦁 BRAVE | THE BROWSER NATIVE WALLET https://bankless.cc/Brave 🔐 LEDGER | NANO HARDWARE WALLETS https://bankless.cc/Ledger ⚡️FUEL | THE MODULAR EXECUTION LAYER https://bankless.cc/Fuelpod ----- Topics Covered 0:00 Intro 7:35 How Great is Web3 Really Going? 8:10 Headline Selection & Website Goals 12:50 Molly is Anti-Crypto 13:36 Crypto’s Promises 15:36 Are We Early? 17:35 Crypto’s Successes 20:23 Crypto’s Biggest Failures 21:50 Banks 26:22 Education Problem 28:10 The Future of Crypto 33:34 What’s Wrong with the Internet? 35:27 The Money Side of Crypto 37:38 Web2 to Web3 42:23 Starry-Eyed Optimism 54:04 Public Goods 1:02:00 Hyperfinancialization 1:05:55 Show Me Fix It 1:08:34 Environmental Impact 1:13:31 Crypto Idealists 1:16:52 Surveillance & Changing Business Models 1:20:40 Wikipedia 1:25:17 Decentralization 1:26:23 Advice For Crypto People 1:27:44 Closing, Resources, & Disclaimers ------ Resources: Molly White https://twitter.com/molly0xFFF web3 is going just great https://twitter.com/web3isgreat ----- 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://www.bankless.com/disclosures

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

• 0:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  We're still here. Welcome to Bankless, where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance. This is how to get started, how to get better, how to front run the opportunity. This is Ryan Sean Adams. I'm here with David Hoffman, and we're here to help you become more bankless. Guys, a crypto skeptic take today. Just some context for the episode you're about to hear. We have Molly White on the episode, the title of which is "Web 3 is Going Great." David and I recorded this just over a month ago, on October 7th with Molly. It's been in our queue to get it out. We've had a lot of podcasts in queue. We had it targeted for release today, the day that you're listening to it. So November 14th, I believe, you'll be listening to this episode for the first time.

• 0:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  Molly did not have the context of the FTX meltdown as we're going into this. So as you are listening to this episode, put yourself in the place of the crypto industry a month ago, before the events unfolded for FTX. I'm going to get into some of the claims that Molly makes in this episode. But David, do you want to give us some more context for where we've come since our original episode recording with Molly?

• 1:10David Hoffman?

  Yeah, certainly. During this episode with Molly, we met the person that can critique Web 3 the best. And Molly is a software engineer, a very experienced one. She's also a contributor towards Wikipedia. And so there's some Web 3 valence, Web 3 ethos valence that she has, like contributing to the open commons of knowledge, knows how to code. And she's somebody that knows the difference. And I think I really appreciated Molly when she made claims that like critiquing the lack of scalability of these systems is like not the right critique. Or critiquing like the energy of Bitcoin isn't really the best critique.

• 1:51David Hoffman?

  But so her critiques of what she was talking about goes straight to the heart of Web 3. They are real criticisms. And so that is the frame of mind that we can go into this. And like Ryan said, we recorded this a month ago. We've just been holding it in the pocket. And then the FTX debacle happened. So we actually are re-recording the intro to this podcast that you are now listening to, because we had to update it. And I think just because of this FTX debacle, it might just hit, it's certainly hitting a little harder for me as to... How this industry looks to the people that are not yet believers. And I think that is the frame of mind that it will be useful to go into this episode is like, damn, sometimes it's pretty hard to justify what we're up to in this industry.

• 2:36David Hoffman?

  And I think Molly comes and shares that perspective.

• 2:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, Molly had a lot of critical takes before the FTX thing actually just happened. So you can imagine what she would, she would add to this. And overall, I do think she is a good skeptic and we need more of those in the crypto space. Of course, so a few things we get into this episode. Molly's central claim, why web three is not going so great. This was even prior to FTX. Number two, why she thinks tokens actually make everything worse. Interesting point there. And why, despite acknowledging some of the good in crypto and web three, Molly believes crypto is a net negative for the world and probably will be in the near future. I think her claims got a little bit stronger after the week's events.

• 3:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Of course, David and I have a debrief after the episode, which we've recorded on October 7th as well. So you can hear our frame of mind. Then if you are a bankless premium subscriber, you get access to that. I can't even remember everything we said at this point in time, David, but some hot takes post this conversation that I actually want to listen to again.

• 3:44David Hoffman?

  I think we've gone through the portal of this FTX debacle. And now like the frame of mind is just completely different. And I think it is going to be interesting to see what we said back then.

• 3:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  I'm so curious. Anyway, if you want access to the brief debrief episode, of course, it's on the bankless premium podcast. You can upgrade to a premium membership. There's a link in the show notes. Guys, we are going to get right to our episode with Molly. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this possible.

• 4:13David Hoffman?

  In all of my years in crypto, I have never been hacked, scammed, or lost money to a thief. And a lot of that credit goes to my Ledger hardware wallet. The Ledger Nano X and the Ledger Nano S Plus hardware wallets allow users like you and me to secure and manage all of our crypto assets and our NFTs, all with the security of storing users' private keys offline and out of reach from hackers. The Ledger Nano X is the perfect hardware wallet for managing your crypto and NFTs on the go because it connects to your phone with Bluetooth and has a nice big screen for easy transaction readings. Ledger has also upgraded the iconic Ledger Nano S and made the new Ledger Nano S device more DeFi and NFT friendly, making it the perfect hardware wallet for beginners. Ledger has truly maximized for both ease of use and security. So discover which Ledger device is best suited for your journey

• 4:57David Hoffman?

  by going and visiting shop-ledger.com. The Layer 2 era is upon us. Ethereum's Layer 2 ecosystem is growing every day, and we need Layer 2 bridges to be fast and efficient in order to live a Layer 2 life. Across is the fastest, cheapest, and most secure cross-chain bridge. With Across, you don't have to worry about high fees or long wait times. Assets are bridged and available for use almost instantaneously. Across's bridges are powered by Uma's Optimistic Oracle to securely transfer tokens between Layer 2s and Ethereum. Across is critical ecosystem infrastructure, and Across V2 has just launched. Their new version focuses on higher capital efficiency, Layer 2 to Layer 2 transfers, and a brand-new chain with Polygon, all while prioritizing high security and low fees. You can be a part of Across's story by joining their Discord

• 5:40David Hoffman?

  and using Across for all of your Layer 2 transferring needs. So go to across.to to quickly and securely bridge your assets between Ethereum, Optimism, Polygon, Arbitrum, or Bova networks. Arbitrum 1 is pioneering the world of secure Ethereum scalability and is continuing to accelerate the Web 3 landscape. Hundreds of projects have already deployed on Arbitrum 1, producing flourishing DeFi and NFT ecosystems. With a recent addition of Arbitrum Nova, gaming and social dApps like Reddit are also now calling Arbitrum home. Both Arbitrum 1 and Nova leverage the security and decentralization of Ethereum and provide a builder experience that's intuitive. Familiar and fully EVM compatible. On Arbitrum, both builders and users will experience faster transaction speeds with significantly

• 6:25David Hoffman?

  lower gas fees. With Arbitrum's recent migration to Arbitrum Nitro, it's also now 10 times faster than before. Visit arbitrum.io, where you can join the community, dive into the developer docs, bridge your assets, and start building your first app. With Arbitrum, experience Web3 development the way it was meant to be. Secure, fast, cheap, and friction-free.

• 6:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bankless Nation, we are super excited to introduce you to Molly White today. She's a crypto critic. She's also an experienced software engineer. She's been a longtime Wikipedia editor. We thank her for her Wikipedia service. It's a website I use every day. She also cares very deeply about free and open access to high-quality information and things that we definitely value in crypto and at Bankless. And recently, Molly has been doing a lot of critical speaking about crypto, about this thing called Web3. She covers this in her website. It's called "Web3 is Going Just Great." And it chronicles all the headlines of all the grift, hacks, toxicity going on in crypto. Marvelous website. I enjoy it a lot.

• 7:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  Molly, welcome to Bankless.

• 7:31Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me.

• 7:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  So this is going to be a fun conversation, I think. And really, we want to get out of our crypto bubbles and hear your perspective during this conversation, Molly. But let's start with this question. So how great is Web3 really going?

• 7:48Speaker 02

  Well, the title's a little bit sarcastic. You know, when I first created the site, I was trying to figure out what Web3 even was and like what it was all about. And every time I was looking for stuff, I kept coming across things where I was like, wow, this doesn't seem like it's going so great. And so that's sort of where the title came from.

