ROLLUP: Biden’s Crypto Executive Order | Sanctions & Commodities | Coinbase & MetaMask | Bear Watch?!

2nd Week of March 2022 ------ 📣 OPOLIS | Sign Up to Get 1000 $WORK and 1000 $BANK https://bankless.cc/Opolis ------ 🚀 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 3:23 MARKETS 3:24 BTC Price https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/09/bitcoin-btc-jumps-after-treasury-statement-on-crypto-executive-order.html 4:40 ETH Price 5:05 ETH/BTC Ratio https://twitter.com/cburniske/status/1501449852495925248 6:38 $BED https://www.indexcoop.com/bed 8:50 BEAR WATCH 8:55 Bad Start for Equities https://twitter.com/MacroAlf/status/1501263319222603783 10:38 Commodity Crisis? https://www.ft.com/content/555b7167-eaf2-43a0-a66f-802e39cccf36 10:40 Prices https://www.cnn.com/business/markets/commodities/ 12:55 DJCI https://www.spglobal.com/spdji/en/indices/commodities/dow-jones-commodity-index/#overview 17:15 Kyla Episode https://twitter.com/BanklessHQ/status/1501244475569442820?s=20&t=pZSQ2PFE136VyrUkLCCb6Q https://twitter.com/BanklessHQ/status/1501244475569442820?s=20&t=pZSQ2PFE136VyrUkLCCb6Q 17:40 ETH Gas ATL https://decrypt.co/94648/ethereum-transaction-fees-drop-six-month-low-report 18:54 NFT Search Down https://twitter.com/meowmeowmeuw/status/1501396257163685890? https://twitter.com/meowmeowmeuw/status/1501396257163685890 19:50 ETH & Car Gas Meme https://twitter.com/RyanSAdams/status/1500331461140000772 27:00RELEASES 27:05 StarkNet Ecosystem Dashboard https://www.starknet-ecosystem.com/ 28:35 Tally Wallet Token Swapping https://twitter.com/TallyCash/status/1498705393182248964 29:55 Ledger https://shop.ledger.com/pages/ledger-nano-s-plus-genesis-edition?utm_source=Bankless&utm_medium=partnership_podcast&utm_campaign=22-03-HW_LNSPlus_Genesis-ALL-Brand_Consideration-Partnership&utm_content=msg_Preorder_Genesis__other_Media_Blitz_2 https://shop.ledger.com/pages/ledger-nano-s-plus-genesis-edition?utm_source=Bankless&utm_medium=partnership_podcast&utm_campaign=22-03-HW_LNSPlus_Genesis-ALL-Brand_Consideration-Partnership&utm_content=msg_Preorder_Genesis__other_Media_Blitz_2 31:50 RAISES 31:55 Immutable $200M https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/136548/immutable-raises-200-million-nft-crypto 33:50 WalletConnect $11M https://twitter.com/WalletConnect/status/1501292985048350721 34:36 Bain Capital $560M https://www.theblockcrypto.com/linked/136753/bain-capital-ventures-first-crypto-fund-560-million 35:12 Diagonal $2.5M https://twitter.com/diagonalfinance/status/1499742888594493453 36:15 a16z $70m into Lido https://twitter.com/cdixon/status/1499436156861227008 36:45 JOBS https://pallet.xyz/list/bankless/jobs 38:30 NEWS 38:31 Crypto Dystopia? https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2022/03/07/ukraine-is-buying-bulletproof-vests-and-night-vision-goggles-using-crypto/ 39:40 How Much Ukraine Has Raised https://coinmetrics.substack.com/p/state-of-the-network-issue-145 41:15 Sanctions Coming for Crypto! https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2022/03/08/ukrainian-deputy-minister-reiterates-call-for-crypto-exchanges-to-block-russian-users/ 42:40 Warren Crypto Bill…AML/KYC https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/warren-crafts-bill-targeting-cryptocurrency-russia-sanctions-rcna19094 44:45 Coinbase Blocking Russian Accounts https://news.coincu.com/70594-coinbase-will-block-russian-accounts/ https://twitter.com/brian_armstrong/status/1499622118224392195 https://twitter.com/hannahdlang/status/1499029140305068033 49:15 MetaMask Wasn’t Blocking Users https://twitter.com/WatcherGuru/status/1499414900355047427 49:50 MetaMask Geofencing https://thedefiant.io/metamask-geofencing/ 51:00 Other Alternative Nodes https://twitter.com/dmihal/status/1499803776898719752 52:35 BTC vs ETH vs Sanctions https://docs.google.com/document/d/1x-KBbWKZuWnyxC2UquG7UxYmfAoXXYRLP-giQ_OAafM/edit 55:45 EXECUTIVE ORDER https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/09/heres-whats-in-bidens-executive-order-on-crypto.html 1:00:00 Jeremy Allaire Thread https://twitter.com/jerallaire/status/1501516683051155456 1:01:30 Jerry Brito Thread https://twitter.com/jerrybrito/status/1501583673438707716 1:02:22 Jake Take https://twitter.com/jchervinsky/status/1501590214539726857 1:03:44 ETH 1:03:47 Optimism Cheaper Transactions https://twitter.com/optimismpbc/status/1499527731389808643 1:04:45 Aave on Optimism https://twitter.com/optimismPBC/status/1501336754644729863 1:05:00 NFTs 1:05:05 Tai Lopez NFT Mess https://twitter.com/eddyiskongz/status/1499886629099474945 https://twitter.com/coffeebreak_YT/status/1500213278609481729 1:09:45 Limewire Returns ​​https://twitter.com/CNBC/status/1501475218405179395 1:10:34 DeFi 1:10:37 Andre & Anton Terminating Apps https://twitter.com/AntonNellCrypto/status/1500405473337565191 1:12:40 Calling it Quits https://blockworks.co/defi-star-developer-andre-cronje-calls-it-quits/ 1:14:02 RSA Take https://twitter.com/RyanSAdams/status/1500975757958520836 1:17:10 MISC. 1:17:12 Goldman ETH Funnel https://www.theblockcrypto.com/linked/136950/goldman-sachs-receives-fee-to-connect-clients-to-galaxy-digitals-eth-fund 1:17:46 Laura Shin Callout https://twitter.com/laurashin/status/1500266527693709321 https://twitter.com/ercwl/status/1500633023259508736 1:20:40 Brantley Staying ENS https://twitter.com/avsa/status/1500844406391386114 1:25:15 TAKES 1:25:40 Heard it Before https://twitter.com/TrustlessState/status/1501061536080556034?s=20&t=pZSQ2PFE136VyrUkLCCb6Q https://twitter.com/TrustlessState/status/1501061536080556034?s=20&t=pZSQ2PFE136VyrUkLCCb6Q 1:26:50 Who Holds What? https://twitter.com/iamDCinvestor/status/1500586827589238788?s=20&t=pZSQ2PFE136VyrUkLCCb6Q https://twitter.com/iamDCinvestor/status/1500586827589238788?s=20&t=pZSQ2PFE136VyrUkLCCb6Q 1:30:22 Assets and Liabilities https://twitter.com/LynAldenContact/status/1499170071356260352 1:31:03 Seizing Dollars Makes Bad SOV https://twitter.com/CoinDesk/status/1501593517596028928 1:32:36 What David’s Excited About 1:34:48 What Ryan’s Excited About 1:36:50 MEME of the Week https://twitter.com/BowTiedIguana/status/1501606948013281289 1:37:23 Disclaimers ----- Not financial or tax advice. Do your own research. See our investment disclosures here: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/bankless-disclosures

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

• 0:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  I thought we agreed during the break we'd stop saying the B word, David, but we can't.

• 0:03David Hoffman?

  Bull or bear?

• 0:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's true. Not bull, not bear, but bankless.

• 0:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  Hey, Bankless Station, happy second week of March. David, what time is it?

• 0:16David Hoffman?

  Oh, it's the Friday Bankless Weekly Roll-Up Time, where we cover the entire week in crypto. This week, not actually as crazy as all the other weeks. There are some very big headlines, and not too much more other than that. So definitely a week of some big news headlines, but a few concentrated news this week. Concentrated news.

• 0:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  This one's coming at you one day early. We've got some things scheduled, so we're getting this to you a day early. So I guess maybe that's our treat. But some topics of the week for you. Number one, the Biden executive order for crypto just came down the pipeline. This is much anticipated. Yeah, I mean, there was a ton of fun about this, and we're going to answer the question whether this is actually bearish for crypto, as many anticipated, or is it bullish? We'll talk about that.

• 1:03David Hoffman?

  The question, Ryan, was oof, question mark.

• 1:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes, exactly. Exactly. And it's still a question mark. That's why you have to tune into the episode. Also, commodity prices, we got to talk about that. We talked a little bit about that earlier in the week, but getting crazy out there, maybe threatening a global recession. That's happening. Update on sanction week. More sanctions, people freezing everyone's bank account. Coinbase, the exchange, we'll talk about what they're doing in the sanctions world. Also, Metamask and Infura, are they sanctioning people too? What's going on there? David, you got the last one. There's some things going on in the NFT space. How would you characterize those things?

• 1:40David Hoffman?

  Oh, I would definitely characterize them as complete shenanigans, right? Not just one shenanigan story, but multiple NFT shenanigan stories. So definitely deserves an oof there as well.

• 1:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  NFT shenanigans. Guys, before we dig in, we want to tell you a little bit about our friends at Opless, okay? They sponsored this message. They wanted us to tell you about what they are doing for the self-sovereign worker. And this is for US listeners. Primarily because for US listeners is very difficult to get health insurance. If you're not working for a large corporation like, how do you do it? If you want to work for a Dow, if you want to work for yourself, if you want to work for a community, how do you actually get health insurance? We can get that through Opelis. They offer health insurance and other payroll benefits to the self sovereign worker. This is the 21st century worker, the worker who's working for a set of DAOs, working for

• 2:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  themselves, is somewhat independent. They also provide the ability to get paid in crypto. They take care of all the pay stubs, all the paperwork, all the W2 sorts of things so that you don't have to. It's a really awesome tool and I think it's going to power a whole new generation of Dow workers and crypto workers and ultimately get more people on boarded to web three. And there's also a bonus. Tell them about that bonus, David, if they sign up for Opelis now.

• 3:01David Hoffman?

  Yeah, if you sign up for Opelis and go through the onboarding process, you can get a thousand work tokens and a thousand bank tokens. So long as you do that before May 1st, which is a couple of months away, but it's going to come fast. So go ahead and click that link in the show notes to get your bank and work tokens. Work tokens being the tokens of Opelis, which is a Dow.

• 3:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Awesome. Dow's helping DAOs. That's what we're doing here.

• 3:22David Hoffman?

  We like it.

• 3:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  Is Bitcoin helping us? Switch to markets, David. Bitcoin helping us?

• 3:27David Hoffman?

  Confused market. I think I would, I would call it confused market this week. Started the week at $44,000 Bitcoin price, hit a low of below 38,000, but has since climbed back up to just above 42,000 to where it is right now at $42,200. Overall down five ish percent on the week. Yeah.

• 3:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is, this is hopeful though, this little spike. Is that a spike on the, on the Biden news?

• 3:50David Hoffman?

  But I mean, you want to zoom out though, Ryan? And see what it looks like?

• 3:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, fine. If you make me 30 days.

• 3:56David Hoffman?

  Yeah, do the 180 days.

• 3:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  90 days, 180. Okay.

• 4:00David Hoffman?

  Yeah. Yeah, okay.

• 4:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  We're heading down. Okay.

• 4:03David Hoffman?

  All right.

• 4:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  But look at this line. It's going to, look at that 14 hours. Look at this, okay? It looks like we're actually up. Here's a report from CNBC. 8%, Bitcoin up 8% as Biden announces executive order on cryptocurrencies. We're going to talk in depth about that when we get to the news section, but it seems like the market is interpreting that as

• 4:27David Hoffman?

  Positive news.

• 4:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  Not bearish, anyway. Positive news?

• 4:29David Hoffman?

  All right.

• 4:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's a silver lining.

• 4:30David Hoffman?

