ROLLUP: LooksRare Airdrop | Fees.WTF | Inflation | PayPal Stablecoin | Top Shots Ban

Second Week of 2022 ------ 📣 ONJUNO | Crypto from your Checking Account! https://bankless.cc/OnJuno ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/ 🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/ ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum 🍵 MATCHA | SMART ORDER ROUTING https://bankless.cc/Matcha 🚀 SLINGSHOT | LAYER 2 SOCIAL TRADING https://bankless.cc/Slingshot 🏦 GEMINI | TURN FIAT INTO CRYPTO https://bankless.cc/Gemini 🦁 BRAVE | THE BROWSER NATIVE WALLET https://bankless.cc/Brave 🦄 UNISWAP | DECENTRALIZED FUNDING https://bankless.cc/UniGrants ------ Topics Covered: 0:00 Intro 3:10 MARKETS 3:27 BTC Price 4:30 ETH Price 7:15 ETH BTC Ratio 8:15 Burning ETH https://twitter.com/ultrasoundmoney/status/1480578475295653907 - Burners https://twitter.com/ASvanevik/status/1480077502659719168 - Visualized https://twitter.com/tokenterminal/status/1481304683750825988?s=20 14:56 Merge https://twitter.com/RyanSAdams/status/1481280658135728129?s=20 16:55 DCF https://twitter.com/RyanSAdams/status... https://twitter.com/RyanSAdams/status/1481636495089967104?s=20 20:00 Uniswap on Polygon https://twitter.com/haydenzadams/stat... https://twitter.com/haydenzadams/status/1480998714319724547 21:54 Brave Passes 50m MAU https://www.coindesk.com/business/202... https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/01/05/crypto-browser-brave-passes-50m-monthly-active-users/ 24:00 RELEASES 25:00 LooksRare Airdrop https://looksrare.org/ 33:42 Fees.wtf Airdrop https://fees.wtf/claim 34:55 Tally Wallet https://blog.tally.cash/a-community-o... https://blog.tally.cash/a-community-owned-wallet-for-the-new-internet/ 35:54 GMI Index https://twitter.com/indexcoop/status/... https://twitter.com/indexcoop/status/1479181847330492416 37:10 Etherscan NFT Tracker https://twitter.com/etherscan/status/... https://twitter.com/etherscan/status/1477986601976283141?s=20 38:18 IMX Permissionless https://twitter.com/Immutable/status/... https://twitter.com/Immutable/status/1481121636296577025 39:16 dYdX v4 https://dydx.exchange/blog/v4-full-de... https://dydx.exchange/blog/v4-full-decentralization 40:23 Optimism Explosion https://www.optimism.io/ 42:49 Zerion x Avalanche https://twitter.com/zerion_io/status/... https://twitter.com/zerion_io/status/1481295284030394376 43:04 Ramp x zkSync https://www.argent.xyz/blog/ramp-x-usa/ 44:09 FairX Coinbase Acquisition https://www.coindesk.com/business/202... https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/01/12/coinbase-buys-fairx-to-launch-crypto-derivatives-offering 45:20 Jobs https://pallet.xyz/list/bankless/jobs 46:00 NEWS 46:23 Inflation at 7% https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/12/cpi-d... https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/12/cpi-december-2021-.html 50:42 Moxie on Web3 https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-fir... https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html Vitalik’s Response: https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/com... https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/ryk3it/my_first_impressions_of_web3/hrrz15r/ 55:44 Arbitrum Outage https://twitter.com/arbitrum/status/1... https://twitter.com/arbitrum/status/1480165924355330051?s=12 59:00 AP NFTs on Polygon https://thedefiant.io/nfts-associated... https://thedefiant.io/nfts-associated-press/ 1:00:09 Nas on Royal https://twitter.com/3LAU/status/14792... https://twitter.com/3LAU/status/1479221218754670593?s=20 1:01:23 Penguins Drama https://www.coindesk.com/business/202... https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/01/07/pudgy-penguins-nft-project-ousts-founders-as-mood-turns-icy 1:03:48 Doodles Soar https://thedefiant.io/doodles-nfts-fl... https://thedefiant.io/doodles-nfts-floor-price/ 1:04:54 World of Women https://boardroom.tv/guy-oseary-signs... https://boardroom.tv/guy-oseary-signs-nft-phenomenon-world-of-women/ 1:06:25 Top Shot Bans Users https://www.coindesk.com/business/202... https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/01/12/nba-top-shot-bans-user-freehongkong/ 1:12:37 PayPal Stablecoin https://twitter.com/Blockworks_/statu... https://twitter.com/Blockworks_/status/1479575310580523013?s=20 CBDC: https://blockworks.co/fed-chair-powel... https://blockworks.co/fed-chair-powell-cbdc-and-stablecoins-can-coexist Tom Emmer: https://twitter.com/reptomemmer/statu... https://twitter.com/reptomemmer/status/1481283945492852743?s=21 1:16:46 Aarika Rhodes vs Brad Sherman https://www.fec.gov/data/receipts/?co... https://www.fec.gov/data/receipts/?committee_id=C00308742&two_year_transaction_period=2022&data_type=processed 1:21:00 TAKES 1:23:00 Zones of Sovereignty https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/st... https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/1479501366192132099?s=20 1:29:30 Esoteric Terms https://twitter.com/sassal0x/status/1... https://twitter.com/sassal0x/status/1481055947934277632?s=20 1:31:38 Cobie https://twitter.com/BanklessHQ/status... https://twitter.com/BanklessHQ/status/1480999234526613504?s=20 1:33:35 Preaching https://twitter.com/RyanSAdams/status... https://twitter.com/RyanSAdams/status/1481105469741715456?s=20 1:40:10 What David’s Excited About https://twitter.com/RyanSAdams/status... https://twitter.com/RyanSAdams/status/1480681147986284545?s=20 1:41:25 What Ryan’s Excited About https://twitter.com/RyanSAdams/status... https://twitter.com/RyanSAdams/status/1481424097544491009?s=20 1:43:55 MEME of the Week https://twitter.com/sartoshi_nft/stat... https://twitter.com/sartoshi_nft/status/1478971394214051843?s=21 ----- Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/bankless-disclosures

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

• 0:00David Hoffman?

  This is one of the reasons why I'm super excited about optimism because they are committed to public goods and public goods get me all hot and bothered.

• 0:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  Good morning, Bankless Nation. It is the second week of January. David, what time is it?

• 0:14David Hoffman?

  Oh, Ryan, it's the Friday Weekly Rollup time where we roll up the entire week in crypto, which is always an ambitious endeavor, yet we undertake it nonetheless because that is what we do every Friday morning on the Bankless Friday Weekly Rollup.

• 0:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  Absolutely. Topics for the week, okay? Inflation over 7%. That means your dollars are worth 7% this year versus last year.

• 0:35David Hoffman?

  7% less.

• 0:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  7% less. Did I say more?

• 0:38David Hoffman?

  You just said 7%.

• 0:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's 7% less. That's bad, okay? PayPal doing a stablecoin. What's the news on that? We're also going to talk about this airdrop from Looks Rare. I got my Look token, Looks token. Did you get yours?

• 0:50David Hoffman?

  Oh, I got my Looks.

• 0:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, finally.

• 0:53David Hoffman?

  Looks bright.

• 0:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like, this is like an OpenSea competitor. We're going to dig into that. Maybe it's what we've been looking for, not sure yet. There's some other airdrops we're going to touch too. Also, some big NFT winners this week and some losers. What are the winning projects? What are the losers? Last two unpack on the rollup. And you are freshly back, David. You're back from your ice climbing trip. How was that, man?

• 1:13David Hoffman?

  Well, I didn't die, so that's correct. I've always been a big rock climber, but never been ice climbing before. And I've had this badass afterglow for the last week. It was just, yo, I went ice climbing. That's amazing.

• 1:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Are we going to show those pictures like toward the end of the show?

• 1:28David Hoffman?

  Oh, yeah, we are. Yeah.

• 1:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  That was pretty badass.

• 1:31David Hoffman?

  Hanging on with one arm while I'm taking a selfie. Yeah.

• 1:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  You will never see me up there with you, dude, but like, I admire, I admire what you're doing.

• 1:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, that's very cool. Also, we got to tell you a little bit about our friends and sponsors at Onjuno. David, tell me what Onjuno is.

• 1:47David Hoffman?

  Onjuno is a checking account for crypto people. So if you're frustrated that your Boomer Bank account doesn't have USDC or ETH or BTC when it totally could, use Onjuno because Onjuno is a crypto-enabled checking account. You can put USDC in there. You can also get 4% on that USDC. Ryan, how much APY do you get on your Deposits in your in your bank account.

• 2:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, I know this. 0.01% in my Wells Fargo Way to Save account.

• 2:17David Hoffman?

  Yeah, that's significantly less than the 4% that you can get on OnJuno.

• 2:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Also significantly less than inflation, I would remind you.

• 2:25David Hoffman?

  And in addition to that, you can also get your direct deposit from your company, sent into your OnJuno account, and they will automatically convert that into crypto. So you can reduce the amount of time that you hold your inflating dollars, and it can get sent directly into actual, sound, real money like Bitcoin and Ether. You can do a number of other cool things. They have a metal debit card for you, where you can get like 5% cash back at select Web2-type companies. Walmart comes to mind, Spotify, stuff like that, and just a bunch of other features as well. So if your bank account, if your Boomer Bank account has not taken the crypto pill, OnJuno has. So you can go and sign up with code BANKLESS to get $50 when you get your first direct deposit into your OnJuno account.

• 3:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I've never seen a bank account that can do this. This is my OnJuno account. Look at this. You can get started, split your paycheck, and you get to pick whether you are a Bitcoin maximalist, an ETH maximalist, or something in the middle. Really cool features that OnJuno is rolling out. So make sure you guys check that out and get an account. There is a link in the show notes. David, let's start with some market news of the week. Get to the numbers, man. Bitcoin first. How is Bitcoin hanging in there in this second week of January 2022?

• 3:36David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so the big red days were last week, literally eight days ago. So the seven days of price action has actually not been terrible, even though we've kind of had like a bad market. So Bitcoin is actually up 1% since like Monday. It started, and also like, we kind of, since we record these on Thursdays, but the weeks end on Sundays, there's a little bit of discrepancy. We have to sort that out. Anyways, seven days ago, the Bitcoin price was $43,000. It hit a low of $40,500 in the middle of the week. We are currently clocking in at $42,800. So actually, since I wrote these numbers down, we must have taken a little bit of a dip because we are actually down. 1.8%, so scratch that.

• 4:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Down 1.8%, who knows what it'll be at the time of recording, of course, pretty choppy, pretty volatile, but definitely it's been down in 2022 so far. Same story for ETH. What are we looking at on the week?

• 4:34David Hoffman?

  ETH started the week at $3,400, which was the high of the week. It hit a low of just below $3,000. Didn't stay below $3,000 for too long. We don't, we don't like that 3,000 number. That's, that's too low of a number. I hate that number. 3,000, I'll settle for 3,300, but we are below 3,300 right now at 3,286. What happened was that the last Wednesday, a week ago Wednesday, the Fed minutes came out and people realized that the Fed is now, are now looking at reducing their balance sheet, which means that they are going from injecting $120 million, billion dollars per month into the market to pulling out $80 billion.

• 5:19David Hoffman?

  So a $200 billion month difference in liquidity. That spooked a lot of people, especially risk on assets like crypto assets. And that was because of perceived just like unsustainable nature of the balance sheet. And so, and also inflation. And so that's what spooked the market. That's why the market's down. And then on Wednesday, when we went from a price of like 3,100 to 3,400 over the course of 24 hours, that is when the CPI came out and inflation wasn't worse than expected. And so people said, okay, it's not, couldn't, couldn't have been worse than this. So I'm going to go a little bit more risk on. So markets went from like 4,000 down to 3,000 because of the Fed notes and then bounced back from 3,000

• 5:59David Hoffman?

  up to 3,400 with Ether price. But since I wrote these numbers down, we are back down to $3,290 on Ether price, Bitcoin doing similar things. So that is the TLDR of the last week in crypto prices.

• 6:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, macro really taking center stage in the crypto markets and, you know, Jerome Powell. And so it's like that, that $120 billion that they're buying every month, right? That's kind of like an asset, yeah, asset stimulus program.

• 6:26David Hoffman?

  It's a price floor.

• 6:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's a, it's a price floor. Exactly. And you know, that goes into all risk on assets. So I think there's that compounded with the fact that people are wondering, does the Fed really know what it's doing? Are they really in control anymore? Or a couple of rollups ago, I called this like the Jesus take the wheel economy. It's like, no one actually is steering this ship. And you know, is the Fed really on top of things? Are they just reacting to things just like everyone else? I think that's given some jitters to the market. That's going to take some time, I think, to work itself out. So I don't know what's going to happen for the rest of Q1. But I think this macro stuff could be in the headlines for a while, David.

