ROLLUP: SHIB | WorldCoin | Twitter, Reddit, Disney NFT Platform | Facebook Meta

4th Week of October, 2021 ***** 📣 POOLTOGETHER | DEFI LOTTERY https://bankless.cc/PoolTogether ***** BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum 🍵 MATCHA | DECENTRALIZED EXCHANGE AGGREGATOR https://bankless.cc/Matcha 🔐 LEDGER | SECURE YOUR ASSETS https://bankless.cc/Ledger 🧙‍♀️ ALCHEMIX | SELF-PAYING LOANS http://bankless.cc/Alchemix ------ Topics Covered: 0:00 Intro DAOpunks: https://twitter.com/DAOpunksNFT/status/1452700209029472258 7:00 MARKETS 7:20 BTC Price 7:54 ETH Price 8:50 ETH/BTC Ratio 10:25 DeFi Action 15:30 Uniswap Volume https://twitter.com/Uniswap/status/1452673839654113291?s=20 16:54 Polygon Transactions https://twitter.com/MihailoBjelic/status/1452797571227918342 18:47 8m ETH Staked https://launchpad.ethereum.org/en/ 19:44 Ethereum Fees https://twitter.com/drakefjustin/status/1392556085941350400?s=20 25:00 RELEASES 26:00 GMI Index https://twitter.com/banklessDAO/status/1453055618948939784?s=20 28:07 Across Protocol https://twitter.com/AcrossProtocol/status/1452645990750695433 28:42 Argent to Starknet https://twitter.com/StarkWareLtd/status/1452656894724747265 30:08 XDEFI Token https://xdefi-io.medium.com/xdefi-wallet-token-economics-3378187df2b4q322 31:18 Metamask https://twitter.com/MetaMask/status/1453089090908262404?s=20 32:22 Why Optimism? https://twitter.com/justinjmoses/status/1453389396963700737?s=20 34:37 Ultra Scalable Ethereum https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/ultra-scalable-ethereum 38:38 Parallel https://twitter.com/techcrunch/status/1451216968724406272?s=21 39:42 Meta4 Capital https://twitter.com/aarontcadena/status/1451417795556638720?s=21 41:24 Alchemy https://twitter.com/fintechfrank/status/1453708525067251713?s=20 42:58 Hyy.pe https://medium.com/hyype/hyy-pe-raises-2-mn-in-a-funding-round-to-build-a-social-storytelling-platform-b25dd9960bbc 45:08 CoinList https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/122005/coinlist-new-funding-100-million-valuation-1-5-billion 46:15 Jobs https://pallet.xyz/list/bankless/jobs 48:00 NEWS 48:13 Disney NFTs https://www.ledgerinsights.com/disney-to-launch-nft-digital-collectibles-with-veve/ 52:00 SHIB https://twitter.com/MorningBrew/status/1453445533754855433 59:52 WorldCoin https://twitter.com/sama/status/1451203161029427208?s=20 1:06:47 Goldman Likes DeFi https://blockworks.co/goldman-sachs-defi-has-its-advantages-over-traditional-finance/?oly_enc_id=9918E2523689A0T 1:07:30 Hacks Polygon: https://decrypt.co/83997/polygon-dodges-850m-hack-pays-record-2m-bounty Cream: https://thedefiant.io/cream-finance-third-largest-exploit/ Secure Apps: https://twitter.com/cyounessi1/status/1453377961198071816 1:13:57 Reddit NFT Platform https://www.thestreet.com/crypto/defi/reddit-is-building-an-nft-platform 1:15:54 Twitter NFTs https://twitter.com/wongmjane/status/1452373149689909248?s=20 1:17:20 Wordpress x Zora https://twitter.com/nnnnicholas/status/1453502239218225152?s=20 1:18:02 Photoshop NFTs https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/26/22745506/adobe-nft-art-theft-content-credentials-opensea-rarible-photoshop 1:18:55 Economist Cover https://decrypt.co/84508/economist-defi-rabbit-hole-nft-sells-419k-ethereum 1:19:56 Firefighters Pension https://www.coindesk.com/business/2021/10/21/houston-firefighters-pension-fund-makes-bitcoin-ether-purchase/ 1:20:55 El Salvador Buys BTC https://cointelegraph.com/news/el-salvador-buys-a-smokin-hot-420-more-bitcoin 1:21:16 Coinbase Lobbying https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/121687/coinbase-spent-nearly-800k-on-lobbying-in-2021s-third-quarter-as-part-of-influence-revamp 1:22:32 Terra vs SEC https://www.scribd.com/document/534537134/Terraform-v-SEC 1:24:38 Mastercard 1:25:25 Regulation Rumors https://twitter.com/Dogetoshi/status/1452750423912296448?s=20 1:27:11 Eric Peters https://blockworks.co/one-river-ceo-eric-peters-crypto-is-most-interesting-macro-opportunity-and-investment/ 1:28:11 Polymarket Investigation https://twitter.com/CoinDesk/status/1451963547748028424?s=20 1:31:00 TAKES 1:31:30 Positive Feedback Loop https://twitter.com/TrustlessState/status/1453483897778421767?s=20 1:35:17 Unconstitutional Fed https://twitter.com/ronpaul/status/1451940261400096775?s=21 1:37:13 Hyperinflation https://twitter.com/jack/status/1451733913961783299?s=20 1:40:05 Why Fiat Worked https://twitter.com/RyanSAdams/status/1452703301846413312?s=20 1:43:39 Unrealized Gains Tax https://twitter.com/matthuang/status/1452477175655919616?s=21 1:47:02 Facebook Whistleblower https://twitter.com/Jessicalessin/status/1452441900808433667?s=20 1:48:32 Owning NFTs https://twitter.com/3LAU/status/1452774836153905155?s=20 1:48:55 What David’s Excited About 1:50:20 What Ryan’s Excited About 1:55:12 MEME of the Week https://twitter.com/banklesshq/status/1452263812183347201?s=21 ----- Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/bankless-disclosures

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

• 0:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  Hey guys, happy 4th week of October. This is the Halloween edition of your weekly rollup. David, how you doing? It's dark over there, I can't see you right now.

• 0:16David Hoffman?

  Yeah, the viewers on YouTube are confused as to what's going on and why there's a blank screen in front of them. Should we do it?

• 0:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is not a mistake, right?

• 0:22David Hoffman?

  No, this is not a mistake.

• 0:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, tell them what we're about to tee up. Okay, so...

• 0:26David Hoffman?

  Well, I've got my costume on.

• 0:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  A costume? We were supposed to wear costumes?

• 0:29David Hoffman?

  Yeah, we're supposed to wear costumes. You forgot your costume?

• 0:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, no dude. So, I knew this. I knew you were planning something big, okay? Because when I tweeted you and asked about the rollup agenda, you tweeted me this picture of you and somebody who was like in your apartment applying makeup to your face. So, I have no idea what I'm about to see, but here's my guess, David. I think that I'm going to see you as a rendition of your punk, okay? That's like my best guess. I feel like all the hints you've been dropping over the past few weeks about what you're planning to do.

• 1:01David Hoffman?

  I've been pretty explicit about it.

• 1:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, maybe you've been explicit. But you have no idea whether I even dressed up. You don't know whether I've been just playing you this whole time? You don't know whether you're gonna see Crypto Punk on the other side?

• 1:13David Hoffman?

  I think you bought a $15 Amazon Ninja Turtles costume, which you are currently wearing.

• 1:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  What the hell? Does that sound like me?

• 1:23David Hoffman?

  Yes.

• 1:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  Does that sound like something I would do? You're saying I would cheap out on like my NFT? I would never do that. Premium NFTs, all the way. So, we're gonna do this reveal. We're gonna do this live. I've never seen David.

• 1:34David Hoffman?

  I haven't seen Ryan.

• 1:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay.

• 1:36David Hoffman?

  Alright.

• 1:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Alright, ready?

• 1:38David Hoffman?

  3, 2...

• 1:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  I'm taking off the lens cap.

• 1:40David Hoffman?

  1, here we go.

• 1:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh my god! Oh my god, David!

• 1:47David Hoffman?

  Oh my, that's a little bit more than $15.

• 1:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, tell me what I look like, I'll tell you what you look like, okay?

• 1:52David Hoffman?

  Yeah, you look like a ninja...

• 1:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, wait, wait, wait! It's not done.

• 1:58David Hoffman?

  You bought your first ever cigarette to have that right now, didn't you?

• 2:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  How'd you know, dude? I went to the gas station this morning and I'm like giving a pack of cigarettes and they're like, "What kind?" I was like, "I don't know."

• 2:10David Hoffman?

  The ones that you smoke.

• 2:13David Hoffman?

  Alright, so you are certainly a ninja turtle. Well, actually, I think you're just a turtle with a blue eye mask on and now you have a cigarette.

• 2:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah? Let me show you what I am. Have you spent time like looking at this? Look.

• 2:28David Hoffman?

  Hey, that's a pretty good costume. That's a pretty good costume. Yeah, it's pretty identical. It's pretty good. You did a good job.

• 2:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh my god, okay. You look like, let me see. I see the colors, you know? You got definitely some whiter face. There's a little bit of a mime, oh god. I can't, sorry, I can't do this with the cigarette. And put the cigarette down.

• 2:50David Hoffman?

  Cigarette's over.

• 2:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  A little bit of a mime vibe. No, no dude, I see, okay, I see the smile now. I see the smile going down, okay, I see the pixelation. I love the hat. This is good, David. It's good, man.

• 3:02David Hoffman?

  It's too bad.

• 3:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Good.

• 3:03David Hoffman?

  Shout out to Haley for putting on makeup on me for my first time ever. This is my first time ever wearing makeup. I swear to god.

• 3:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's awesome, man. So are you gonna do this again, like for actual Halloween? Or is this just for the show? Is this just special for today?

• 3:16David Hoffman?

  Yeah, no, I gotta do it tomorrow too. I'm doing a Layer Zero with Griff Green after this. And so I have to like take it off or else he's just gonna be...

• 3:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  You won't care, man. Just do it. All day, okay? You are your punk today. I am my turtle NFT, my tiny turtle NFT, and that's just how it is. It's Halloween.

• 3:33David Hoffman?

  They were doing a window washing in my apartment, so they had to come into my apartment. So I just opened up my door to like talk to the facilities people and I just was wearing this, my Crypto Punk on my face.