  Yeah, we're gonna have to unpack that. There's definitely some optimism to be had about this executive order.

• 4:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  You know what? I could tell. David, you're feeling bearish, aren't you?

• 4:41David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I'm in bear mood.

• 4:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  You're never in a bear mood. What happened? What changed?

• 4:47David Hoffman?

  We'll get to the commodity section. Ether started the week at $3,000, hit a low of $2,450, and is currently at $2,720, down about 8% on the week.

• 5:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  ETH down 8% on the week. Chris Berninski, I saw, had a take on that, but that's actually to do with the ratio. Let's talk about the ratio first. ETH to Bitcoin ratio, that's down on the week too. What's happening here?

• 5:12David Hoffman?

  Yeah, we broke down below 0.065. We are at 0.0644. I think we were at 0.067 last week, so the ETH BTC ratio took a big hit. Down 3%. The Bitcoin news, the executive order out of Biden, where Bitcoin jumped 8%, Ether didn't follow suit. So Bitcoin responded more than the rest of the crypto market on the executive order news, which is interesting.

• 5:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  So Bitcoin up more than ETH. We're back to where we were in February, which was sort of a local

• 5:43David Hoffman?

  We're below where we were in February.

• 5:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  We're now below where we were in February. Wow. We're going back to where we were in, what's this, October?

• 5:52David Hoffman?

  October, yeah.

• 5:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  And this bodes interesting things. I think we've said on Bankless before, when ETH Bitcoin ratio is going up, that means secular bull market?

• 6:02David Hoffman?

  That means risk on.

• 6:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Risk on. This is what Chris Berninski says as well. Why don't you read out this tweet, David?

• 6:09David Hoffman?

  Yeah, Chris says bulls are celebrating Bitcoin ripping on the executive order news. Meanwhile, while the ETH BTC ratio, which is a proxy for risk appetite in crypto, grinds Lower. So this is a mixed signals, right? BTC up on the executive order news, but ETH BTC, which as we've said before, is kind of a bull market indicator is hitting new lows that it hasn't, that we haven't seen since October, which is one of the few things, one of the many things that has caused me to not have my bull hat on this week.

• 6:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay. Well, I get to, I get to be a bit more bullish than David Hoffman this week. So I know Chris has been bearish the last few weeks and months, I would say. And I do agree with this ETH Bitcoin ratio being a proxy for risk appetite in crypto. But doesn't ETH, doesn't Bitcoin generally have to go up first when we're breaking out of these bear market patterns? Like generally, that's been the pattern. Bitcoin has a breakout. Everyone's like, okay, is it safe? Is it safe? Weeks go by, sometimes months go by, and then other assets follow suit. ETH generally next in kind of the the classic cycle that we've seen again and again. Could that be what's happening here, David?

• 7:24David Hoffman?

  That's definitely been the meme historically, but I don't think we've seen that been a thing for the past like six months or so. I think a lot of just like, we are in uncharted waters, and I think we have been for a while now. Crypto is in a place, both in its development and in its global relevancy and in the regulation spotlight, both very good and very bad and just like a lot of neutral stuff that is relevant to the crypto markets that really just changes, I think, like all of our like previous models and patterns. Like, oh, first we would have Bitcoin season, then we would have ETH season, then we would have altcoin season. When's the last time that that happened, Brian? I think it was over a year ago.

• 8:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  I would say, I would say the last time that probably happened was like, a year ago, it kind of started and we had a good, after DeFi summer, we had a nice, strong Bitcoin rally, price rally. And then we cycled into ETH. And then it kind of skipped DeFi.

• 8:23David Hoffman?

  And it went straight to the all L1s.

• 8:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, straight to all L1s. And then that like trailed off and now here we are. So but you think it's different and I think probably the reason you think that is maybe because of the macro conditions which we'll get to in a few minutes with the commodity prices but before we do bankless bed index that's a third a third a third Bitcoin ETH and DeFi what are we looking at on the week?

• 8:45David Hoffman?

  It's about flat on the week started the week at about a hundred dollars currently at ninety-nine dollars so flat.

• 8:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  Flat on the week a way to get out some of that volatility from holding one of those asset classes individually. All right, let's get to a few other things on the on the bear watch bear market.

• 9:02David Hoffman?

  Bear watch.

• 9:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is the second worst start of the year for US equities in a hundred and twenty-three years. That's the tweet. Good, good place to start the bear watch is in the equities market. We generally don't talk about equities, but look at this for context, the eleven negative eleven point nine percent drop in the first forty-four trading days in 2022. That's what we've seen is only rivaled by the nineteen twenty Great Depression and the Great Financial Crisis. Those are the only two times something like this has happened in 2009, of course, when we had the financial crisis and in nineteen twenty when there was the nineteen twenty Great Depression.

• 9:48David Hoffman?

  Right there.

• 9:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 9:52David Hoffman?

  Okay, right here.

• 9:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  Eleven point eight percent.

• 9:54David Hoffman?

  We beat it by point one percent.

• 9:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, but then we got the roaring twenties, David. This is nineteen twenty.

• 9:59David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so like it's a little bit like one half bear watch, but also is like, all right, did we already express all the bear is the bear already expressed? I don't know, maybe, maybe perhaps. But I mean, also, it's a little bit of just like a timing thing, right? Like we hit the highs in the stock market right at like December, January and then and then Putin invaded like you put amassed his army. We did a normal correction, then a war happened. So like, yeah, there's a little bit of just like timing bias on this on this one. But still, at the end of the day, down twelve percent is a big deal.

• 10:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bad start to the year for all assets, including equities, including crypto, of course. This is the headline title from the Financial Times. War in Ukraine Sparks a Commodity Crisis. Let's dig into that. Let's dig into the commodity crisis a little bit more. Here is prices of various commodities. And I'm looking at the one year here. Is that the thing to look at?

• 10:56David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I think, well, I mean, it just shows that spike at the end of the year so clearly. Where like in April of 2021, we had $60 a barrel for oil. We are currently up above $120 a barrel. So like oil has doubled in the last like six months. And we don't, we don't have this tweet ready, but Jim Bianco made a tweet where like every time that there's been a 50% increase in crude oil has triggered a recession. Like the hit rate is 100% according to, according to Jim Bianco. And like you can also see this in other commodities too. Like gold, which I mean, I guess isn't really necessary for production, but still is an indication of just kind of people being spooked out of equities and fiat and other

• 11:40David Hoffman?

  currencies, like gold is surging past $2,000. Zoom out, zoom out to like the five year on that one, Ryan.

• 11:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Here's the five year on gold.

• 11:48David Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah, setting, almost setting new highs, basically.

• 11:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  Back to COVID. Remember when it did a big run during a kind of early COVID days?

• 11:55David Hoffman?

  Right, yeah. And then Bitcoin sucked all the air out of its, out of the, out of its sails. And then of course, corn and wheat are up bigly as well. Corn and wheat setting basically new highs again.

• 12:09David Hoffman?

  Yeah. And like that, that really matters because that's food prices, right? Corn and wheat is food prices. And it's not just like food prices going up like 20 to 25% at home, which is probably what it could happen if these prices sustained their higher levels. But it also means just like perhaps famine for Africa. Because apparently some economists are saying like, yo, like so much of the African continent is dependent on Russia and Ukraine for wheat that they have to, are going to have to rethink where they're getting their wheat from. Because there's, there's absolutely zero way that a cycle's worth of crops is coming out of Ukraine right now.

• 12:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  And specifically, specifically wheat, because Ukraine produces a massive amount of wheat for the world. So commodity prices are jumping. This is a commodity indices from the Dow Jones as well. And I think we can see that if I can pull up the graph here.

• 13:04David Hoffman?

  Yeah. I guess the graph, there it is. Yeah. So these are all commodities, right? And you can, we're going all the way back from April 2021. But even with the five year, you can just see the commodities going, going from where it was like 500. This is an index. So these numbers are arbitrary. 500 where it was at 27 in July 2017 to where it is now at 1,260. So like when commodities go up in price, over, over a doubling over that four year, four or five year period. So like four or five year period, that's, that's a very large time in crypto terms. But in commodity terms and manufacturing terms and production and food and just the cost to produce things. The commodities of the world have like over doubled in a four year period.

• 13:48David Hoffman?

  So like, how does that make, how many businesses are no longer viable because the costs of goods are higher? And so much of this run has come up in the last like three months. And so like, if these high commodity prices stay sustained for a long amount of time, it can cause significant disruption in so many businesses that consume, that need to consume commodities to produce their products. So this is, this is part of like bare mode, bare mode David right now.

• 14:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  And some of these niche commodities as well, like things like neon gas, which is an ingredient for semiconductors, like.

• 14:25David Hoffman?

  Which are in everything.

• 14:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right? Including your coffee cup.

• 14:29David Hoffman?

  Yeah, including my coffee cup.

• 14:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  You know, and fertilizer for, for crops. Apparently that's a, that's a product that Belarus has a commodity ingredient.

• 14:41David Hoffman?

  Which is now sanctioned, a country that's now sanctioned. So we can't buy that anymore.

• 14:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  Palladium, that's a key commodity for cars, I believe, and other manufactured goods like that. So it's just like a ton of different commodities. And we've never, we've never seen crypto during this sort of a, you know, macro backdrop. So is this what's giving you the? Bear market vibes.

• 15:06David Hoffman?

  This is, this is a very big part of it. And I think the story really hangs on is that how much of this are traders just speculating that commodities are the trade right now and like forcing commodities up? And how much of this is actually going to be sustained? Broken supply chains, Eastern Europe disruption, cascading contagion domino effects of across the globe? Or is just this just a blip? Like, are we going to return to more like normal levels in a couple of weeks? Or is this actually going to cause significant disruption? Because like, if commodity prices are high right now, like, like when lumber spiked, a lot of, like, at the beginning of COVID, when lumber spiked, like, construction was just like pause, and people waited for it to come, come back down. And then people

• 15:48David Hoffman?

  just resumed business as normal as soon as just like the markets cleared. If the, if it hadn't spiked, however, that would have caused significant disruption in construction. And so that's basically what I'm looking at right now. It's like, is this a spike? Is this just the financial markets being financial markets? Or is these high commodity prices going to be sustained? And remember, at the end of the day, while there is a big difference between currency inflation and commodity price asset like valuation increases, for the average consumer, it doesn't really matter, because it still makes your milk more expensive, or it still makes your construction more expensive, or driving your car more expensive. How many, how many individuals can, can stomach like a 10 to 15% increase of the goods that they consume on a monthly basis? Like, that starts to like raise the

• 16:33David Hoffman?

  water, the threshold line, as to like, what is viable in the world?

• 16:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Do you know, do you remember that episode we did with Lynn Alden? I think that was like during the summer. And we're like, Lynn, what, what should people hold during the 2020s? Because it's going to be a chaotic decade. And she was like, you should hold commodities, like hold commodities.

• 16:51David Hoffman?

  She did say that.

• 16:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  Very interesting that that's, that's what's kind of coming through. When fiat is unstable, when there's uncertainty in the world, commodity prices just shoot up. Not necessarily crypto commodities, though.

• 17:04David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 17:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  ETH and Bitcoin as commodities, but they're

• 17:06David Hoffman?

  Consumable commodities, yeah.

• 17:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  You can't, you know, fill up your stomach on ETH gas, right? So it's a different type of commodity class. That is not following suit here, but we'll get more into that a little bit later. And I think the commodities story is something that we'll be talking about a lot over the next weeks to come, probably on the rollups as well. But we put out an episode with Kyla Scanlon on Fortress Russia and commodity prices as well, including the R-word recession we talked about. So go check that out. It was published earlier in the week. We'll include a link in the show notes as well. Just a good episode to get a recap on everything that's going on in the world. Something that is down as far as commodity price, though, is Ether block space.

• 17:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  Ether gas fees dropped to a six-month low. The decrease is likely related to a cooling off of the NFT market, is the subtitle here. I've definitely noticed Gue prices down here lately. Is that some solace to you, David? Bear market David?

• 18:08David Hoffman?