• 8:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  I love it. And so for folks that can see, we're going to share this on YouTube. But if you're listening to this, the title is "Web3 is Going Just Great." And the subtitle is "And It's Definitely Not An Enormous Grift That's Pouring Lighter Fluid On An Already Smoldering Planet." That is the tone. And I'm looking at a few of the more recent, this is as of October 6, the headlines like Celsius, they just exposed the names of all their customers and their recent transactions. Of course, Bankless listeners will be familiar with Celsius's shenanigans. Also on October 6, the Binance Smart Chain just halted. We also have South Korea reportedly freezing 40 million from DoKwon, Zcash suffering attacks. It's kind

• 8:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  of all of the bad news, I would say, in crypto. Molly, give us a sense for some of these headlines, how you select them from an editorial perspective, and what the website itself is trying to accomplish.

• 9:08Speaker 02

  So, well, I guess I'll start with what I'm trying to accomplish with the website, which is, when I created it back in the fall and winter of last year, you know, crypto was really on a bull run. Prices were at almost all-time highs. People were really buying into a lot of the mania. And it felt like a lot of the headlines that I was seeing, even in mainstream media, but also in the crypto press, were around people becoming, you know, overnight millionaires and, you know, putting a ton of money into crypto and then becoming super wealthy and, you know, saving their families because of crypto. And it felt like there was not all that much attention being given to where things

• 9:51Speaker 02

  were going really poorly. And, you know, even when crypto was on a bull run, there were a lot of examples of things going really, really badly, where projects would get hacked, or, you know, someone would get their wallets would be compromised, or, you know, some of them were just really bad ideas of projects that people were thinking up, that they were like, "We're gonna do this, but on the blockchain." And so I was kind of hoping to provide sort of the alternate perspective, or at least just like a little bit of balance to some of the reporting, to say that like, "Hey, not everyone is becoming a millionaire overnight. And maybe if you put your retirement money into this, it won't be there in a couple of months." So that's really the goal, is just to say that like, you know, despite some of the

• 10:33Speaker 02

  really, you know, the boosterism, there's also a lot to be concerned about. Um, as far as how I select, you know, articles for the site, it mostly has to do with, um, I mean, any example of something going really poorly, any loss that's over like a hundred thousand dollars or so, I usually will include. But I also try to really highlight some of the examples where people as individuals are getting hurt. So, you know, even if a person isn't losing an amount of money that would be significant to like an institution, I still will often put it in there, you know, if it's really significant to them, just because I think that's also been a pretty big issue where, you know, people will put money that they really can't afford to lose into crypto and then something goes wrong.

• 11:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  Did you ever think you'd have this much content, Molly?

• 11:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, I didn't fully, uh, expect it to be like multiple posts a day.

• 11:30David Hoffman?

  Molly, there's a lot of, uh, people in crypto. Uh, I think Bankless would be a part of this group of, uh, people that are like perpetually optimistic and perpetually bullish. Like, we can really only see the best of what crypto has to offer. Uh, some might, some might call us the people that are like, you know, handing out the Kool-Aid, if, if, if you will. So this, this effort is like the opposite. It's like the anti-Kool-Aid. It's like trying to say, hey, there's all these crypto, like crypto believers that are just like only, are up only like believers and they can't really see the negative side. And so you're trying to sober us up with this website. Is that kind of the goal?

• 12:04Speaker 02

  I think so. Although, you know, I think with some of the true believers, you know, the really idealistic folks, there's only so much that can really be done on that. Um, but, you know, I think, I think it is important regardless of what technology you're interested in to sort of pay attention to the potential downsides, where people can get hurt if they're using it. Um, you know, the risks that people are being exposed to. And then, you know, I also try to reach some of the people who are still kind of on the fence around crypto and they're trying to decide, you know, is this actually a good place to invest my money? You know, should I be taking big bets on crypto? Um, are all of those really sparkling headlines actually true? You know, so I think it's kind of a multifaceted approach.

• 12:49David Hoffman?

  So would you say that you are like anti-crypto? Or are you just saying, seeing that there's an imbalance in the narrative space and you're trying to counterbalance it?

• 12:58Speaker 02

  I would say that I am anti crypto. You know, I, for what it has been promising, it has not lived up to a lot of those promises. And the promises have been really big lately. You know, I mean, crypto has been around for a while, but the sort of web three hype and a lot of the talk, you know, around it becoming a really mainstream part of the financial system and even society. You know, those are really big promises and so far the technology doesn't seem to have really lived up to that. Nor have a lot of the people who are building in the crypto space.

• 13:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  Can we talk about some of those promises? High level, Molly, just to get kind of your framing of it. So from your perspective, what promises do you think crypto has made to the world? What, what checks has it written? And how many of those checks have been cashed? Which, which ones are falling short?

• 13:56Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, like anything, it really depends on who you talk to. So there are some people out there who will say that, you know, crypto is really just for speculation. And, you know, that's it, which I would probably say, okay, it, it has served well as a speculative asset for people who are interested in that type of thing. But when you start to look at some of the promises that are being made by really big names in the crypto space, by some of the VCs who've been jumping in, it's stuff around like becoming a major part of the financial system. In some cases, even like replacing traditional finance when you get to some of the more extremes. There's a lot of talk around banking the unbanked and, you know, fixing

• 14:37Speaker 02

  the widespread inequality in the financial system, providing services to people who have not had access to them. You know, serving as a better store of value than some stores of value that we have today. I mean, the list kind of goes on depending on who you're talking to. Becoming a pillar of the, you know, web as we know it is a big one with web three. You know, people talking about blockchains really underpinning every service you use online. And so far, I don't think any of those checks have been cashed. You know, there have been instances where you could argue that Bitcoin or something like that has served as a store of value, assuming that you're willing to, you know, take two specific points on the timeline and compare them, rather than, you know, the highs and

• 15:22Speaker 02

  the lows, or, you know, depending on when someone actually needs that store of value. But besides that, you know, it's not replaced web technology, it is not banked the unbanked.

• 15:36David Hoffman?

  What do you, what would you give, what would you say to the statement, just like, you know, it's early, like Bitcoin was created in 2009, but also Bitcoin didn't really open up many of the doors that created those narratives, like replacing parts of the internet. That was like more, that came after Ethereum. That was Ethereum brought that, so Ethereum brought that in like 2015. So like, what, we've got like seven years of Ethereum history and most of Ethereum's history and development has really happened in like the last four or five years? So what would you say to the response of just like, yo, we're still trying to figure it out, but the vision is still here, like the foundation's still here?

• 16:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, so that comes up a lot. I think in the tech world, you know, five or 10 years is actually a pretty long time. Things move faster in technology than they do in a lot of other industries, just because of, you know, you don't have to set up a manufacturing plant or something like that. You know, there isn't that sort of upfront cost. And so, you know, I still would have expected a little more by now, as far as, you know, becoming a really stable part of technologies that people are using day to day, that are actually deployed and like being used by real people. I also think that, you know, there hasn't been a great explanation of even how we will

• 16:55Speaker 02

  get to the point where crypto banks the unbanked, or, you know, underpins the whole web. You know, there's a lot of people who will say things like, well, once we fix the scaling and the transaction costs and, you know, the privacy issues, then it'll, you know, be... Something that everyone uses every day, but that's a big leap, you know, to say, well, when we just fix all of those problems, it'll be perfect, which like, that's true of a lot of things, you know, once we fix all of the emissions problems with fossil fuels, then we'll have no climate change problems. But, you know, that's actually not possible, right? At least today, we have no clear way of getting there. So most people aren't seeing things like that.

• 17:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  What would you say, Amali, to some of the success that maybe, I'm sure you wouldn't argue that there haven't been some successes in crypto, but some of the successes, maybe a few notable things. Of course, the total crypto market cap is over a trillion dollars, right? I know that's a price. But if you, if you pick an asset like Bitcoin, for example, for any like four, five year period that you've held Bitcoin has appreciated relative to the dollar. And for, you know, a Bitcoin advocate, they are not promising no volatility, certainly, right? HODL has been an adage for, for that community for, from the very

• 18:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  beginning. They, they are promising that it will hold up to the dollar, which is going through kind of a debasing type of experience and Bitcoin is not. So something like that. But we could also take decentralized finance and we see a use case like stable coins, which are like borderless dollars. There's, you know, over a hundred billion in stable coins out there. The Ethereum network itself did about the value transfer of the Visa network last year. Uniswap, a smart contract protocol born, what, three, four years ago, did over

• 18:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  a trillion in value, kind of this permissionless, open ecosystem. What would you say to some of those successes? Do you just think that they're just kind of niche and not significant compared to the, the promises, the checks that were written? Or do you think that there could be something early that, that might manifest later and you're still holding out hope?

• 19:19Speaker 02

  Um, I mean, I think a lot of the successes of crypto are um, a little bit hard to measure. I think, you know, things like market cap are really hard to measure in crypto where things can be double counted pretty easily and tokens are often being overinflated. So I have a, you know, healthy amount of skepticism when it comes to things like market cap. Um, you know, I think that there are people using crypto. I think that's sort of hard to uh, argue. But as far as the use cases that are being promised and the, you know, the idea that stable coins are a better option in some cases, or, you know, for, for, for things

• 20:03Speaker 02

  other than trying to get into the crypto ecosystem, I think that's a little bit hard to argue. Um, I also don't know if stable coins on the whole are, have been, you know, purely successful. There've been a lot of issues with stable coins and there are a lot of questions around a lot of remaining stable coins.