• 7:07David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I think that's right. The actions of the Fed are similarly as volatile as the markets themselves. So it's not really helping anyone.

• 7:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, let's look at the ETH Bitcoin ratio. So our numbers for Bitcoin and ETH are flat on the week. Is the ratio looking pretty flat too?

• 7:23David Hoffman?

  Yeah, the ratio is up from 0.075 to 0.0767, up a tiny little bit, but still down on the like a on a four week trend. About four weeks ago, we almost hit 0.09. We are currently at 0.076. I would like to be above 0.08. I've said it in episodes past, and so I'll have to say it again, like the ETH BTC ratio going up is an indication of the bull market. It's been going down the last four weeks. I don't like that. If it's not an indication of a bull market, it's an indication of a bear market. So I'll have to be fair to myself and say that it's still pretty good, though. 0.076, not too bad.

• 8:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  Hanging in there, not knowing what to do. It's kind of like, it reminds me of the summer. We back to crab season for this quarter? It might be a crab season quarter. See how that plays out. How about the Fed index? That is Bitcoin, ETH and DeFi tokens all combined a third, a third, a third on the one week. What are we looking at?

• 8:21David Hoffman?

  Yeah, we started the week at 126. We are ending the week at 128. We are up by about 2.4%.

• 8:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  2.4% on the week. Interesting. You know, let's switch maybe to away from away from the short term chop and back to fundamentals. So I tweeted this out, David, earlier this year, like, and this is kind of earlier this week, rather, this is kind of a joke, but like, I'd rather sell an organ than sell my ETH this year because it's a merge year. All right?

• 8:51David Hoffman?

  Will someone take my kidney for ETH?

• 8:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  I don't know, you can tokenize it.

• 8:54David Hoffman?

  Hey, if anyone needs my kidney, I got an O plus or oh, oh, blood type O. Like, let me know, let me know.

• 9:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  You only need one. Yeah, so like, but, but seriously, the fundamentals for Ether as an asset, and I think for, for other assets in crypto, are looking quite strong. And now we're talking about the burn, the furnace is, is quite hot this week. 18K ETH burn record in a 24 hour period of time. That happened on January 10th, earlier this week, the biggest ETH burn in a single day. Pretty impressive there. We got some other things on the burn. Why don't you talk about this, David?

• 9:29David Hoffman?

  Yeah, for seven days, we had no net new Ether issuance. We had a day where Ether issuance was matched by Ether burn. And actually, this tweet is actually a little bit outdated. The issuance offset point 1.00 is actually, the last time I checked it was 1.02. So we actually burned 2% more Ether than we issued.

• 9:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  So Ether supply didn't increase this week?

• 9:55David Hoffman?

  Yes.

• 9:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  Is what you're saying?

• 9:57David Hoffman?

  Yes.

• 9:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like, that doesn't happen with any other blockchains.

• 10:00David Hoffman?

  Never, ever. And this, this is, is likely because of volatility. One of the first articles, actually, I think the first article I ever wrote was an analysis of MKR getting burnt during times of market volatility. And I noticed that a lot of MKR gets burnt when prices go up and down really, really quickly.

• 10:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Totally.

• 10:17David Hoffman?

  Because people are paying back their debt into Maker Dow and that burns MKR. And now we are seeing the same dynamic play out where market volatility creates congestion on a blockchain. People are getting liquidated, there are arbitrage bots all over the place, people need to cover their positions. People need to do DeFi stuff when prices move. And so when that happens, congestion on the chain goes, goes really, really high. And so during times of market volatility, Ether gets burned the most. And so we definitely saw that with, there was definitely a decent number of liquidations on Saturday and Sunday of last week. And that is being reflected in how much ether we are burning. So market volatility ultimately burns more ether.

• 10:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's definitely some of that. And at the same time, OpenSea activity like hasn't slowed down either. So you've got both the market volatility, causing people to click more buttons on DeFi. And then you have OpenSea and NFTs going full steam ahead. That all adds up to a lot of burn, perfectly balanced as all things should be. Is the Thanos meme reference here. This is a whole review of 2021, the top Ethereum gas consumers. And you can see the big ones here. What came in number one, David?

• 11:29David Hoffman?

  Yeah, for the viewers on the YouTube, you can watch these graphs. The bottom is going to be the biggest. And then you can see the bands get highlighted as we move up. This is Alex Svanevic from Nansen. And so Uniswap coming in at number one, burning like what looks like 40%. Yeah, 40% roughly of all gas in 2021. So that's pretty big, definitely taking up the majority, followed by OpenSea. And you can see just the rate of adoption in OpenSea where even though it's number two, it actually didn't burn all that much gas in the first half of the year of 2021. It was all in the second half. And from the period of like August to November, OpenSea was actually burning more ether than Uniswap. Or consuming gas, I guess is a more technical term.

• 12:13David Hoffman?

  So that's number two, followed three by one inch, which had a nice steady ETH gas consumption all throughout the year. Number four is the wrapped ether contract. So that's wrapped ether being transferred around that wrapped ether. Okay, quick dive into wrapped ether. Why does wrapped ether exist? Because ether is not an ERC 20 token and DeFi is used to ERC 20 token. So just to make ether be on the same page as all the other tokens we use in DeFi, we have this wrapper contract called wrapped ether. People put their ether in there and then boom, ether behaves like an ERC 20 token. And wrapped ether coming in number four at the most burned in 2021, followed by Tether coming in at number five, getting a blow through the rest of these.

• 12:54David Hoffman?

  USDC at number six, AVE at number seven, Zero X, Zero X Exchange and Matcha coming in at number eight. Number nine is MetaMask swap and number 10 is Sushi swap. So there you have it. There are our top 10 ETH gas consumers in 2021.

• 13:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, pretty cool. DeFi and NFT is definitely the story. This is a visual from Token Terminal. Let me see if I can expand this, blow this up a little bit. Of ETH becoming a productive asset. So this is the effect of EIP1559 visualized. I'm playing this now, so you can see transaction fees to miners, if you're on YouTube looking at this in the aqua. And then suddenly EIP1559 kicks in, burn transaction fees. Oh, look, look, about to hit it. It surpasses transaction fees to miners. The nice thing about these burn transaction fees, of course, is they go to all ETH holders.

• 13:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's kind of like a stock buyback type program, if you're thinking about this in terms of, you know, capital assets like stocks or something like that.

• 14:00David Hoffman?

  Wait, before you go on, I want to elaborate on that point because the number of miners out there are like, you know, not that many. Like, less than 1,000 individuals or entities are capturing like 95% of the value of the transaction fees going to miners. The number of Ether holders out there is far more than that. It's over a million people. So we're going from like just 1,000 people who receive the benefit of Ethereum transaction fees going to over a million people. That's one of the beautiful things about EIP1559. It democratizes the value captured by the Ethereum protocol to the maximum number of people possible that's also aligned with the Ethereum protocol, which is Ether holders. So this is a democratizing force.

• 14:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it's interesting too. I mean, this, this doesn't go to whales disproportionately. It goes to everyone equally. So you, you want some of this, the benefits of the stock buyback?

• 14:50David Hoffman?

  You can have it.

• 14:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  Own some ETH. You can have a fraction of ETH and you receive this benefit. It's pretty cool. One of my predictions, maybe this is kind of a hot take for 2022, is the Ethereum merge will happen this year. And historically, it'll be like, it'll be a historic milestone in the whole, you know, history of crypto. That's how it'll be viewed in the decades to come. But when it does happen in a few months' time, the time, people will still be disappointed. Because there's this idea, David, that ETH2 and the Merge will actually reduce gas fees and that's not what's going to happen. It's it's almost like a efficiency improvement. It's a monetary policy improvement, right?

• 15:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  You're ripping out the old proof of work engine and you're installing this this hyper efficient electric engine. So we've gone from a combustion engine to an electric engine, but it is not going to alleviate gas fees. And I'm worried there's this sentiment that people think, oh, when the merge happens, suddenly gas fees on Ethereum will go away. That's not what's going to happen. That is not Ethereum scalability strategy. So I guess a quick PSA for people who didn't realize that. And also the take there is I think some people will be disappointed because there's a lot of bad information about what's going to happen in the future with Ethereum's roadmap. Any thoughts there?

• 16:11David Hoffman?

  No, I had that same question while I was on a podcast the other this week where like, what's going to happen to the gas fees after the merge? I don't know where that excuse me. I don't know where that misunderstanding came from. I've never heard that be iterated. I think people just assume that ETH2 has low gas fees and it kind of does with sharding. That's that's the part where Ethereum block space actually grows is because of sharding.

• 16:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  A lot of bad information out there. It's like, it's look, to be fair, it's hard to keep track of all of this stuff. And sometimes we use all sorts of like technical terms. You have to kind of be in the weeds like EIP 1559. What like, what is that? What does that even mean? ETH2, oh, it sounds like an upgrade. Is the upgrade going to be faster? Well, no, it's not like, what does it improve? It's complicated, so I get it. But yeah, I'm not sure why that sentiment has somewhat spread. The interesting thing about all of this is somebody actually put together a discounted cash flow model that I thought was really neat.

• 17:01David Hoffman?

  Oh, wow, this is amazing.

• 17:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  Putting a link in the show notes. Yeah, it's it's pretty cool, right? So this is how analysts analyze. This is done by Ryan Ellis. This is a discounted cash flow. It's how analysts look at capital assets like stocks or, you know, rental properties, that sort of thing. And what's interesting about this is if you just look at it from a amount of revenue that goes to ETH as a productive asset, once staking kicks in, right? The value, the fair market value of ETH, if it has a PE ratio, something that would be common for a fast growing tech company of 100, then ETH is massively undervalued.

• 17:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  It should be valued at close to $12,000 per ETH, just because this thing is a revenue machine, all right? It's December 2021 revenue was $13 billion. And remember what we said, so like the EIP 1559, all of those burn metrics that we're going back, that's stock buybacks. Okay. But basically, when the merge happens and you stake your ETH, then you not only receive the stock buyback, but you also receive a dividend. You also receive annual, you know, staking revenue rewards.

• 18:19David Hoffman?

  The fees that are currently paid to miners go to validators. The leftovers from the burn go to the validators who stake their ETH.

• 18:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  So that effectively is like a dividend. So that's what's happening right now with Ether. And if you just value it as a productive asset, it just seems hilariously undervalued at this point in time. I know Bankless listeners are probably sick of us saying that, but like,

• 18:40David Hoffman?

  Hey, we're gonna beat this drum until it happens.

• 18:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Just look at the numbers. Okay, just look at the numbers for yourself. Check out this discounted cash flow. And this is only if you view Ether as a productive asset, as a capital asset. When you add a monetary premium, right? So like, as a productive asset, it's worth $2 trillion. But if you, if you consider that, it should also have a monetary premium for all of its uses as money, collateral and DeFi. Like, what else are you gonna hold? You gonna hold sovereign bonds? No, you want, you want a long-term store of value. I mean, that feels like a $4 trillion, $5 trillion valuation, right? I have no idea if that's gonna happen this year, but these are just the fundamentals that I think you and I see when we look at Ether as an asset and why we talk about it so much, because it just seems like a freaking no-brainer.

• 19:26David Hoffman?

  Right, it really does. It really does. I mean, it can't just teleport to its fair valuation, right? Because then there's too many people that got too rich too quickly, so they gotta sell. There's many dynamics about why it's not at that price, but one of those dynamics about why it's not at that price is time. And so Bankless will be here talking about this until that time comes.

• 19:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's just the most fundamentally strong asset in this space.

• 19:49David Hoffman?

  In the world, in the world, the best asset the universe has ever seen.

• 19:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, now we're being too bullish, but yeah, it's a it seems like a massive opportunity. All right, let's talk about Uniswap on Polygon. So it's going pretty well, David. What's happening here?

• 20:05David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so we've been covering this lately where there was a proposal to put Uniswap on Polygon. It passed with overwhelming support. So now it's there. And it's only been a few weeks, tweets Hayden Adams, since launch. And Uniswap V3 is already the highest volume DEX protocol on Polygon with only 45 million TVL2. That's one of the beautiful things about Uniswap V3. It's super capital efficient. You can get a lot of liquidity with not that much capital being provided in liquidity. And so no surprise that Uniswap comes to Polygon and dominates in the DEX space. So congrats to Uniswap, congrats to Polygon, congrats to DeFi and Layer 2.