• 3:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh my god. Alright then, well, uh, let's dive in then. This is gonna be the same roll up, right? All of the quality you've come to expect, except David and I are NFTs today. So like, we're taking this extremely seriously.

• 3:53David Hoffman?

  It's the most serious, yeah. Why would we joke about crypto? It's the most serious thing on the planet.

• 3:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  I can't tell if you're smiling anymore with this makeup on.

• 4:01David Hoffman?

  I'm always smiling. I'm always smiling.

• 4:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Everything's funny today. Alright, guys, uh, first thing before... Actually, what are we gonna cover today, David? I think there's three things we gotta cover. First is Shib. What is going on with his dog coin?

• 4:12David Hoffman?

  Absolutely insane.

• 4:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's going nuts. All right? That's gonna be a big news item. Also, Disney NFTs are coming? Question mark? Disney finally getting in the NFT game? I feel like somebody tweeted this out. I might have tweeted this out a month ago, like, Disney, where's your NFT game? They have so much IP, they're getting in.

• 4:28David Hoffman?

  They listened.

• 4:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  WorldCoin. What is this? Yeah, they listened, of course. WorldCoin, what is this thing? It's a new monetary system. You actually, you know, plug your eye into an orb and get coins? Is that how this works? We're gonna dive into all three of those news topics. Of course, guys, we try to cram as much of crypto as we can. The week in crypto in your brain in approximately 90 minutes. Sometimes we go a little bit over. We're not always successful with that. But before we begin, gotta give a shout out to our friends and sponsors at Pull Together, because they have released something pretty awesome that the bankless community should know about. And that is V4 of the Pull Together pools. This is a no-loss lottery. So it has lottery in the word, because you can actually win stuff every week. They're giving out a million dollars in prize.

• 5:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  But the no-loss piece makes this a bit more like a savings account. So you put savings in, you can't actually lose. You have an opportunity to win every single week. You win prizes and effectively you keep your principal. Pretty awesome. What else is special about version 4, David?

• 5:29David Hoffman?

  The low gas fees on Polygon are an absolute treat. And the best thing about V4 is that all of these pools that are spread across all over Ethereum are now linked together. And so they're all, one gigantic pool, or at least a fewer number of pools. I think just four now. And so you can actually enter these pools from different parts of Ethereum. And so if you don't like gas fees, because who does? You can just go to Polygon and enter in the pool there.

• 5:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, that's awesome. Thanks to Pull Together for letting the bankless community know about that. Cigarettes gotta go out of my mouth again. Okay, DowPunks as well. This is a project that's kind of a spinoff from Bankless Dow. They're doing some minting. That's coming, that's starting tomorrow. I believe actually today and tomorrow, depending on if you got in the pre-mint or not. I think these are really cool, David. What's going on here with Dow?

• 6:17David Hoffman?

  Yeah, it's a first NFT project that is associated directly with a DAO. As we know, Bankless DAO is actually one of the biggest DAOs out there. And there's only 1,111 DAO punks as well, and they're pretty dope. They're the most realistic looking versions of like profile picture NFTs that I've ever seen. They're actually humans wearing attire, wearing crypto swag. And so if you are playing in the NFT profile picture NFT games, maybe DAO punks might be for you. I know I'm gonna get one.

• 6:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Not only that, David, you know, you actually get a shirt. So it's gonna be like whatever NFT you mint, you get a shirt printout of the NFT as well. It's pretty awesome. It's like a tie into the real world too.

• 6:56David Hoffman?

  I mean, people know that I like to have the physical relationships with my NFTs. So I'm very, very into that.

• 7:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think today proved that if anyone doubted, David really likes the physical relationship of his. He's becoming his NFT. So anyway.

• 7:11David Hoffman?

  I am my punk. My punk is me.

• 7:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think 1,111 or something they are minting. So if you're interested, go check that out as well. All right, man, let's get to the markets. What is Bitcoin telling us this week? We hire, we lower, what are we looking at?

• 7:25David Hoffman?

  Well, we ended last week at the high, the new all time high last week. And so it's actually been a down week for Bitcoin, even though it's crazy that we are down 7% on the week in Bitcoin. And we are still above $60,000. That is just fantastic. We started the week at $63,000, hit a low of $58,500. The high of the week was $64,000 and we are currently at $61,000.

• 7:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  There you go. Still, still good for Bitcoin, you know, even though a down week, but it's, it's been a healthy month. That's for sure. How about Ether? Price of Ether, what are we looking at?

• 7:57David Hoffman?

  Ether up 1% on the week, started the week at $4,100, hit a low of $3,950, hit a high of $4,300. And we are currently clocking in at $4,220, again, up roughly 1% on the week.

• 8:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's cool, man. I thought we were gonna get rugged on, uh, on, uh, what was this, uh, Wednesday? Is like, did you see that massive liquidation?

• 8:17David Hoffman?

  Yeah, what, oh, yeah, yeah, there was a big-

• 8:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  Was it on Binance?

• 8:20David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 8:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  FTX or something? Somebody got liquidated for like a hundred and thirty million dollars worth of ETH.

• 8:25David Hoffman?

  Yeah, the price of Ether on Binance, I think, dropped to like three hundred dollars inside of a single candle and then popped right back up, caused a bunch of liquidations. Uh, I think people would probably be pissed off at that because people got liquidated before they were actually supposed to.

• 8:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I saw one like monster wreckage, uh, liquidation I've never seen, like a hundred and thirty million dollars or something. Anyway, uh, good to clear out some of that leverage, that foliage and continue the, the bull run. That's where I think we're headed, David, continuing the bull run in this corner. Okay, what's the ratio looking like? Because that's an interesting indicator as well of bull run spirits?

• 8:56David Hoffman?

  Yeah, again, ever since the Bitcoin ETF, the Bitcoin Ether ratio has been up in Ether's favor. So we're up to point zero six nine on the, uh, this week. I think we ended last week at point zero six four. Uh, so still, again, still in that same range that we've been in ever since May. But again, also painting higher lows with Ether versus Bitcoin, uh, having a really strong performance there.

• 9:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Is that counterintuitive to you? Would you think that like Bitcoin ETF would, uh, reflect in the ratio and ETH would be down relative to Bitcoin? Because the opposite seems to be happening right now.

• 9:26David Hoffman?

  Yeah, if we want to put on like the trader narrative hats right now, like they're the momentum behind Bitcoin after it got its Bitcoin ETF, like traders piled in because, oh, Bitcoin's getting the ETF, it's gonna pump. Traders pile in, it actually does pump because traders pile in. But then like the buying pressure for Bitcoin after the ETF just didn't come. And so then it fell down below its, its all time high. And then people are starting to, in my mind, people are rotating into Ethereum because like Bitcoin didn't have the energy to sustain itself. But you know what does? Proof of stake is coming, the merge is coming, like all the same reasons that people are bullish on Ethereum. NFTs are eating the world. And so like, I think there's a rotation into Ether right now, coming out of most of the other blue chips, crypto, uh, crypto blue chips.

• 10:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  The equivalent of three halvennings, people have called this the triple halvening, right? Because it's like the equivalent of three Bitcoin halvennings and 90% supply reduction is coming within the next six to nine months. So maybe that's starting to get priced in a little bit. Although I feel like if that was really priced in, we'd already be a whole lot higher. But this is good news, David. I checked this right before we jumped on. And DeFi Pulse Index total locked value in DeFi is still above 100 billion, my friend. Two weeks in a row, first ever time we've had two back-to-back weeks over 100 billion. Pretty exciting to see.

• 10:44David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I've actually, I think DeFi Pulse is actually starting to lag behind with a lot of the integrations of other apps. So there's another website out there called DeFi Llama that other people are using. And according to, and I tweeted out like, hey, a billion dollars locked in DeFi, like, when we cross 1 billion dollars locked in DeFi, all of crypto tip Twitter absolutely blew up. When we crossed 100 billion dollars in DeFi, like, it was just dead silent. And I think it's actually just because like, DeFi Pulse is one way to count locked in DeFi. If you go to DeFi Llama, we're actually already at like 170 billion dollars, or excuse me, 240 billion dollars.

• 11:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  It depends what you count, right? It's like, I actually appreciate DeFi Pulse, and I'm glad we're like, using it since the beginning, because it's like a standard metric, right? Because like, I don't know what DeFi Llama counts, or these other TLV. But like, if they're counting stuff that's in Binance, I don't know that I'd count that, right? It's like, why would you count that? I mean, like, do we count all of the, you know, liquidity that's custodied on Binance itself, or on Coinbase, or like on Gemini? I mean, so there's, again, what's the definition of DeFi? So at least with DeFi Pulse, it's consistent. But like, I take your point. I'm not sure that all the projects are reflected here. We might be above this. But I actually appreciate that DeFi Pulse is a bit more

• 12:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  rigorous than than some other sites, myself. But I guess it's debatable. All right, let's talk about the DeFi Pulse Index, which is a measure of the value of blue chip DeFi tokens. There's a whole bunch of good DeFi blue chip tokens inside of this thing. What are we looking at on the week?

• 12:19David Hoffman?

  Week at $342, hit a low of $324, hit a high of $380, and we are currently at $344. Overall, up just under 1% on the week, so mostly flat. I will actually extrapolate the same exact thing I just said about DeFi Pulse and Total Value Locked. DPI as an index for DeFi, it's actually missing a lot of like the newer tokens, like the Rari token, the Om token, the Tok token.

• 12:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  Talk about that, aren't we? Talk about that in releases a little bit. Yeah, I think there's some solutions coming down the pipe for that.

• 12:49David Hoffman?

  100%. Yeah, but and then also like I will say that my point 01 or my point 13 bottom call for DPI versus ETH, I think it would have been sustained had DPI had Om and Tok and all these other like newer tokens. So like, I will say that I think I think I could, you know, eke out a victory here.

• 13:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  David's gonna go back in time and retrofit the data and see if he was right, using the right data, of course. But let's look at this. At least it's consistent over time. So DPI to ETH, the index, down again on the week. Where are we hanging now?

• 13:22David Hoffman?

  Oh, it's on that same linear, it's the same rate of downwards that has been on the weekly roll up for the last like four months. We are down on the week. It's down. It's at point 082. It's just down.