  I mean, no. Ethereum block space demand is low. That's an indication of the bull market. It's not, I wouldn't say it's a predictive indication. It's a lagging indicator. But it's just like another signal that like things are just quiet in crypto land. And as we know, like Kobe put out that article a while ago that was like, basically, everything in crypto hangs on attention, right? Like, things only go up when people have attention on them. And what I'm seeing is that the crypto industry has less and less like attention on it, other than the regulators, which isn't like the best kind of attention that you want. NFT attention going away is bad because that was what sustained a lot of the bull market. And that's actually kind of the graph that we have up next is like, we all know that the NFT

• 18:52David Hoffman?

  search terms on Google, just like when Scott gangbusters during NFT summer. But like, how long can it be sustained? And right now, we're back down to roughly September 2021 levels of NFT search volume. So six, over six months ago, I think. So so much of that block space demand for Ethereum and for other chains came from NFTs, and people are starting to care less and less and less about NFTs.

• 19:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  Does this little, this little graphic here in the search bar, does this remind you of 2017 at all? ICOs?

• 19:22David Hoffman?

  It reminds me exactly like 2017.

• 19:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  I'm just feeding into the bear market, David, this week. I'm less worried than David for bankless listeners, but I do think that this could mark a turning point as well. I guess we'll just have to see, but you know, you know what's, if you don't laugh, you're gonna cry, you know? This is the gas price I saw. This is a screenshot from somewhere outside of LA. And we're talking like $7 a gallon in the US for gas. And contrast that with Gwaifree fees, right? So like, real life gas up, yeah, but ETH gas price down. That's the world that we're living in right now. I don't know. Give us a, give us a case to be hopeful, though.

• 20:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  What do you, what do you think? What's, what's something that gives you some bear, a bull market vibes?

• 20:16David Hoffman?

  Well, it's one of those, you, maybe if somebody of your preferred park podcast is bearish, maybe that means that the bear things have already happened. And so there was a line that I heard, I can't remember where, where it was said, but like, people, oh yeah, I was actually in Ray Dalio's book, which Ryan got me on, where like, people will keep on buying Amazon stock at, at every single price level because it went up so much. Therefore, it's, it's, it's clearly a good buy, forgetting that like when you're buying it at the top, it's not a good buy, it's an expensive buy. And so perhaps this is just like the inversion of that. Like if so much of this bearishness has already happened, maybe that means all these stuff is cheap and the bearishness has already manifested.

• 21:02David Hoffman?

  However, the whole contagion crypto, the commodity contagion thing still looms in the back of my head. Like, we really need that to not trigger a bunch of other breakdowns in other parts of the world.

• 21:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  I do think it's funny that the, the only thing that really concerns me, at least in the short run in crypto, in the short to medium run, let's say in crypto, is macro events. Like the fundamentals of everything else are just like so strong.

• 21:28David Hoffman?

  Always happen.

• 21:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, the ETH merge this year, right? Like, that's gonna be, that's a massive catalyst. How can it not be? And yet, if that happens while we're still in the, in the slump. Of a bear market, maybe, I mean, when you have good news during a bear market, it just like doesn't move price and that's an indicator of the bear market. So I think in the next, you know, three to six months, we'll actually see what type of market we're in for real, including when, when the merge happens and when that ships, what happens to the price of crypto? Will that be a positive catalyst? Or will it just like fall flat? Because that's a massive fundamental event that hasn't been priced in. Maybe it won't get priced in if we're in the backdrop of all of these macro events. We will have to see.

• 22:13David Hoffman?

  I think that's exactly right. And if you believe the Bitcoiners that about like how the four-year crypto cycles that we've historically had are all triggered by the halving events. Typically, the halving happens during a bear market and only Bitcoiners would care. They were like, oh, halving, yay. But then like mainstream media is like, we don't really care about that. But then because of the supply issuance reduction coming out of Bitcoin would get halved. There would be miners selling less Bitcoin on the secondary markets. And then slowly Bitcoin would start to creep up and it would creep up for like a year straight. And then people would realize it and then they would turn into a bull market. And so if you believe that these, the supply halvings out of Bitcoin triggered bull markets anywhere between like 12 to 24 months later, you would definitely expect that same thing to happen

• 22:57David Hoffman?

  to Ethereum during the merge because it's three halvings all at once. And so like maybe a viable path forward is that like we are, we are in a bear market as bear market David says that we are. And then the merge happens and the mainstream media just doesn't care about Ethereum. They forgot about crypto. No one's paying attention. It's quiet. And so the, the merge happens, we get a small little blip in price, but it doesn't, nothing really happens. But then for the next like 12 to 18 months, ETH just slowly just grinds up and grinds up and grinds up because of the supply issuance reduction. Like this isn't something, these are patterns that we've seen before that I, that I could totally see playing out.

• 23:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  If we are in the bear market, though, like, um, let's say this repeats similar, like a fractal of 2018 and 2019, uh, there's some like periods where things stay steady. And then there's like a series of drops.

• 23:50David Hoffman?

  Yes.

• 23:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  You get a 50% drop and you're like, okay, that was it. That was the fifth. And then you get another 50% drop, right?

• 23:55David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 23:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  And you're like, oh my God, okay, that was it. And then you get another 50% drop.

• 23:59David Hoffman?

  That's one of the things that's got me into bear market mode. It's just like every time these crypto prices come up to an inflection point, it always goes down. Like you can predict it. It's like, well, if we're in a bear market, it's going to go down and then it goes down.

• 24:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I, um, I, you know, it's, I think it's a different orientation, certainly, looking at how to, how to invest during the, you know, the bear market. But, um, I mean, the thing that remains true is like, don't sell when the market is panicking, right? That's the absolute worst time to sell. And, uh, so you can either hold through these types of things. You can have some dry powder on reserve to buy aggressively the dips that could happen, or this could be sort of a, a fake out of some sort. And we're not repeating 2018, 2019, given the strong fundamentals. So impossible to tell. Um, but I've noticed that the, uh, the super cycle believers have been quiet recently.

• 24:53David Hoffman?

  Well, the thing is like, I bet you if we like zoom to all time highs in like three to four months, people will be like, oh, super cycle.

• 25:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's like, it's like narrative follows price, guys. All right. Not the other way around.

• 25:05David Hoffman?

  That's exactly right.

• 25:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  Anyway, we've got a lot more to talk about. We're going to cover the releases. We're going to hit the news of the week, including, including that Biden executive order. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible.

• 25:16David Hoffman?

  Bankless is proud to be sponsored by Uniswap. Uniswap is a new paradigm in asset exchange infrastructure. Instead of a cumbersome order book system where trades are matched with other humans, Uniswap is an autonomous piece of software on Ethereum that lets you trade any token at the current market price. No human counterparties or centralized intermediaries, just autonomous code on Ethereum. Input the token you want to sell and receive the token you want to buy. The Uniswap Grants Program is accepting applications for grants. Do you have something of value that you think you want to contribute to the Uniswap ecosystem? No matter how big or small your idea is, you can apply it for a unique grant at uniswapgrant.org and help steer Uniswap in the direction that you think it should go. Thank you Uniswap for sponsoring Bankless.

• 26:00David Hoffman?

  Slingshot is a decentralized trading platform that combines the performance and ease of a centralized exchange with the openness and transparency of DeFi. Slingshot aggregates liquidity from all of DeFi in order to find the best price on thousands of crypto assets. Every token on Slingshot comes with a price chart and trade logs to give you insights into the market's activity in real time. Slingshot is available on Polygon, Arbitrum, and Optimism, saving you from the high gas fees and low transaction fees of the Ethereum L1. There are no fees to trade on Slingshot, and any positive slippage is given to the users. Trading on Slingshot is a social experience. You can even set your chat avatar to your favorite NFT, or soon, a Slingshot 2099 NFT avatar. Once you bridge your assets to Polygon, Arbitrum, or Optimism, go to app.slingshot.finance to trade, and use the chat box to share your trades with others, and find other tokens

• 26:45David Hoffman?

  to ape into. 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, Binance 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 a limit on-chain orders. So you can set and forget your DeFi trades, and they will go through automatically while you're away. 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.

• 27:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  Hey, guys, we are back with the news of the week. Now we got the bearishness out of the way. Let's talk about what's getting released. I said "news of the week," but first, we got to cover what's getting released. Starknet, that's some good news this year, okay? Layer 2 is coming, Layer 2 is here. This is a starknet-ecosystem.com website. Look at all these projects on Starknet, or either live, or on the roadmap in beta version of some sort. Alpha Road, Argent X, Bitmap Box, BRIC, DYDX, of course, is already there, Dope Wars, it's a cool game, Diversify, we know Diversify. They're immutable X ecosystem is getting larger and larger. So I expect this website to fill up with tiles. What do you think about this?

• 28:15David Hoffman?

  Oh, I think on the other side of the bear market, Ryan, we're going to come out with five second, five cent transactions and instant finality. And everyone's going to be like, oh, Ethereum solved the scalability problems during the bear market. It's gonna be great. Sorry, we were supposed to leave the bear market behind?

• 28:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  David's recovered, though. That's that's bull market David talking. Just might take a few months. Let's talk about this too. The tally wallet, what are they up to?

• 28:36David Hoffman?

  Yeah, tally wallet, that's a new MetaMask competitor now has the swap feature ingrained into the tally inside the tally wallet. All the fees go into the community multi sig. And they have apparently half the cost of a MetaMask swap fee. And then they finish up the tweet saying, you'll want to give this a try before the Dow launches, dot, dot, dot. I wonder what that means. Ryan, what do you think that means?

• 29:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  You'll want to give this a try before the Dow launches. Hmm. I don't know what hint they're dropping here, Dave.

• 29:11David Hoffman?

  What do you need to launch a Dow? There's literally only one thing that you need to.

• 29:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  Does it start with a T?

• 29:18David Hoffman?

  It does start with a T and it's not tally.

• 29:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, we'll let Bankless listeners derive what this tweet could mean for themselves. But hopefully you can read between the lines there a little bit.

• 29:29David Hoffman?

  I will say that when you advertise the schmear schmop that's coming, it generally becomes crowded. Definitely becomes a crowded thing. So.

• 29:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  Why not? Why not say it? Everyone knows everyone else is going to do it as soon as they can, as soon as it makes sense. So why not?

• 29:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Hint the schmear schmop.

• 29:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is cool. This is not something that's being hinted at from our friends at Ledger. They wanted us to let you know that there's a new Ledger device that's out. This is Ledger, the hardware wallet. I don't have one of these yet, but I want one. And the reason I don't have it is because it just came out. This is the Ledger Nano S plus. So maybe you have a Ledger Nano S. You probably do. Maybe you have the other version of of ledgers as well. Ledger Nano X. The Ledger Nano S plus is a new ledger device that has just been released. Bigger screen, more memory, more stuff you can do on the wallet side of things. Including when you plug it into Ledger software, the ability to manage your NFTs.

• 30:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  Send and sign your NFT transactions with full transparency in Ledger Live. So this is like taking the ledger that everyone knows and loves and probably already has. And like upgrading it, making it better.

• 30:54David Hoffman?

  Yeah. So this is like for the right mental model, I think for this is like this is the new shiny iPhone SE. Is what the Ledger Ledger S is. It's like the more affordable version of Ledger. The other one being the Ledger X, which is kind of like the iPhone Pro. But this has gotten a big upgrade to kind of look like the Ledger X, which I have. I also I have both the old Ledger S and the current Ledger X. I thoroughly enjoy the Ledger X, but it's looking like the Ledger S is getting the glow up to look a little bit more like the Ledger X. But also being a little bit more affordable, just clocking in at $80 for one of these things.

• 31:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it's super cheap for a for a new product like this. So go check that out. I think these aren't going to last long. Like Ledger has had some.

• 31:40David Hoffman?

  They always sell out. Yeah.

• 31:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, they always sell out and their, you know, supply chain is difficult.

• 31:43David Hoffman?

  Yeah. Another one is to be bearish.

• 31:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Stop, okay? Just get your ledger. That's what you should do. There's a link in the show notes. Get a Ledger Nano S plus. Go try that out. Let us know what you think of it. Immutable. They just raised $200 million. Now Immutable, the company, is valued at $2.5 billion. Of course, folks that have been listening back, let's know what Immutable is. It's a layer two solution, particularly for NFTs. What's the significance of this raise, David?