• 20:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's thrown off some serious revenue here, too. So in 2021, Uniswap LPs, this is the liquidity providers, they made $1.6 billion worth of revenue. And Hayden says that's more than any app, any decentralized app. DeFi Protocol, L1 network or L2 network, aside from Ethereum, the king itself. Pretty impressive. He also shows six other projects that are direct V2 forks of Uniswap. So the Uniswap AMM model working pretty well, generating a ton of revenue for the space.

• 21:14David Hoffman?

  And the the highlight about this revenue, this $1.6 billion in revenue, is going to liquidity providers who never did any KYC, who never filled out a form, who never signed up with anything. This is permissionless revenue. So yes, it's 106 or $1.6 billion, but in my mind, it's the best kind of $1.6 billion, which is the permissionless and free kind, where no one had to submit any sort of documentation to access it. It's the best kind of revenue.

• 21:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  How old is Uniswap? Is this like just?

• 21:44David Hoffman?

  November 2019.

• 21:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, so three, just, you know, three years old, just over three.

• 21:49David Hoffman?

  Yep.

• 21:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  Incredible how fast these protocols can grow. Another growth story from a market perspective, Crypto Browser, the Brave Browser, just passed 50 million monthly active users. Of course, Brave just launched a crypto wallet as well. This is more crypto native browser and pretty cool, pretty impressive to see that growth.

• 22:10David Hoffman?

  Yeah, this is not strictly crypto because Brave is just a privacy, it's a crypto ethos browser where you get to, crypto friendly, yeah, you get to control your digital footprint. It's user first, it's user sovereignty, so very aligned with crypto values. And then they do have their brand new wallet in the browser as well, which you've heard of from the bankless ads. So you'll hear about that later in the show.

• 22:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  Guys, speaking of bankless ads, they're about to come at you. We want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible. We'll be back with the releases and the rest of the roll up in just a minute.

• 22:44David Hoffman?

  The Brave Browser is the user-first browser for the Web3 internet with over 50 million monthly active users. Control your digital footprint with built-in privacy and ad blocking. Inside the Brave Browser, you'll find the Brave Wallet, the first secure crypto wallet built natively inside of a Web3 crypto browser. Web3 is freedom from big tech and Wall Street, more control and better privacy. But there's a weak point in Web3, your crypto wallet. The Brave Wallet is different. Brave Wallet is built natively inside the Brave Browser, no extension required, which gives the Brave Wallet an extra level of security versus other wallets. With the Brave Wallet, you can buy, store, send and swap your crypto assets, and you can even manage your NFTs and connect to other wallets and DeFi apps, all from the security of the best privacy browser on the market.

• 23:28David Hoffman?

  Whether you're new to crypto or a seasoned pro, it's time to switch to the Brave Wallet. Download Brave at brave.com/bankless and click the wallet icon to get started. When you shop for plane tickets, you probably use Kayak, Expedia or Google to compare ticket prices. So why would you limit yourself to just one exchange when you trade crypto? When you make your trades, you want to make sure you're getting the best possible price on your trade, and that's why you should be using Matcha. Matcha has smart order routing that splits your trade across all the various liquidity sources in Ethereum and is also operational. On Polygon, Avalanche, Finance Smart Chain and other chains. Trading on Matcha is super easy because it pools the liquidity for me in a single, easy to use platform and allows me to make limit on-chain orders. So you can set and forget your DeFi trades and they will go through automatically while you're away.

• 24:11David Hoffman?

  So when you're making a trade, head over to matcha.xyz/banklist and connect your wallet to start getting the best prices and most liquidity when you trade your crypto assets. Banklist is proud to be sponsored by Uniswap. Uniswap is a new paradigm in asset exchange infrastructure. Instead of a cumbersome order book system where trades are matched with other humans, Uniswap is an autonomous piece of software on Ethereum that lets you trade any token at the current market price. No human counterparties or centralized intermediaries, just autonomous code on Ethereum. Input the token you want to sell and receive the token you want to buy. The Uniswap Grants Program is accepting applications for grants. Do you have something of value that you think you want to contribute to the Uniswap ecosystem?

• 24:53David Hoffman?

  No matter how big or small your idea is, you can apply for a uni-grant at uniswapgrant.org and help steer Uniswap in the direction that you think it should go. Thank you, Uniswap, for sponsoring Banklist.

• 25:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, guys, we are back with the releases of the week. We got to start here with an airdrop and a release, a combo, double threat. Looks Rare, they just released, this is a vampire attack on OpenSea? An NFT trading platform, an NFT listing platform, minting platform? You do a lot of things with Looks Rare. What's going on here?

• 25:23David Hoffman?

  Yeah, this is kind of, I think this might be the OpenSea alternative that we've all been looking for. There's definitely some very viable alternatives. Zora comes to mind, like, you know, Rarible, you know, Foundation. But like, everyone's really looking for that, that search and organization and curation feature that OpenSea really has done a very good job of. And looksrare.org is a brand new app on the scene, Web3 app with, that is closer towards the Web3 end of the spectrum than, than OpenSea. OpenSea is kind of, you know, a Web 2.5. And also, I think people have just finally swallowed the pill that OpenSea's, I don't think it's going to be doing a token. And so people really want an NFT platform that they can own, which means they need a token. And this

• 26:06David Hoffman?

  Platform came with token first, so they airdropped the looks token to anyone that has put three ether of volume through OpenSea. So if you've ever bought anything more than three ether or collected, collectively purchased anything more than three ether through OpenSea, you have the looks token. We'll pull up a chart here in a second because that number actually scales up the more volume that you put through. Three is just the minimum. In order to get your airdrop, you must list an NFT for sale. So you are not automatically eligible. You have to actually list an NFT that you own for sale on the LooksRare platform. But there's some pretty interesting tokenomics and this is, there were angel investments. I'm not sure if there was a big VC profile behind this, but there were angel investors. So there is investors in this. It's not like

• 26:49David Hoffman?

  the immaculate nature of ENS where they have absolutely no investors. There are some investors behind this. But I think so far, like, it's been very, very well received by the community. A lot of the friends that I've heard chit chat about this are excited about it. And I think that I went through and I listed the two airdrops. I got the airdrop twice, two different wallets, and I've listed two NFTs. And that process was great. Very sleek UI. We did ask the LooksRare team to come on the State of the Nation, but since they are all Anons and they are also very busy with the launch, they politely declined, which is totally fine. But maybe we will talk to them in the future.

• 27:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, that's really cool. And I guess the vampire attack part of this, right? So like, last episode, I feel like we were just talking about OpenSea, almost a good chunk of that episode. It's because OpenSea just raised $20 billion. And at that point, if you issue a token, I mean, a lot of the gains have already been realized by accredited investors, the VC side of things. In this case, the vampire attack piece of it is basically, they went through, they got all of the higher volume OpenSea users, and they said, hey, you can take part in our equity, in our economy. We're issuing a token, we're giving that to you. And I believe, David, there's some, like, staking incentives here. So the revenue, OpenSea, of course, collects 2.5% of all trading fees, right, on the OpenSea platform. LooksRare collects

• 28:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  2% of that. And then is it somehow staked? Is it somehow distributed to people who are staking the Looks token? Is that how this works?

• 28:25David Hoffman?

  That's exactly right. And Ryan, you just said that OpenSea raised $30 billion. Not quite. They raised $300 million at a $13 billion valuation.

• 28:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  Ah, did I say? Thank you.

• 28:37David Hoffman?

  They did not raise $30 billion.

• 28:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  Did I say 30 billion?

• 28:40David Hoffman?

  You did.

• 28:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, I don't even know what I, okay.

• 28:41David Hoffman?

  They raised 300 million at a $13 billion valuation. And yes, they charged a 2.5% ETH fee on the sales. And that goes into the OpenSea company. Instead, with Looks Rare, they charge 2%. And that goes to people that are staking their Looks token. And if you actually, you can go into the rewards page on the looksrare.com website, Ryan, and it'll tell you the APY, which is insane. 930% APR on your Looks tokens. And this is not a pool two. This is not coming from, actually, maybe, maybe there is, maybe there actually is some inflation. But you are not providing liquidity on this. So you are not getting like, you can't, people can't dump on you.

• 29:24David Hoffman?

  It's not pool two. So that's very strong percentage of APR. And this is a combination of, yes, this must be because I'm staking my Looks token and I'm watching that number go up. So you get more Looks token when you stake. So there is some inflation there. And then you also get wrapped Ether. You get wrapped Ether in your wallet. And Ryan, I tweeted this out earlier today. Just some of the metrics of 24 hours worth of staking on the airdrop that I got. And I don't know if you have that tweet up, but let's see if we can, let's see if you can, if you do. Yeah, so 24 hours into staking Looks, I got 21 new Looks tokens, which is about $100, and .024 ETH, which is about $80 in rewards. So about $180 inside of 24 hours on my airdrop.

• 30:08David Hoffman?

  The airdrop that I got when I claimed it, it was $4.2,000 for the airdrop. And then because appreciation is now up to $7,000. And so I kind of, it's a pretty compelling airdrop.

• 30:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's amazing. And it's like, so you're earning, you're, that, those earnings are denominated in ETH too. It's really hard. To find like ETH denominated earnings.

• 30:28David Hoffman?

  Yes, this is an application that is sending out Ether dividends towards its users on day one. So that's in of itself, like a brand, like a kind of a breakthrough. This is something I've always wanted.

• 30:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  Also, no wonder they're anonymous because I can imagine there could be some securities, like SEC type concerns with this type of an arrangement, but I'm glad they're like moving the overton window in its favor. What is the value of the looks token here, David?

• 30:56David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so the last I checked it at when the looks token was, I think, $4.8 per token, $4.80. It was valued at roughly $4.2 billion. $4.2 billion on day one is like,

• 31:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's a lot.

• 31:11David Hoffman?

  It's a lot. That's a, that's a, that's a big number. That's very strong. That's very strong returns for all of those angel investors who invested at, I don't know what valuation, but I'm, it wasn't a billion dollars. I can be sure. So, you know, this is already like a pretty highly valued token. So, you know, buyer, buyer beware, but the hate, you know, open C competition.

• 31:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Airdrop though.

• 31:32David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 31:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  You got an airdrop.

• 31:33David Hoffman?

  Definitely pick up your airdrop. Yeah. Ryan, do you have that chart of the different airdrops tiers? If not, I can just read it out.

• 31:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  Where would that be? Would that be on?

• 31:43David Hoffman?

  I can just read it out.

• 31:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, read it out.

• 31:45David Hoffman?

  Okay. So like I said, the lowest tier is that if you ascend three Ether through, through OpenSea, you get 125 looks tokens. And again, looks tokens is trading about $4.5. Three to six to 10 Ether, you get 200 looks tokens. 10 to 20 Ether, you get 400 looks tokens. 25 to 35, you get 800 looks tokens. So you can, you can, you know, extrapolate from there. They'll be on link in the show notes to check that out. And overall, there's a decent bell curve distribution. So the biggest, the people that spent the most through Looks Rare, who spent over a thousand Ether through OpenSea,

• 32:22David Hoffman?

  those collectively, those people got 4.5 million tokens, but the, the biggest tier were people that spent between 35 and 120 Ether through OpenSea. And collectively, those people got about 35,000.

• 32:36David Hoffman?

  Looks tokens combined, so.

• 32:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's impressive, man. It's impressive. Look, and they also shipped a product like day one with the airdrop, which is super impressive. And I think we're going to see this as a trend in 2022. Like, we've seen it a little bit last year, but you'll have kind of a, I guess, a more closed, less community-owned type of application, like, say, an OpenSea, for example. And then I think in 2022, what we'll see is a fork of that, a vampire attack of that. This is not a fork. They didn't steal OpenSea's code, but like, similar concept, except rather than VC-owned and kind of going public route, it'll be community-owned. That's exactly what we're seeing. I think we'll see this repeat again and again and again in 2022. So, it always pays to use crypto

• 33:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  applications, doesn't it? I mean, all you had to do in order to be eligible is like, definitely 3 ETH is a decent amount of volume out of T, but all you had to do is do that and use OpenSea, and you got some free money. Crypto pays you to learn about crypto, as we say so often. A really cool trend to see. There's another airdrop here, David. WTF? A fees.wtf airdrop.

• 33:48David Hoffman?

  People might know this website as the website that you don't want to go look at when you look at how much money you've spent on gas.

• 33:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, is this your account? Did you really spend $2.5 million on gas?

• 33:57David Hoffman?

  I did not spend $2.5 million on gas. This is some random, this is some random address. But, at the time of recording, this contract unlocks in about six hours, so you, it will already be unlocked by the time that you listen to this. No clue what the token does. Unless I, I have no clue why they need a token. Why do we need a token? For how much gas you've spent? I don't know. Maybe they actually plan to do something of it. One of the big reasons why I haven't sold my Looks tokens is because I'm staking it and it's giving me Ether. The only way that I know that I can get Ether from this new fees.wtf airdrop is by selling it for Ether. What is your purpose? You, you get sold for Ether. That is just my personal take. That is perhaps what I'm doing until I see any further information.