• 13:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's just like, there's this narrative now that DeFi can't really compete with ETH because ETH is like sucking in all of the value ultrasound ETH. And this is a year ago at this time, it was the exact opposite, interestingly enough. Everyone said ETH was dead and like DeFi is the breakout application, but ETH as an asset would not accrue value. It's funny how that switched. The exact opposite 12 months later.

• 13:55David Hoffman?

  And I think I said this last time, but I'll reiterate it. We're used to seeing indexes in the stock market, ETFs, like just go up, up, up against the dollar. And like the take is that, well, that's actually just a dollar going down in value, not the ETF going up in value.

• 14:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  That is a take, yeah.

• 14:08David Hoffman?

  The take here is that like, well, we have ultrasound money that's supposed to get more scarce as the economy grows. And so where like legacy dollar ETFs go up in price because the dollar's going down, DeFi indexes go down in ETH price because ETH is going up. I think that makes a ton of sense.

• 14:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's the thing that totally screws with your mind. We talked about this a little bit last roll up is like, it all depends on what you denominate things in, doesn't it? Like, if you're denominating in dollars, it's very different than denominating in Ether, denominating in Bitcoin, or even denominating in gold. And when you start to change the denomination of your net worth, your wealth, it totally flips things on its head because, yeah. I mean, are you actually making money if dollars are just going up? Not necessarily. Anyway, okay, let's talk about the bed index, which is a third, a third, a third, Bitcoin, ETH, and DPI, all three of those smushed together. How are we looking at on the week?

• 15:05David Hoffman?

  Yeah, started the week at 172, hit a low of 157, hit a high of 180, and currently clocking in at 172. Again, up a little bit under 1% on the week, so flat.

• 15:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is why I like this index, because it's like, it's like, kind of the...

• 15:20David Hoffman?

  So balanced, yeah.

• 15:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's the turtle of indexes, you know? Just slow and steady wins the race, my friend. All right? And I mean that in the best of ways, obviously.

• 15:31David Hoffman?

  Of course you do.

• 15:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  Of course. Look, huge milestone for Uniswap. We're talking about numbers and markets. Over the weekend, Uniswap Protocol passed 500 billion in total trading volume since its launch in November 2018. Three years, 500 billion dollars. Look at this. Look at this curve, up.

• 15:50David Hoffman?

  It's a great, great chart, great looking chart.

• 15:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  Every time we talk about Uniswap hitting these numbers, and like, it's a 20-person team, you know? Like, three years. I am blown away that no one is talking about this. Like, why isn't CNBC talking about this? Why isn't this the startup of, like, the year? Like, this is an incredible story, how fast this growth has been. It's beyond, like, blitzscale growth, and I still feel like no one's talking about it, so...

• 16:19David Hoffman?

  It's because no one knows how to talk about it.

• 16:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  No one knows how to talk about it? It's not that hard.

• 16:23David Hoffman?

  It's so brainbreaking that, like, legacy media companies are just confused.

• 16:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  God. I mean, why don't they invite people like us on CNBC, David?

• 16:30David Hoffman?

  I don't know.

• 16:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, like, serious people like us.

• 16:33David Hoffman?

  It's very, very legitimate people who take their jobs extremely seriously. Why don't they take it and put us on air?

• 16:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  I don't understand this. CNBC, if you're watching, Dave and I would love to come on your show. We'll even put on ties.

• 16:45David Hoffman?

  As pictured, as pictured. I won't put on a tie.

• 16:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh my god, I'll just put on a tie over my turtle costume.

• 16:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  Another big day for Polygon hitting some milestones. They just crossed a billion transactions processed in the Polygon proof of stake chain. This is just the beginning, says Mihalo, who is one of the co-founders of Polygon. They're just continuing to crush it. Pretty impressive growth there, and he takes.

• 17:10David Hoffman?

  Congrats to Polygon and the Polygon team. I guess it's the market week of cumulative transactions here. 1 billion transactions is a significant amount, and this just illustrates why we need layer twos. Layer twos are required for adoption and usage.

• 17:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  Three comma club. You know, so I watched your Bitcoin debate versus ETH debate. I don't know if people caught that, but it was great for me to sit in the audience, David. Like, I enjoyed it. Like, it was literally popcorn time for me.

• 17:37David Hoffman?

  While you were making your turtle custard?

• 17:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I was stitching it. This is not like I didn't buy this on Amazon or at the store. I stitched this together by hand. Well, I was listening to you debate Bitcoiners. Anyway, one of the points I think one of them made at one point in time was like, well, look at like, look at all of these other chains, like Polygon, for instance. Someone's mentioned Polygon. More transactions than Ethereum at this point. And I wanted to stand up while I was like stitching away on my turtle shell and just be like, that's how it's supposed to work, right?

• 18:09David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 18:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like, more transactions should go on sidechains and layer twos, and Ethereum should be for highly economically dense transactions. It's a settlement layer.

• 18:19David Hoffman?

  It's for settlement. Yeah.

• 18:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right.

• 18:22David Hoffman?

  Which is what they broadcast as what Bitcoin is. Bitcoin is for settlement.

• 18:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  Exactly. Exactly. I don't understand why. Anyway, that was a good episode, guys. By the way, if you can catch that, go catch that.

• 18:32David Hoffman?

  Justin Drake, Team Ether was me and Justin Drake. Team Bitcoin was Dennis Porter and Muneeb Ali.

• 18:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, absolutely. And it even matched because they had like one tech guy, one money economics guy on both sides. I thought it was an even match. It was a lot of fun. Anyway, all right, we just passed, we just passed 8 million ETH staked.

• 18:51David Hoffman?

  8 million ETH staked a quarter million validators staking on the beacon chain. Ethereum developers have talked about how they want to see a minimum of 10 million Ether staked to the beacon chain in order to consider Ethereum secure. And we are approaching 10 million Ether, and we haven't even merged yet. That 10 million ETH number is for after the merge, not before. And we are already getting very, very close to that. So that's pretty cool.

• 19:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  Another memory lane thing, right? Like a year ago, everyone was debating, will we get enough ETH staked?

• 19:22David Hoffman?

  We needed like half a million ETH in order to launch.

• 19:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  Need half a million? Are we gonna make it? I don't know. Here we are, 8.3 billion.

• 19:30David Hoffman?

  8.3 million Ether earning 5.4% in Ether terms. 5.4% in Ether.

• 19:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  250,000 validators. I know you have a take on that later. We'll get to that. Okay, let's talk about this number as well. So this is Justin Drake, your debate companion. "One billion per day in Ethereum fees might not be far-fetched," he says. Okay, that sounds astounding. Only, that's only though, 16 million per day, per shard with 64 shards, okay? A single shard today, which is the main chain today.

• 20:04David Hoffman?

  Ethereum, the one, the one single shard, yep.

• 20:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  The monolithic chain that we have in place already does 100 million per day. So if you just assume 64 shards doing a fraction of that, 16% of that, each of them doing an average of 16 million per day, you get a billion dollars in Ethereum fees per day. Which, would that be like, I guess that would be another 10x?

• 20:29David Hoffman?

  It would be, yeah, just, just one more 10x. And honestly, like, what's a single 10x in crypto? Like, we eat 10xs for breakfast. And like, the whole, the 200-

• 20:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  What would a billion dollars per day mean, David?

• 20:40David Hoffman?

  It would, it would mean, and well, so like we were talking about, there's 8, 8 million, 8.3 million Ether being staked to a quarter million validators on the beacon chain. That means that like 70, 30-ish percent of that 1 billion dollars actually starts going to those validators, actually starting earning the fees. And so the incentive to actually spin up a node just like blossoms because of the fees are going to the validators. So more money, more fees being paid to the validators means more security, which means we spin up more validators, which again, we will revisit, put a pin in that because more validators means cool things happen. We'll, we'll talk about that later.

• 21:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  Also means ultrasound money. Think of how much ETH we're burning in this case.

• 21:20David Hoffman?

  A significant amount, 700 million dollars worth of ETH a day. Oh my god.

• 21:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  I tweeted, I tweeted this out to you because, you know, okay, it's a riff on Justin Drake's tweet, but here's the tweet. "Some of you guys keep forgetting blockchain sell blocks. That's literally the product." Someone responded and said, "Yeah, duh." But like, I feel like this is a simple fact that a lot of people forget.

• 21:43David Hoffman?

  The whole entire industry is based upon this.

• 21:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes, blockchains sell blocks.

• 21:47David Hoffman?

  That's what they do.

• 21:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, that's what they do. That is their product. Apple sells iPhones, okay? Google sells advertising and eyeballs. Facebook, same thing. What do blockchains sell? They sell blocks. That is their revenue. So if you want to look at the healthy, successful products that have product-market fit, look at how much revenue they're driving from the sales of their block space, okay? Ethereum, over the last seven days, do you know what it was, David?

• 22:16David Hoffman?

  Tell me.

• 22:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  10x Bitcoin in terms of the sales volume of its block space. The product that it sells is valued at 10x the value of Bitcoin block space. And nothing else is close. Nothing's close to Bitcoin in terms of the value of its block space, okay? People forget this simple fact, but everything falls out from this. Economic security, ultrasound money falls out from this. Like, the monetary premium that your asset is able to command. It's the proof of product-market fit. It's like, the security, it's the decentral... Everything falls out of the fact that blockchains sell blocks. So, if you want to find the winning blockchain, sell...

• 23:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Find the blockchain that is selling blocks for the highest amount of value. It's that simple.

• 23:05David Hoffman?

  What blockchain has the highest quality product? And you can tell that by seeing how much people are willing to pay for that block space. With the crypto world, we unlocked the power of immutability, where we can make data immutable. And we use this immutable data to make immutable transactions, because what's more valuable than money? So, we have like this, the most valuable kind of data we've ever been able to create, which is immutable data. And the amount of immutable data that we can create is constrained by the system that produces blocks. But blocks sell immutable data. That's the thing a blockchain does. It's like, "Oh, I have this much amount of immutable data for sale." And a blockchain that has that immutable data actually valued by the market

• 23:49David Hoffman?

  will see block space actually consumed. And so, many, many blockchains are out there can sell block space, but it's the quality of the immutability and the utility of that block space that determines the price for it.

• 24:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Absolutely. Take it from the turtle, take it from the punk, folks.

• 24:05David Hoffman?

  We know what we're talking about.

• 24:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Absolutely. Alright guys, we will be back with the hot releases of the week, but before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible.

• 24:15David Hoffman?