• 32:14David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so this is not too long ago, Immutable announced a partnership with GameStop and had the GameStop like development fund. And people got really excited about that, but then they got disappointed and they did in the fact that this fund, the funds from this came from a sale of IMX. This is not that.

• 32:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is not the token. This is the company itself, I believe, that has raised 200 million in Series C funding.

• 32:38David Hoffman?

  Yeah, and so valued at 2.5 billion, which is distinct, although related to the 3.2 fully diluted valuation of the IMX token currently. But this is all going to go into building games and the gaming ecosystem on top of Immutable X.

• 32:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  More layer two dry powder. This is cool too. Wallet Connect just announced they've raised a little bit of money, 11 million dollars worth. What's Wallet Connect, David?

• 33:01David Hoffman?

  Yeah, Wallet Connect is a nice way. I use it to connect some of my mobile wallets to whatever I'm doing on desktop. So Argent particularly, if I want to use anything with my Argent wallet, but use a desktop app like Uniswap or Compound or whatever. You can scan a QR code using your mobile wallet, using Wallet Connect. And the QR code will link your Wallet Connect wallet on your mobile phone to whatever app you're using on desktop. So it's a nice hybrid mobile desktop connectivity feature. And actually just really useful and fantastic UX. And they've raised 11 million dollars to help grow out Wallet Connect. So congrats to the Wallet Connect team.

• 33:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, you know what's really cool is I remember Wallet Connect back in like 2018, 2019, when like there was very little funding in crypto. And it was, it was kind of thought of as a, as a public good with no, like no funding, no real business model. And like not really a strong way forward from a revenue perspective. Now here they are in 2022, getting 11 million dollars in funding. My have things, how things have changed, and I think that's because like tokens have changed things, right? So now that there is, there is a way to monetize a public good. We've seen this with ENS previously, which didn't really seem to have a good monetization strategy back in 2018, 2019. We're seeing this with Wallet Connect. We're seeing this with all sorts of projects.

• 34:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  So it's very cool to see good, public goods-esque projects get funded in the way that they're getting funded now.

• 34:28David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I think people that consider publicly accessible tokens on decentralized exchanges, close enough to public goods.

• 34:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  So yeah, count it. Yeah, yeah. Bain Capital Ventures, they just launched a crypto focused fund now worth 560 million dollars. Bank Capital, of course, is like a fairly famous private equities firm, I believe. And, you know, they're a 38-year-old firm. So this is kind of old, older money PE now joining the crypto fray. Any thoughts here?

• 34:57David Hoffman?

  Well, it's good timing to be raising 560 million dollars.

• 35:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Don't spend it all. It is a good time to raise.

• 35:03David Hoffman?

  It is a good time to raise.

• 35:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Just don't buy. Just buy the dip, guys. My advice for Bank Capital. We'll see what they do with their money. All right, who's this? Diagonal Finance. They're excited, they say, to announce that they have raised 2.5 million dollars in a pre-seed round. What are they gonna do? They're gonna enable crypto native subscriptions on Ethereum. What's that mean?

• 35:24David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so this is using the Superfluid streaming payments protocol.

• 35:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  Really?

• 35:29David Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah. So this is a startup built on top of a startup. So that's already pretty cool. And so this is, rather than just, I don't know, however you would normally do subscriptions with crypto, I don't even think that you could.

• 35:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  There's not really a way.

• 35:41David Hoffman?

  There's not really a way. With Superfluid, you can stream, like, microtransactions, your subscription. So like, I don't know, you pay for Netflix like one penny at a second, or whatever the right math is.

• 35:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  How about a bankless premium membership?

• 35:54David Hoffman?

  Something like that, too. That would work, too. And obviously, you aren't paying gas fees for this. That's, that's kind of the workaround that Superfluid offers. So, on-chain subscriptions, now a thing, coming out of Diagonal.

• 36:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  Subscriptions in 2022 were 7.3 trillion dollars. So that's a fairly significant market to capture, if Diagonal can do this. David, A16Z, they're at it again. They've just invested in Lido Finance. How much they put in here?

• 36:22David Hoffman?

  70 million dollars into Lido. So this has to be a discounted token vested lockup investment out of Lido. So probably a discounted, discounted valuation on the Lido token going into A16Z, probably locked up for a number of years.

• 36:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Good investment in proof of stake. A16Z is getting... Speaking of good investments, one of the best investments you can make is getting a career in Web3. Join crypto. Get a job in crypto, as we say every week.

• 36:52David Hoffman?

  If you can get a job during the bear market, you're gonna thrive during the bull market.

• 36:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's the pitch. I thought we agreed during the break, we'd stop saying the B word.

• 37:04David Hoffman?

  Bull or bear?

• 37:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  True. Not bull, not bear, but Bankless, okay? Because Bankless is featuring an editor. That's the number one job. Do you know that? Do you know we're hiring an editor for the Bankless newsletter?

• 37:18David Hoffman?

  Who put that number one?

• 37:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  It seems like a great job. I'm gonna, I'm gonna hold on this. Look, Bankless, fantastic newsletter, read by over 150,000 crypto natives. Actually, more than that. I don't know who wrote that, but it's old news, okay? We're at 175,000 now. Anyway, we're looking for an editor. If you can write, if you've got some skills in the crypto space, if you're a Bankless consumer, go ahead and apply for that job. Let's talk about a few more of the jobs on the jobs board. I lost it. Here it is. A senior product manager at the Bankless Academy. I guess, wow, is this Bankless DAO? Hey, we're, we're hiring for Bankless stuff.

• 37:54David Hoffman?

  Bankless is hiring across the board, both DAO and HQ.

• 37:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  A senior product manager is super rare. What an awesome job that would be, NFT company. A senior technical product manager at runtime verification, head of marketing at status.im, and operations manager at MakerDAO, lead financial analyst, strategic finance at MakerDAO. DeepDAO is hiring, Primus is hiring, Tally's hiring, Novel's hiring. I could go on. There's a lot more at the Bankless jobs website. Go ahead and check that out, guys, and get a job during the B market.

• 38:26David Hoffman?

  That's a great way to put it. Listeners can hear whatever they want to hear.

• 38:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  News time. All right, news time. Let's start here. This was a crazy story that I read. This is, I guess, is the, the Ukraine thread, but it, it sort of read like a crypto dystopian novel, a little bit. Ukraine is buying bulletproof vests and night vision goggles using crypto. That's what they're buying.

• 38:51David Hoffman?

  I mean, it's better than like AK-47s and missiles, I think. That would be a little, a lot more contentious. Bulletproof vests, night vision goggles are, I mean, one's to protect you, one is definitely to help kill other people. But again, this is what we talked about last week on the roll up. Like when you donate your crypto assets to the Ukrainian government, they can go buy bombs with it.

• 39:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  And it's not just that, it's the military suppliers themselves. They are now spinning up crypto accounts so they can accept crypto.

• 39:19David Hoffman?

  Oof, that deserves an oof. That's an oof.

• 39:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right, doesn't, look at this, man. This just reads like a dystopia novel, like world's at war and now people are using crypto to like buy military gear in order to protect themselves in order to like-

• 39:32David Hoffman?

  Permissionless payments for military gear is a scary sentence.

• 39:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right? That's the world of 2022. I guess on the flip side of this, the happy side of this, this is a summary of all of the inflows that went to Ukraine and for various things, many different things, but look at the top line here. ETH donations, $18 million. That was, that, that beat out Bitcoin. Bitcoin is $10 million and the rest, I think it's over $55 million or something like this. The rest were in ERC20s or some dot donations as well. But what's interesting about this is ETH was now the money, not Bitcoin. ETH was the main money provided to Ukraine. Something we've been saying for a while is ETH is money. Looks like it here.

• 40:21David Hoffman?

  Yeah, and my bias is definitely going to come out on this one, but like the Ethereum community generally a little bit more altruist, I would say, than the hardcore conservative nature of Bitcoiners. And Ethereum community showed up, showed up more than Bitcoin did. It's important to note that like, not only did $10 million out of the Bitcoin, Bitcoin came and got sent to Ukraine, $18 million out of Ethereum, but the Bitcoin market cap is like two and a half times the size of Ethereum's market cap, which means the total wealth held by Bitcoiners is two and a half times the total wealth held by people that hold ETH. And ETH donations almost doubled Bitcoin donations.

• 41:03David Hoffman?

  So the Ethereum community, I think, much more tapped in to the global world that's going on and where needs need to be met.

• 41:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  ETH is still definitely underrated as a money in the way that Bitcoin is rated as a money. Okay, so this is the story in Ukraine. Ukrainian deputy minister just reiterates a call for crypto exchanges to block Russian users. And you can kind of get in their headspace. They're just doing whatever they can to survive. And they're calling on the rest of the world to just do whatever they can to sanction Russia in all various ways. But I don't know if we should always be listening to them. It's kind of the same reason we don't have, you know, the victims of a crime as jurors in a court case, right? They're like, they're too enmeshed, entrenched in the problem to actually provide, you know, a less, a more objective-

• 41:53David Hoffman?

  A cool-headed response.

• 41:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  A cool-headed response to this. And this is sort of what they're saying. So they want all crypto exchanges to just block all Russian users. That's the message that's coming out of Ukraine right now.

• 42:03David Hoffman?

  Yeah, and how helpful is that really? Like, the Russian individuals of the world, who I think, I mean, we can feel pretty damn certain that Ukraine does not have a Coinbase account or a Kraken account or any of the other oligarchs. They're too easy to find. But that leaves like the Russian citizens, the Russian users of these crypto accounts. And like, how is freezing their accounts going to help anything? Like, bombs are still going to drop on Ukraine even if you freeze Russian users out of their Coinbase account. So this one, as much as I stand with the people of Ukraine and want the war around Ukraine to end as soon as possible, I don't see this one moving the needle.

• 42:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  Elizabeth Warren, related to this, just crafted a bill that targets cryptocurrency exchanges in Russia sanctions. So she's worried, I think some lawmakers are, particularly Elizabeth Warren, that cryptocurrency might be used to sidestep existing sanctions. There are a few interesting quotes in this article. Senator Lindsey Graham says, "Cryptocurrency is rearing its ugly head here. As you sanction the Russian central bank, which is a good thing, I worry about how the cryptocurrency, the cryptocurrency, could be used by the Russians to stay afloat."

• 43:17David Hoffman?

  That darned cryptocurrency.

• 43:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Some of the, I think the language in the bill says the provision would make it easier to verify the identities of customers and transfers to private crypto wallets by requiring financial institutions, that is like the exchanges of the world, to keep detailed records and submit reports to the Treasury Department. So basically, they already, Coinbase or Kraken or Gemini, they already AML KYC everyone. Now Treasury wants a copy of all of the identities of all of the crypto wallets that they're AML KYCing. Whereas before, you'd expect Coinbase to sort of have that information in their own private records in case they need it.

• 44:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  Maybe there's a court order, some sort of reason to give it to authorities, but otherwise they'd keep it private. Treasury wants a direct data feed so that every time you deposit or withdraw from a crypto wallet, Treasury knows whose wallet it is. So your address, your ETH address is linked directly to your identity. That's what she's proposing.

• 44:25David Hoffman?

  Yeah, they're asking all of the crypto exchanges to spin up their own Eye of Sauron, directly connected to the meta Eye of Sauron, which is the central government. And so they're asking, it's like, hey, we do our job with financial surveillance, we want you guys to take equal parts in financial surveillance. That's what's going on here.

• 44:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Remember we talked about last week that some of the exchanges were resisting some of this? In particular, they were resisting the complete blocking of all Russian accounts on their platforms. And what we said at that time was like, I wonder how long that's going to last.

• 45:03David Hoffman?

  Right, one week.

• 45:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Barely, right? Like, if even. So what happened here, David?

• 45:09David Hoffman?

  Coinbase will block Russian accounts to sanction the country. So they are just not trying to pick a fight at all during this debacle. And they have indeed kicked off Russian users, frozen Russian users off of their accounts to comply with sanctions. And so I'm pretty sure this is true, but like, once again, crypto exchanges are not regulated in the same way as other financial institutions. And so this...