• 20:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Are you, you're probably referring to uh, to Luna and Terra as, as one of those uh, quote unquote, "stablecoin failures" that happened uh, earlier this year. I'm curious, from your perspective, as you've watched crypto more closely over the last, you know, year or two, what are some of the most colossal failures that you've seen? What's, what's kind of the, the biggest evidence uh, to support your points?

• 20:48Speaker 02

  Well, I think Terra Luna is a pretty good example. Not only the collapse of that specific coin, but also all of the sort of ripple effects that it had throughout crypto where other projects were, you know, using the Anchor Protocol or, you know, had exposure to Terra. Um, you know, I think the failures of some of the other institutions like Celsius, that's been pretty spectacular. Um, you know, people having a lot of money locked up in Celsius and who truly believed that it was like a safe place to put their money and it was better than banks in some situations. So I think that's another really good example.

• 21:32Speaker 02

  Um, and then, you know, some of the huge hacks that have been happening lately, especially when it comes to crypto bridges. Um, you know, I feel like every time I read something about a blockchain bridge, it's because like a hundred plus million dollars were just exploited. There have been a couple of those. So I think those are probably my top three.

• 21:50David Hoffman?

  I think we definitely, as an industry, should take responsibility and ownership over why people in the outside part of the world are considering these things like DeFi and Web3, right? Celsius, in hindsight, was a bank. And this guy, Alex Mashinsky, wore this shirt that said, like, you know, let's bring down the banks. And it was like, it had DeFi on the back end, but it was like a centralized institution that took customers' deposits. And as an industry, we kind of just like let it go on because nothing really bad was happening. But nothing bad does happen when prices go up, right? It's always when prices go down. And then there's also like, kind of the issue, the definitional issue of all

• 22:31David Hoffman?

  of these cross-chain bridges, which are used multi-sigs, which is kind of like a bank with some limitations, but not enough limitations, right? So as an industry, we do have this like, definition problem where we don't actually know how to label these things because they are new, they are like net new to the world. And so as a result, we get it, it's labeled like crypto. It's what crypto is, it's what DeFi is, it's what Web3 is, even though like these things have gotten like blurred and honestly like bastardized some of the pure crypto native products that are supposed to not do these things. What do you, what do you think when you hear this?

• 23:08Speaker 02

  Well, I would say that I wouldn't call them a bank, because I think that's actually what got a lot of people really drawn into Celsius, is that they were told that Celsius was a bank. And when they read that, they were like, great, my money is safe. You know, if you put money into a bank in the United States, and the bank suddenly explodes, you don't lose all your money, right? It's insured by the FDIC. And I think people thought that they were getting those kinds of protections with Celsius, and especially with Voyager, which had actually sort of implied that they were protected by the same FDIC insurance. And so like, when you say bank, people get a really... Specific idea in their head that is not what Celsius and Voyager and other centralized exchanges are providing.

• 23:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think from a terminology perspective, when we talk about bank on bankless, which is what the show is called, like, we're trying to go self sovereign without banks. What David was referring to is, when we say bank, we have a negative connotation in it. Not applying this to outside of crypto, although we do often apply it to financial institutions that are banks outside of crypto. But crypto banks themselves, when David says banks, he means that there is a hidden trust vector there, that it is a siloed institution that doesn't have transparency, where you're actually depending on a set of individuals. In this case, Alex Mashinsky, who you had to trust.

• 24:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  And so David was using it in a, well, it turned out to be a bank in that a lot of people thought what they were doing was self sovereign, and I just deposit here, and it's transparent, it's fully open, the way decentralized finance is. What it turned out is they were depositing funds into a closed bank that Alex Mashinsky could deploy however he wanted with his group of executives and withdraw funds to. So it implies this trust vector. But I think I take your wider point, that is, a lot of these, and we've been critical of this as well, a lot of these interest accounts, whether it's in Anchor or whether

• 25:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  it's in Celsius, are marketed as if they are risk free to retail in the terminology of bank, which people think of as FDIC insured, this thing is completely safe, and they're certainly not those things.

• 25:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I think there were sort of people in both camps in this Celsius instance. You know, I've read a lot of the letters that people sent to the judge in the bankruptcy case. And there were some people who absolutely believed it was like a bank in the sense of like stability. And, you know, you're not going to lose access to your funds. There were also definitely people who thought it was more of a self sovereign thing. And there was one person I remember who wrote in and said that like, because USDC made all of these guarantees around being tradable one for one with the US dollar. How is it possible that her money was locked up in something like Celsius? And it's like, she almost didn't realize there was an intermediary there that was, you know, controlling her money.

• 26:17Speaker 02

  So I think it's, yeah, I think, I think it maybe goes both ways.

• 26:21David Hoffman?

  Do you think that that makes this more of an education problem than it is really of like a structural web three crypto problem?

• 26:28Speaker 02

  I think every, I think there's always an education problem in finance and technology, actually. You know, crypto especially is really, you can get in the weeds really fast. And, you know, even with the project that I run, you know, I find people who follow the project and who are clearly like pretty interested in crypto, either because they like it or they don't. But, you know, who have a fairly decent knowledge of it, who also sort of misunderstand things. You know, I've had, I posted about the Celsius disclosure of all their customer names the other day. And, and someone was like, wow, so much for DeFi. And it's like, well, no Celsius isn't DeFi, you know, but those are a lot of, to a lot of people, that's like, they have no idea what that means.

• 27:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  Can I just say, can I just pause and say, I very much appreciate that you're getting to that level of detail, even with the critiques, because many crypto critics do not do that. I think, you know, in addition to all of the grifters and scammers we see in the crypto community, I think there are many crypto critics who sort of don't actually take the time to understand what they're criticizing. And I've read countless articles after the Celsius implosion about how

• 27:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  This was an example of DeFi and look how broken DeFi is. And I just wanted to go to the reporter and say, hey, this is not DeFi at all. Like, don't, don't throw us in with those people. Like, this is not what this industry is about. In fact, nothing was transparent or decentralized about this entire operation. And so there's that element as well, but I definitely appreciate the work you're doing here. I guess one high level comment I'd say, Molly, is I think you'll find that many people in crypto, David and myself, and I think a lot of Bankless listeners included, will look at all of the events that you just mentioned. The scams, the grifters, the Celsius, the irresponsibility of BlockFi,

• 28:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  the Three Arrows Capital, like, margin craziness shenanigans, the Lunaterra, Doquan, you know, Die Must Die, the stablecoins. Ronin's sidechain, Wormhole's sidechain, we can go down the list. You will find, many of us have been calling these things out the entire time. And also after the fact, also, you know, emphasize how this is, does not represent crypto values is not what our, what our community and our industry stands for. So we kind of stand, I think, in support with you on that. But one difference, I think, and I want to get some clarity, is, as David mentioned, he called us perma-bulls, right, at the outset of the show.

• 29:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  And that's because like, it doesn't mean that prices won't go down and think you can't, you know, it doesn't mean that you won't lose 90% in a certain cycle. But we are bullish over the long run, over the five to 10 to 20 year time cycle, that this entire thing that is being built in crypto is not only going to appreciate in price, that aside, but is actually going to be good for the world, is going to be a net benefit, is going to actually help humanity in ways that are not the same, but are similar to the level of the internet. This is another wave of the internet, if you will. And so we are, long term, even though we see all the scams and the grift, we think crypto is a net Positive for the world, not a net negative.

• 29:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  But I'm wondering if you disagree with that. So we talked about like, you know, current state. Even some in crypto might argue that's been a net negative so far. But they're still in crypto because, and I would argue that's still net positive so far. But that aside, some people would say it's net negative. But they're still in crypto, still building because they think we are building a brighter, better future. Do you think that this possibility even exists? Or do you think, are you kind of thinking that crypto is a net negative? Not only now in its current form, but into the futures as well? Like, it's never going to be worth more than all of the effort and all of the grift and all of the negative externalities that have been pushed out by it. What are your thoughts on this?

• 30:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I don't have strong hopes, I guess, for the future of crypto.

• 30:49Speaker 02

  But, you know, I would say that anything is possible. And, you know, I've said this before, that, you know, my goal with the work that I'm doing is not to be able to look back, you know, 10 or 15 years from now and be like, ha, I was right. Crypto had no purpose, nobody's using it, there are no blockchains in existence, you know, or whatever. Like, say, you know, to be able to say that. My goal is really to try to make sure that the web is a better place for the people who are using it, which, you know, and if that means that in five years, you know, 10 years, all the problems are fixed. Crypto is amazing, everyone's using it, you know, I'm, I've got my wallet

• 31:32Speaker 02

  and I'm paying for my groceries with crypto or whatever it might be. That's fine. Like, if it's better and fixed, that's great. But, you know, in the same vein, if five or 10 years from now, people aren't getting scammed and, you know, they're not losing all their money and these things aren't blowing up every other day. Because crypto turned out not to have any promise, that's also fine. You know, I just want to sort of make sure that everything is moving in a better direction. So broadly speaking, I don't have strong hopes for crypto. You know, I think that for, you know, I would need to see pretty strong evidence that the technology has a lot of promise for the applications that it's being, I guess,

• 32:17Speaker 02

  advertised for. And I haven't seen that yet. I haven't seen really compelling use cases of it yet that aren't doing things like, you know, basically taking advantage of the lack of regulation.