  Matcha, everyone's favorite Decks aggregator, has just launched an open beta for gasless trading. So if you're trading more than $5,000 in common ETH and wrapped Bitcoin pairs, then your gas fees on Matcha are free. And that's why you should be using Matcha. Matcha routes your orders across all the various DeFi exchanges on Ethereum, Polygon, Binance Smart Chain, and gives you the best possible price without any trading fees or unnecessary slippage. Matcha has smart order routing that splits your orders across multiple liquidity sources. If Matcha sees that that it gives you better pricing. Trading on Matcha is super easy because it pulls the liquidity for me into a single and easy to use platform, and has even saved me multiple times from accidentally picking

• 24:58David Hoffman?

  the wrong Decks to trade on and getting a bad price. Matcha also allows you to make limit orders on-chain, 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, connect your wallet, and start getting some of the best prices and most liquidity when you trade your crypto assets. Alchemix is one of the coolest new DeFi apps on the scene. It introduces self-paying loans, allowing you to spend and save at the same time. Deposit the DAI stablecoin into the Alchemix vault in order to get an advance on the interest it generates. Borrow up to 50% of the total amount of your deposited DAI in the form of AlUSD stablecoin. Here's

• 25:42David Hoffman?

  the craziest part: the loan pays itself back, and you cannot be liquidated. Unlock your assets' potential in the ultimate DeFi savings account. And brand-new to Alchemix is the ETH vault, where you can deposit ETH into the application, borrow AlETH against your deposits, while having your advance gradually paid back over time. V2 is rapidly approaching, which will allow for even more collateral types, plus a variety of yield strategies to choose from. Harness the power of Alchemix at alchemix.fi. That's A-L-C-H-E-M-I-X dot F-I. Follow Alchemix on Twitter at @AlchemixFI, and join the Discord to keep up to date with Alchemix V2 and to get involved in governance.

• 26:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  Alright guys, we are back with the hot releases of the week. David, let's start here. It's not quite released, but it is in the process of being approved by the Index Co-op. This is maybe an answer to the DeFi Index problem that you were talking about, capturing some of the smaller cap, up and coming DeFi protocols. This is called the Gonna Make It Index, the Growth Index, GMI. And I think some folks from the Bankless DAO proposed that, this along with folks from the Index Co-op. And it's basically a, I guess, lower cap version of the DeFi Pulse Index, with a whole bunch of different, almost like, we've called these before, DeFi 2.0 type protocols. So unpack this for us.

• 27:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  What's in the Gonna Make It Index? When's it going to be released?

• 27:16David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so there are many, actually, teams that we've actually talked to recently that have tokens here. So we talked to Olympus DAO, so the OHM token is in here. We've also recently talked to the TokenMac team, the Toke token's in here. Perpetual Protocol, the Perp token, the DYDX token, Advisor, FLX, and a very large number of others. Varrick, the governance token of Varrick is in here. And these are like the, it's just the newer DeFi tokens. And there's actually a rule in the DPI Index that you have to, these tokens have to have a certain amount of age to them. But that's actually kind of, you know, that's optimized for one thing. But like, a lot of new things, a lot of alpha in crypto, comes from newer stuff. And so they are making the GMI Index to capture the newer things that are about DeFi.

• 27:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I love this. I think it'll be a good complement, right? So you could own the bed and then you can own a portion of something like this. And that's kind of like all you need. Let's talk about this. The ACROSS Protocol has just been announced. I think this is announced for release. This looks to me, David, like another bridge. So this looks a little bit like a hop or a connects. This is ACROSS. What are these guys doing?

• 28:23David Hoffman?

  That's exactly right. ACROSS L2 Protocols for Asset Transfers. This is a huge industry. So just another way to get across your money from L1 to L2, L2 to L2, L2 back to L1, or whatever.

• 28:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Thank you, bridge builders.

• 28:38David Hoffman?

  Yeah, literary bridge builders, yeah.

• 28:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, let's talk about this. Argent is one of my favorite wallets, has been for the user experience, but I think adoption has been slow because of mainnet.

• 28:49David Hoffman?

  Gas fees.

• 28:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  Gas fees, and it's been built on Ethereum mainnet. Now, I don't think they wanted to compromise by going to like a sidechain of any sort, right? Like, Argent has always been like, let's be bankless, a bankless wallet. It looks like they are coming to Starknet, though. This is, of course, a ZK-powered rollup, which is pretty cool. So, this is Argent the wallet, and then Starknet for computation account abstraction. So, Starknet Speed plus Argent Wallet UX equals Rocketship. Pretty cool. I haven't seen anything here yet, but I know this was in the works from Argent, so I'm looking forward to seeing this out in the wild. I don't know when it's coming. Do you have any more details?

• 29:29David Hoffman?

  Yeah, the world of smart contract wallets, of which Argent is, the future is ultimately smart contract wallets. We just have to get there. And the world of smart contract wallets is hamstrung by the L1, by the nature of it being slow and expensive. Smart contract wallets on a Layer 2s are going to be wallets with superpowers. And so, I know we're all frustrated about like the MetaMask UI right now, and just like the lack of wallet infrastructure. The wallets will take over the world with smart contract wallets on L2. You heard it here on Bankless, when Vitalik talked about this on an episode that we did with him. So, if you want to peek into that information more, there's a show available to you on that.

• 30:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  Absolutely. Also, new wallets are coming to the space. This is the Xdi wallet. What's interesting about this...

• 30:12David Hoffman?

  Xdefi, Xdefi.

• 30:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  Xdefi, excuse me, not Xdi. Xdefi wallet. I think we announced this like two weeks ago, or they announced it and we reported on it in the weekly rollup. What's interesting now is it looks like they're going to have a token associated with this wallet. One conclusion that, one implication of this, I think, is this is probably going to cause a token rush in the wallet scene, right? So, when MetaMask token...

• 30:37David Hoffman?

  When MetaMask token.

• 30:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  We saw this with Sushi, right? So, Sushi copied Uniswap and then released a token, and Uniswap didn't plan to release a token, decided it had to. Release a token in order to fight back. Maybe we'll see something similar play out with MetaMask. What are your takes here?

• 30:53David Hoffman?

  Yeah, it's one of those things where I don't actually necessarily think that Xdefi Wallet needs a token, but tokens are like steroids, right? You just inject growth community into your application with a token. And it's one of the reasons why we think everything is going to have a token in the future. You can have your product and then you can also have your product and a token. And that just adds new features and capabilities to it.

• 31:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  Definitely a token arms race going on. I think that's what this will propel. But MetaMask is hearing users as well, particularly Ledger users. I think that the experience between a Ledger hardware wallet, which I love, and MetaMask, which I also love, has not been ideal. And I think a lot of folks listening to this will realize that and recognize that. Lots of different updates, some browsers don't work. And it's difficult because there's multiple parties involved here, right? There's MetaMask, there's Ledger, there's the apps that you're using, there's Chrome, there's all the browsers. So a lot of parties have to get this right. So it's not any one individual group's fault, but MetaMask is looking to smooth this out. It sounds like teaming up with Ledger to smooth this out. And it's coming soon.

• 31:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  The new support, they say, will be entirely in browser. Seamless connection between Ledger and MetaMask. My God, I can't wait for that. Seamless connection, please.

• 32:07David Hoffman?

  I would love to delete Firefox from my computer.

• 32:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  Is that why you have to use MetaMask?

• 32:12David Hoffman?

  Yeah, MetaMask and Firefox use my Ledger, yeah.

• 32:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right, I mean Chrome is just completely a crap to us.

• 32:19David Hoffman?

  Chrome really heft the industry a little bit.

• 32:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Let's talk about this, David. This is why optimism, which of course is a layer two roll up that we love, an optimistic roll up that we love. I think that was a post written by the optimism team, rather. What's going on here?

• 32:35David Hoffman?

  Yeah, this is Justin J. Moses from the Synthetics team. We've had him on the show as well before. And he writes a tweet talking about why optimism, which is a take about the release. And basically, he says that the reason why he likes optimism is because of the whole EVM compatibility, excuse me, EVM equivalence strategy that optimism is going for. In contrast to EVM compatibility. What EVM equivalence means is that the optimistic roll ups produced by the optimism team are as close to the EVM as possible, meaning that a lot of the... God damn it, I just realized why he did that. Meaning that the, sorry for the podcast listeners, this is very visual show today.

• 33:18David Hoffman?

  Meaning that like the EVM equivalence means that all of the developer tooling, the infrastructure, the nodes, anything that you need to run Ethereum, run Ethereum, you can also use to run optimism, optimistic rollups run by optimism. So having EVM equivalence allows you to port all the network effects of Ethereum also to the optimism rollups. And that is the design, the design philosophy of optimism and really just a strategy to make everything into an optimistic rollup, which is just by latching on to the network effects of Ethereum itself. So the line that the optimism team likes to give is optimism, rollups from optimism are Ethereum. They're actually, it's not a layer two, it's actually just part of the EVM at the base

• 34:02David Hoffman?

  chain. So it's kind of a technical differentiation, but the, the strategy of EVM equivalence I'm really, really bullish on.

• 34:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Would you say, David, almost that it's like, it's like turtles all the way down? Would you go as far as to say that?

• 34:14David Hoffman?

  You can't just like skip to the conclusion of the announcement post and just say that because you're just going to confuse everyone. The way, the reason why it's turtles all the way down is because, again, EVM equivalence, right? It's Ethereum all the way down. And then Ryan just skipped to the meme at the end of the blog post.

• 34:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's the best, it's my favorite part, okay? You know, no further explanation needed.

• 34:37David Hoffman?

  Okay.

• 34:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Ultra scalable Ethereum. David, you wrote a post this week, why modular blockchains are the best scaling solution for crypto. We also did the state of the nation that was based on this post. I thought it went pretty well. We kind of prepared it last minute, but you know, it was very well received. What's the TLDR of this post? I guess the reason it's in the releases section is because there hasn't been a lot released on modular blockchain design.

• 35:01David Hoffman?

  So we did it ourselves.

• 35:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  We tried to do it ourselves. Pauli Nia, Anthony Sisano, some others in the industry have been doing this, but we tried to wrap it up and package it for you. So what's the, what's the quick summary here?