• 45:35David Hoffman?

  Complying with sanctions, I'm still, I'm pretty sure this is true, is optional, right? Like, they are not, because they're not a bank, they don't have to comply with bank regulations. They're just doing it anyways because they don't want to piss off the Eye of Sauron. It's probably a good move, it's probably a good move, but they have indeed blocked access to sanctioned users.

• 45:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's kind of like "optional" in air quotes, right? It's like, when you get letters from the government, how optional is it really? Brian Armstrong put together a thread about this, you want to read out some of these tweets?

• 46:07David Hoffman?

  Yeah, the main tweet that I think is important to highlight is that tweet number five in this thread, you can, we'll link it in the show notes, he says, "That being said, we don't think that there's a high risk of Russian oligarchs using crypto to avoid sanctions. Because it's an open ledger, trying to sneak lots of money through crypto would be more traceable than using US dollars, cash, art, gold, or other assets." Which is what we have been saying for a long time. If you want to launder money, you shouldn't use crypto. It's a terrible vehicle for that because of the fact that it's an open, public permissionless ledger. People like Lindsey Warren and, uh, and, uh,

• 46:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Lindsey Graham, you mean?

• 46:42David Hoffman?

  Excuse me, Lindsey Graham and Elizabeth Warren, thank you. I mean, same talking head, though.

• 46:48David Hoffman?

  They, when they,

• 46:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  Totally different sides of the aisle, but somehow the same message.

• 46:52David Hoffman?

  But same, yeah, exactly. Like, when you go, just because when they go to EtherScan and they don't understand what the hell's going on, doesn't mean the rest of the world doesn't. Like, it's a public ledger, you know everything. Just because they don't understand that doesn't mean that crypto can therefore be used to violate sanctions just because they don't get it.

• 47:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, can you blame the exchanges? Like, we knew this was gonna happen. What else, what else are they going to do? Like, are they going to really piss off the nation-state? Is that a good idea? I mean, they can't, they can't afford to do this. This would cost them their entire business. Obviously, that's what they're going to do. Obviously, that's what centralized entities do. This is the whole reason for DeFi. The whole reason for Bankless is so that we don't have a third party that can surveil us and be the Eye of Sauron and arbitrarily lock our accounts. This is why we need DeFi. What's this take here? It seems related. It's not just Brian Armstrong saying this, but it seems to be like, uh, you know, nation- And state authorities saying that crypto is a poor conduit for Russian oligarchs. What's this about?

• 47:52David Hoffman?

  This is from Hannah Lang. At the webinar this morning, the National Security Council Director of Cybersecurity, Carol House, says that the scale that Russia would need to circumvent all of financial sanctions, quote, "would almost certainly render cryptocurrency as an ineffective primary tool for the state," which is what we said last week, which is what we said on the Monday opening note two weeks ago. Like, the market cap of crypto is about $2 trillion, and Russia and all the oligarchs have, like, a third of that that's being frozen. Like, you cannot fit a third of the crypto market cap through tornado cash or through, like, whatever Tumblr you have. It doesn't work. And that's aside from

• 48:34David Hoffman?

  how it's all public and permissionless and transparent. And so, the more and more consensus of bi people who know what they're talking about are all like, "Yeah, crypto wouldn't work for sanctions, so why are we even having this conversation?"

• 48:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  What they're having this conversation is an excuse to tighten up

• 48:52David Hoffman?

  Yes.

• 48:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  the state surveillance on crypto. It's just a nice narrative in the headlines where you can start to get things through and pretend like, you know, the country supports it and pretend like it makes sense.

• 49:06David Hoffman?

  Terrorism, child porn, Russian sanctions, these are all the same things.

• 49:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  Great excuses to, like, restrict freedoms. That's what's going on. Let's talk a little bit about a new story we didn't get to last week because it was kind of breaking. We wanted to see what happened when it settled. But there were reports, I think last Thursday and Friday, that MetaMask was actually blocking transactions, blocking individuals in Venezuela from putting MetaMask transactions through in the wallet. That was not, that's not quite true. It's not quite what happened. Can you tell us what exactly happened? There was some arbitrary blocking, but it wasn't on the MetaMask side. Where was it, David?

• 49:48David Hoffman?

  Yeah, it was on the Infura side of things. And I believe it was Venezuela. It did have to do with a geographic region, but it was was not as a result of sanctions or not any pressure by any nation state regulation. Apparently it was just like a misconfiguration in Infiura. So basically like a whoopsies, a bug, an exploit, a glitch in Infiura.

• 50:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  What's Infiura for people who don't know?

• 50:10David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so when you send a transaction via MetaMask, it gets relayed to an Ethereum node. All transactions all get relayed to an Ethereum node somewhere, somehow, some way. And MetaMask defaults to Infiura. And Infiura is a centralized node provider spun up by consensus. It's a consensus product. And so if you just need a, if you need an Ethereum node, because you do, if you ever want to write a transaction or do anything else, you have to send it to an Ethereum node. And so Infiura offers that service. And when you download MetaMask, it defaults by pointing to Infiura. Infiura was this, was the thing that had the whoopsies in the, in the configuration for Venezuelan countries. And so Venezuelans, when they wanted to use MetaMask, said, they went to MetaMask

• 50:52David Hoffman?

  and then they got this warning saying that there is no node provider for you, basically, and your transaction won't get through. Running, hooking up a node to MetaMask that's different from the default one is not something that users typically do, just because Infiura works so well and we never have had any issues prior, and we still really don't have any issues. But it's important to know that you can quickly and easily and trivially swap out Infiura for any other Ethereum node. There's a website spun up by our friend David Mihal called ethereumnodes.com, which just lists off a bunch of public companies or also communities that run nodes that you're welcome to hook into. So if one goes down, you can just pick up a different one, or you can run your own node, which is also an option.

• 51:36David Hoffman?

  And so if the backend node provider for MetaMask ever goes down, do know that you can go to ethereumnodes.com and just pick a different one. And it is, and which Many, many Bitcoiners have not realized that, you know, no, like Ethereum does not have centralization risk around Infira because there's an infinite number of alternatives. Anyways.

• 51:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Including running your own node.

• 51:58David Hoffman?

  Including running your own node.

• 52:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it's just a matter of changing the defaults. Although, you know, I will say it is important, increasingly important, that we try to decentralize this data, like this data provider portion of Ethereum node infrastructure, right? Because it's also not super practical for everyone to run their own nodes, obviously. And they're like, they're like BitTorrent-like solutions to this. And there's some companies working on decentralized data providers that I think will be very helpful in the future. But yeah, it's a good PSA. It's something to know. But this is a link you included in the agenda, David, and I'm wondering if you could explain this. This is sort of Ethereum versus Bitcoin sanctions.

• 52:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  And this is a document here. What is this document talking about, David? The difference between Bitcoin versus Ethereum sanctions?

• 52:51David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so this is a document I put together when I heard on a podcast about how Bitcoiners were pointing at this event of Infira being down for a certain parts of the country. And Bitcoiners were pointing at Ethereum like they always do. And they say, this is why Bitcoin is designed the way that it is. It's maximally simple. It's maximally like manageable. And there isn't any sort of just like node like risk like this, like Ethereum always centralized around Infira. And so this podcast, the host just kind of regurgitated a bunch of Bitcoiner takes. And I was kind of, I messaged him, I said, yo, I'm kind of disappointed in your reporting because all of this stuff is just basically wrong. And so I put this document together, we'll put it in the show notes, which he asked me

• 53:33David Hoffman?

  to put together as like a statement as to like trying to like fix, correct the record. And so I'll just share a few lines here. I say, I say that Bitcoiners often see a few chinks in Ethereum's armor, how Metafot mask defaults to Infira, the larger state size of Ethereum's nodes, and then they extrapolate it into hyperbole and use this as a narrative as to why the simplicity of Bitcoin is good. But Bitcoin does not shine during times of Nation state ire by not even making on-chain native financial applications possible, which is kind of where the need for Infira comes from in the first place. Bitcoin waves the white flag of providing self-sovereign finance in a trustless way and gives it straight to the centralized institutions, who are forced to bend the knee to those that have monopoly on physical power.

• 54:16David Hoffman?

  The absence of native DeFi on Bitcoin allows Bitcoiners to sneakily critique all of the Ethereum chinks in the armor that comes with actually taking the hard route of providing native DeFi. And so here's my spicy take. This is akin to a Cheeto dust-fingered couch potato critiquing the landing of a pro sports like gymnast. Sure, they didn't stick the landing, but they did three backflips and a 720 twist.

• 54:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  Little armchair keyboard warrior sort of takes.

• 54:44David Hoffman?

  Yeah, and so the last spicy line that I have is that Bitcoin shouldn't be getting props because it doesn't even try to offer DeFi. That's not a solution, that's a cop-out, and it's not a pro argument for Bitcoin just because it succeeds at not trying. And so if you are a Bitcoiner who likes to fudge Ethereum for having some sort of centralization risk around Infira, read this and reconsider.

• 55:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  David's talking about Bitcoin maximalists.

• 55:10David Hoffman?

  Yes.

• 55:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  You know, in particular, that like to charge. And here's the point, right? If if all of your banking transactions have to take place on a centralized exchange, like a BlockFi, or a Celsius, or a Coinbase, or a Kraken, like, how many orders of magnitude worse is that? We just saw what Coinbase can do is can block an entire country, an entire class of citizens from accessing their crypto, right? And this is the need for DeFi and why I think Ethereum as well is like already ahead. Let's talk about this. I think this is the big story of the week, maybe.

• 55:49David Hoffman?

  This is the big story.

• 55:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  The Biden administration just put out an executive order. This was a long awaited executive order. Like all the way months back, when we were talking to Andrew Yang, and I think he re-echoed this in that Eve Denver, the executive order was coming. A lot of people in crypto were terrified about this. They thought the executive order would be a Biden administration crackdown, a complete crackdown on crypto, a very hostile, you know, attempt to like kneecap crypto in, in the United States. But it was not that.

• 56:21David Hoffman?

  No.

• 56:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Actually, maybe it was actually bullish. What, what was inside this thing?

• 56:26David Hoffman?

  The fact that it wasn't just a massive failure of an executive order and then the fact that it actually looks like they were trying to do an intentional and like well researched job is like the bullish part of this. It's like, oh, they're not just being ridiculous nation status like Elizabeth Warren and they're actually taking a well reasoned approach to this. So that, that's what the market, I think, reacted to. Basically, Joe Biden said, hey, let's spend some time, let's spend some resources and research the best way to regulate crypto.

• 56:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, cool.

• 56:56David Hoffman?

  Yeah, with, with a, uh, measures on, focuses on six different areas. Consumer protection, obviously, financial stability, illicit activity, US competitiveness, financial inclusion and responsible innovation. Responsible innovation, the last one being like the thing that everyone in crypto is really, really happy about. So there, there's some, some things to talk about, but generally people in the crypto world are all pretty like happy with this executive order.

• 57:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Look at three of these things. Actually, all of these things actually like matter a lot. US competitiveness, thank you for considering that. Financial inclusion, that's important. That's something web three can bring. Responsible innovation, like absolutely, let's talk about the innovative side of crypto rather than all of the kind of illicit activity side of things that, that people want to dwell on. It's fantastic to see this kind of language in a report. And this is just a call for investigation into, into these areas. It's not a call for like some sort of decision right now or some sort of immediate action.

• 57:55David Hoffman?

  It's a call for a decision after research. However, I will push back a little bit with what you said, Ryan, because there's two sections that kind of make little to no sense to me. But I think that if they do their research, they'll discover why. The illicit activity one, this is a statement from President Biden. The president has called for an unprecedented focus of coordinated action from federal agencies in mitigating illicit finance and national security risks posed by cryptocurrencies. He is also urging international collaboration on this issue. We already know from chain analysis that like very, very illicit, illegal transactions happens using crypto rails. Like, less than 1% is like the latest figure that I got. So like, I'm hoping that when they go and investigate the illicit activity being used by crypto rails,

• 58:40David Hoffman?

  they discover like, oh, there's actually not a lot there. In this article, they cite the Bitfinex hack, which we know about. And then the trope of how like, following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, they're worried about how Russian individuals can use crypto, which, again, we've already discussed. There's another one.