• 34:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's beautiful about airdrops. People can do whatever they want with them. If you, you know, spend the time to research this project, then you can hold. If you don't, then just sell. Or you could stake, in some cases.

• 34:50David Hoffman?

  Maybe there's something that people know that I don't. And maybe I should be much more bullish on it, but until then, selling it for ETH.

• 34:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  By the way, on that trend of looks rare, here's a community-owned wallet for the open internet. This looks like it's maybe trying to take the MetaMask play and create a community-owned version of MetaMask. The wallet is called Tally at tally.cash. What do you make of this?

• 35:14David Hoffman?

  Yeah, free, open-source software, kind of true to the nature of crypto, which is free and open source. They do take a swing at MetaMask for having a license on it, but can you really blame them for having a license? Some people can. I guess this wallet does. Definitely interested in seeing more and more competition in the wallet space. And so I'm excited to try this out. I have not yet tried it out.

• 35:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, these wars between sort of community-owned versus VC-owned, the net result of them, there's like mud back and forth and like there's all sorts of noise about it, but the end result is consumers get better products and the industry moves forward faster. So I'm all about it. Bring on the competition. Let's go.

• 35:52David Hoffman?

  Love it.

• 35:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is pretty cool, too. Index Co-op, in partnership with Bankless DAO, they just released a new index called the GMI, Gonna Make It Index. What's in the GMI index, David? What is this thing?

• 36:04David Hoffman?

  Yeah, a bunch of the newer tokens that aren't in the DPI, and I think that's really what this angle of the GMI token is. A lot of newer DeFi projects have moved faster than what the parameters of the DPI index allow for inclusion with. So there's a bunch of tokens in here that are not in DPI, things like Tok from Tokamak, Maple Finance, CVX, Perp from Perpetual Protocol, Spell, Tribe, FLX from Reflexor, a bunch of different stuff. Also a very balanced index. There's nothing really with that has really too much outsized proportion of it. So Bankless DAO is just churning out the products.

• 36:42David Hoffman?

  The streaming fees, 1.95%, so 1.95% of the market cap of the GMI index goes, splits between the Bankless DAO and Index Co-op. And Bankless DAO got two products on the Index Co-op as index, both the bet index of which we talked about and the GMI index. So kind of taking the lead without using Index Co-op to churn out some awesome indices.

• 37:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it's pretty cool. Good to see more indices enter the market, too. Let's talk about this next thing, which is EtherScan. Man, there's not a day that goes by that I don't use EtherScan. And I'm not always thankful, you know, I don't always think about it. But because it's just like become second nature to me. It's like kind of like Google, but it is the most useful tool.

• 37:27David Hoffman?

  It's crazy, too.

• 37:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  In crypto, crazy useful. Now they're adding some more features. So this is an NFT feature. So it allows for the on-chain NFT. Like you can track trading and minting in EtherScan's new NFT tracker. What are we looking at here, David?

• 37:44David Hoffman?

  It's just a UI UX upgrade. People, you can already see when you're trading NFTs, but now you can see what NFTs. So just a small, medium UX increase improvement to EtherScan. They're always shipping and it's crazy how good EtherScan has been even before DeFi was like, good. Like EtherScan was a good product before anything else on Ethereum was a good product.

• 38:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  I don't know what would happen if EtherScan went down. Like I would be beside myself.

• 38:14David Hoffman?

  Ether blocks of I/O just doesn't have it.

• 38:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  Let's talk some LT releases. We're going to burn through some of these. Immutable is now permissionless. So it used to be permissioned, used to have to fill out some paperwork in order to get on Immutable. Now you don't. Anyone can enter. The theme park is open. Anyone can set up a ride and they're doing some serious volume here, too. So they've just hit 1,000 test contracts that are registered on Immutable X. In just two months, the number has skyrocketed for X. So insane growth for Immutable X. Seriously impressed with their traction.

• 38:49David Hoffman?

  Yeah, this is what happens when you have free NFT fees. This is the beauty of Layer 2.

• 38:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  Free block space.

• 38:56David Hoffman?

  It's free block space.

• 38:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it's free real estate.

• 38:58David Hoffman?

  It's free real estate. ZK rollups are just pure magic. And this is why Ryan and I are just harboring on Layer 2s is because Layer 2s is where you get the fastest and most free kind of transactions. And Immutable is definitely getting the adoption based off of that. So congrats to Immutable.

• 39:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  DYDX also based on Layer 2, of course, using Starkware technology. CK Layer 2, really cool, advanced stuff, feels like a centralized exchange, but it's not. And now they are fully decentralizing. There's a whole blog post about this that we'll include in the show notes, but I think the line is they are planning to, in V4, their newest launch by the end of 2022, be fully decentralized in the implementation of the DYDX protocol. So that means no central party has the ability to receive fees on V2 or V4. It will just be the DYDX token holders, I believe, and the parameters of which governance kind of, you know, sets what those trading fees actually are.

• 39:55David Hoffman?

  I'd love to pick their brain about, you know, the nuances of this. Like, what about the front end? Is the front end still going to be centralized? Things like a liquidity protocol have done a fantastic job incentivizing other front ends. When we say fully decentralized, are we also talking about the front end? And what about the other components of decentralization? But they are doing what we like to see, which is decentralizing.

• 40:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  So moving in that direction is always great to see. We will always support it. All about that at Bankless. Tons of stuff going on with Optimism.

• 40:24David Hoffman?

  Dude, Optimism had a killer week. You want to burn through these, Ron?

• 40:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, so they went permissionless. They opened up their doors to the theme park for all applications the third week of December. Now, one month later, what are we seeing here, David?

• 40:36David Hoffman?

  Oh, gosh. Matcha is now on Optimism, so one of the most used DEX aggregators is on Optimism. So congrats to Matcha. We also have Tornado Cash. So if you have a doxed wallet and you want to regain your privacy, Tornado Cash on the Ethereum L1 is pretty like gas intensive. It requires a lot of computation to do its duty. So it makes much more sense to be on Optimism. So Tornado Cash now on Optimism. If you want to undox yourself, you can bridge your ETH over to Optimism and use Tornado Cash there for much reduced fees. Set Protocol also now on Optimism. The OGs will remember Set Protocol. It was a big topic during the bear market, 2018, 2019. They are one of the teams that is responsible for helping index co-op spinoff.

• 41:22David Hoffman?

  And so that's definitely where some of their energies have been. Other, since then, been kind of quiet, but they are now on Optimism with their token sets. So check that out. And also, in addition to that, Optimism, all of these like...

• 41:36David Hoffman?

  All sequencers of Layer 2s, people that produce blocks, they, just like on the Ethereum 1, they can take transaction fees and MEV. And this is a very significant conversation to be had because of so many different things that are related to who gets the money that is value extracted from Layer 2s. And Optimism, as a part of just its ethos, its values, is giving away all of its profits to donate it towards public goods. So in the last year, Optimism, of all the adoption it has had, is sending out the blocks, sequencing the blocks, which is eventually going to be decentralized. But last year, they donated $1 million to open source projects on Ethereum. And then they finish up saying, "Over the course of hashtag L222, Layer 2 2022,

• 42:21David Hoffman?

  we'll be giving away significantly more." So this is one of the reasons why I'm super excited about Optimism, because they are committed to public goods, and public goods get me all hot and bothered.

• 42:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  Me too, David.

• 42:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  And of course, like all rollups, they're speeding up. So fees on Optimism just got a nice reduction. So more incremental improvements going on all the time in rollup land. Transaction fees now 30% cheaper than last week, and that will continue to happen as well. We're also seeing some applications go to alternative Layer 1s, too. This is Zirion deploying on Avalanche, so you can now track and trade all your Avalanche assets directly on Zirion. Cool to see them expanding as well. Last thing, in all of these Layer 2s, this is really cool. There's now a fiat on-ramp. So you have the ability to buy crypto directly on a Layer 2 in your Argent wallet.

• 43:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  Of course, Argent switched from mainchain to ZK Sync, which is a ZK rollup. And again, some of these terms, mainstream, by the time this is fully ready for mainstream, they won't have to worry about any of it, right? It's like, they don't care about ZK rollups, or ZK Sync, or any smart contract wallets, for that matter. They'll just see, "Oh, cool, here's an app, super easy to use. I can deposit directly from my bank account, and now I can use cool DeFi stuff," which is not inflating away at 7% per year and gives me a higher interest. Rate than 0.01% in my Wells Fargo bank account. So I'm just going to click some buttons and make that happen. That's how the mainstream experience will feel. And I feel like we're getting closer to that all the time.

• 43:57David Hoffman?

  All right. No one these days says, I'm going to go log into the world wide web using my TCP IP. Like, that's not what we talk about. There's a take later on in the show. Well, we'll unpack that a little bit more.

• 44:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  Absolutely. Some raises, maybe the only one to highlight this week, not really a raise, it was an acquisition. But Coinbase bought this company called FairX to launch crypto derivatives. I've not heard of FairX, but Coinbase getting into the crypto derivatives market, I think, is a big move. I guess maybe derivatives are ready for Coinbase. They've been holding back. FTXs of the world, the binances of the world have outstripped them recently. Hopefully Coinbase plans to catch up a little bit. I guess that's probably their plan with this acquisition. So that is happening as well. Anything else on that, David?

• 44:42David Hoffman?

  Yeah, FTX really putting the fire under Coinbase. FTX gets their name on the Miami Heat arena and then boom, what does Coinbase do? They get a partnership with the NBA, I think. And then FTX signs on somebody like Tom Brady. And then boom, what does Coinbase do? I think they got Steph Curry. And then, you know, FTX really big on crypto derivatives. Boom, what does Coinbase do? Acquires Ledger or FairX. So this is why competition is always good for the consumer.

• 45:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  Absolutely. Totally. I think this battle will play out in the years to come. There'll be two titans clashing in this way. But you don't have to get involved, or you could. You could go get a job in crypto on our jobs board. That's the bankless.pallet.xyz job board. Now's the time, 2022. It's the beginning of 2022. You're probably evaluating things, probably have some new year's resolutions you're trying to keep. Maybe one of those things is to get a job in crypto. Crypto is always hiring. All right? We are in still a secular bull run. We will be for the next decade. There are lots of opportunities to plug in. Here's a senior full stack engineer.

• 45:49David Hoffman?

  If you don't have enough crypto and you want more, the best thing you can do is get more exposure to crypto by working in crypto.

• 45:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  Absolutely. You know, some of these positions probably come with token upside as well. Senior Full Stack Engineer at Syndica. There's a Senior Software Engineer at Gilded. There is a founding Full Stack Engineer at Utopia Labs, a Community Ecosystem Lead at DYDX as well. That's all we have time to highlight. A ton more on the Bankless Job Board, so go ahead and check that out.

• 46:18David Hoffman?

  I don't have to dance that long today. It's lovely.

• 46:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Guys, news time. David, you want to start with the CPI story? I know we alluded to it, but like CPI, that's Consumer Price Index. So your shelter, your groceries, like the stuff that you pay for in your everyday life has just gone up 7% over the past year. It's the highest inflation has been since 1982. We all remember like parents, people in our lives talking about the 1970s being crazy for inflation. Well, we're starting to see it again. Transitory inflation, not so transitory. What's happening here?

• 46:55David Hoffman?

  Yeah, inflation clocking in at 7%, which is crazy. And I think I actually want to start with a little anecdote that I remember during the 2019, 2020 era of DeFi. There was a time where there were multiple years, two plus years, where MakerDAO had a 0% or 0.5% interest rate, stability fee is what they call it, interest rate on their DAI. So it was extremely cheap to borrow DAI. All you'd have to do is deposit Ether into MakerDAO. You could borrow DAI basically for free. And that's because the DAI was always pegged to the dollar pretty damn well. And as soon as the bull market hit, the DAI started to lose its peg. And so it went from $1 down to 98 cents, down to 96 cents. It got even as low as 94 cents

• 47:39David Hoffman?

  because the Ether price kept on going up and up and up and up and up. And so in your brain, think S&P going up, right? Like the market goes up. There's more capital in the market. And when there's more capital, people can borrow more. And DAI is minted when more people borrow more by depositing more Ether. And so when Ether doubles, you have the same amount of Ether, but you can borrow twice as much. So the DAI supply just got out of control. And so MakerDAO started to like increase their stability fees. Went from point uh 5% to 1.5%, then they went to 2.5%. And then the die pay got even worse. It got down to like 92 cents. And so like Rune called Maker Dow Governance and was like, yo, guys, I think we might need to be really, really aggressive with the interest rate. Like, I'm thinking like perhaps plus above 10%.