• 32:30Speaker 02

  But, you know, that's also something that can change, right? Like, if someone finally comes up with that one Web three project, it's like, dang, that is actually better than the alternative and, you know, is providing a useful service and isn't just taking advantage of the fact that it's being poorly regulated, then yeah, I'm like, I'm open to changing my views. I'm not, I'm not, you know, totally stuck in the mud here. But I don't share your permable, I guess, perspective. That's probably pretty clear.

• 33:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, from a values perspective, you mentioned one thing. You want the web, you want to see the web be in a better place for those who are using it. So, so maybe you are, you are a maximalist, you are bullish on the web as a technology. And that seems to, I'm guessing here, Molly, because we don't know each other well yet, but like, I'm guessing your contribution to Wikipedia, contribution to kind of open source tools as an engineer, as a developer, are all based on, on that belief. I'm curious, your perspective on like, is there anything wrong with the internet today, do you think? Like, what are the problems with the internet?

• 33:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like, what would you solve if you could wave a magic wand?

• 33:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I've gone into this a little bit before in some of my writing where I actually share a lot of the same goals as a lot of the people who are working on Web 3 projects. You know, people will talk about the extreme levels of surveillance that are happening on the web, the capture of the web by just a few small companies, you know, the the lack of access to web projects and even to the Internet in general. You know, I think there's a lot of issues with the web that Web 3 advocates talk about that I also really care about, you know, the the really crazy way that platforms are being governed these days. You know, I I would actually point to those same things.

• 34:29Speaker 02

  The difference is that I sort of don't see crypto as a great solution to those problems. You know, I tend to feel that problems with the web are really, they tend to come down to problems with like society and the way that these communities are being built. And it's really tough to sort of fix a really societal problem with just a technology. You know, I think that it's going to take something like societal sort of change and regulatory change on the web to really help with a lot of those issues.

• 35:11Speaker 02

  And crypto, I worry, tends to go in sometimes the opposite direction with really sort of hyper-financializing a lot of things and sort of taking, trying to take sort of the side route to fixing those things without actually addressing a lot of the underlying issue.

• 35:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  And so you have common ground with with the the stated problems that the Web 3 community might say about the the existing Internet. How about the stated problems with the the money system, right? Because there's almost like two sides of crypto. There's kind of like tech, Web 3 crypto, and then there's also like money crypto, which is like, central banks are broken, banks in general are kind of broken, they're inefficient, you can't program against them, they're not open. And so we have this thing called a non-sovereign store of value, and we have other primitives that we can create, and we want programmable money, and we want a bankless money system. Are you sympathetic to some of the problems that they point to? Or, yeah, what are your thoughts on the money side of crypto?

• 36:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, so the money side of crypto is definitely further out of my area of expertise, I would say. You know, I come from sort of a software background, not an econ background or a policy background. But, you know, I think that, again, a lot of the people in crypto are identifying serious issues with banking. You know, there's a lot of issues with access to banking, there's high fees, it's it's slow, you know, there's all sorts of stuff. But I think also they tend to sometimes ignore the reasons for some of those issues. You know, like, a lot of the slowness is coming from regulatory intervention, for example. And so, you know, it's like, you can make a faster system that's completely unregulated,

• 36:55Speaker 02

  but you also end up with a lot of the chaos that we've been seeing in crypto, where, you know, your funds are gone, they're gone, and there's no, you know, recourse there, or, you know, pick your, pick your example. So, you know, again, I think there are issues there. I think there are improvements that could definitely be made in the financial system. You know, some of the slowness, for example, does not need to exist. We live in a world where, you know, banks probably don't need to be on a nine to five schedule or, you know, other financial systems. But, you know, I also sort of question crypto's ability to just sort of circumvent those issues and end up in a better state, rather than address the issues themselves.

• 37:38David Hoffman?

  So putting on my crypto-optimist crypto-apologist hat, which fits very nicely, by the way, there's, there's like two, there's two sides of this crypto conversation. There's like the web conversation, whereas like our, our platforms are owned by some like tech elites, and they dictate what we say, and they don't feel us, they don't make us feel very empowered. And then there's also like the banking situation, which it kind of feels like there's just these banking elites, and they just like use our money as a way to generate revenue for themselves and not pass it back to the consumer, and not really enable the consumer very well. And I think the crypto, the crypto take is that we've, we've had these web two apps,

• 38:18David Hoffman?

  Facebook, Twitter, you know, Instagram, and their trajectory doesn't feel good for most people. Like their trajectory is bad. Uh, so Facebook's causing civil wars and

• 38:30Speaker 02

  I don't know, that's the web three take. I think that may be the general take, but

• 38:34David Hoffman?

  Yeah, that's a general take, right? And so, but the web, the web three take is that like, there's kind of no fixing web two. Uh, there's no way to like hit the reverse button on web two and like, oh, that didn't work. Let's go back and go, go in a different route. Uh, and it's kind of the same take that we have with banking because of regulation, like these, these regulations have entrenched winners in the banking system that has calcified, uh, the banking system. And I think the web three take might even extend that to like the, the political system is like the, the political system is entrenched and not changing. And so while so many crypto people like talk about, oh, we got all these use cases. We got, we're going to fix the banks. We're going to fix the web two platforms. We're going to fix like social organization systems. It's like,

• 39:17David Hoffman?

  it's because we see like the trend of, you know, what the current state of the internet is, is heading towards a dead end. And we also feel that with finance and we also feel that with politics and like social cohesion. And so like while crypto is coming in and not really necessarily like fixing things right off the bat, what we are kind of doing is we're like taking the cage and like rattling it and like, hey, we need to like shake some things up real quick. And yeah, we're going to like break some stuff, but that's kind of what we need to like go backwards to then progress forwards again into the future. How do you, how do you feel about this take?

• 39:52Speaker 02

  Well, I have said, you know, that one thing I think crypto does succeed in doing very well is highlighting issues that need to be addressed, whether it's with traditional finance, the web, whatever you want to call it. Um, you know, I think it has really made people more aware of issues in banking, which like most people probably don't think a whole lot about. Um, but you know, now that people are focusing on crypto, I think they sort of do think about those things more. Same with the web. Um, But you know, I think it's also, I sort of question the idea that the web is unfixably broken, that society, banking, politics are unfixably broken, because those are not

• 40:36Speaker 02

  things that really just go away. You know, like, it sort of depends how you define web two, but like, if you talk about going from web two to web three, and you say that web two is unfixably broken, and web three might be a path forward, a lot of web three relies on the current web that we have today. So depending on how you're defining web two, I guess, like, I don't really see how that follows. You could definitely, if you're defining web two as like, large platform companies that are really controlling social media or something like that, then you could, you could definitely make an argument for those going away in some form and being replaced with something else. But if you're talking about web two as just sort of the web that we use today, like, websites are still going to exist with web three, you know, there's still going to be just sort of the underpinnings

• 41:21Speaker 02

  of the web. And so, you know, I don't really know how you can say that the web is intractably broken and should be replaced with something else unless you're talking about like, kind of getting rid of the whole thing, which is definitely not what web three is trying to do.

• 41:34David Hoffman?

  I think we're mainly focusing it on our, our social media platforms, our, our web platforms, like the big ones that, you know, you, it used to be when I would go onto the internet, there would be like 20 websites that I would visit, and now it's like three, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Amazon.

• 41:48Speaker 02

  So if that's, if that's sort of the, the way you're approaching it, you know, then I, I sort of see what you're saying, you know, like, those things are really broken, and we should replace them with web three, or something like that. But by the same vein, like, if that's a possible way forward, why can't we say that those things are unfixably broken, let's replace them with something else, you know, social communities with a better governance model, regulations that prevent companies from forming those, you know, enormous monopolies, you know, federated social media, things like that.

• 42:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  So one take on crypto for this is because what's really interesting, Molly, is that we see so many of the same the same problems that you do, right? And crypto is saying, hey, we're trying to build something to fix some of these things. And at times, many times, I would say crypto is overly ambitious in its promises. And I don't think that like token incentives don't help this, right? Because it incentivizes projects and founders to over promise and then undeliver, right? And yet there is something here that I think is fresh and kind of different because crypto at its best can, we hope that it does, offer a different kind of governance model, if you will, at the root.