• 59:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Do you think this is like a good faith effort, though?

• 59:02David Hoffman?

  I think, yes, I definitely think this is a good faith effort.

• 59:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wow.

• 59:06David Hoffman?

  Certainly.

• 59:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  I did not expect a good faith effort.

• 59:08David Hoffman?

  Right, right, yeah. But, you know, I'm happy to be surprised. Another thing that came out is climate change. Biden also dropped a mention of the sheer energy costs baked into digital currencies like Bitcoin. He wants the government to study ways to make crypto innovation more responsible, reducing any negative climate impacts. I think this is actually really hilarious. He wants the government to study ways to make crypto innovation more responsible. Oh, do you mean what the Ethereum researchers have been researching for the past six years with proof of stake? Like, don't worry, guys, we got this. We've been doing this for years now.

• 59:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, do you think, you know, a bunch of government people in the executive branch are now going to have to listen to bankless and get like schooled up on what's going on here?

• 59:54David Hoffman?

  Oh my God, are we going to be cited as a source in some sort of like federal statement?

• 59:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh God, I hope not, but maybe a bunch of new podcast listeners, that'd be, that'd be kind of fun. So what are the takes from around the industry on this?

• 1:00:04David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so Jeremy Elair and also Jerry Brito from Coin Center, Jerry Brito from Coin Center, Jeremy Elair from Circle, the stablecoin, put both some threads together that are linked in the show notes. So we will read out a few key tweets, starting with number one. Jeremy says, "White House Executive Order and US Government Strategy for Digital Assets, A Thread With Thoughts, TLDR. This is a watershed moment for crypto, digital assets, and Web 3, akin to the 96, 97 hole of the government wake up to the commercial internet." And then I'll skip to tweet three. Specifically, "The executive order calls for nearly every relevant federal agency to take an on understanding and developing policy positions that understand and address risks, but vitally that support innovation and US national economic competitiveness."

• 1:00:49David Hoffman?

  And then skipping to the last tweet. "For those of us in the crypto community, in my opinion, this executive order should be viewed as the singest biggest opportunity to engage with policymakers on the issues that matter. The proverbial doors of policymakers are wide open. This is now a national conversation in the US." So like this is, the policy doors are wide open for the crypto industry to go through them and educate them, but also for the banking industry to come in and fud us. So like the board is set, the match is about to begin. It's now us versus like basically the banking industry to make sure that crypto is treated well. So those are the key tweets out of Jeremy Elair from Circle. So here are two tweets from Jerry Brito out of Coin Center.

• 1:01:31David Hoffman?

  Coin Center being the, basically our lobbying agency for the industry. Jerry Brito says, "The message I take from this executive order is that the federal government sees cryptocurrency as a legitimate, serious, and important part of the economy and society, and I think it's a good signal to serious people who have been holding back from getting involved. The executive order also presents another striking contrast with alarmist politicians and media in that it is ultimately a call for further study and deliberate planning, not a reactive rush to legislate or regulate. This is why we are..." Happy, bullish, bullish, yay, yay, we like it, we like it, we like it.

• 1:02:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bullish David's back, on the back of an executive order nonetheless. Things I wouldn't anticipate in 2022, more of them coming, I guess. That's awesome, that's really great, and I think our friend Jake Trivitsky maybe summed it up really well. I'm gonna read out his tweet. "Anyone worried that President Biden's executive order would spell doom and gloom for crypto can fully relax now. Main concern..." Yes, I feel relaxed. "The main concern was that the executive order might force rushed rulemaking or impose new and bad restrictions." Exactly, that was my concern. "But there's nothing like that here. It's about as good as we could ask for." Guys, you can fully relax now.

• 1:02:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's not... Do you have some relaxing music?

• 1:02:54David Hoffman?

  I don't.

• 1:02:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's a tear.

• 1:02:56David Hoffman?

  Okay, but I got one for Elizabeth Warren, though.

• 1:03:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. I'm relaxed. This is great, this is great news.

• 1:03:06David Hoffman?

  Cool.

• 1:03:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  I'm really excited about this, very happy. I guess that's all we have to say about it, maybe we'll get some more content on this in the weeks to come. But it sounds like, as you said, the game and the pieces are now laid out and we just have to play our hand. There's nothing scary about this executive order. But we gotta hit the gas pedal and keep moving forward in DC.

• 1:03:29David Hoffman?

  Yeah. Maybe actually relaxed is actually not the right way to put it because we still have to play the game. But the game appears to be fairly set and not rigged against us, so that's nice.

• 1:03:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  That is nice, that is nice.

• 1:03:43David Hoffman?

  It's a nice change.

• 1:03:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. Ethereum stuff, Layer 2 continues to get cheaper, what's this?

• 1:03:50David Hoffman?

  "Optimism, once again, reduces transaction fees by about another 30 to 40%." I mean, when you keep on doing this for like seven times in a row, like things start to approach zero really, really fast. So, as of recently, like the last time this happened was like on March 3rd, and what is it today? March 9th. So, on March 3rd, it called out, it got compressed by 40%, and then we're doing it again by another 40%. Like, fees are approaching zero, which is kind of unfortunate because now the gas fees on the Ethereum L1 are also approaching zero. Like, it starts to matter less. But hey, at least when the bull market finally rolls around again, Layer 2 fees will actually be like close to zero.

• 1:04:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's kind of like the Bankless Podcast is just like a repeating cycle of us being sad about gas fees too high and then us being sad about gas fees too low.

• 1:04:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  And we're in the part where we're sad about gas fees too low. But it's awesome for the long term. Honestly, this is exactly where we need to see the market going. Ave's on optimism too. That's happening.

• 1:04:49David Hoffman?

  Ave contracts a point on optimism, yeah.

• 1:04:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  Contracts a point on optimism. So guys, layer two does not stop getting built out. NFT, NFT side of things. Let's start with this story.

• 1:05:00David Hoffman?

  This is where the shenanigans come from.

• 1:05:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  You said there were some shenanigans. Okay, tell us about the shenanigans. Tell us.

• 1:05:04David Hoffman?

  Alright, so Ty Lopez, who, I don't know who he is other than an influencer, has released his own NFTs. I think very, very, very, very inspired by Gary Vee. Gary Vee, he mentioned these NFTs that were redeemable, right? Like, one of them was redeemable for like, a gift box and another one was redeemable for a phone call with Gary Vee and another one was redeemable for, whatever. And his community just loved it. Like, big success. Everyone loved it.

• 1:05:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  He executed well.

• 1:05:29David Hoffman?

  He executed beautifully. Ty Lopez is taking a similar approach, as in like redeemable NFTs, but these ones are egregious. These are ridiculous.

• 1:05:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  Kind of cringey.

• 1:05:39David Hoffman?

  Oh, these are terrible. Okay, so like, let's go through some of these. I think the most, okay, I'll save the most hilarious one for last. One-on-one Michelin star restaurant with Ty Lopez. Like, I'm sure that's a very, like, for the right price, that would be interesting for the right fan. But it's being sold for 29 and a half ETH. I don't even know what that is in dollar terms, because I think in ETH terms, but 30 ETH times, where are we? $200 ETH price or 2,000?

• 1:06:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  2,000. Don't say 200.

• 1:06:09David Hoffman?

  That was a bear market joke. That's like, this $80,000 for a one-on-one Michelin star restaurant with Ty. You're allowed to pay $80,000 to take Ty Lopez out to a Michelin star restaurant?

• 1:06:24David Hoffman?

  One-on-one WhatsApp access to Ty's personal phone number? He's basically selling his phone number for 32.8 ETH. That's a whole entire Ethereum validator for Ty Lopez's number.

• 1:06:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  He'll tie you up? Like, what are you gonna do with that? Like, what are you gonna?

• 1:06:39David Hoffman?

  He doesn't even guarantee that he'll respond.

• 1:06:44David Hoffman?

  One-on-one, watch a movie with Ty Lopez for 13 ETH. You can't even talk to the guy. You just gotta shut up and watch the movie.

• 1:06:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  Just watch a movie with him? Is he gonna have popcorn? Like, wait, is that in person? I hope it's like on his couch or something.

• 1:06:57David Hoffman?

  You guys are on Zoom and you guys press play at the same time? 13 ETH, please. Okay, here's my favorite one. A one-on-one, $10,000 game of horse with Ty Lopez. For the low, low price of 20 ETH, you can have the ability to play a game of horse with Ty Lopez. And if you win, you get $10,000, which is like one-fifth the cost of what it costs to buy one of these things.

• 1:07:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  $50,000 for a game of horse with Ty?

• 1:07:29David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wow. Better make that last.

• 1:07:32David Hoffman?

  Wait, if you lose the game of horse, you have to pay another $10,000?

• 1:07:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  I hope, like, I don't know.

• 1:07:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is, do you think that maybe we just don't get it because we're not part of the community? And this is just laughable, but Ty has some super fans that to him, he's just kind of like a, I don't know, like a Taylor Swift or a Kanye West or like someone actually worth this kind of, you know, experience price? You think we're the people who don't get it? You think there's people in the community who want this?

• 1:08:02David Hoffman?

  Yeah, are we the blank holes? No, we're not.

• 1:08:08David Hoffman?

  There's no way.

• 1:08:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  You know, it's mostly egregious. It's an ETH too.

• 1:08:11David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  Why would you spend your ETH this way, guys?

• 1:08:14David Hoffman?

  God damn.

• 1:08:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yo, the merge is happening. People spending like 20 ETH on a game of horse? Do they know how much this is gonna be worth post-merge, David?

• 1:08:23David Hoffman?

  God, this is gonna be one of the most financially terrible investments ever made by a lot. I hope people, well, apparently people are actually buying these things.

• 1:08:33David Hoffman?

  And because you can actually see it on-chain. How many of are actually being bought? I don't know. But yeah, either way, ridiculous.

• 1:08:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wow, it's crazy. Do you think this is, uh, gives NFTs a bad name? This kind of thing? Cause this is what makes headlines, right?

• 1:08:47David Hoffman?

  Bigly, yeah, like this got onto my radar just because somebody tweeted this out. It was like, oh, this is clearly the end of NFTs. Like Ty Lopez is ruining it for everyone. Like honestly, like here's, here's Bear David coming out. This feels like the last gasps of ICOs in 2018. The ICO mania was in 2017 when they all worked out. The ICO mania continued for another year while they got more and more ridiculous and more and more egregious and just more and more cringe. Uh, and like this is that to me where like that was the ICOs. This is NFTs. This is like the cringiest NFT thing I've ever seen.

• 1:09:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Really? It was, was it worse than, uh, whatever we talked about last week with those, uh, mutant, uh, NFTs? What's his name?

• 1:09:30David Hoffman?

  You're right. Yeah. Uh, Kevin and Pixelmons.

• 1:09:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, Pixelmons.

• 1:09:34David Hoffman?

  Uh, okay. Uh, good point. Now you have to make me consider that, Ryan, but like I'll make you consider that this happened two weeks in a row.

• 1:09:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  What's happening next week?

• 1:09:43David Hoffman?

  Oh God, I don't even want to know.

• 1:09:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right. Well, speaking of cringe, David, uh, former file sharing site LimeWire is getting ready to relaunch as an NFT marketplace. Don't tell me this is another top signal. Remember LimeWire back in the day?

• 1:09:58David Hoffman?

  Oh, I use LimeWire so much.

• 1:10:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it was great. It was coming back. How would you like it as an NFT platform?

• 1:10:05David Hoffman?

  What the hell? What the hell? What the absolute hell? Uh, yeah. I mean, what's, you can't use it yet. There you can join the waitlist or say that you're a creator. I mean, they gotta just be rotating the brand into an, an NFT marketplace platform.

• 1:10:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Because NFTs are hot, that's why.

• 1:10:23David Hoffman?

  Because NFTs are hot, but again, a little late, guys. Like you have to wait for, for the NFT markets to come back.