• 35:12David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so the whole idea of modular blockchains has actually been around for a while, but it's that modular word that really unlocks things. And we've talked about this a few times before, but the power Of naming something of actually ascribing a name to something is really, really powerful. Because once you have a name for something, you can actually talk about it. And Paulina, I think maybe, maybe it happened elsewhere, but really Paulina is the one that really surfaced the concept of modular blockchains to just to the Twitter sphere, the public knowledge. And so Paulina, it's a pseudo anonymous writer, they write short blog posts. And so one thing that we do very, very well at Bankless is that when we collate a lot of ideas and collapse them into one single blog post. And so that is what we did. So if you are trying to understand the concept of modular blockchains,

• 35:56David Hoffman?

  which is a really, really important concept to understand, the future of crypto is via modular blockchains. And I say this line at the very, very end. If we like went back in history, back to like 2009 and or into a parallel universe, and we've rolled the dice again about how the crypto industry would pan out, it will pan out into modular blockchains 99.9% of the time. Every single time it'll end up at a modular blockchain design, construction. And so this blog post goes through why that argument is true and how Ethereum is working towards a modular design structure, allowing Ethereum to become ultra scalable Ethereum. So Bankless listeners know all about ultrasound money, ultrasound ETH. Now we have ultra scalable Ethereum. And these two things go hand in hand.

• 36:40David Hoffman?

  I'm actually working on another blog post that talks about the relationship between the positive flywheel effects of Ethereum and how the more scalable Ethereum becomes, actually, the more ultrasound ether becomes as a money. And the more ultrasound that ether becomes as money, the more valuable it becomes, the more scalable Ethereum is allowed to get. It's this positive feedback loop that the modular design structure enables that really just is going to propel Ethereum into this ultrasound money, ultra scalable future.

• 37:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  And the reason this is really important, guys, is because if this thesis holds true, it will really inform how you approach the space, how you think about the space, how you invest in the space. So I think it's a thesis that is underexplored in the market right now and very much underrated. One of the comments we made at the top of this post is like, we feel like the ultra scalable Ethereum story and the scalability of Ethereum story is as underrated. As ETH the asset was back in 2018, 2019. Now, folks remember from that timeline, no one thought ETH was worth anything. Okay, trading like $150, people said it was just gas, just a utility coin. Was never going to be a money, never going to be a store of value.

• 37:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, that's what the narrative for Ethereum scalability is like out there in the market. Everyone says ETH will never scale. There are all of these improving like new ETH killers that will take its place. I think the modular blockchain idea inverts that entire concept, flips it on its head. So you gotta wrap your mind around that. Again, we have this blog post, we have the state of the nation from earlier this week. David has even read out the post for you. If you are an audio listener, he's got this post on YouTube. You could just listen to it into your ears rather than read.

• 38:19David Hoffman?

  Right, we've done all the things, like go consume one of these things. Like what do you want? You want me to read it to you? Do you want to listen to me and Ryan talk about it? You want to read the blog post? I don't know, do something.

• 38:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  Interpretive dance, please.

• 38:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, release time, big releases. Oh my God, look at this one. Parallel, this is an NFT sci-fi card game just raised a cool five at a cool $500 million valuation. The card game has not been released, $500 million, but massive valuation, huge investor behind this. This is Paradigm. David, what's the story here?

• 38:53David Hoffman?

  When I hear a sci-fi card game, I'm thinking something like Hearthstone or Magic the Gathering, but now as NFTs. We've seen this model before with Gods Unchained from Immutable. I like card games. I play Hearthstone every now and then, and now I really, really want to play this thing, especially when playing the game might earn me some really dope NFTs that I can sell for Ether maybe.

• 39:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  Look, Axie Infinity has just blown the doors, you know, through this entire industry. Now everyone's piling into these crypto games. I think it's going to be a next mega trend. NFTs are, yeah, go ahead.

• 39:24David Hoffman?

  The amount that Axie Infinity moved the needle is absolutely insane. It's one of the biggest needle movers I've ever seen, ever.

• 39:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, and it happened so fast. It caught a lot of people by surprise, which is, I think everyone thought, whoa, my God, we're under allocated. Now we have to pile in. Okay. What another thing people are filing, piling into is funds are piling into NFTs. What is this story with Metaphor Capital?

• 39:49David Hoffman?

  Metaphor Capital raises $100 million to buy up rare NFTs. So it's an NFT fund. Very unfortunately, put the Mecca verse as the thumbnail to their, the article that they wrote. Mecca verse is an NFT project. It's not doing so hot.

• 40:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Really? What happened with this?

• 40:03David Hoffman?

  It was one of those NFT projects that had the like the reveal scheme. So everyone would buy the unrevealed Mecca verses and then they would reveal them. And then turns out like my complaint about the Mecca verses was that they were very undifferentiated. Like the rares looked like the mids looked like the floors. And overall, like I just, I followed the NFT flipper bot. So whenever I see somebody flip an NFT, like a tweet goes out and you just see people just like failed, fumbled flip, fumbled flip, going from like, people bought it for 60, selling it for like 1.5 ETH. Big oof. Anyways, that's actually a side quest. Unrelated, Metaphor Capital invests $100 million in buying rare NFTs, including things like Board Ape Yacht Club, and I think of many of the other NFTs that we know today.

• 40:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  Just crazy. This would be a crazy story. Like if you told me that, you know, last year at this time, there would be funds that are just dedicated to buying NFTs, not buying startups or NFT infrastructure, but $100 million just to purchase NFTs. Like, do you see this in the traditional world? Does anyone buy like Picasso, Michelangelo, like art funds?

• 41:02David Hoffman?

  I think so. I think there's fractional art platforms, but like

• 41:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, there's definitely fractional, but like

• 41:06David Hoffman?

  There's not funds. I don't think there's funds.

• 41:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Have you ever heard of a raise of $100 million to just go buy like, you know, items?

• 41:12David Hoffman?

  Monets, yeah.

• 41:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  Monets, yeah.

• 41:14David Hoffman?

  Is there like an art ETF that exists? Is that a thing?

• 41:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Hmm, I wonder. I bet there is.

• 41:19David Hoffman?

  There will be in crypto, that's for sure.

• 41:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  There definitely will be. It'll be way easier as well. We have the primitives to build it. Let's talk about this as well. Blockchain infrastructure provider Alchemy just clinched a $3.5 billion valuation. They raised 250 million. Our friends at A16Z are in on it.

• 41:36David Hoffman?

  It's a given.

• 41:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  Chris Dixon from A16Z will be on the podcast on Monday. We just recorded with him this week, so catch That podcast on Monday. Just, yeah. Anyway, Alchemy, what do they do, David? They're basically a lot of the data infrastructure behind all, everything you see in crypto. Like when your Uniswap page loads, some of that data is being served by Alchemy. You know, all of the various DeFi apps use it as like kind of a data layer. People think that Infura provides a lot of this. Actually, behind the scenes, it's a lot of it's Alchemy. Some of it's the graph as well. So this is kind of the, not, it's not a blockchain layer, but it's like a data services layer. It's almost like an AWS for blockchain specific data and indexing

• 42:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  and APIs and that sort of thing. So I can, I can understand why it's worth what it's worth.

• 42:25David Hoffman?

  I would like to know the business model, like how they actually capture value. Maybe it's like Dealflow, if they're routing transactions in the same way that kind of like Robinhood sells its flow to Citadel, which kind of is an unfortunate analogy, but it might work the same either way. They raised $250 million. That's a lot of money. At a $3.5 billion valuation. That's huge.

• 42:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. I mean, but they're servicing NFTs, they're servicing like all, so much infrastructure actually depends on this backend, which is, which is Alchemy, which is, I guess, cool. It's also a little concerning. I hope that there's a plan to sort of decentralize some of this stuff, too. But let's talk about this. Hype just raised $2 million on a follow-on funding round. So this is something that's been, I think a lot of folks have been thinking about for a while. It's like, we have NFTs, right? They're instantiated in the physical world. As you can see, if you're listening to this, there's also a passionate community of NFT holders, but we don't have a NFT native social media platform, do we? We just like put it in our Twitter profile,

• 43:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  but there's no way really to like flex or tell the story of the NFT or create an NFT specific profile. That's what Hype is for. That's what Hype is trying to do. It's an NFT social media company, a social community that's really focusing on the lore of NFTs. Do you want to explain it some more? What is this idea of lore behind NFTs as well?

• 43:47David Hoffman?

  Yeah, it's like, it's basically a social media page for you, but not you. For your NFTs, right?

• 43:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes.

• 43:53David Hoffman?

  So I loaded up my page. I, you can, yeah. And so there are, just in the same way that there's Twitter handles, there are hype handles. You can find Ryan at HYY dot PE. That's the hype website. Slash RSA for Ryan. Also slash David Hoffman for me.

• 44:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  Can I like friend you, David? Because I know you asked me to do that. I haven't. Is David Hoffman?

• 44:13David Hoffman?

  I'm trying to get Ryan to be my friend for years now. And like, dude, I'm doing it now. Follow? Yeah. Yeah. Hit follow. Yeah. So like, any, anytime, like, you get to create stories about your NFTs. Like, yeah, yeah. Now, my NFT is going to come visit your NFTs. Like, oh, I can post on Ryan's NFT wall. Say, hey, how's your NFT doing today?

• 44:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  My NFT is great, man. How's your punk? My turtle's doing great.

• 44:33David Hoffman?

  Punk's doing lovely. It's a good day to be a punk, as always. And so, yeah, this is a social media platform for NFTs. So you can go sign up right now and then you can start making posts about your NFTs and have a little NFT community.

• 44:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  And it reads directly from the chain. So you just plug in your MetaMask wallet. All of the NFTs like can be verified. I'm excited to see what they'll actually build here. I'm actually excited to like follow, maybe it's other turtles, other members of the community, see what you're doing, see what you're buying. Like, it's going to be a whole social stream for NFTs, which is really cool.

• 45:02David Hoffman?

  Disclaimer, Ryan and I are seed investors and.

• 45:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  We had to be. Couldn't, couldn't ignore that one. Coinlist, what are they doing? Man, Coinlist, they're now valued at $1.5 billion. They just got a fresh, fresh $100 million in funding. Think they're up to 75 employees. They plan to double. What's the, what does Coinbase, Coinlist actually do? That's where you can, if you're retail, you can sort of get in on recent, and you're based in the US generally, like you can get on, in on recent token launches, right? That's where I mostly know Coinlist.

• 45:34David Hoffman?