• 43:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's similar to me to, I know we've made this comparison in the past on Bankless, but like a constitution, right? If you're trying to replace kings and dictators and emperors, what do you do? Seventeen hundred United States, you have to create a governance framework, you have to write a protocol, you have to put in some new legal code that gets social consensus, that balances out power and is more credibly neutral. And at its best, that's what we see the hints of in technologies like Ethereum. It's credibly neutral, it's censorship resistant, it's peer to peer, it's decentralized.

• 43:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Anybody with an internet connection has the ability to open up a bank account, essentially. All they need is a private key and it's theirs, right? And this is a hopeful substrate. I personally don't know, Molly, if we'll ever get to the level of like replacing Facebook, right? Like, I remember the early days in crypto, it's like people, my early days in crypto, people are talking about, let's just put Uber on a blockchain, right? And it'll be better Uber and the world will be magic. And of course, like, it doesn't work these, this way at all, but there is hope. And we've seen some evidence, I think, at least us crypto bulls have, us, you know, optimists and evangelists, that what we are able to do is instantiate some of our values of

• 44:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  Decentralization of incredible neutrality in the base layer protocol. And something that David and I often say on Bankless is if they adopt crypto protocols, they adopt crypto values. Like, it's a new type of constitution. And this isn't to say that we shouldn't continue to try in our existing nation-state governance frameworks to fix things and reform things, right? It's like, I encourage people to buy crypto and vote. Like, you should still vote. You still need to participate actively in your democracy. This is not kind of a, like, you know, I'm sure you've heard sort of the Bitcoin tribe, Bitcoin maximalist tribe of a little bit like, we're gonna buy a bunker and the world's gonna, like, be destroyed.

• 45:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  And like, that is one subset of crypto that, at least Bankless, David and I do not resonate with at all. Like, let's try to fix the problems in our existing governments. But also, we have this other approach that is exploring a new frontier in kind of the digital landscape. There's, it just feels so much, Molly, like there's something there. And I guess I'm curious twofold. My question here is, one is, do you think that there might be something there? Or do you just think, look, you're starry-eyed dreamers, like, it's not gonna work? And then, secondly, if it's not this, Molly, like, what is it? Because, to be honest, I don't have a lot of hope in our existing political system. I mean, like, we've tried these things.

• 45:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Our existing frameworks, our existing companies, Silicon Valley, like, what's gonna shake the banks up unless it's some external startup technology that's like, hey, we can outcompete you? You know, Hayden Adams can create a decentralized exchange with $60,000 grant that can beat the NASDAQ in like, five to 10 years, right? $10,000. I don't know what the range is. Some people have told me $10,000, $60,000, $120,000, some range. There may be multiple grants, David. Regardless, what do you think about this idea, Molly?

• 46:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I think I probably share some of your starry-eyed optimism around substrates when it comes to the web, right? You know, I think that a lot of what has been enabled by crypto has been enabled thanks to the web. You know, if someone has an internet connection, they have access to the web and, you know, to building communities there and to organizing without needing to be within physical proximity to people and, you know, to participating in systems that are built in various ways that will allow them to do really powerful things. And I really do share that underlying system of thought. And, you know, decentralization is possible on the web without crypto.

• 47:17Speaker 02

  You know, there are ways of building, you know, collaborative governance systems on the web. You know, I like the, the sort of positive things that crypto is trying to do, but I also try to acknowledge some of the really negative things that I think threaten a lot of its future. You know, when, when we talk about governance in crypto, for example, so far, a lot of the government structures have operated around the token-based model where you really, your power in that project is completely, you know, correlated to how much money you've put into that project, which I think is the wrong direction for us to be going, these really pay-to-play models where if you don't have the capital, you can't even participate.

• 48:01Speaker 02

  And if you don't have a ton of capital, you can't have an impact on a project. And so I started doing some research, you know, because I was reading about a lot of these DAOs that were set up in that way. And I was like, boy, that seems bad. And so I was trying to do a lot of research into, you know, okay, so how are other projects? And, you know, clearly there are people in crypto who agree that that's not a great way of doing things. I don't think a lot of people think that's the optimal way of doing things. So I started, you know, doing a lot of research into, so, okay, so how are projects trying to solve this problem? And things got worse when I started looking at that. You know, when I was looking at ways that projects were trying to do, you know, one person, one vote.

• 48:43Speaker 02

  That type of thing, it got really scary as far as privacy and some of the sort of sacrifices that you had to make in order to do those types of things. So, you know, I sort of worry about those types of, you know, trying to basically predicate everything on crypto because you start with an obvious governance model that has serious problems and you start trying to circumvent those problems and things just get worse and worse and worse is what it seems like to me. You know, my, my thought is to build systems where you're not immediately fighting against the token-based model. You know, when you talk about how to replace banks, you know, and the, the best way to

• 49:24Speaker 02

  do that is to out-compete them with, you know, some startup that's doing things in a really genius way. You know, that seems sort of to be really leaning into the sort of capitalist model that we're already stuck with at this point and saying, okay, the only solution to capitalism is hyper-capitalism and, you know, just gotta compete and, you know, let the free market decide and then we can overthrow the banks or whatever. And again, that seems like the wrong direction. You know, I feel like financializing everything, making everything that people are doing into this really, you know, hyper-capitalized, financialized transaction feels antisocial

• 50:01Speaker 02

  and, you know, detrimental to society, to community, to the web, you know. So, yeah, I think, I think, you know, I'm starry-eyed about the future of the web. I am not starry-eyed about the future of crypto.

• 50:17David Hoffman?

  One of the, the stories that crypto proponents will, will like to bring up is the story of Uber. Uber tried to issue equity to all of its Uber drivers, but they just couldn't for a variety of reasons. It was, there was too much overhead, the regulations for doing this were too ridiculous. They just couldn't figure out a way of, of transferring equity from company to contributor, to the drivers. And then, then this like airdrop meta happened where Uniswap airdropped like 30% of its token supply straight to Users, previous users, previous contributors to the protocol. And they did it with like the snap of the fingers.

• 51:00David Hoffman?

  And so we like to use this example as like a contrast between like the previous systems, the systems without private keys, because there was private keys that specifically enabled this. We had this Ethereum address, you could just like as a destination to deposit a symbol of equity, a symbol of ownership, a symbol of power to the users. And so, yes, one take is that, yes, this is kind of like hyper financialization. We're creating more financial assets and providing them to more and more people. But also at the same time, like the paradigm that we came from wasn't really able to support a large diffusion of capital and power to a wide number of individuals. Like, and to us, this is like just a huge success story. When you hear that story, like what do you hear?

• 51:42Speaker 02

  Um, I mean,

• 51:45Speaker 02

  that Uber wasn't able to do it doesn't seem all that compelling to me. You know, there are plenty of examples of co-ops that function pretty well. You know, so I, I guess I don't, I don't know a lot about the Uber story, but it does seem like we probably don't need crypto to make that happen. We might need, you know, better,

• 52:08Speaker 02

  you know, changes to basically the financial and regulatory framework to make that smoother. But, you know, co-ops do exist and mutual organizations have been operating for a really long time.

• 52:20David Hoffman?

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• 53:04David Hoffman?

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• 53:49David Hoffman?

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• 54:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  What about this idea, Molly? I know you've come back a few times to this idea of like hyper-capitalism and being kind of a negative, right? And like, you know, plutocratic token votes. We certainly agree with your point and take your point about that. But what about this idea of public goods that we're creating? I mean, the internet protocols, the adoption of protocols like TCP/IP and other layers of the internet stack, they're not owned by anyone specifically, right? They're kind of a public good for all of humanity. Open source code works very much the same way. Wikipedia, for God's sakes, this is like open source, public good for the world.

• 54:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  I don't know, you're in the inner beast of Wikipedia, so you might have a different opinion on that, more informed opinion on that. But this idea is not just that we are creating kind of like new corporations and LLCs and tokenized private capital entities, but we are creating new public substrate. So for example, now with Ethereum, as I said earlier, anybody, all over the world, let's say, imagine for a minute that some element of the DeFi optimists are right, and there is this DeFi Banking system on Ethereum. Well, what that would mean, and it's good. It's like comparable to maybe better than the kind of banking system you might get in the West, in the developed West, right?

• 55:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  Or something like this, even though I think the West's banking system kind of sucks in lots of ways, but let's say it's that. Well, now what have you done is a public good. You have a, somebody in India, Africa, all over the world. All they need is an internet connection. They have the ability to spin up and access a bank account. Okay, how would they get access to these sort of financial tools? They don't have to pay anything in order to do this. There are gas fees and this sort of thing. This is the scalability conversation. We're trying to fervently and feverishly make those gas fees go down. But the idea would be they could just spin up an account. And just like they have a keyboard, they have an internet connection, they're plugged in to this communication network.