• 48:24David Hoffman?

  In order to restore the peg, they had the Maker Dow Governance had to increase the stability fee up to 19.5% before the die peg got back down to a dollar. And this is kind of a similar mandate that the Fed has. The Fed has a demand for price stability, where Maker Dow pegs their die stably to the US dollar. The US dollar just needs to be pegged towards a basket of goods. And right now, it's not being pegged towards a basket of goods because how of inflation is 7%. So there's a nice little anecdote about how DeFi works and how it's kind of the same in the traditional world. And I think that's what's going on here. I think the Fed had a moment in the last few weeks where they realized that like, yo, it's not going to take like a marginal increase in interest rates.

• 49:07David Hoffman?

  Like, it's going to take an aggressive increase in interest rates to combat inflation. And so that's, I think, why part of the story of why the markets are down this week and why people are freaking out. Because people see the Fed, people are freaking out because they see the Fed freaking out about how high the interest, the inflation is. And so they are projecting high interest rates in order to combat that inflation.

• 49:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  And they have to do this without breaking the economy, which is the tight walk that the Fed has to, has to walk. And it's pretty tricky, but like for the average person, I mean, you look at 7% and this just looks broken. I mean, have you, did you get a 7% raise this year? Oh, if not, then you actually lost money. You got like, you know.

• 49:49David Hoffman?

  A real term pay cut.

• 49:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, you're earning less than you were last year. We're talking about bank accounts, right? They call it a savings account and they give you 0.01% interest. It's just embarrassing. How does a bank even call it a savings account when you're losing 7% per year? You can't possibly make that up on the interest. So this starts to feel like a broken economy, and I think people are looking to the Fed to get a hold of this. It's not just the Fed's responsibility, right? Like fiscal policy comes into play here. Anyway, it's going to be an interesting decade as we watch some of these dynamics around money supply playing out. But this is the case for crypto, isn't it? I mean, crypto people have been saying that this would happen for a while, and here it is.

• 50:36David Hoffman?

  Sorry if people didn't like the buzzer. I thought it was funny.

• 50:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  I like the buzzer. Good buzzer, David.

• 50:42David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I think people know what's coming.

• 50:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  This was a good post. First impressions of Web3. This is somebody from the Signal application, I believe, kind of a founder or someone involved in that project, which is a great privacy-centric messaging application. And I don't know, what did you make of this article when you read it, David?

• 51:01David Hoffman?

  Yeah, the takeaway was that while these foundations, the blockchains, may be decentralized themselves, and some things on them may also be decentralized, like DeFi, things up the stack are less decentralized. And so the take is like, yo, we have these decentralized base layers, but like the things on, a lot of the things on top of them are not decentralized. And this goes into the question of, like, where does the data for your JPEG actually live? Is that on a blockchain? Because like, if your JPEG's any more than a very small file size, the answer is no. Very, very few NFTs actually have the image stored on chain. And that's actually why things like Autoglyphs out of Lava Labs are so popular. Fun fact,

• 51:45David Hoffman?

  CryptoPunks are actually on the Ethereum blockchain. But the average NFT does not have the data on the blockchain. And that's just one example of how there is centralization worked into different spots around the Web3 world. And that was the critique out of Moxie here. Just parts of the applications that we use aren't decentralized. They are censorable. They have weak attack vectors. And so the critique is like, yo, what is this Web3 thing? If it has all these potential attack vectors? What's your take, Ryan?

• 52:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I think he brings up a good point, something we've known for a while. And it's not just like the image themselves and the storage isn't decentralized, but actually accessing the JPG is also uses APIs from centralized companies. So if OpenSea went away, for instance, did you know you probably wouldn't be able to see the NFT in your MetaMask wallet, at least for some period of time? Because MetaMask and many of the different wallets, they just call OpenSea for that indexing data to tell them which NFT is what. My take here is that I think he raises some good points, but that also the crypto industry is not unaware of these things.

• 52:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  And he might not appreciate the extent to which we're working on them and the extent to which we're taking them seriously. This was a post from Vitalik, who just actually commented on Moxie's post. And he said this, this stuck out at me, because one of the things Moxie said is like, oh, if you're going to call this space decentralized, why hasn't it actually become decentralized? Why hasn't it happened yet? Vitalik said this, "As for my theory about why this hasn't happened yet, I would say a lot of it comes down to limited technical resources and funding. It's easier to build things this lazy centralized way, and it takes serious effort to do it right.

• 53:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  The Ethereum ecosystem did not have that much resources up until four years ago." And I think that is really the theme, or probably the response from the crypto community. It's basically like, yeah, we're using some Web2 infrastructure. We have to take some temporary shortcuts and centralize things that long-term we want to decentralize, but we are working to decentralize them over time. Vitalik gets into some more technical details about how light clients can actually prove to be a better, more decentralized kind of access layer for some of these things. And also the work that the graph is doing, for example, as an indexer to decentralize itself. So it's kind of a work in progress. I feel like this was a good critique. It's a good reminder.

• 54:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  Definitely a good reminder, elements of truth, and also that we're still early in the crypto industry, at least the parts that we love the most are working on these things to start decentralizing them over time.

• 54:34David Hoffman?

  I 100% agree. When we created crypto, everyone, applications on the internet, we're good at making web 2 applications. Developers have gotten mastered the web 2 universe. The web 3 universe is a new universe. And so it's not like we can just immediately imbue all of these applications with everything, all components of decentralization. Some things are easier to decentralize than others. For example, DYDX was non-custodial from the very beginning, but it's always had centralized servers doing the orders. And that, like, some things are easy to tackle, some things are hard, and we just need more innovation to tackle the rest of the things. And so I would just like to say that, like, it's, we just have to wait for the decentralization of the base layer to work its way up the stack into the application layer.

• 55:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  Totally. And we've already seen it happen. So do you remember a time where there was only centralized exchanges? There was no such thing as DeFi. If you wanted to exchange one crypto asset for another, you had to go to Coinbase, and you had to use a centralized exchange. And somebody could look at that and be critical, or they could just wait a couple of years. And now we have tons of decentralized exchanges. So we are working our way up the stack, wholeheartedly believe. But good post, good reminder. There's also some downtime for Arbitrum that happened this week. A few hours of downtime on the Arbitrum sequencer. So why did Arbitrum go down, David? And what did that mean?

• 55:56David Hoffman?

  I don't actually know the how or why it went down, but this is what happens when you have a centralized sequencer, you know, single point of failure, the sequencer is down, therefore Arbitrum is not producing blocks. So assets can't move on the Arbitrum layer 2. They can be withdrawn from the layer 2, but they can't really have, like, the super fast transactions or super low fees on Arbitrum. I think it was down for four, five hours or so. And I actually haven't read the postmortem about it, but...

• 56:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think there was some equipment failure or something, and sort of their redundant equipment, their redundant hardware, like gave out...

• 56:28David Hoffman?

  Somebody accidentally kicked the power cord.

• 56:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, somebody kicked the power cord. Yeah, but so the thing about this is, of course, this is less severe in my mind than a layer 1 going down, right? Because layer 2s always have layer 1 to follow. Back, but I think it's interesting question, an escape hatch. An interesting question is, okay, well, so during that five hours of time during that outage window, could people actually withdraw to the L1? Like, it's a good time to test this, this, this theory. And what's interesting about that is like, number one for rollups, optimistic rollups, is actually the withdrawal period takes seven days. It doesn't happen immediately. And the second thing is, it's not easy to do that right now.

• 57:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like, it takes some command line, technical skills, digging into the code to actually execute a withdrawal. And so user interfaces, easy user interfaces, aren't available to do that. But the fact that you can, that this bridge exists, also means user interfaces are getting spun up and going to be spun up to make withdrawals easier if this happens again. So, yeah, it's, it's different when an L2 goes down versus an L1. But it can seem similar, I think, to people if they don't have an easy way to actually exercise and use that escape hatch. And we're not there yet. Like, we don't have easy user experiences to be able to go back to layer one.

• 57:52David Hoffman?

  Right. We know that it is technically possible to do this. So if you had your money on there, you would be technically able to do that. It would just be a matter of just like, making the effort to like, if you don't know how to code, you gotta go find a developer, you need some instruction, stuff like that. But, you know, it's technically possible. Now, the next step in the L2 ecosystem is making it easy. I know teams like L2B are working on having front ends for every single significant rollup, so you can just press a button there. And this is a very solvable problem. And just like, like you said, this is, fast chains, like optimistic rollups, are unstable chains. Fast equals unstable. We can do some optimizations, we're going to make these things stable, more stable over time. But if you want fast, you have to commit to some amount of instability. That's just how it works.

• 58:36David Hoffman?

  And that's why fast chains belong on the layer twos, because you don't want unstable L1s. Because imagine if Ethereum was a fast chain, and then Ethereum halted or went down. Every single L2 would be stuck. Like, you wouldn't be able to get your money off of any of your debt. You're dead, you're dead.

• 58:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Scott, it's over.

• 58:53David Hoffman?

  Stability on the layer one, speed on the layer two, that's how it works.

• 58:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Let's talk about the NFT game. Some cool stuff going on in the NFT world. AP, this Associated Press, they just doubled down on NFTs. So they're launching a marketplace for some of their iconic images. A ton of really fantastic images from the Associated Press over the years. They are doing these photography NFTs on Polygon as well. Really cool to see, I guess, literally mainstream media entering the NFT market.

• 59:23David Hoffman?

  Yeah, an NFT photography marketplace is...

• 59:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  Do you feel like that's a nascent space? Like, it hasn't really been developed yet?

• 59:31David Hoffman?

  I hope so. Photography was my side gig throughout high school and college. So it holds a special place in my heart. One of my frustrations with the industry was that in order to pay bills, I would have to take photographs for events. And that wasn't my creative expression, right? And this is the power of Web 3. We can unleash creativity. Shout out to the podcast coming out on Monday with Lee Jin and the creator economy and what crypto protocols can do to unleash everyone's internally native kernel that they have inside of them.

• 1:00:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Get paid for your creativity now? Really hard to do that these days, but more opportunities coming with Web 3. This is cool as well. Once you talk about this, it seems like Nas is doing something in the NFT space.

• 1:00:17David Hoffman?

  Yeah, people will remember our two episodes that we've done with Blau, the DJ Blau who has the Royal platform. Ryan might call him Three Lau. Sorry, Ryan.

• 1:00:28David Hoffman?

  Royal is a tokenized music platform. So if you like a song and you think that it is going to be a hit, you can buy a song and receive royalties. And now Nas has joined Royal, or will be joining Royal, has joined Royal on the 11th, so two days ago, and is selling royalty rights to two of his songs as NFTs. So music NFTs really taking center stage lately.

• 1:00:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  The vision for Blau, or Three Lau, as you like to call him, David,

• 1:00:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  is like, turn Spotify into a marketplace, into an ownership economy. So you find some hot artists that you really like their music, buy some royalty license and receive a piece of that in the future. Pretty awesome what that unlocks for creators and fans.

• 1:01:11David Hoffman?

  Imagine you're going out to Starbucks and a song that you own comes on. Imagine how good that would feel.

• 1:01:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  That would be amazing. I just made money.

• 1:01:19David Hoffman?

  I'm making money right now.

• 1:01:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Amazing. Pudgy Penguins, let's talk about some drama, right?

• 1:01:26David Hoffman?

  NFTs are up, NFTs are down.

• 1:01:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, some are up, some are down, but Penguins are down. They're down bad because some drama's going on. I haven't been following this closely. Tell us.

• 1:01:38David Hoffman?

  Well, it's a little bit of a chicken and the egg as to what came first. Did the prices go down and then drama happened? Or did drama happen and then prices went down? Perhaps a little bit of both.

• 1:01:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's always a flywheel.

• 1:01:48David Hoffman?

  There's some drama with the team because my kind of take here is that because the Pudgy Penguins never really caught on as much as the other NFT projects. The prices never really did the things that other NFT projects. So that's frustrated the founders and the drama is that they are looking just to sell the project.

• 1:02:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  You can do that?

• 1:02:08David Hoffman?

  Apparently. I didn't know you could do that. I mean, I guess somebody owns the admin keys for that. And so they wanted to list the project for a pretty large sum of Ether, something over 1,000 Ether. No one took a bid. They dropped that price down to 888 Ether. I'm not sure anyone took a bid on that either. But they are looking just to exit the project because I think they are just kind of done with it. Except the thing is, like, the Penguins community is strong. Like, it's not like the community's absent. There's just friction between the founding team and the community. And so like what I'm kind of hopeful for, Ryan, is that this kind of turns into like a sushi swap story. Where it's just the perhaps less aligned founders. And I do not know the full story here.