  Coinlist, Coinlist is one of the companies that came around during the ICO era and wanted to be like picks and troubles for ICOs. And then actually made it through the bear market, right? And actually made it all the way through. And so then Coinlist is basically a token launch platform. And it has like, it's just services and infrastructure, minting your token, compliance, KYC, you know, capital collection, all that sort of stuff.

• 45:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  Have you ever purchased anything from Coinlist?

• 45:59David Hoffman?

  No, I get all my tokens from Uniswap.

• 46:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I, I registered. I think I've done a few things, but not too much. But a ton of people have and, you know, many of these launches have actually worked out very well for them.

• 46:09David Hoffman?

  Yes, yes.

• 46:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  Not surprised at this listing. All right, that, that's our raises for the week. Now it's our weekly reminder to tell you to get a job in crypto.

• 46:18David Hoffman?

  Get a job. Listen to the turtle. Get a job. Listen to what the turtle tells you.

• 46:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  The turtle's telling you to get a job. That might be a good idea. This is, this is a serious business here. In crypto, we are building the future and there are a lot of fantastic jobs that are available for you on the

• 46:34David Hoffman?

  Head of Ethereum Research at Immutable. Oh my God, that is a dream job.

• 46:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  Crypto gaming, Ethereum, research.

• 46:43David Hoffman?

  Layer, layer twos, like research. That just means you go and learn stuff. Like, that's the coolest job ever.

• 46:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  Uh, head of research at Immutable, head of tokens at Immutable as well.

• 46:53David Hoffman?

  These are the most fun jobs ever.

• 46:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  The master of coin, is that what that is? Community builder and evangelist at Dexable, that sounds cool. Lead engineer at hats.finance, community manager at, uh, you say it.

• 47:05David Hoffman?

  E-graninam.

• 47:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  And a CTO as well.

• 47:09David Hoffman?

  At E-granam.

• 47:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  And general counsel, there's jobs for lawyers here. Smart DeFi, finance and operations, Smart DeFi, senior backend engineer, Smart DeFi. Blockchain CTO, Merit, community manager, uh, Argon. Founding blockchain engineer, highlight, senior software engineer, Popcorn, also, community lead at Popcorn. There's something for everyone here. Look at all of those.

• 47:31David Hoffman?

  Community lead, you just go and hang out with your bros in the Discord. That's your job.

• 47:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's gotta be the best job ever, being a community lead, right? Like, your job is to make Discord awesome.

• 47:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  We all do that. We all do that in my spare time. Uh, anyway, I don't know how many featured jobs that is, but the Bankless Job Board just keeps on growing, guys. As we always say, take a look at that job board, sign up for it, you can get these messages so we don't have to bother you every single week by telling you to get a job in crypto, even though we'll keep doing it.

• 48:02David Hoffman?

  Yep, yep.

• 48:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  If you sign up or not.

• 48:04David Hoffman?

  I guarantee you a crypto job is more fun than your non-crypto job.

• 48:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 48:08David Hoffman?

  It's just how it works.

• 48:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  You can wear this to work. Come on. What could be better? All right, let's talk about the big items of the week. We gotta start with Disney, so we're gonna hit Disney. What else are we gonna hit?

• 48:20David Hoffman?

  Shib.

• 48:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh my god, and World coin. Okay, let's start with Disney. Disney is going to NFTs, what's happening here?

• 48:25David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so there are a bunch of these like NFT firms that are popping up. And I think the way that this works is like the V V V V is this new NFT like, uh, like, I think it's like an agency more or less. I think it's a collection of like, like, sales, marketing, tech, infrastructure.

• 48:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's like another type of bridge, right?

• 48:42David Hoffman?

  Yeah, it's another type of bridge. Like, hey, Disney, you have all this IP. We can, we will help you actually turn that IP into digital merchandise, which is basically what NFTs are. So, uh, Vive is announcing that Disney will offer non-fungible tokens, NFTs of its characters as part of its promotion. And so like, think of it as like, anything that has merch, merch has IP behind it, right? SpongeBob merch, like whatever merch. What is an NFT other than digital merch, right?

• 49:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's all it is.

• 49:09David Hoffman?

  It's all it is.

• 49:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's digital merch and a whole bunch of fans that want to buy it.

• 49:12David Hoffman?

  Right. Uh, and so Disney is coming into the world of selling digital merch because apparently people buy digital merch. Uh, so things like Marvel, uh, DC Comics, Superman, James Bond, Star Trek, Back to the Future, Cartoon Network. All of these things are gonna get NFTs. Mickey Mouse, the NFT, like, imagine owning the Mickey Mouse NFT.

• 49:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Star Wars, dude.

• 49:31David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 49:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  Disney has everything.

• 49:33David Hoffman?

  Yeah. Uh, there, and there's a, I don't know if this is completely true, but there's a speculation that, uh, um, uh, V V is built on immutable X, which is a Starkware-based, uh, Layer 2 that settles on Ethereum. So Mickey Mouse coming to Ethereum.

• 49:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's also looking for a head of tokens.

• 49:51David Hoffman?

  That's also looking for.

• 49:54David Hoffman?

  And so, uh, you know, Mickey Mouse on the Ethereum L1, one day.

• 49:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Look, man, the, the, can you imagine being in a Disney boardroom and being like, let's look at our balance sheet and all of the assets that we have, okay? And then looking at your IP, your intellectual property, all of the brands that you own, that is the core asset of Disney.

• 50:13David Hoffman?

  The unmonetized IP.

• 50:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, and then it finds all of these various ways to make money on top of that intellectual property, right? It's like, and then it buys new. Intellectual property that thinks it can make more money on. And then seeing this NFT opportunity, right? What is the business case like for that?

• 50:29David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 50:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  If you're Disney? Oh, my God, now we can issue and sell NFTs? And we don't have to build anything in the physical world.

• 50:37David Hoffman?

  We don't need supply chains, which are broken anyways?

• 50:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  We don't need supply chains. We don't need like more plastic toys. We can actually like just distribute digitally. And there's very little like variable cost for these things. I mean, every I'm shocked it's taken Disney this long.

• 50:56David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 50:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  To get to this point, right?

• 50:58David Hoffman?

  There's so much to unpack here, like there's like the narrative of like, it's actually, this is really good for societies because we can like be consumers and do our consumer things without actually like wasting plastic and physical materials and atoms going into the ocean. We can just like, and Disney's got to be so confused. They're like, we just mint these things and people buy them, I guess.

• 51:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  Let me, let me see this. How long do you think it's going to take? For Disney to open a theme park in the metaverse?

• 51:25David Hoffman?

  Oh, my God, that's a really good question. Holy shit. As soon as the metaverse like arrives, yeah.

• 51:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  Five years.

• 51:33David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 51:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's what I'm gonna say.

• 51:34David Hoffman?

  Yeah, that sounds right. Three to five years. Yeah.

• 51:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  Three to five years.

• 51:37David Hoffman?

  Because think of the dead time. You don't need to actually build the thing. You just pay a bunch of coders to make it in the internet.

• 51:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's amazing. This is, this is the future. This is what's going to happen. This is just a small step, but like.

• 51:50David Hoffman?

  You don't got to sign like a liability waiver, like you don't need lawyers, like people don't.

• 51:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  The media institutions are coming. Is that a narrative we can use? I mean, I feel like that's what's happening, NFTs. All right. Let's talk about Shib. That's the other big story that we, it just dominated. It crushed. So Shib, what is Shib? For people who are like, don't understand this thing. It's a dog.

• 52:09David Hoffman?

  I don't understand it either. Yeah, it's a dog token. I don't.

• 52:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  You do understand. You don't understand why it's going up, but like, what is it? It's just a meme, isn't it? What is it?

• 52:17David Hoffman?

  I don't know how it's like, I can mint a token called like some sort of doggy token. I don't know how Shib got so much traction in that it did, but like it's ba, it was basically just a derivative of Doge. After Doge started pumping, a lot of dogs tokens came out. being the leader and for some reason they just collected a lot of meme power and a lot of traders and like the amount of volume that went into the ship markets this week was absolutely insane billions billions of dollars it flipped Doge it flipped

• 52:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  without Elon Musk

• 52:48David Hoffman?

  yeah right like they're not even a billionaire supporting this thing the amount of money like so much of this trading volume happened on Coinbase because these are all these US retail apes oh yeah TikTok TikTok is a great answer as to how this happened like apparently

• 53:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  blame TikTok

• 53:04David Hoffman?

  the very low denomination of Shib of .000078 cents per coin is very, very low so like you buy like a dollar of these things and you have a billion of them and so people like to think that them well I'm a billionaire now because I have like a billion ship tokens

• 53:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  and people legitimately think this thing is going to a dollar

• 53:21David Hoffman?

  yeah people actually think this thing right and so like it'd be like a trillion dollar market cap something absolutely insane yeah and so ship like pull up the chart Ryan the chart movement of it is absolutely nuts

• 53:35David Hoffman?

  yeah just hit just hit refresh

• 53:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  this is the trading view chart ship to

• 53:44David Hoffman?

  zoom out to yeah the one year at the bond yeah go to go to three months

• 53:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  oh my god

• 53:48David Hoffman?

  dude it goes that is the denominated in dollars right and so it started the year it started this pump at .000005 cents and then around September it jumped it did like a 6x and then we ended up at like .0003 we are

• 54:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  can I view this in market cap like what's this market

• 54:09David Hoffman?

  maybe you can you might be able to type in in the left hand corner Shib market cap that might show up I don't know though

• 54:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  okay

• 54:15David Hoffman?

  I mean but it is it is a market cap hit the log button because you can only really view this thing in log in the bottom right corner There you go. That doesn't even, it doesn't even change. It doesn't even move. It's absolutely insane. So yeah, just like the, again, insane amounts of volume all piled into Shib. I don't know why it happened, but it happened. Shib just like dominated the markets this week.

• 54:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  Are you mad about it or do you not care?

• 54:37David Hoffman?

  Uh, it's just frustrating how much volume is going into these things. And like, I got, I literally got four text messages from people, not in my like crypto chats or anything. It's like, hey, like, do I sell this Shib that I bought? And I'm like, yes, yes, you absolutely sell that. How do you not sell that?

• 54:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  But if you told someone that in the beginning of October, David, they'd hate you right now.

• 54:57David Hoffman?