• 56:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, they could be plugged in to this ownership network, this property rights system that is crypto native. No one can tell them not. At some level, I guess I'm saying is there is a lens where you could look at crypto and focus on all of like the perverse incentives that happen when money gets injected into the system. But maybe are you missing the public good side of what we're also creating here, which is like, I mean, Uniswap, anyone can use Uniswap. It's a, you know, anyone can spin up an ERC 20 and like create their own business. Anyone has access to a stablecoin from any part of the world. What about this side of crypto seems much less capitalist and much more public goods?

• 57:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, so this kind of gets into what I touched on earlier, where a lot of the arguments for crypto and web three end up, you end up in discussions where it's like, okay, but what if we fix all the problems and then everyone has access to this perfect banking system? And it's like, yeah, I want that too. Let's fix all the problems and have a perfect banking system. Which is great, but I have not yet seen how we're gonna just fix all the problems. You know, I think that creating open source software, creating networks that everyone has access to, those are great things. I think, you know, public goods are far more important than we tend to treat them as a society.

• 57:40Speaker 02

  But I don't think that solely because something is a public good, that it is also going to be the future of society. I mean, like, there's a lot of open source software out there that's wonderful, but I don't think it's gonna overtake the banking system. And I don't think it's, you know, the, you know, makes the developers all perfect and wonderful people. So, you know, I think that, I think that creating a public good is definitely a good thing, but I don't know if it is the argument for why something should exist.

• 58:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  So Molly, your comment is kind of like, yeah, cool, Ryan, show me first, right? Like, that, that system doesn't really exist.

• 58:17Speaker 02

  I don't need to see it, you know, deployed and working and wonderful. I just need a plausible path from where we are today to where we are in 10, 15 years, when this utopia has been achieved.

• 58:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  And nothing about Uniswap and a MetaMask wallet and, you know, a protocol like Maker or Aver Compound, nothing about these tools that exist today kind of show a glimpse to you of what that future could be? Do you still think these things are too niche?

• 58:50Speaker 02

  No, so it's, it's not to say that there aren't crypto projects that are doing cool things. You know, I think decentralized networks in general are interesting and cool. And I think there are crypto projects that are providing value to people, that are helping people. The thing that I don't, the, the thing that I really try to make clear is that it is the negative sides of things that I see as being almost intractable, potentially intractable. And And sort of not offsetting, or rather offsetting the good that a lot of these projects are trying to do. And so, you know, when you talk about things like, you know, removing the money from the system because money is having such a negative impact. I don't see how that's possible with crypto because crypto is predicated on being, you know,

• 59:35Speaker 02

  the only way you really maintain a network, when you get down to it, a decentralized network with crypto. You know, the way that that is, that that happens is by paying people with money and, you know, requiring money to use the system. So, you know, the, there have been people who have been like, well, what if we just ignore the tokens? Ignore the crypto tokens. We'll just look at Web 3. It's like, how are you going to use Web 3 without the token? How are you going to use the Ethereum network if you don't have any ETH? You know, so I think there's just like, you can't just separate things like that and say, well, like, ignore all the bad stuff for a second. What about the good stuff? Like, I would like any, you know.

• 1:00:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is why it's a net negative to you in your mind because you're like, you're like, hey, Bang, this guy's like, the negatives are a 10 in terms of like plus or minus 10 for the world, right? It's bad, all of these things. And I, you do acknowledge the positive, but maybe that's just a 2, right? And so you got a negative 10 versus a plus 2 and you still get negative 8. It's a net negative for the world. And you see that even if crypto is more successful, it's always going to be kind of net negative because you are seeing these sort of harmful types of incentive structures and influences and like core, I guess, like core grift and scam inside of the system. Is this right?

• 1:00:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, if you just look at the history of crypto, you know, as crypto has become more successful, more mainstream, more widely adopted, the grift and the scam and the harm that it has done has also grown enormously.

• 1:01:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  You'd say proportionally, like it's just like.

• 1:01:14Speaker 02

  At least, I would say. And so, you know, if that pattern suddenly stops and like, okay, we fix all the grift and the scam and the, you know, the issues with, you know, people evading regulations and blah, blah, blah, you know, fix all of that and we just keep the good stuff. Great. I think that's great. You know, it's like, it's like what I said at the beginning, you know, if we fix all the problems and we end up with only the good stuff, you know, I'm not going to still be here waving my flag about how crypto is the worst thing in the world. Like, but I don't see the credible way that we can get to that future state where all the bad stuff just magically disappears. And these wonderful utopian, you know, visions continue to persist.

• 1:02:01David Hoffman?

  On the note of the hyper financialization of society, the, the way that I try and reframe this, and the worry here is that like, cool, we have this new primitive, it's the ERC20 token. We also have NFTs and now people can mint all these tokens and they can go everywhere and they can inject their way into society. And a lot of people are worried about this because there's many aspects of society that perhaps finance should like stay out of, perhaps money should stay out of. The way that I try and reframe this is that, yes, there's the line, we are a hyper financializing like culture. But also, I try and flip it around and I say, we're actually injecting culture into our finance. We can't have one without the other. So you're putting finance into culture, but you're also putting,

• 1:02:45David Hoffman?

  taking culture and you're all actually, culture is corrupting finance. And I'm using corrupting in like a good way. And so people are saying, I guess, like, we're hyper financializing our culture and finance is coming into corrupt culture for the bad. But I would like to say, like, actually, you're allowing culture to become expressed in these financial assets. And I think we really saw this in, which was the bull market of 2021, when NFTs, while there are many like, you know, JPEGs that are collectibles and they're kind of Ponzi schemes and they're kind of just like, sweet, you're buying this like picture of a monkey for a quarter million dollars. It makes no sense. While that money could have definitely have gone to better uses. There's also artists that are making real neat art.

• 1:03:26David Hoffman?

  That are tokenizing their art with NFTs and selling those NFTs on the internet because art collectors want to collect those things. And so we are financing new culture. We're financing new art that I don't think we could have done in a web two way. Not without like Apple taking a 30% cut on the iOS store or you know, Facebook or Instagram wanting a slice of it. Uh, and so this era, this part is like, yes, we are, we are putting finance into art. When ways that make some people uncomfortable, but we're also economically, we're making a lot more art economically viable by the creation of NFTs. And while it is definitely not the dominant use case of NFTs, a lot of it's like the monkey JPEG speculation.

• 1:04:11David Hoffman?

  It is a real part that is actually putting a food on the table for a lot of new artists. What would you say to this like reframing of like the NFT, uh, financialization side of things?

• 1:04:21Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, so I wrote a whole essay about sort of the idea of NFTs, enabling digital art and you know, empowering artists. Um, and I can go into it if you want, but it's also kind of a long rant. Um, you know, I, I don't necessarily think that it was the crypto itself that specifically, uh, enabled artists to be paid. You know, the, the, the, the new idea with NFTs is sort of this idea of like digital scarcity. Where people are assigning value to digital art in a similar sort of frame of mind as they do to physical paintings and things like that. Right?

• 1:05:00Speaker 02

  But you know, you can do that without crypto, you know, you could sign, you could digitally sign a piece of artwork and upload it somewhere. And then people could check it and see that I own, you know, some piece of artwork. And you can incredibly do that. Um, it's really the sort of cultural change that, that, you know, people were willing to assign enormous amounts of value to NFTs. Um, you know, associated with digital art that has helped artists and it has like, you know, again, I will acknowledge that there are artists who have benefited from NFTs. But it was really the speculative bubble around NFTs that has enabled artists to get paid. If there had been a speculative bubble around, you know, PGP signed pieces of artwork, you know, it could have been the same thing.

• 1:05:45Speaker 02

  Do I think it's necessarily likely that that would have emerged? No, but I also don't think that it's really crypto. It's the speculative side of things that sort of made that possible.

• 1:05:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  I feel like the, maybe the, the thought on that or pushback on that, Molly, is you know, in the same way, you're saying basically, hey, everything you guys are saying sounds great, but like, show me because it's not happening yet, right? I, I feel like, um, you know, optimists in crypto could say the same thing to the existing system. Sure, the existing banking system could be better. Sure, it could, you know, serve underserved populations. I'm sure artists could create a PGP signed piece of art and actually earn an income, but that's not happening. So existing system, show us. Meanwhile, while you're trying to show us, we're going to be building stuff over here to actually make these possibilities happen.

• 1:06:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  What would you say to that kind of pushback?

• 1:06:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, so I think the, the thing about the NFTs is that, you know, a lot of people will say like, well, we hate the speculative bubble. We like that it's helping artists. And my point is that, you know, helping artists was not, I don't know how possible that is without the speculative bubble, right? Um, and so I think that that's really something that's key to focus on when it comes to NFTs. As far as the sort of general argument around like, show me, fix it. Um, you know, I think that that's a very reasonable point. I think there are serious issues with the existing system that we have today.