• 1:02:49David Hoffman?

  I do not know there's the founders, there's takes and sides to unpack on both sides. I'm just giving some preliminary takes. My take here is that the founders are just not as committed, they're ready to move on. But the community wants new leadership. And so this is kind of like the community taking over, maybe taking over the project and finding a new leader to spearhead the Pudgy Penguins project into perhaps new successes. Perhaps this is a sushi swap moment where like, you know, it starts off good, then fails and doesn't get the traction because, you know, some maligned founders. And then the community takes over and takes it from there. I don't know. Disclaimer, I guess I have like three Penguins, I think, maybe four.

• 1:03:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  My take is, we don't have this kind of drama in the Turtle community, okay? So I don't know what the Penguins are doing, but...

• 1:03:35David Hoffman?

  When's the last time that you've talked to a member of your Turtle community?

• 1:03:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  No drama, all right? In fact, it's silent most of the time.

• 1:03:41David Hoffman?

  Completely silent.

• 1:03:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's how drama free it is.

• 1:03:44David Hoffman?

  Turtles don't make noise.

• 1:03:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  They don't, that's true. Let's talk about some, some NFT projects that are going up. Yeah, the W is this week. Doodles is one. What's happening here?

• 1:03:55David Hoffman?

  Yeah, doodles. I didn't get the doodles, but other people do. Doodles just caught on a ton of bids.

• 1:04:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  What's a doodle look like?

• 1:04:02David Hoffman?

  Yeah, what does a doodle look like?

• 1:04:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Here's doodle number 6914.

• 1:04:06David Hoffman?

  There's King Doodle.

• 1:04:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  King Doodle. That's a king? Oh, God. Five million dollars for King Doodle?

• 1:04:12David Hoffman?

  That's, well, that's the current offering. But yeah, that is like the best doodle out there. Click the, click the doodle link on the top center so we can look at some more doodles. My opinion on these is that they don't really differentiate themselves as much, but people are really, really liking them. And so doodles really won the NFT market lately.

• 1:04:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, number go up. They're, they're crushing it. Their floor price above 10 ETH right now.

• 1:04:33David Hoffman?

  Yeah, at the start of the November, it looks like the floor price was around 1.5 to 2 and now it's at 10. And that is only one of two winners in the NFT market.

• 1:04:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  We gotta ask, we gotta ask Carly what's going on. Overpriced JPGs. Carly, another bankless show. It's just, yeah, all about NFTs.

• 1:04:49David Hoffman?

  What's going on with the dudes?

• 1:04:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  What's going on with the doodles?

• 1:04:53David Hoffman?

  Send dudes.

• 1:04:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is cool, this project, World of Women. So W, W, W. I always think of World of Warcraft, but they are crushing it as well. This is another project on the ascent. Looks like they're getting a lot of celebrities purchasing these World of Women NFTs. Legendary music manager known as Guy Osara has just bought, is that how you pronounce his name? Or am I making an embarrassing celebrity thing again?

• 1:05:19David Hoffman?

  This is the first time I've heard of that name as well.

• 1:05:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, we're both, we're both, we're, 15 million worth of NFTs in the last week were sold of these wow NFTs. Pretty cool. What's going on? Eva Longoria, I think I saw last week, purchased one. What's, what do you make of this?

• 1:05:36David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I think all the NFT ladies or DeFi ladies that I know who are into NFTs have a world, they're flexing their, their World of Women NFTs. So a World of Women NFT is very hot with the ladies. So if you're trying to impress a lady friend, perhaps get her a World of Women NFT and maybe that's why the price is going up. I do think that some of these look really, really cool. They have these gradients. They have a very artistic. Ladies love the World of Women NFTs. I know Cami Russo has one. I know Aubrey Strobel has one.

• 1:06:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I see it.

• 1:06:09David Hoffman?

  Yeah, right?

• 1:06:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wendy Beyonce, huh?

• 1:06:11David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  Jay-Z has a CryptoPunk, right? Matches Beyonce. She's gotta get one.

• 1:06:16David Hoffman?

  Yeah, CryptoPunk plus World of Women collab relationship. Love it. Love it.

• 1:06:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  God, that's gonna happen too. We just predicted it here. All right, let's keep moving. NBA Top Shots. They are banning users right now. This is on the Flow blockchain NBA Top Shots, the application specifically. This is purported to be an NFT platform as well. Seems kind of anti-crypto to start banning users, particularly like for geopolitical reasons, like bending over to authoritarian nation-state pressures. Am I reading too much into this? Or what's going on?

• 1:06:52David Hoffman?

  That's the signal that I'm hearing because we know that the NBA has bent the knee to Chinese influence before, so that there's very strong precedent before the NBA. And this is actually a global macro problem at large. Like, I'm gonna swear. Everyone's kind of China's bitch. Like, they own all of our assets. They own our stock markets. They like, they kind of control us. They control Hollywood. They control the narrative. Like, if you say something bad about China, you can't put that in Hollywood. That's the, listen to the Hidden Forces podcast about this with Dimitri if you want to unpack that a little bit more. I think it's a systemic problem, but it's outside the scope of the Bankless

• 1:07:32David Hoffman?

  podcast, except when a blockchain like Flow, from Dapper Labs, has NBA Top Shots on top of it that's banning users and freezing assets because of a free Hong Kong username. I don't think that has explicitly been stated, as in that was why. They just said that the user provided false or misleading information during the verification process, according to an email, and they said that this activity breaches one or both of the Top Shot terms and use of the Dapper Labs service terms of use. Maybe it was something else. I don't know, but

• 1:08:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  The fact that they can ban them.

• 1:08:10David Hoffman?

  Blockchain, Ryan, don't ban people. Blockchains cannot freeze stuff. And so this is why I have always had a grudge against Flow and Dapper Labs. Because if you can freeze something, you're not a blockchain. You're a database. You're not permissionless. You're permissioned. And so I tweeted out this morning, said, hey, Dapper Labs, the guys behind Flow, the blockchain that NBA Top Shot is built upon. I said, if you can ban a user on NBA Top Shots for a free Hong Kong username and freeze their assets, you don't deserve to call yourself a blockchain. The name NFT requires strong property rights. Your NFTs are fraudulent. Get GTFO out of here. I guess that's a little bit redundant. Your NFTs are fraudulent.

• 1:08:51David Hoffman?

  The tokens only work if they're actually tokens on a blockchain with strong property rights. If you can take someone's NFT from them, it's not an NFT. Stop using the word NFT. That's our word. You don't get to use it. Yeah, you get to use a JPEG. Like, your NFTs are fake. Our NFTs are real. Get the hell out of here and stop with this decentralization theater because you're harming users by freezing their assets and taking away their accounts.

• 1:09:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, so some people are listening to that and they're going to feel like you came down too strongly on this, David. So what do you think about that? It's like, do you think that's being a little too decentralization maxi about this blockchain? Do you think there's a role to play for NFT platforms that are more centralized? Like Flow, what would you say to somebody who says that?

• 1:09:38David Hoffman?

  I think Dapper Labs in China came on too hard on this particular user. I'm like, I'm sorry. Like, I will take the blame that perhaps I have been too critical on other blockchains, which I'm working on. That's one of my resolutions in 2022 to not harp on be kinder to some of the blockchains out there that have meaningful adoption. Things like Avalanche, things like Solana, going to be kinder to them moving forward.

• 1:10:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  But David gets fired up when there's a freezing account episode.

• 1:10:09David Hoffman?

  When you can freeze an account, like, you gotta draw the line somewhere, Ryan. And I draw the line at China using its nation state influence to control a blockchain and a user's funds. Like, uh... At some point, the decentralization maxi comes out, like, I'm sorry.

• 1:10:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  I do feel like this is part of, at least, our role in the space, or Bankless's role, or like, what I feel like I care about most. I've noticed a lot in just kind of mainstream, Reddit and such, just different subreddits, people hating on the term metaverse. Because they're like, what is metaverse? It seems like this virtual reality world that Facebook wants to control to suck out all of our energy and trap us into their ad platform. And like, we've been there, done that. We don't want part of Mark Zuckerberg's dystopia. And I'm like, I see that, and I'm like, my god, now Facebook gets to co-opt the term "metaverse"? Right? I'm like, hell no. The metaverse is about strong property rights.

• 1:11:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Not about virtual reality, it's about strong property rights. So, I do get fired up, and I do agree that there's things that we have to do in this space to like, make sure that we have crisp definitions of things. And in NFT, the term does imply some level of property rights. It might not be Ethereum, the main chain, level property rights, but it has to fall somewhere in the spectrum of cannot be censored.

• 1:11:35David Hoffman?

  Yes.

• 1:11:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  Or else it is no longer an NFT.

• 1:11:38David Hoffman?

  Yes.

• 1:11:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  It becomes the thing we already had in the past, which is just a JPEG, selling for an exorbitant price. And I'm not sure where exactly that line is, but I agree, David, when you start to see censorship, when you start to see banning, when you start to see like, some authoritarian pressure being put down on the platform, and then it just like, kind of crumbles away, like, that is where you have to start drawing the line. And I do think that's partially our role in the space. So, let's definitely be nice, you know, compassionate, but like, I think this is part of what we need to do as people on the Bankless journey, is like, appreciate and respect decentralization and evangelize for it. Tell people why it matters so much.

• 1:12:20David Hoffman?

  Absolutely, yeah. And to their credit, Avalanche, Solana, I haven't heard of any of those blockchains freezing anybody.

• 1:12:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  But when they do, look out, David's coming for you.

• 1:12:29David Hoffman?

  If they do do that, we are talking about it.

• 1:12:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  We are talking about it in angry tones.

• 1:12:34David Hoffman?

  Yes.

• 1:12:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  That'll be the angriest part of the podcast. This is pretty cool. Okay, on the regulatory front PayPal is planning a stablecoin, maybe? Now, this is leaked news, so PayPal didn't come out and say it, but somebody was like digging into the code and found references to PayPal that it would be backed by the US dollar. But how big would that be if PayPal issued and launched their own stablecoin? I wonder what that would look like and how that would change the conversation about stablecoins in the United States. Pretty bullish from my perspective.

• 1:13:05David Hoffman?

  Yeah, the thing is that, I mean, I guess the competition isn't all that crazy. There's really only USDC and I guess also Paxos. I'm not considering Tether as part of the conversation because it's offshore. Sure, I guess there could be more competition in the stablecoin space. We'll see how PayPal uses its influence to penetrate its own stablecoin into the DeFi markets.

• 1:13:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  The next few things we'll talk about are all kind of related to that. So there was this, this hearing in the Senate, I believe, with Powell and some various senators who were talking about stablecoins, various things. And Powell made the comment when asked if stablecoins and a central bank digital currency could both exist simultaneously at the same time. He said, yes, a central bank digital currency and stablecoins are compatible. They can both exist together. You don't, you don't have to just have one or the other. So making some room for stablecoins. And then there was this Senator Tom Emmer. He just introduced a bill that actually prohibits the Fed from issuing a central

• 1:14:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  bank digital currency directly to individuals. And this bill would also support privately adopted stablecoins. And here was his rationale for doing so. As other countries like China, he says, develop central bank digital currencies that fundamentally omit the benefits and protections of cash, I think he means privacy, it is more important than ever to ensure the US digital currency policy protects financial privacy, maintains the dollar dominance and cultivates innovation. Central bank digital currencies that fail to adhere to these three basic principles could enable an entity like the Federal Reserve to mobilize itself into a retail bank, start collecting personally identifiable information on users and tracking their transactions indefinitely.

• 1:14:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  He goes on to say, requiring users to open an account at the Fed to access a US CBDC would put the Fed on an insidious path akin to China's digital authoritarianism. And he says, "Any central bank digital currency implemented by the Fed must be open, permissionless, and private. This means that any digital dollar must be accessible to all, transact on a blockchain that is transparent to all, and maintain the privacy elements of cash." That is incredibly powerful, hearing that coming from a senator with a bill to back that up. I'm not sure how much steam this bill actually has, the likelihood of passage, but I love that we're starting to have this conversation. This is the conversation

• 1:15:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  we need to have. Like, digital currencies could be very bad, very authoritarian, could usher in a dystopia if we're not careful. And the way to do it right is with public blockchains. Issue a stablecoin on a rollup, even a central bank digital currency on a rollup. Have the private sector develop this out and collaborate as well. Like, this is the way to export the dollar in the digital world. Use free, open-source technologies, blockchain to do it.

• 1:16:04David Hoffman?