  Well, I mean, but

• 54:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Because it's gone like

• 54:58David Hoffman?

  But they didn't text me because it didn't pump. Yeah. If you, if you're texting me about whether you should sell Shib or not, the answer is yes. The answer is yes. Yeah.

• 55:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  That, that's the top signal. Somebody's texting you.

• 55:07David Hoffman?

  Four people, four people. Yeah. It's like, dude, I've been trying to get you to buy Ether for like four years. You bought Shib without asking, without telling me about it? Like, god damn it.

• 55:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, but people are, people can be right in the short, in the short run, and they can be very right in the short run. Look at this, uh, person.

• 55:24David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 55:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  This person had a wallet, purchased, uh, this is an Ethereum address, $800, $8,000 worth of Shib in, in last August. You know, dog token, YOLO purchase last August.

• 55:35David Hoffman?

  Like, you know.

• 55:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  Put $8,000, throw $8,000 on it, whatever. It's now worth $5.7 billion.

• 55:42David Hoffman?

  That's so fucking insane. So crazy.

• 55:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  From $8,000 to $5.7 billion in 400 days, we might actually be looking at the greatest individual trade of all time. And it's a Shib coin. It's a meme token. We haven't talked about it at all on Bankless.

• 56:01David Hoffman?

  Like, I don't know how much liquidity there actually is. Like, I don't think the guy could actually sell $5.7 billion. But he could get a still a lot of money. It's still a fantastic trade.

• 56:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  He could probably get a billion.

• 56:11David Hoffman?

  Yeah, you probably get a billion. A billion, you think a billion dollars can come out of the Shib market and still be sustainable?

• 56:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Maybe. Or maybe once this kind of moves, if they see this address move, who knows? But right, you can get hundreds of millions anyway. Let's call it that. Great trade, no matter, no matter what you're doing. So like, what does this teach us, David? Fundamentals are dead?

• 56:31David Hoffman?

  I guess so.

• 56:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's everything-

• 56:33David Hoffman?

  Stop listening to bankless advice. We clearly cannot find the Shib markets.

• 56:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  Look, yeah, look at, you know, this is, uh, yeah, I don't know what to say. Coinbase is number one in the App Store.

• 56:45David Hoffman?

  It's because-

• 56:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  Look at how they advertise themselves.

• 56:47David Hoffman?

  Trade BTC, ETH, and Shib is in the title of the Coinbase application on-

• 56:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  The three greatest assets of all time. Digital assets our industry can bring you. Bitcoin, ETH, Shib.

• 56:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Buy now, folks.

• 57:00David Hoffman?

  Oh, damn.

• 57:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  Meme coins are gonna meme, though. This is partially why I'm actually not that mad because like if you're buying Shib,

• 57:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean Shib is not actually pretending to be something it's not. I'll say that about Shib.

• 57:15David Hoffman?

  That's true.

• 57:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay? It's just a dog token. This is what I actually appreciated about Doge is just like, it's kind of intellectually honest. It's here to be a meme and it's here to go up. And a lot of people get wrecked by it, but like it's not trying to pretend it's something it's not. It's just a meme. So I actually appreciate that at least.

• 57:36David Hoffman?

  Also, unlike Doge, it's built on Ethereum, so it's that.

• 57:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  Where's the meme index? We gotta buy that.

• 57:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  Here's, if you're an ETH holder and you missed out on Shib.

• 57:48David Hoffman?

  It burnt 2,000 Ether in the last seven days.

• 57:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 57:52David Hoffman?

  2,000 Ether.

• 57:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's an ERC20 token, right? That's the difference, okay? Doge's got its own chain, has to provide its own security. Shib actually leverages the security of Ethereum. And every time a token is purchased, sold, uh, transacted on the Ethereum network, it burns ETH, which is interesting. So here's my take on this, okay? So like, this is why you won't get hot tips on what dog coin to buy on bankless. Like, because quite honestly, guys, we don't know.

• 58:25David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 58:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right? Like, we just don't know. And here's the other truth, nobody does.

• 58:29David Hoffman?

  No one does.

• 58:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right? Like, I don't think anybody does. For the one Shib that's successful, how many meme coins have crashed and burnt and gone to like zero? And how many like millions of dollars- have people lost on these things, right? Or like tens of millions, hundreds of millions. Okay, so my, our strategy is to keep buying the things. It's like, it's like

• 58:52David Hoffman?

  You buy the infrastructure.

• 58:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's the Warren Buffett. Just be Warren Buffett in crypto. Okay. You buy the infrastructure. You buy the things that are lasting. I'm going to keep buying ETH because Shib is built on top of ETH.

• 59:04David Hoffman?

  All the memes, all memes coming to ETH.

• 59:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  They pump and dump. They're going to be burning some ETH, right? And Ether is something that is going to be lasting, is sustaining, does have fundamentals, and you don't really have to like guess. So that's this dumb turtle strategy. But, you know, what do I know?

• 59:22David Hoffman?

  Yeah, you're just a dumb turtle. But I'm just a dumb turtle. I'm also doing the same thing. So there's that.

• 59:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. So we'll see what the next one is, David. Do you think, how do you think this ends? Let me ask you that before we go to the, you think this is up only?

• 59:35David Hoffman?

  The fact that it flipped Doge gives it a bunch of Lindy. So I think Shib is, it's here to stay, man. It's, it's meme is officially stuck.

• 59:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  Flipping ETH next, flipping Bitcoin next?

• 59:46David Hoffman?

  God damn, oh gosh. We will take the week off if that happens.

• 59:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, no roll up on that week, guys, if that happens.

• 59:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  Third news item of the week, WorldCoin, a new cryptocurrency that will be fairly distributed. This is what Sam Altman says. WorldCoin got a lot of, I think, like negative attention in the crypto native world. It got lots of mainstream attention. I'll definitely say that. But what is the experiment trying to do?

• 1:00:11David Hoffman?

  Yeah, we've seen a few of these experiments be attempted before. There was this initiative Q back in 2018 that tried to do the same thing. Basically, it wants to verifiably distribute the same amount of money, currency, new tokens, new cryptocurrency to everyone. So everyone receives the exact same amount across the whole entire globe. And so this requires anti-sibyl attacks, right? So like, you can't just like spin up a bunch of sock puppets. You can't just distribute everything to like all the Ethereum addresses because I own multiple Ethereum addresses. So they need to verify that they, when they give this currency, they give the same amount to every single person. They don't actually allow people to get it twice. And so the The way that they're doing that is with this weird orb hardware thing that like scans people's irises.

• 1:00:57David Hoffman?

  And so it uses a retina scan to check out your iris and and make sure that it never gave you any crypto before before you got your retina scanned.

• 1:01:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is it.

• 1:01:06David Hoffman?

  Yeah. And so like apparently that is they've gotten a lot of people to get their irises scanned so they can get this free crypto, right? And so like they're using this orb as a mechanism to not to verifiably give everyone the same amount of crypto without giving any one person more than one share of crypto because they check all the irises against each other. I think you can see why crypto Twitter got pretty upset about this whole thing.

• 1:01:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  Why?

• 1:01:31David Hoffman?

  Just like giving up your irises for for some crypto.

• 1:01:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  For airdrops?

• 1:01:35David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  You do dumber things for airdrops?

• 1:01:37David Hoffman?

  Let us let us register your DNA so we can so we can give you crypto.

• 1:01:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  I actually, I don't know the privacy implications of this. Are they like, are they deleting it? Is it just using cash? Is it just for unique identification? I don't know those details.

• 1:01:52David Hoffman?

  Yeah, no, yeah, apparently they they scan the retina, they turn it into a hash, they delete the actual scanned retina, but they keep the hash. And so that's why it's private also. But like, it's just very, very dubious in my mind.

• 1:02:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  It is also called a world coin, right?

• 1:02:08David Hoffman?

  That's a bad name.

• 1:02:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, that that's going to get some resistance on just crypto Twitter.

• 1:02:13David Hoffman?

  Very 2017, very 2017 ish.

• 1:02:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, it sounds like it just sounds like something Mark Zuckerberg would come up with, right? And so there's that. But here's some of the flip side of this, okay? So the flip side is I go back to an Eval tweet that really, you know, struck me. I think he tweeted this in 2017, 2018, like crypto has tried a lot of monetary experiments. And generally, it's it's trying sort of the the the ground up hard money type of experiments through Bitcoin and Ether, right? But but the hardest part about money is actually distribution. And in crypto, we've never tried a civil resistant distribution mechanism, right? It's like, what if we could distribute this to a billion people around the world and seed start?

• 1:03:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Up a money that way, okay? Like, we couldn't do that with Bitcoin, because while it was fair distribution, it wasn't accessible to many people. You had to be sort of nerdy. You had to follow the right forums, be in the right internet chat rooms, like run a miner, all of these nerdy, difficult things. So the distribution wasn't very wide. It was maybe fair, but it wasn't wide. And so what about a monetary experiment in crypto, where we're distributing this thing as widely as possible and seeding a non-sovereign money that way? So that's why the experiment, like, I'm not ready to go to crypto Twitter and totally dismiss it. Like, I actually want to hear more. The other thing that is interesting to me is

• 1:03:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  this does not feel like we're building a better blockchain. Hi, we're in crypto. We're here to build a better Layer 1 type of experiment, which you've seen play out so many times in the past, which just frustrates and annoys me. They're actually building this on a Layer 2.

• 1:03:58David Hoffman?

  As they should be.

• 1:03:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Ethereum-secured Layer 2. They're building this on some kind of a rollup. I don't know the details of this. It's called Hubble, I believe.

• 1:04:07David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I've never heard of it before.

• 1:04:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  But there's some cool tech behind it, right? So they can actually compress and get... This is an ERC20 token, so it's a coin on Ethereum. I think transaction costs are going to cost like 3 cents, 3 to 6 cents per transaction. Again, all fully secured by Ethereum on this rollup. So some of their technical decisions are actually kind of cool. So on the one hand, you've got WorldCoin, and you've got "Insert your eye here." On the other, you've got maybe there's some opportunity to do a new monetary experiment that is distributed beyond just the geeks and nerds that are into crypto today. And also, it's built on Layer 2. So they're not trying to create their own blockchain

• 1:04:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  and fix crypto that way. This was an interesting take by TokenTax. Why don't you read this?

• 1:04:58David Hoffman?