• 1:10:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, it's, uh, we'll, we'll, we'll see what happens there. Maybe we'll be pleasantly surprised. I doubt it.

• 1:10:35David Hoffman?

  I doubt it.

• 1:10:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  Um, Andre, Andre Cronier, he is a, a DeFi builder and kind of a famous DeFi builder. We had him on the podcast in 2020, I believe. It's the last time we had him on the podcast. We were talking about.

• 1:10:48David Hoffman?

  April 2020.

• 1:10:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, the launch of. And YFI and his whole strategy and a really interesting developer. He's gone on since then to build a lot of things. He's had his hand in a ton of different DeFi projects and even like side chain, alt layer one networks like Phantom. Well, he just quit. It sounds like almost like a rage quit, maybe. Although there's not much communication as to what type of departure this was because he like deleted his Twitter account and everything. And announced through, um, I guess maybe a business partner of some sort that he's terminating all of his work on all of the, the apps and service. There are 25 of them that he had formerly worked on. What's, uh, what's this about?

• 1:11:34David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I think I'll actually zoom all the way back out just to provide context to this. When Andre came on our podcast, uh, this was right after Urn got kicked off, which Urn like stole the show in DeFi for like two weeks. People couldn't stop talking about it. And so that's kind of where Andre like rose up in fame, just because he built this product. And this token that he gave away for free and didn't really collect any of them of himself went from zero to $60,000 in like four weeks or something. And so that's where, that's when like the, uh, brand of Andre came around, but he came onto our podcast like in kind of a storm, talking about like how like, he, he basically bought out, but didn't realize what he was going to turn himself into like DMs, like when, when you like the, the.

• 1:12:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's too much.

• 1:12:17David Hoffman?

  It was too much, too much attention, like too much D gens, people like now asking Andre to pump the price. Him being way too, way too responsible for things. And that was like almost, that was over two years ago. Wow, it's crazy that that's been that long. Anyways, uh, and Andre has since then built other stuff which got him even more clout and put even more pressure on him as an individual. And that kind of continued, he started building on Phantom, building more products, uh, just kind of leading the charge of like the D gen side of, of crypto. People aping into Andre contracts, like Andre kind of turned into a meme. And then he was also tangentially involved with the whole Wonderland, Danny Sesta, Xeroc seafood drama. And I think that's kind of what the.

• 1:13:01David Hoffman?

  The straw that broke the camel's back and actually why I think we see Andre having quit because like he just didn't.

• 1:13:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  Just burnt out?

• 1:13:08David Hoffman?

  Just burnt out. Uh, he, after the whole Xerox, Sifu, Quadringa, Wonderland, Danny Sessa drama, he wrote this tweet saying like, I don't support Danny's actions. I just want to build. I don't want any of this drama. I just want to build stuff. Uh, and so I think after like slogging through the mess of crypto Twitter and Dgen Twitter and Dgen crypto life for two years, uh, he finally just called it quits. Uh, it's like, I've had enough of this, um, which, uh, he's not the only person I've seen do that in the last like month or so. Another reason why I'm Davidson bear market mode. Um, but yeah, so he, I think he's just kind of done with dealing with all the toxic, DeFi community, uh, which he's kind of gathered around himself accidentally. Um, uh, but yeah, the, uh, the end of an era.

• 1:13:52David Hoffman?

  I don't think he'll ever really be gone. Maybe he's found, he spun up a, um, an alt, a private alt that we don't know who it is. So he can still participate. But the persona of Andre is being sunsetted, at least for now.

• 1:14:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  I, I do hate to see DeFi builders go, but one thing that I am actually a little bit relieved to see is, I feel like we were getting into an unhealthy position with respect to some of these DeFi builders and the cult of personality, uh, around them. Like Danny Sesta was a fantastic example. And I think something similar was also happening to Andre where, if people just ape into these projects, you know, just because, uh, these DeFi builders' names were associated with them. And then it almost seemed to get to a healthy place. Not necessarily with Andre. I'm not, I'm not too sure, but I was getting vibes that, um, some of the builders of these projects were like pumping their own projects in unsustainable ways as well.

• 1:14:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  And if not them themselves, like kind of the crowd that gathered around them. Uh, and it just seemed really unhealthy and unsustainable for the space. And so I guess my take is this, is personality cult DeFi dead? I kind of hope it is. I, and maybe Andre as well hopes it is. I don't know. Maybe some of the other DeFi builders in the space who just want to code as they say they want to do are happy with, with kind of personality cult DeFi sunsetting a little bit. And I do hope it's the end of it, at least for a season. This always returns though. Like when there's success, when there's like bull market fervor, when number goes up, we see this every single time, right?

• 1:15:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  And again, like tourists, we talked about tourists and crypto and, and the settlers, right? And I guess if you're a settler, you kind of get tired of seeing the same thing every cycle. But it does feel like the end of maybe a, a local cycle here of personality cult DeFi. And honestly, David, I think that's kind of a healthy thing. Maybe it's a, maybe it's a B market thing, but it's a healthy thing.

• 1:15:52David Hoffman?

  I tweeted out earlier this week, I still never found out who Danny Sessa was, which is like a joke because like that's how, what started the whole like frog drama with us. Yeah.

• 1:16:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  What kind of replies did you get on that one?

• 1:16:05David Hoffman?

  Completely modest, normal people with an absence of frogs.

• 1:16:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  No way.

• 1:16:09David Hoffman?

  The frogs are gone from crypto Twitter. Like there are no frogs.

• 1:16:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  Said that six week, well, you did say that six weeks ago.

• 1:16:15David Hoffman?

  And I got absolutely hounded by, by the, the cult of personality.

• 1:16:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  Driven off of the internet almost.

• 1:16:20David Hoffman?

  Yeah. I had to like fucking take a personal day and just relax and have an IPA.

• 1:16:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is so dumb.

• 1:16:26David Hoffman?

  Now I get to joke about Danny Sessa because the tourists are gone and your boy's still here. And he always will be.

• 1:16:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  Look, man, we invited Danny on the podcast and he said he would come on and then he never, he said he would come on multiple times in private, like DMs. He said it publicly. Never came on. We never got to find out who he was.

• 1:16:46David Hoffman?

  Bankless listeners are ever confused as who the settlers are. You're listening to them right now.

• 1:16:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  We're not, we're not leaving, okay?

• 1:16:54David Hoffman?

  We're not leaving.

• 1:16:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is Leo DiCaprio.

• 1:16:58David Hoffman?

  It's the bear market, I'm still here.

• 1:17:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  You know what? I'm excited to do bankless. If this is a B market, David, I'm excited to do B market season.

• 1:17:06David Hoffman?

  That's kind of what I'm getting into. That's trying to, the mood I'm trying to invoke is like, there are plenty of good reasons to be stoked about a

• 1:17:14David Hoffman?

  bear market.

• 1:17:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  A B market?

• 1:17:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Goldman Sachs is connecting clients to Galaxy Digital's ETH fund. I just think this means Goldman Sachs is a headline. Goldman Sachs has a bunch of clients, of course, with a lot of money and they want an easy onboard to to Ethereum. So they are onboarding to Galaxy Digital's Ether Fund. Probably getting a commission on that as Wall Street likes to do.

• 1:17:39David Hoffman?

  Basically just a finder's fee for funneling people into Galaxy Digital's ETH fund.

• 1:17:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  I don't hate it.

• 1:17:45David Hoffman?

  Fine, whatever.

• 1:17:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  More people in crypto.

• 1:17:47David Hoffman?

  Goldman Sachs has done worse things.

• 1:17:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is a little bit of drama.

• 1:17:51David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  You know, well, let's talk about what this drama is. So Laura Shin released a book that you have. I'm not sure if you've read it yet, David. It's a pretty thick book.

• 1:18:00David Hoffman?

  No.

• 1:18:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  But we've seen a lot of, like, a couple of weeks ago, we talked about the DAO hacker identity reveal. There's some other things Laura Shin uncovered and revealed in this book. Why don't you talk about the spat between Charles Hoskinson and Laura Shin on Twitter?

• 1:18:16David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so this got started off by somebody tweeting out, "Reading Laura Shin's book, it's great to discover Charles's early years portrayed on there." Hashtag crypto. And then Charles responds, "A great work of fiction. Tough market to beat George R.R. Martin and Tolkien, but we wish her well." Basically saying that everything in Laura Shin's book is a fabrication fantasy. And so Laura Shin comes in, taking the opportunity to probably promote her book, says, "Hi, Charles. Speaking of fiction, do you want to address the discrepancies between your claims of dropping out of a PhD program and the school's assertions that you were enrolled as an undergraduate?" Yeah, so Charles has said that like, that he never got his PhD, but he was a PhD student for a while before he dropped out, probably to go do cryptocurrency stuff.

• 1:19:00David Hoffman?

  And then the school allegedly never even had the PhD program that Charles claims that he was a part of. And, and, you know, so that's one thing, like, a lot of people, a lot of deep Ethereum people will kind of know Charles is like a, what's the word for a chronic liar? He's a chronic liar, of course. But then. Who had a really good take? It was Eric Wall had a really good take that was retweeting Laura Shin's comments and said something that I think we're all thinking. And Eric Wall says, "If you think about a person who so easily fabricates the truth about what such a simple thing as being a PhD student, not even having a PhD, but being once a PhD student is what he lied about, don't you think that maybe, just maybe, the

• 1:19:45David Hoffman?

  claimed technical impressiveness of Cardano is just a tad bit exaggerated?" I think this is a great microcosm of my concerns about the Cardano ecosystem at large. It's kind of a cult of personality, as we were just discussing, project around Charles Hoskinson, who appears to be a chronic liar. And that, Ryan, is my spicy takes for the week.

• 1:20:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  There you go. You get one per week, and one spicy take in per week. That was it. Do you know, is this the part of the market cycle where we like call out people who have been maybe deceptive?

• 1:20:15David Hoffman?

  Yes.

• 1:20:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like when price goes down, everyone's like, oh.

• 1:20:18David Hoffman?

  Part of the market cycle.

• 1:20:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  We see, again, it's classic. We already saw it. We saw it in 2008 as well. And it seems like these cults of personalities are, they can't persist during bear market cycles, at least not in the same way they have during bull market cycles. So that's another turning of the wheel, I suppose. More indication that it's B season. There was also an ENS vote that ended Sunday. David, can you talk a little bit about that and the interesting graph accompanying it?

• 1:20:48David Hoffman?

  Yeah, this is, I think, coming to closure with a lot of the ENS drama that was, happened about a month ago. Basically, to speedrun that drama, one of the founders of ENS, Brantley, very Catholic, tweeted anti-homosexual things, anti-LGBTQ things, got onto Twitter Spaces, did not back down from it, caused a bunch of drama in the crypto Twitter sphere. And then there was a movement to remove Brantley as a delegate towards ENS. And ENS, it's a DAO with delegate governance. And what we are looking at is the vote as to whether we should remove Brantley from the ENS DAO delegation. And really, that's the backstory. But really, what we want to

• 1:21:30David Hoffman?

  Talk about here is it's actually really cool to see the transparent nature of how and which delegates voted for what and how big they are. And so you get to see all of the delegates for ENS and how they voted. So it's basically like representative democracy and you get to see your representative. And so you as an ENS holder, you could vote for however you see fit if you want to individually vote directly. Or you could just like delegate your ENS to a delegate such as coinbase. Eith Coinbase is a delegate rainbow wall. Eith is a delegate Nick dot Eith Nick Johnson. Griff. Eith, which is Griff Griff Green. I'm pretty sure Simona. Eith, which is Simona pop.

• 1:22:08David Hoffman?

  You get to see how your delegates voted and you also get to see the weight on which they voted with with which is how much delegate they delegate weight that they have behind it. So as of the end of this vote, Brantley was the the against side one, which was tipped over by Brantley himself, which is something to consider. Which will actually retain Brantley as part of the ENS delegation system. But the point is the transparency.