  The combination, there are plenty of good things about a central bank digital currency. There's a lot of financial inclusion that it can bring, and there's also a lot of bad things, as if you just listed, the censorship and all that stuff. The combination of a central bank digital currency on a rollup on top of a decentralized public blockchain is the best of both worlds, where the Fed gets to have all the control that it wants to have on the rollup, but it can connect to the rest of an open permissionless financial system. And the Fed and the interests of the United States get to be instilled by injecting its dollars into the market. So, I'm interested.

• 1:16:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, pretty cool that this is actually maybe happening, actually being embedded in a bill, and I think this is bullish. So David, I think part of the reason we're getting some of this support in Congress is because we have politicians running crypto platforms now, one of which was Erica Rose, whom we had on the Bankless Podcast. She is running on a pro Bitcoin, pro crypto platform, running against Brad Sherman, who is about the most anti-crypto member of Congress that exists. And we talked to her, we had a great podcast episode. With her earlier in the week, folks can go tune in, listen to that. You know, was really interesting after the podcast, we went and actually looked at donor records for people.

• 1:17:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  She said, go look at Brad Sherman's donor records. Apparently it's open and transparent. I have not done this before, but this is Brad Sherman's donation record. What are you seeing here, David?

• 1:17:32David Hoffman?

  Oh God, number one, clocking in at number one, Wells Fargo and Company. Clocking in at number two, Goldman Sachs, Space Exploration Technologies Corp. Don't know what that is, but we got some banks, Liberty Mutual Insurance Company.

• 1:17:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  A lot of big banks here.

• 1:17:49David Hoffman?

  Big, big banks, big companies.

• 1:17:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  Old finance, Stratford.

• 1:17:53David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so you know, we don't, we don't have any bank support on bankless, do we, Ryan? You don't like the banks?

• 1:17:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  No, you don't get donations from Wells Fargo, unfortunately. I don't think they are aware that we exist. Quite a contrast, though, versus Erica Rhodes donor list. Look at this, Ryan Selkis.

• 1:18:09David Hoffman?

  Clocking in that the first donor ever for Erica Rhodes, Ryan Selkis. The crypto native, the crypto believer, the crypto politician. Nice job, Ryan.

• 1:18:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bunch of individuals here too, which is really good to see. And so you donated too, David, this was important to you.

• 1:18:25David Hoffman?

  Yeah, totally. I mean, one part because I want my money to go to Erica Rhodes, but also I want to virtue signal and signal to the rest of the crypto world that they should also be donating to Erica Rhodes. And I think this, this story of Erica Rhodes versus Brad Sherman is going to be, it's a great microcosm just of so many things that are, that need to happen, in my opinion, as a millennial in America. We have Brad Sherman, who is like, again, no offense to the boomers, but like, they kind of have outsized representation and Brad Sherman doesn't spend a lot of time in his district and Erica Rhodes.

• 1:18:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  He's owned by the institutions at this point.

• 1:18:59David Hoffman?

  He's owned by the institutions and Erica Rhodes says that Rhodes says that his disposition is that he thinks that that seed is just his, that no one can really take it from him. He's been an incumbent for over 20 years. And so we have this incumbent boomer who doesn't, who hates crypto, who's backed by the banks. And going up against him is this millennial elementary. School teacher who's in her district, talking to her people and who thinks that Bitcoin and crypto innovation needs to remain in America. You know, crypto and Bitcoin, they're not her number one priority. But like in stark contrast to Brad Sherman, who wants an outright ban on crypto. All Erica has to do is be like, yo, like, yeah, let's keep Bitcoin innovation in America.

• 1:19:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  I have a good idea. Let's, let's keep an open mind.

• 1:19:43David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's literally all you have to do.

• 1:19:45David Hoffman?

  All you have to say.

• 1:19:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Just keep an open mind and let it happen.

• 1:19:49David Hoffman?

  Mm hmm. And she's had, she's had plenty of personal stories where people have been able to get out of a, a, she, there are parts of her district that are, live in poverty and are un, that are unbanked. And she has stories of her constituents using Bitcoin to access financial services. And like, sometimes we forget about how much of the American population is actually unbanked. So I donated to Erica Rhodes. I hope that you consider, I'm not telling you to, but I hope you consider also donating to Erica Rhodes. At the very least, to get this Brad Sherman, just, what's the right word? Loser out of Congress.

• 1:20:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Incumbent, yeah.

• 1:20:29David Hoffman?

  Do it for your bags. Do it for your bags. Because if, if we can get Erica Rhodes elected, it'll, it'll set off a domino effect of politicians be like, oh God, the crypto people put all of their money behind Erica Rhodes. And it worked. Like, imagine the influence that that would cause if we could get this to happen. So like the ROI from this, from a, just a industry adoption perspective is so huge.

• 1:20:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  There you go, guys. We will be right back with the takes of the week. And of course, things we're excited about in the meme of the week. So stay tuned for that. We want to first tell you about these fantastic sponsors that made this episode possible.

• 1:21:04David Hoffman?

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• 1:21:49David Hoffman?

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• 1:22:34David Hoffman?

  and you can bridge your assets over to Arbitrum using bridge.arbitrum.io in order to experience DeFi and NFTs the way it was always meant to be: fast, cheap, and friction-free. The Gemini exchange has been my exchange of choice ever since I got into crypto. I use Gemini to both buy the dips and also manage my regular automatic monthly purchases of my preferred crypto asset. On Gemini, you'll find over 50 different cryptos, including many of the top DeFi and metaverse tokens like YFI and Axie Infinity. Using Gemini Earn, you can earn yield on your various cryptos, including 8% on the GUSD stablecoin. Gemini is available in all 50 states and more than 50 countries worldwide. So if you're looking to upgrade your crypto exchange, sign up at Gemini with gemini.com/go-bankless

• 1:23:19David Hoffman?

  and get $15 of Bitcoin after you trade $100 or more within the first 30 days. That's gemini.com/go-bankless.

• 1:23:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, we're back with the takes of the week. Let's start with this one from Vitalik Buterin. This was from the Reddit AMA with Ethereum researchers that conducted last week. But it was a really good take and Vitalik tweeted it out. It was his argument for why the future will be multi-chain rather than cross-chain. There's some differences there. And he says, "There are fundamental limits to the security of bridges that hop across multiple zones of sovereignty." What did he mean? It's cool because we discussed some of this on our Bridges panel that we just had earlier in the week. If you guys want to hear that discussion, go check this out. The great L2 migration panel where we dig into some big brain bridging projects and we get their insight on this take too.

• 1:24:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  But I thought this was a super interesting take and it reminded me of our episode that we did with Ruin Christensen about the security hazards of relying on bridges that are multi-sig, that are centralized bridges, and how that is kind of the destination we're heading towards if we go in the direction of a massive cross-chain ecosystem where you have one Layer 1 communicating with a second Layer 1. Vitalik goes and kind of illustrates the difference here. It's really interesting. If you have, say, Ethereum and you want to get that to the Solana token and you transport

• 1:24:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  that Ether to Solana, it becomes kind of a Sol-ETH type token and it has a much different security profile than Ethereum. Because why? Because you have to use some level of a trusted bridge in order to get that Ether to Solana. And the other direction is true too. If you take Solana and you move it to Ethereum, you have a weaker form of Solana. And that because there is a...

• 1:25:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  A security there, because there is a bridge in between those things, it really changes the risk profile of the asset. So something could happen to that bridge and the ether that you had on Solana becomes worthless or worth like 50, 60% of the value that it should be worth. And so this becomes a problem when you get like chains of chains that are strung together and all connected by bridges. Because it creates a very fragile ecosystem for finance. So that's why Vitalik says he actually doesn't think that world is very likely. What he instead thinks is more likely is that we'll have very clear zones of sovereignty. So you'll have sort of an Ethereum world, you'll have a Solana world, you'll have an Avalanche world.

• 1:26:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  And their assets, their version of an ERC 20 and their tokens will be kind of isolated into their universes. So for Ethereum and Layer 2, that's all one in the same universe. But as soon as the assets transfer to something like Solana, it enters into a different zone of sovereignty. So it kind of, for me, David, it sort of throws a monkey wrench in the gears of this idea of a multi-chain ecosystem. I know there was some pushback on this post from Vitalik, but what's your take on it?

• 1:26:36David Hoffman?

  People have identified blockchains as like the new age nation states for a really long time. And this is just an articulation of that thesis where Solana and its Layer 2 ecosystem, if it ever develops one, it would be great to keep, for that ecosystem, right? Like Solana tokens get put on Solana L2s. Ethereum tokens, Ethereum NFTs get to put on Ethereum Layer 2s. But when we talk about multi-sig bridges, the whole point of these crypto things is to have strong settlement assurances that are trustless. And as soon as you use a multi-sig bridge, which is the only way to go from one L1 to another L1, you compromise on so much of what makes blockchain super, super cool. And so I think what Vitalik's saying is that like, he's not saying

• 1:27:21David Hoffman?

  that there's going to be one chain to rule them all. He just kind of thinks that like the Solana things are going to stick inside of the Solana ecosystem. The Avalanche things are going to stay inside of the Avalanche. ecosystem and there's not going to be too much interconnectedness between these things.

• 1:27:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  Is that the way to say that? It's like there's going to be borders.

• 1:27:37David Hoffman?

  There's going to be borders. These are borders. Yeah. And it's going to be difficult to pass through these things. And you're going to have less incentive to do so because imagine if like, just like you're the example, like imagine if you took wrapped ether, you sent it over to Avalanche to the Avalanche bridge, you sent that from, from, so now you have wrapped ether, Avalanche wrapped ether, and then you take your Avalanche wrapped ether and then you send it to Solana and then you have Solana Avalanche wrapped ether. And then you send it back to Ethereum. There would be Solana Ethereum Avalanche wrapped ether. It'd be, it'd be a complete mess. Where if you send it to a roll up, you don't, you don't stack the dependencies. You don't stack the risks. The risks stay small rather than compounding.

• 1:28:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. So it's interesting. I do think we'll have multiple layer ones in the future, but they'll all sort of be like nation states in that they'll have borders and they'll be trade between these nations, right? It doesn't mean the, you know, the different chains, the different nations will, will be at war. They will interact and they will, they will have commerce, but I do think you will have like citizen assets and you will have foreign assets. And when you project that forward, you know, that's, that's an interesting way to, to see how crypto is going to evolve. And I, and I don't think that's very widely known or appreciated that, um, you know, the security profile of an asset can change drastically when you connect it with a multi-sig bridge.

• 1:28:56David Hoffman?

  We can even talk about the concept of like tariffs, right? Because if you want to take like the Solana token and wrap it on Ethereum and then use that as collateral, these applications are going to have to take into account that increased risk and they will be charging higher fees on that increased risk. Yeah. Because they're taking the risk.

• 1:29:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  Risk your asset.

• 1:29:14David Hoffman?

  Right. And so like, there's going to be like pseudo tariffs in order to port your assets into a non-native domain.

• 1:29:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's funny. Maybe not as borderless as, as people hope.

• 1:29:23David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  Borders.

• 1:29:25David Hoffman?

  New borders. Well, new nation states, new borders. Yeah.

• 1:29:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's right. Makes sense. Um, let's talk about this. This was a take from someone who said, crypto people, we need to make crypto accessible and also crypto people, Ethereum, arbitrage, squeth, ZK, sync, blockchain, Vitalik Buterin. As if all of these terms are esoteric and hard to understand. Anthony Sisana with, with the take under this take. Internet people, we need to make the internet more accessible. Internet people. TCP IP, HTML, CSS, JSON, API, modem. I think what he's saying here is all of these terms will become so native to us that they won't really matter anymore, right? So like, like terms for the internet, like the word JPEG at one point in time, that was geek speak, right?

• 1:30:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's like, or GIF. That was like, that was nerdy talk, right? Like, you're, oh, you're an HTML programmer using GIFs and JPEGs? Like, that's nerdy, right? That's geeky. But now, it's just a common, it's common parlance. It's entered mainstream. And a lot of these things like TCP IP that people haven't heard of, well, mainstream users don't actually have to know what the TCP IP protocol is to use a website or use an application. I think Anthony's saying that all of this will get wrapped into the internet, just as the previous generations of the internet have been wrapped into it.

• 1:30:45David Hoffman?

  That's exactly right. These are things are going to get abstracted away. Actually, I don't even know, I don't think I can name a single one of these things. Like, I don't know what a TCP IP is. I know IP is Internet Protocol. HTML, I don't know what that is. CSS, I don't know what that is. JSON?

• 1:30:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  You don't know what these things are?

• 1:31:00David Hoffman?

  I don't know what they are. I mean, I know, I know what they are, but I don't know what they stand for. And so like, the point of technology is to abstract away the protocols and make these things super accessible. And so the fact that the protocols exist are what makes them accessible is now it's up to the interface layer or the browser layer to obfuscate these things.