• 1:07:15Speaker 02

  But I also don't see the, you know, externalities of crypto, uh, adding to that very much. You know what I mean? Like by saying we're going to replace it with this other system, I would hope that that system would be better than the current system, not worse. Um, and so, you know, although I appreciate that people are working towards creating a better system. Uh, you know, if they're doing it in a way that I think is actually net negative and is harmful to people, I think that's important to say, you know, I think there's a lot of talk in crypto around like, just let us build, you know, would you, would you shut up, Molly, and let us build, you know, I get that a lot. Um, and it's like, I get it. I love that people

• 1:07:57Speaker 02

  want to just build stuff, but we've also got decades of history of tech companies just building stuff and then going whoops, you know, like, guess we accidentally started civil wars, you know, or guess, you know, there's this huge issue with radicalization online that we just completely ignored. And so I think that pointing out the issues when people are talking about revolutionizing something with technology is critical regardless of, you know, the end state. I think it will either help to empower the, the web three end state in what I imagine would be your best case scenario, or it will help us avoid ending up with a system that is worse than what we're already dealing with today.

• 1:08:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  Actually, so my take on that is we definitely do not want you to shut up, Molly. We want you to keep speaking. Actually, so here's my hidden agenda in this is actually like, um, you seem so smart and knowledgeable about things that even many people inside of crypto who are buying monkey JPEGs have no idea about that. Like my hidden agenda is actually to recruit you internally. Like, we want all of the good skeptics, uh, you know, as a selfish builder side of things who's optimistic about this community, what we're doing, we want them internal to help us fix things. Uh, and, uh, yeah, so keep up the, the good work, even if you decide to always hate crypto. Please, uh, keep us honest. We definitely appreciate that. Um, let me ask you-

• 1:09:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, I was not accusing you of being one of the shut up and let us build people, but it is a very common refrain.

• 1:09:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  Let me ask you, because I know you've also been, been, been critical of, um, uh, you know, energy consumption, particularly on the Bitcoin Ethereum side of things. Um, one example where I feel like, and I want you to keep me honest here, crypto has made tremendous strides, is recently with Ethereum. So, you know, forever it's said, we're going to move to proof of stake. It's coming. It's anytime. Like soon, well, they actually did it.

• 1:09:50Speaker 02

  Six months.

• 1:09:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, six months away. They actually did it. It actually happened in September. And all of that energy use, I think you'd probably harness the same kind of criticisms you've always had against Bitcoin. But this is an example where Ethereum, a major network, a major contributor to this problem in your eyes, has actually improved. Would you give crypto any points for that?

• 1:10:14Speaker 02

  Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I think it's great that they pulled off the merge and that the environmental impact has been mitigated to an enormous extent. You know, I think that's great. You know, I've always tried to keep my criticism of crypto as far as the environmental impact goes somewhat tempered, just because I think there can be sort of a tendency to over-focus on that in the sort of critical side of things, where, you know, there was a lot of people that were like, it's burning down the rainforest. It's terrible. And that was sort of the only argument, which, you know, it is terrible that Ethereum emissions were horrifying, so were the current Bitcoin ones.

• 1:10:56Speaker 02

  But that has never sort of been my only issue with it. And so, you know, I think I was always very careful sort of before the Ethereum merge to sort of not focus on that quite too much, because people would end up sort of shifting the discussion towards, okay, so how do we fix the environmental issue, which, you know, seems to me like a somewhat solvable problem. It's the same thing with things like scalability, you know, or gas fees. Well, maybe not gas fees quite as much, but scalability, where it's like, people are like, oh, my God, you know, it's so unscalable. It's never going to scale. And it's like, well, there are a lot of things that we're never going to scale that have scaled actually pretty well, like the web, you know? We never thought we were going to be able to stream video or, you know, record something like this, but we're doing it now. You know, so I think it's sort of

• 1:11:41Speaker 02

  important to look at, okay, so what is an issue with crypto that exists today? That is like fundamental to the structure of it and the way that it has been designed and imagined. And then what of it, which part of it is like, well, we just need a little bit of time for the software engineers to, you know, make it a little bit more scalable or whatever it might be. And I sort of see the environmental impact as more of the second, where, you know, we've known for a long time that there are alternatives to proof of work that people have been using. You know, it's not like Ethereum invented proof of mistake when they did the merge. So it always sort of struck me as like a solvable problem. I don't know if the Bitcoin one is a solvable problem, but that's not for a technological reason.

• 1:12:26David Hoffman?

  Yeah, and I do appreciate the fact that we're having a crypto skeptic on that is saying that the energy and scaling things are actually not the things to be skeptical about. I listened to your episode with Jason Calcanis and one of the, one of the arguments that you guys were talking about was like the Bitcoin energy consumption. And I thought that you guys actually completely nailed it. And it's rare to actually see like crypto outside, crypto skeptics, crypto outsiders, I don't know if you accept that label or not or whatever. But just like, say like it's, it's one part about the energy consumption is its current amount of energy consumption. But it's also the mechanism itself that if Bitcoin does achieve what many of the Bitcoiners wanted to achieve,

• 1:13:08David Hoffman?

  then the energy consumption also like rides along on those coattails in a negative sense. And, and, and so I just wanted to give you, give you props for being able to like identify unique crypto parts to be, to be skeptical about, rather than just like the easy ones, which is like all gas fees and, and energy consumption. Molly, I want to ask about like your personality, like disposition. Would you call it, consider yourself like a pessimist or an optimist or somewhere in the middle?

• 1:13:38Speaker 02

  I definitely sort of trend towards the cynical on a lot of things, especially really specific things. But I think generally speaking, I'm an optimist, you know, I, I describe myself as starry eyed about the web. Like I do think that there's a lot there that is, you know, could be wonderful. I'm mostly cynical about how things are today.

• 1:13:57David Hoffman?

  Sure.

• 1:13:58Speaker 02

  But yeah, I guess probably somewhere sort of in the middle.

• 1:14:01David Hoffman?

  Okay. And so like me and Ryan, we consider ourselves like crypto natives. We use this metaphor like crypto tourists. There's people who come in during the bull markets and then they leave. Then there's crypto settlers and like we're like, we'd like we talked about earlier, like kind of permabulls. Like we're like crypto has like baked itself into a part of my identity at this point. And so if crypto doesn't do the things. Not necessarily.

• 1:14:30David Hoffman?

  But like if crypto doesn't do the things that like I think it does, and they start to do the things that you think it does. Like part of my identity gets like crushed a little bit. And so like when you look at like, you know, people like me, people like me and Ryan, who are just like, we're in crypto to see it. See it's this most idealistic vision built out or die trying. Like, what, what, what do you see when you see like this, this type of crypto character? When you look over the fence and see all these crypto idealists who just like are so crypto pilled that they like can't think about anything else. Like, what's your take on what we're up to, what our deal is?

• 1:15:04Speaker 02

  I mean, I think there's always risk in taking a stance that is so strong that you're not willing to change it. You know, I think, I think, I mean, and I think that's just broadly true outside of crypto and technology even. You know, I think it's important to be sort of open to evaluating new evidence as it comes in. You know, so I think being bullish on something sort of despite all evidence to the contrary is not always a great thing. But I think being idealistic about something is fine. You know, I think it's, it's good for there to be idealists out there. You know, I'm idealistic about a lot of things. So, you know, I think, I think it sort of depends exactly where you draw that line.

• 1:15:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  That was a very friendly way of saying, David, get some help.

• 1:15:55David Hoffman?

  I'm aware. I'm aware of my.

• 1:15:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  Molly.

• 1:15:57Speaker 02

  Well, I think, you know, I think a lot of people look at me and they think of me as, you know, bearish against all odds and unwilling to change my position and that this is a huge part of my identity, which, you know, I guess I might give off that perception because I run a website about this.

• 1:16:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it hasn't been my perception in this conversation. It's like, we've been, honestly, can I say something? So Bankless has been on a quest for a while to find good crypto critics and it's eluded us. Like honestly, I feel like this is a genuine quest we've been on. And this is one of the first conversations. I think the other one, David, that comes to mind is our conversation with Rowan Gray. I was gonna say Dimitri Kofinas. Dimitri Kofinas, yeah, but Rowan Gray. And then, and then Molly, I would count you as maybe the second or maybe the third good crypto skeptic that we've actually talked to. So, for whatever that's worth to you, we appreciate it. One other thing, I guess,

• 1:16:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  in all of this, you've, you've gone back several times to kind of like, it's not about necessarily the current use cases. You accept the fact that, you know, crypto could clean up its act with respect to energy. It could actually, you know, scale transactions. Maybe there'll be some great DeFi use cases that work for, you know, a citizen in a country in Africa and actually start to bank the unbank. You accept these possibilities. But you have this fundamental issue with the business model of crypto. This idea of like tokenizing everything, this idea of like financializing and incentivizing things through kind of money. I want to push back on that idea, too. And this is kind of an idea that

• 1:17:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  is certainly probably core to Web3 and also crypto. And it's articulated, I think, in some ways by, I think, VCs like Chris Dixon, Andreessen Horowitz, and also at Bankless. And that's this idea of the, but wait, the internet has a hidden business model already. And I know one of your core concerns that you mentioned earlier in our conversation is like surveillance. We are surveyed on the internet. Every single swipe, every single tap, every single click is logged in a database, even kind of the movement, the location you're in, it's all logged in a database. In the US, this takes the form of like capitalist surveillance. And the reason is,

• 1:18:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think you'd probably agree with this is advertising. Advertising is the business model of the internet. That's been the business model of Web 1. It's been the business model of Web 2. And it's incented this surveillance apparatus that fortunately, not yet in the US, has been used by the state, but is certainly used by large tech companies to prey on citizens, has caused some political instability as a result of this business model. And talk about Cambridge Analytica and Facebook and all of those things going on. And so, the idea of crypto is it doesn't replace advertising as the business model, but it adds a different one. This idea of ownership, right?