• 1:22:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  And yeah, the transparency and I guess governance system in action, particularly delegated governance. And this reminds me of you said representative democracy also reminds me of sort of corporate proxy vote, basically, because everything's weighted by by allocation of capital and how much capital you have and who you're delegating to. But this is a Dow coming to a decision on something. And all of the delegates weighing in. So I think it's healthy from that perspective and a good thing for governance to see. I just love the transparent breakdown as well. All right, David takes time. You ready to talk about the takes of the week?

• 1:23:06David Hoffman?

  Let's do it.

• 1:23:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, we will do it in just a second. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible.

• 1:23:12David Hoffman?

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• 1:24:38David Hoffman?

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• 1:25:23David Hoffman?

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• 1:25:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, guys, we are back with the takes of the week. Here's a first take from David Hoffman himself. What's the take, David?

• 1:25:46David Hoffman?

  I saw somebody tweeted out, "NFTs, the quickest way to annoy everyone in your life." Which is a funny joke, but this is exactly what they said about blockchain back in 2018. At the end of the ICO mania, after everyone was just done hearing about crypto and ICOs and decentralization, people were like, "Blockchain, it's the newest way to annoy your families, the newest way to indicate that you're a virgin." Like, the word blockchain was just like not in vogue in 2018. And, you know, that we just heard that all the way down, like blockchain, super annoying. And now I just, I just saw this tweet, it said, "NFTs, the quickest way to annoy everyone in your life." And I'm like, "Hmm, I've heard this before." And so I'm just reminding people that this is what people said at the end of the ICO mania,

• 1:26:31David Hoffman?

  which is a little bit of, again, a bear market hat, but also pointing to the fundamentals that everyone that talks about how blockchain was annoying, probably forgot to buy stuff during the bear market and forgot to get, forgot to make life-changing money in the next coming bull market. So, take note.

• 1:26:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  David is saying, "There is some market opportunity coming your way, some buying opportunity coming your way." What's his take? Maybe, maybe I'll read it. This is a, the parent tweet was from somebody who said, "Three Arrows Capital holds AVAX, that's Avalanche token, Jump holds Terra, SAM, that's SBF from FTX, holds Solana, Sequoia holds Polygon, Paradigm holds Cosmos, Institutions hold Near, Sailor holds Bitcoin, only Tetranoat holds ETH." Laugh out loud. And you are thinking ETH will go to 20K during proof of stake? Kind of making fun of the fact that

• 1:27:26David Hoffman?

  No one holds ETH?

• 1:27:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  No big institutions, no VCs, no, no brands, no mega whales, none of the like, big money is an advocate for ETH. They all hold these alternative coins. DC Investor tweets on top of this and says, "They may not know it, and they may not have meant it this way, but this is exactly the ETH bullish thesis. Run it back, December 2018 style." Look, somebody else recalling the bear market 2018. What is DC saying in this parent tweet?

• 1:27:59David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so he's saying this parent tweet, the Chichi, whoever, says like, all these funds hold all these tokens and they're not ETH. So why would you ever think that ETH is gonna run? DC is saying like, yes, they don't hold ETH. That means that they still have to buy it because they don't have any of it. And so all of the size of these funds, when ETH goes to the merge and people realize that fundamentals matter and all these other chains are just speculation against what they hope could potentially be an Ethereum killer. Once they realize it's not, they all have to hold ETH. Am I actually gonna go even further on this? Not only are they not holding ETH, but these are, this parent tweet, which they thought was a dunk on ETH, it's actually the complete inverse. It's actually a dunk on all the other tokens.

• 1:28:42David Hoffman?

  Do you want Three Arrows Capital to be holding your token as we go into a bear market? Because then that means they're just gonna dump it. So I would be very nervous as an Avalanche holder that Three Arrows Capital holds is bag holding a bunch of AVAX tokens. And basically, this tweet is just listing off all of the institutions that are probably a little bit underwater to some degree with all of their investments. And so if you have investments and we're going into a down market, you're gonna sell them. Like, you're not, I mean, maybe they're gonna buy more, but like, you don't want, in my opinion, Three Arrows Capital to be holding your asset of choice during times of bearishness.

• 1:29:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh my god, definitely not. I don't-

• 1:29:23David Hoffman?

  They are gonna dump on you. They are not, they are not settlers, okay? These are traders. These are mercenaries. They are going to do whatever is in the financial best interest, obviously. They're not gonna hold through a brutal bear winter. They're gonna switch over to USDC or stable coins, or maybe Bitcoin and ETH in a bear market. Definitely not the holders of Last Resort that I would want on my team during the bear market. And DC recalled December 2018, this is sort of what happened in December 18. Like, if this is a B market, not saying it is, if it is a B market, though, everything's gonna dump, but some things are gonna mega dump. Like, dump harder-

• 1:30:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  Then you can even imagine, do you remember some assets went down 99%? Most never recovered. Okay. So like, what are you holding? Good time to take an objective look at your portfolio and see what other people are holding. What, what holding camp do you want to be in is the question if this is a B market. Okay. Lynn Alden had a take to the difference between assets that are somebody else's liability and assets that are nobody's liability probably got a lot clearer to people in recent weeks. What she, what's Lynn saying here?

• 1:30:34David Hoffman?

  Yeah. So there's, there's assets like debt or assets that are conditional on the actions of somebody else for them to be realized. And then there's assets like Bitcoin or Ether or gold that are no one's liability. If you have it, you have it. And you have a lot more security in these assets. And during times of insecurity, during times of chaos, during times of war, having assets that are no one's liability is really, really useful.

• 1:30:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  During times of sanction as well. You definitely want those. See what the real assets are, what the bearer instruments are. What's this take from Nick Carter? He wrote an article and this is a quote from it. Could you read it out?

• 1:31:09David Hoffman?

  Yeah. Nick Carter says, while seizing Afghan or Russian reserves may feel righteous and just the immediate effect of such actions is to completely undermine the credibility of dollar debt as an international savings device, more or less saying, hey, do you store your value in dollars because you think the dollars are a safe haven? Well, we can also just rug pull you because of how you save them in dollars. This is an asset that is somebody else's liability. If you hold dollars, you are, maybe it's a good store of value because you trust the federal government more than any other federal or Federal Reserve out there, but they can also freeze your money. And so anytime we sanction people, regardless of whether you consider these sanctions to be good sanctions, it's undermining the value of dollars because they can be snagged from you.

• 1:31:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, exactly. And I think what Nick is saying here is just let's all just acknowledge the trade off here. It might still be the right thing to do. It might still be the thing you want to do, the thing you feel like you should do. But let's acknowledge the trade off is the US's reserve currency status, because what are other countries going to want to hold now that they realize the Western financial apparatus can just like freeze their dollars on a whim? Is it going to be dollars? Is it going to be USDC? Or are they going to look to alternatives? And I think the answer is pretty obvious. They're going to look to alternatives. So, cause and effect, right? There is going to be a reaction to this sort of thing. It's not, there's no free lunch in the sanctions world.

• 1:32:35David Hoffman?

  Yeah, that's exactly right.

• 1:32:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, so let's get to this, David. What are you excited about this week?

• 1:32:39David Hoffman?

  I mean, listeners already know, like, there's, I don't see a lot to be excited about, like,

• 1:32:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  What?

• 1:32:45David Hoffman?

  I mean, we can, we can talk about the usuals, we can talk about the merge, blah, blah, blah. There was, at the beginning of this bull market, I put a line into Market Monday that stuck in my head where the, the bull markets are when society comes and they remember crypto is a thing, and then they reprice everything. And then some people stick around, but most people leave, and then the bear market happens again. That's what I'm seeing. I'm seeing the attention leaving the space, people caring less about NFTs, these JPGs are no longer interesting, they're just JPGs now. DeFi tokens never really got traction again post DeFi summer. L1, alternative L1s are like falling through, through the floor. Meanwhile, like, the only real attention that crypto has on it right

• 1:33:29David Hoffman?

  now is with sanctions and regulation, which are not exciting. Like crypto bull markets happen during exciting times. And like, what is there to be excited about? Like, I'm excited about the merge, I'm excited about layer twos, but like, those things don't scale out in the same way that, that NFTs did with culture and like, social dynamics. And so like, I'm looking at the horizon, being like, what left does the crypto industry have in its quiver? How many arrows does it have left in its quiver to get people excited about it? And I'm just not seeing very many.

• 1:34:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  So do you think we're entering at the least, like, maybe a quiet, a quiet period? If it's not a bearish period, it's definitely going to be another B, which is a building period of time.

• 1:34:12David Hoffman?

  I was gonna say that. Yeah, we're entering the quiet building periods, which, I mean, kind of, kind of are loosely synonymous with bear markets. Because it's easier to build during bear markets, but like, I just, I just see all the same things that we saw post 2018, like in, in the 2022 version.

• 1:34:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  There you go, guys. That's David's take. Tune in next week to see whether we get, uh, bull market David back, or whether it's gonna be, not bearish David, builder David.

• 1:34:40David Hoffman?

  Or ETH price goes past like $3,000 and I'm just like, super, oh, I'm bullish again. Like, I was totally wrong.

• 1:34:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  The super cycle's right.

• 1:34:46David Hoffman?

  Super cycle. All right, Ryan, what are you excited about?

• 1:34:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  I'm excited about the executive order, just because it's not super dumb. I thought it'd be, I thought it'd be super dumb. Like, to be honest, I thought that they would screw it up. It's, um, it's reasonably measured. It's keeping America in the game, and I care about that because, look, I, I live in the US and I have, uh, hopes for the US. Uh, to preserve, you know, some, uh, to, to reject state surveillance, to reject the half-assed authoritarianism that's been trending towards in recent years, to do something that a lot of other countries around the world, uh, aren't doing. Look, I mean, uh, the US shouldn't try to compete with countries on authoritarianism. That's a bad path. It's never gonna win. It's just not authoritarian enough to actually do a good job at it, right?

• 1:35:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  So what is the path for the US?

• 1:35:36David Hoffman?

  A hilarious take.

• 1:35:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  I, I mean, it's true. It's just like, it's ju, you know, it's just gonna do a half-assed job. So why do that? Why not, why not double down on your core competency and like, the founding narrative of the country, which is like freedom, right? That, like, that's the true narrative that a, a lot of people in the US can actually get behind. Strong property rights, freedom, uh, civil liberties, these are the things that the constitution embodied and the things I would argue that, that made the US actually a, a country worth living in and worth immigrating to. And, uh, I think it can still preserve these things if it does things like embrace crypto technology. I just saw a glimmer of hope. This week in the executive order that not the least that they not that they were going to embrace it, but at least they weren't going to quash it all in one fell swoop.

• 1:36:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  So that's what's exciting to me this week, and I never thought I'd be saying a executive order is is an exciting thing for crypto. But hey, that's what we're working with during the B market. We'll take anything we can get.

• 1:36:35David Hoffman?

  It's a complete inversion right now. NFTs are lame. DeFi is dead. But hey, regulation, super sick.

• 1:36:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it's super sick regulation. All right, guys, that's, that's it. That's the take of the week. Let's get to the last thing, David, which is, so what's the meme of the week this week?

• 1:36:52David Hoffman?

  Ah, the meme of the week is just watching the, a video of people watching the Shell gas price, just click upwards, $4.07, $4.08. You can watch it go up in real time.

• 1:37:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  How depressing is that?

• 1:37:03David Hoffman?

  People with their hands on their hips, just like watching gas go up in price.

• 1:37:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's crazy. It's sad. Yeah, gas prices are insane this week, but I don't know.

• 1:37:14David Hoffman?

  Because it's a bear market.

• 1:37:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  There you go. Guys, sorry for all the B market talk, but you know, we got to say what's on our mind in the rollups. That's what we do every week. But of course, none of this has been financial advice. We don't know what type of B market it is. That's for, that's for you to make the decision. But we do know that Bitcoin is risky, ETH is risky, DeFi is risky. We've been telling you all along, you could lose what you put in.

• 1:37:38David Hoffman?

  They're less risky in bear markets.

• 1:37:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  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.

• 1:37:49David Hoffman?

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

• 1:38:32David Hoffman?

  we summarize the week in crypto and other fantastic content. Thanks, everyone, for watching and being on the journey as we build out the Bankless nation.