• 1:31:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Also, also kind of weird that this Twitter user listed Vitalik Buterin. That's an esoteric name.

• 1:31:25David Hoffman?

  Vitalik Buterin's not necessarily the most accessible person out there, so I take your point.

• 1:31:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  He's just Vitalik, though. You don't have to use his last name, you know? He's kind of like Madonna or Prince, you know, it's just Vitalik. Let's go here. Kobe had a fantastic clip. Should we play this?

• 1:31:40David Hoffman?

  Yeah, let's play it.

• 1:31:41Speaker 02

  Before I had money, I thought everything was a scam and it was all rigged and blah, blah, blah, blah. And now, having money and being able to help my family out, for example, and seeing my parents' personalities change because they don't have to worry about certain things anymore, like making ends meet or like what's gonna... Happen when they retire, seeing their personalities change and getting to know them more as people because some number changed on a screen makes me A, like, everything seems like a giant scam, but B, feel like I was also slightly robbed of experiencing that while I was growing up or while I was younger because they had these burdens and had to worry about them. So it doesn't weigh on me so much, but I do think a lot about about

• 1:32:26Speaker 02

  that. Like, it feels like everything is a bit of a scam for some, like, weird numbers on a screen. And it means that people, like, live their lives in ways where they don't get to properly know the people around them because everyone's always worried about short-term stuff.

• 1:32:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  So David, this clip was from our recent episode with Kobe. It absolutely blew up on Twitter. Why do you think it resonated and landed so much with people?

• 1:32:47David Hoffman?

  Well, everyone kind of resonates with the story at one point or another. It's not like, most people struggle with money. That's something that usually everyone comes across. And so everyone kind of ideates about what their life could be like if money wasn't an issue. And I think that was the biggest issue, the biggest takeaway that I had out of this is that, like, a lot, when Ryan and I, you really, you and I really emphasized decentralization. And, you know, some people just aren't in a place that they can worry about decentralization. They need to worry about other things, like getting out of the rat race, getting out of the nine to five, actually having stability in financial terms. Then they can start to worry about decentralization. So that's kind of my takeaway.

• 1:33:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I really liked this conversation with Kobe because, like, I think he articulated things differently than Bankless and pushed back on on some different things that I think we we emphasize from time to time. Like, with some reflection, you know, I sort of thought about this. This is my tweet. People don't come to crypto for decentralization. They come to get rich so they can live fuller, freer lives. And they don't like anyone gatekeeping about how they got rich. Pontificating decentralization is the thing people do after they get rich. That's why it can feel out of touch. I think you and I on Bankless a lot, like, we talk about decentralization so much that that can become, in some people's minds, sort of like, the the end game. Like, why are David and Ryan always preaching about decentralization?

• 1:34:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  And I think we have to remember collectively, all of us in cryptos, like Bankless and, you know, listeners externally, is decentralization is just a means to an end. It is anti-corruption technology, but the end goal is freedom. And you know, if you don't have, if you still live in sort of the scarcity mindset of living paycheck to paycheck, right? And you know, money is a real issue for you. Well, like, you don't have freedom either. So at some level, thinking about systemic problems like decentralization, like, that's something that you do after you have money. So I think sometimes that is why when, and this is for, for people who value decentralization like us and talk about it so often, that's why it can come across as sounding preachy or

• 1:34:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  out of touch. Because like, hey, like, people are in crypto, and I think part of the attraction that brought you and I in crypto, of course, is like, the ability to make money fast, right? Towards some financial freedom in the future. What are you going to do with that freedom? Like, live a fuller life, provide for those around you. That's what Kobe's clip was about, too. And I think we have to remember that, as we're talking about and extolling the virtues of decentralization, that it is a means to an end, freedom is the end. And there's, like, you almost have to get, you have to do well for yourself first to fully appreciate that. And that gives you the, the time to think about these, these higher level things like decentralization. So some people aren't ready to talk about

• 1:35:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  decentralization yet. And, yeah, I think sometimes we run the risk of, like, if we overemphasize it, we, we might sound a little bit preachy or out of touch. And, yeah, I don't know what your thoughts are. It's a, it's a hard thing to talk about sometimes.

• 1:35:50David Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah. It's definitely a privilege to be able to care about decentralization. Like, it's, it's, it's what I hope people, all people, after they get theirs, lean into after they get theirs, right? It's something that we all should strive for, but I, I now fully accept that anyone needs to do whatever they need to do to get out of the rat race and, and to get theirs. And, and so I think the mistake that perhaps we've, we've made is that, Ryan, and you and I have made our wealth using decentralized assets, Bitcoin and Ether. And if you go, and everyone who comes into crypto, is kind of a product of the generation that they came in on, right? Like, you came in, I think- I think in 2016, I came in 2017.

• 1:36:34David Hoffman?

  And the only two assets that made it through the 2018 to 2020 bear market. Actually, there's three of them. Bitcoin, which is decentralized, Ether, which is decentralized. And what's number three, Ryan? Doge. Dogecoin, which is also decentralized. And so that's a lesson that we've learned. And we saw the centralized spinoffs come and go. Things like EOS and things like all the, I can't remember all the other centralized spinoffs that came out in 2017. And so we saw centralization fail. And we didn't want to see history repeat itself, but it didn't. Some acceptable amount of centralization has worked out. And it's made a lot of people very, very wealthy.

• 1:37:15David Hoffman?

  And I think the mistake we made was like, it's like, hey, we made our wealth using decentralized assets. You need to make your wealth with decentralized assets too. And so we kind of gate kept how people choose to, you know, get out of the rat race. And I think that that was a mistake that I am now reflecting upon. However, I want to also extrapolate into the future. The reason why decentralization works so well and why we emphasize it is because decentralization means that there's room in the future for future generations to also make their wealth. Because in my mind, centralization tilts into the favor of a few people rather than the many. Whereas decentralization is much more balanced and much more long-term focused.

• 1:37:59David Hoffman?

  And so I think the world will have more total wealth for more total generations and be able to include more people in the long term if we ultimately land on decentralized platforms. So we have to have to consider the near term of needing to get wealth now so people can actually start to care about these things, while also ensuring that we are decentralized enough to include future generations so that they can also get theirs.

• 1:38:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I think part of the bankless platform from day one has been like kind of no shortcuts, right? And that's been important. It's like, I do think that some of the centralized L1s will not stand the test of time. And I'm not sure which ones those are. And we've seen many cycles where that has happened. They've just kind of collapsed and founders have gone on to other projects. They've never really developed a community. And I worry that that is also happening this cycle, too. Which is why it's like, it's kind of like, part of the call for bankless is like, hey, think about the long term, right? It's like, what has fundamentals? What is sustainable? Decentralization is one of those things that is sustainable in the long

• 1:39:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  run, is a competitive advantage. But it's not the only way to do well in the crypto markets, right? And I think one of the things that we need to take with us in 2022 is just like, being happy when people do well and achieve financial freedom in crypto. And I think we've always been that. And at times when we've been harsh, it's been like, I think, more directed at, I feel like, people who should know better, right? It's like, Justin Tron should, your Justin's son, rather, should know better. In like, copy pasting Ethereum, hyping it up, making a big deal, issuing tron, and then exiting the project. And then collecting more ether than Vitalik Buterin.

• 1:39:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's just like, it's just, it sucks, okay? And it's like, so, people who've been in the space for a while, they've seen these cycles repeat, and they're just like, they see it every time. And that's why they come off a little, like you and I sometimes, come off a little, little strong, and a little harsh on other projects. But, anyway, that was a good learning lesson from Kobe, and I think one of our takeaways. So we'll carry that forward. David, what are you excited about this week, man?

• 1:40:13David Hoffman?

  Oh, man, right after this, Ryan, I'm taking all the stuff that you can't really see in the background, because I'm hiding it, putting it in my car and going off to Joshua Tree, because I just got done ice climbing, but I haven't finished getting my climbing fix. So I'm on my way to Joshua Tree to go climbing.

• 1:40:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  So here are the ice climbing pictures. That's awesome.

• 1:40:30David Hoffman?

  By the way, like, yes, there's a harness with that rope definitely holding on to me, but like, I am also holding on as I take that selfie. That is not just a relaxed arm holding on to an ice axe.

• 1:40:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like, how, um, how secure is that ice axe?

• 1:40:43David Hoffman?

  Uh, yeah, it's holding, it's holding my entire weight. Between that ice axe, ice axe and my feet in the wall, yeah, that's my entire weight.

• 1:40:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wow, and you're totally roped in, like, you know, nothing could possibly go in wrong.

• 1:40:55David Hoffman?

  Right, yeah. I mean, I did fall off the wall and got caught by the rope a number of times, yeah.

• 1:40:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  But, okay, well, it's, it's been tested, then.

• 1:41:01David Hoffman?

  Yes, certainly.

• 1:41:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wow, that's hardcore.

• 1:41:04David Hoffman?

  I thought you had a pretty funny, funny comment in this, which I think is linked.

• 1:41:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:41:08David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  I said this.

• 1:41:10David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  When someone says Bankless is too risk adverse, I'm tweeting them this photo, these photos. Uh, yeah, absolutely, man. You're doing it, something I could never do.

• 1:41:18David Hoffman?

  Ice climbing's dope, yeah.

• 1:41:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  On the edge.

• 1:41:20David Hoffman?

  Hopefully, I'll, maybe I'll come back with some pretty dope rock climbing pictures as well.

• 1:41:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  Sweet.

• 1:41:25David Hoffman?

  Ryan, what are you excited about?

• 1:41:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  Uh, I'm excited about competition coming for, for OpenSea. I think this is a big deal. I think, um, these kind of community-led vampire attacks really level the, the playing field. I mean, we're talking earlier in the episode about, um, VC things getting attacked by community things. I think that's a trend that's, that's going to continue. And I think ultimately, users win from that, right? So like, we get new platforms, we get new experiments, we get to put the incumbents on their heels, to, you know, think about who they're rewarding in their ecosystems, and it's all net positive. So I'm super excited about that. I'm also excited about the recent unblocking that is happening in crypto Twitter. So, right, like, in crypto Twitter, there's always backs and forth, back and forths.

• 1:42:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  Um, like, people make enemies, you know, block people, uh, some people block you. Uh, one person that's blocked me, and I had no idea why, is, uh, Sam Bankman-Fried from FTF's, uh, SBF. And he, um, I don't know, maybe it was something I said at some point in time. We've never really had an interaction on Twitter. But, um, with Kobe's, with, with this, with this video that kind of went viral, um, you pop actually tweeted this out.

• 1:42:37David Hoffman?

  Yeah, who doesn't talk about Bankless, by the way?

• 1:42:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  Doesn't tend to talk about Bankless, right? But by the way, I had some nice things to say about Anthony Pompliano because I do respect what he does in the space and his hustle and his ability to build fantastic media products, media companies. And, you know, so he tweeted something out from Bankless, which never happens, about Kobe. And then a Bitcoin maximalist who we've had on the podcast, Preston Pish, said, wow, I really like this point. Kobe says, oh, my God, I got unblocked. I guess Preston Pish had blocked Kobe in the past. So he got unblocked. And I said, we're healing the world out here, Kobe. Next, someone get SBF to unblock me. And then SBF shows up on the thread and he's like, I just unblocked Ryan. So everyone's unblocking everybody. I think you called this,

• 1:43:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  David, a unblocking jubilee or something like this. Like, we're all resetting the clock here.

• 1:43:27David Hoffman?

  Yep. Yeah. And I really loved your tweet following SBF saying, hey, I'll give you a shot. Well, I'll unblock you. And you go, suddenly, best be friends for SBF, which I thought was pretty funny. So yeah, everyone's loving everyone right now. And so I think maybe the end of Q4 2021, the rise of the alt ones kind of caused some spite. But I think that now love only, love only on crypto Twitter.

• 1:43:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  There you go. That's what's happening. Meme of the week, David, you ready for it?

• 1:43:57David Hoffman?

  I'm ready for it. Yeah.

• 1:43:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right. What are we looking at?

• 1:43:59David Hoffman?

  This is the my parents in their 30s versus me in my 30s meme. So my parents in their 30s, honey, we've saved enough for a house. Why don't we also have kids? And then me in my 30s, which is this guy with frazzled hair, looks like death, just like gaunt eyes and goes, I just took a nap and I'm down 22%. And that was the story of the last week or so.

• 1:44:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  That is crypto all the time. That's how it feels, guys. But we're glad you're with us. Of course, as always, none of this has been financial advice. Bitcoin and ETH are risky. So is DeFi. So are all of the alt layer ones. You could definitely lose what you put in. But we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone. But we're glad you're with us on the Bankless journey. Thanks a lot.

• 1:44:40David Hoffman?

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

• 1:45:25David Hoffman?

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