• 1:18:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  So you can own a specific piece of the internet and maybe like pay as you go. It disincents or starts to disrupt the whole business model of advertising of the internet. And so like, I guess maybe pushing back on this idea that financializing everything and tokenizing everything is bad. There seems to be a problem with the existing business model of the internet in that this is surveilling everything. It's preying on us in a way that is unhealthy. Do you see this problem? And is there any other way out besides the Web 3 ownership adding a different layer,

• 1:19:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  you know, in the capitalist system to the internet? Changing up the business models or any way out of this?

• 1:19:49Speaker 02

  So I would disagree that the advertising model of the internet is endemic to the internet in the way that the token model is endemic to crypto. You know, there exist sites on the internet today that don't advertise to you. Wikipedia is a good example of one. You know, that exists, so there is no advertising on Wikipedia. And so it's, I think, not correct to argue that, you know, in order to succeed on the web, you need to be advertising to customers or surveilling your users. I agree that it's not the dominant form of business on the web. Obviously, I think everyone would agree that advertising is clearly the, the way that people tend to get,

• 1:20:34Speaker 02

  to monetize their websites and things like that. But it's not fundamental in the same way.

• 1:20:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  Can I ask, just because we're on the subject of Wikipedia, what's it like to like contribute to Wikipedia? I imagine this is kind of like a messy process and there's probably so, so, so many things DAO governance could learn from like, you know, the, the nature of contribution to something like Wikipedia. But what like, what's a day in the life? What kind of things have you done there? You know, how does this thing actually work? I think people, people have lost their wonder for Wikipedia. But like, I remember the early days of Wikipedia. It's just like mind blowing that people would come together for free and write a freaking encyclopedia that is just like an incredible resource for, for humanity. So tell us about that.

• 1:21:21Speaker 02

  I think Wikipedia is sort of partly what keeps me so idealistic about the web because like Wikipedia is one of those things that should not function, right? Like you look at it and you're like, how is that possible? That people are just doing that for fun? They're not being paid, you know, they're not experts or academics. But it works, right? You know, and so that's sort of one thing that tries, it sort of tempers a lot of my cynicism around things where it's like, that could not possibly work. It's like, well, it kind of does.

• 1:21:50Speaker 02

  But yeah, I mean, I think as far as like a day in the life, it is a very messy process, especially on more popular pages or pages that themselves are controversial in some way. But it's sometimes kind of meditative in the quieter parts of Wikipedia. You know, if you find some random article on some really niche subject and you want to just like do a deep dive, that's pretty fun. I enjoy that a lot.

• 1:22:15Speaker 02

  But yeah, I, I mean, I enjoy, I think, all parts of it. The arguments sometimes are a little bit more than I would like to put up with.

• 1:22:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  What motivates you?

• 1:22:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  What motivates you to contribute? What motivates the, the average Wikipedia contributor to, to actually do the work? Because it's not tokens.

• 1:22:31David Hoffman?

  There's no token. How could you possibly be motivated?

• 1:22:36Speaker 02

  They've actually tried to do research on this because I was like, nobody really knows.

• 1:22:43Speaker 02

  I think there's sort of this weird subset of people who just love doing stuff like that. You know, it's like this sort of born encyclopedist or like the born archivist almost who just get a lot of joy out of like collating data and making it accessible to people. For me, a lot of it has to do with just a really strong belief that like knowledge should be available to people as widely as possible without being, you know, stuck in expensive volumes of encyclopedias or, you know, behind academic paywalls or behind news paywalls increasingly. I think, you know, creating that resource is societally incredibly important.

• 1:23:25Speaker 02

  But, you know, I think there's a really broad range of reasons that people edit. You know, some people like, you know, in sort of a token based model, they like to see their edit count go up. That just makes them happy inside. They can't spend those edits anywhere, but yeah, it's like a clout thing. But I think, I think probably most people are just motivated by the, the end result, you know, that, that is very fundamental.

• 1:23:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  So spreading knowledge to the entire world and, and believing that that is an important thing to do, Molly, that, that's what keeps you contributing. You know, famously though, Wikipedia is blocked in many different countries around the world, right? I'm not sure that it gets through to, to China across the great firewall. There are other locations where it doesn't get to either. How important in, in your mind is getting access to Wikipedia, knowledge based like Wikipedia, to these places where it's currently censored? Would you rate that as, as very important?

• 1:24:21Speaker 02

  I would say it is. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's impactful to be able to have access to that kind of knowledge. And I would say that the attempts to block it have been somewhat unsuccessful. I think a lot of people get around the great firewall to access Wikipedia. You know, Russia recently tried to block it and, you know.

• 1:24:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  Is it via VPN or how do they, how do they do this?

• 1:24:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, to some extent, it's largely via VPN. But or, you know, people will log on via Tor or things like that. But, you know, I think that as a community, we sort of do what we can to enable people in those situations to access Wikipedia in various ways. There have been attempts to, you know, create offline versions that could be distributed or to, you know, enable people to circumvent those, you know, firewalls to the extent that we can.

• 1:25:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Do you think that anything you've seen in crypto has a role to play in making things like Wikipedia more censorship resistant? I'm thinking projects maybe like IPFS, which is sort of a distributed file storage system, projects even like ENS, which is a decentralized DNS system. So you can go to kind of like a website URL and access it. Have you seen anything there that is interesting? These are less talked about, I think, in crypto because it's not a JPEG token that could be pumped. But yeah, what are your thoughts around this?

• 1:25:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think the general decentralization idea is really interesting and important and has been, you know, far before crypto and probably will continue to be. You know, again, I don't always feel like crypto is necessary for decentralized storage, but I do think that, you know, attempts to make it available through crypto are interesting. You know, IPFS, Filecoin, some of those projects are really interesting. But yeah.

• 1:26:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  So far, we haven't seen it. Molly, this has been a lot of fun. I guess last question for you because as I said at the outset, David and I want to get outside of our kind of crypto bubble and maybe Bankless listeners who want to do that as well. Do you have any advice for people in general in crypto? People that you've seen that are a bit maybe, you know, too much, drinking too much of the Kool-Aid, a bit too starry eyed, a bit too naive? Do you have any advice for them on how to break outside of their kind of information bubble? What would you say?

• 1:26:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think just being open to alternate perspectives is important. You know, like, I try not to read all anti crypto stuff all the time. You know, I listen to podcasts like this one or to, you know, I read crypto media a lot. And I think that is really key to having a fairly

• 1:27:17Speaker 02

  healthy perspective on things. You know, I think there are really, I think, I think there are probably more good crypto critics than maybe you do. Who are doing really, really interesting work. And, you know, I, I think I would just encourage people to try to just try it. You know, they're, they're not boring to listen to. They're not trying to sell you anything.

• 1:27:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  Maybe we'll get a few names for you after, from you after the show, Molly, and other crypto critics we can bring on. This has been a really fun conversation and thank you for, for joining us. I hope you didn't feel like you were going behind enemy lines on today's episode, but I appreciate you coming on a crypto podcast. Yeah, thanks, Molly.

• 1:27:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was happy to do it.

• 1:27:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  Action items for you, Bankless Nation, of course, break outside of your information bubbles. You're probably listening to the Bankless Podcast. Maybe it's time to also put a non crypto podcast in your rotation. Should we say that, David?

• 1:28:10David Hoffman?

  Nah.

• 1:28:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  Cross that out. Never mind. That's not an action item.

• 1:28:13David Hoffman?

  Not after you're done listening to the five Bankless podcasts.

• 1:28:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  The action item for you is to check out Molly's website. It's called Web3 is Going Great at web3isgoinggreat.com. You will see a compilation of things that aren't going so well in crypto. If you ever need to be reminded, and of course, guys, risks and disclaimers should include, as always, none of this has been financial advice. Crypto is definitely risky. So is ETH, so is Bitcoin, so is DeFi. You could lose what you put in. If you need to be reminded of that, go to Molly's website. 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.

• 1:28:49David 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, Ask Me Anything's and weekly rollups where we summarize the week in crypto and other

• 1:29:34David Hoffman?

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