  A fun little joke. So this is the trade-offer meme format in a tweet. The trade-offer is, "We get your eyeballs. You get a taxable event." Because if you receive an airdrop, you receive a taxable event. So you're giving up your data and then you get a taxable event. I will agree with you that the pursuit of what they're trying to do, I think, is noble and it's a very viable experiment to run. There's just that inevitable friction of like, all right, like in order to achieve completely fair distribution, you have to verify the uniqueness of each human. And verifying the uniqueness of each human requires some sort of data or property about how that human is unique,

• 1:05:37David Hoffman?

  who that person is. So you are inherently going into the private lives of that individual because you need to establish uniqueness. It's one of those things that like, maybe the experiment's unique, but just getting there is just too damn hard.

• 1:05:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think the other thing that gave crypto Twitter a bad taste in Smith's when this first release is it was just chock full of VCs. It was just only VCs in the funding of this. And there were no kind of crypto native type outreaches, like not a lot of community development yet. So we'll see how that emerges. But here's the thing. I think we should give them a fair shot on Bankless if they decide to come on the show at some point in time. And like just hear kind of the pros and cons, I'd be interested to dive into their layer two technology and hear more about that. So I'm not ready to completely dismiss it, but I'm also not ready to get my eyeball scanned yet.

• 1:06:26David Hoffman?

  Yeah. The thing is like, how do VCs benefit from this when it's inherently a global distribution, right? Like, do they have their own supply of the coin at the same time as they're trying to have this equitable distribution? Like, how do they, right? How do they get upside here?

• 1:06:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, definitely so many questions. Guys, those are your three news items of the day. Let's get into some other news items as well. Our friends at Goldman Sachs, they just figured out that DeFi has its advantages over traditional finance. That's what they said. They created a report that said DeFi is great. That's amazing. From Goldman Sachs, David.

• 1:07:00David Hoffman?

  Thanks, Goldman.

• 1:07:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Would you have ever thought?

• 1:07:02David Hoffman?

  Never, never, ever. Well, I mean, one day, but I guess it's happening a lot sooner than I expected.

• 1:07:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  Why are they doing this, do you think? Why are they doing this?

• 1:07:10David Hoffman?

  Because they know DeFi is about to come eat their lunch and they have to come to terms with it.

• 1:07:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  They remember, so Goldman Sachs, actually, they invested in our friend Eric Peters firm. Maybe that's why I subliminally, subconsciously called them friends.

• 1:07:21David Hoffman?

  They filled their bags and now they're shilling. Nice. Good strategy. Good strategy.

• 1:07:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  Good strategy. Fill your bags first and then then shill is the strategy here.

• 1:07:28David Hoffman?

  Fill then chill.

• 1:07:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Polygon, okay, so I think hacks have been a theme this week in the Ethereum ecosystem. Polygon just dodged an $850 million hack. A white hat discovered this in advance. They paid out the white hat, a $2 million bounty for finding that critical vulnerability.

• 1:07:49David Hoffman?

  The largest bounty ever paid ever to anyone.

• 1:07:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well deserved.

• 1:07:52David Hoffman?

  Well deserved, like two, yeah, congrats, like, set the record for highest bounty paid to that one guy. Or girl, so congratulations to that white hacker. Thank you for not, thank you for taking the $2 million rather than the $850 million. We appreciate that.

• 1:08:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's, it's an interesting trade. I'm glad that they're being paid so well for these things because like, you know, let's say you had, let's say you had no morality, no ethics were not involved, and you're just doing like an expected value analysis and you have like 850 million on one hand. But like, you have to live a completely, I guess, pseudonymous life. Maybe make sure that you're covering your tracks. Like, can you actually get away with $850 million? Or, on the other side, you get $2 million, you're a hero, free and clear. What choice do you make? No morals, David? Which one would you do?

• 1:08:40David Hoffman?

  Oh, no morals?

• 1:08:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  No morals, David, what would he do?

• 1:08:43David Hoffman?

  Yeah, see, like, the cumbersome of living a life with $850 million that I can't use. Like, is it actually worth $850 million if you can't actually like buy a house with it? Because you can't actually send that outbound?

• 1:08:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right?

• 1:08:55David Hoffman?

  Right, yeah, and like, I, I, I'm a person that enjoys being liked. And so I'll take, I'll take the praise of doing the noble thing.

• 1:09:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  I would do that too. I mean, like, just no morals Ryan would do that too. Like, I would, rather than live like a drug lord. I mean, who wants to, I mean, I don't know. I wouldn't want to live on the lam like that, so.

• 1:09:13David Hoffman?

  More money, more problems.

• 1:09:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's right, especially when it's stolen money. Not that I would know, okay? I'm not a hacker, never done anything of the sort. Cream finance was exploited though. For $130 million, here's a hacker who went in the other direction. A black hat, so.

• 1:09:32David Hoffman?

  Yo, hacker, in one year, let us know how your life's going.

• 1:09:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  Are you living like a drug lord right now? Are you wearing a turtle costume to like be in disguise? All right, but so, okay, this is actually serious. We shouldn't be laughing about this because people lost some money. Cream Finance, it is a, I guess it's not a first tier DeFi.

• 1:09:55David Hoffman?

  Yeah, it's a, it's a compound, it's an AVE. Yeah, it goes after the long tail of assets, which is inherently where the risk comes in.

• 1:10:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  And they've been hacked before, there've been issues before. This is the biggest one, though, $130 million. And I'm not sure how this is going to be resolved. I think the story is, is still developing, but I think I saw the message. Okay, this is, this is what the, the attacker wrote. Babe Lucky, Iron Bank Lucky, Cream not. Y Dev, incest bad, don't do. That was the cryptic message they received. Hackers are weird, I don't know.

• 1:10:31David Hoffman?

  I mean, maybe so the hacker isn't an English speaker, but they wrote in English for some reason? I don't know.

• 1:10:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay. Or maybe they're trying to like disguise.

• 1:10:38David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  Incest bad, don't do. I don't think that's a mistranslation. I think that's just being weird, okay? Anyway, bad news for Cream. I think this is another, like every once in a while, we get these things in DeFi, and it's just another realization that you have to be careful. Okay, like, this is, I thought Cyrus had a great tweet about this. In my opinion, dApps that I'm willing to put greater than 50% of my total net worth into, in no order, number one, Maker.

• 1:11:07David Hoffman?

  Well, he, he previously worked at Maker, so do know that.

• 1:11:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes, okay, but also, well, that's actually a good sign then, right?

• 1:11:14David Hoffman?

  Yeah, sure.

• 1:11:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  Because he's seen all the skeletons, he knows where the bodies are buried, I guess. Maker, AVE, Compound, Curve, Uniswap, those are the five, right? So there are tiers of safety inside of even, even DeFi, right? So we always end the show with this, like DeFi is risky, you could lose what you put in, be careful, we're headed west, all right? But like, some DeFi is far riskier than other DeFi as well. And there are some applications in DeFi that have reached the point at which, not that they're unhackable, but they are, someone like Cyrus, who's on the inside. He's willing to put in 50% or greater of his total net worth in. I probably feel the same about these protocols. I don't know if you'd add any to this list, David, or like, would you agree with this list?

• 1:11:57David Hoffman?

  I definitely do agree with that list. That's the, these are the applications I consider like home. These are the applications that I use and feel familiar with. And there's a lot of like, people ask, often ask me like, how do I actually evaluate a DeFi app? The risk of a DeFi app if I don't know how to code? And I actually made a talk in paper about this. So if you want to go to YouTube and type in settlement assurances and the protocol sync thesis at the Ethereal Virtual Summit, I gave the equation of time value locked, where you just take the value that's been deposited into some of these applications, and then you look at how long that value's been there. So there's two variables, how much value and how much time. And the more and more a protocol lives with having a bunch of money inside of it, is an indication of how safe these things are.

• 1:12:42David Hoffman?

  And the, these five applications that Cyrus lists off have an insanely high time value locked measurement. So they've had a lot of money in there for a lot of time without exploits. And so these are generally a nice litmus test for how secure an app is. Cream, not that young or not that old, like was built in DeFi summer, and not that much total value locked in it, and also spread over a large amount of assets. So the risk is all there. So these are the nice little like, quick mental calculations you can make to understand how to evaluate a DeFi app.

• 1:13:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  I totally agree. I totally agree with that metric as well. A couple other, I guess, you know, caveats to is often if one of these major protocols upgrades, the, the Lindy can sort of reset a little bit, right? So you gotta be careful with a version two of Uniswap versus a version three, because they could be a little different. The other thing that has a bit of a different risk profile is say, using Uniswap on a layer two versus using it on mainnet, right? So we just saw a side chain, like Polygon with a hack in it itself. So it's not as safe as, as on mainnet. So there's some stratifications of this, but yeah, I totally agree with, with that metric. That's the best way you can tell.

• 1:13:51David Hoffman?

  I mean, you can also judge the layer twos by the same metric, right? How much money is deposited onto layer twos for how much time?

• 1:13:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Exactly. Let's talk NFTs. Reddit doing some stuff in the NFT space. What are they doing?

• 1:14:01David Hoffman?

  Yeah, we've always known that Reddit is very, very Ethereum friendly and they've been working with, I think Arbitrum won the Reddit scaling bake-off and now they are integrating tokens into Reddit. There already are like rewards and like little icons that you can reward posters and commenters. I think now they're just actually, the problem with those little icons that you pay for is like they're just super inflationary, right?

• 1:14:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:24David Hoffman?

  And so like, maybe now like with Reddit and actually like scarce rewards, scarce like praises.

• 1:14:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  You can't sell them? You can't do anything with them? Like, who cares?

• 1:14:31David Hoffman?

  Yeah. Once they become NFTs though, it really opens up the world of like actually incentivizing good content. And like when you actually receive a reward, that actually means something because it's actually an NFT. So cool. So Reddit, the biggest social media network, one of the biggest social media networks ever. One of the most trafficked websites ever is getting Ethereum to have its backend for NFTs. It's fantastic.

• 1:14:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  Do you know, also I read recently, they're actually one of the least valuable social media networks per user, right?

• 1:15:01David Hoffman?

  Right, because they just can't monetize.

• 1:15:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, Reddit users were making a joke and they're like, hey, we're the least valuable users of any social media platform out there. This was a Reddit post I was reading the other day and it's true. So the cool thing about this though is for Reddit, why are they moving into Web 3 so quickly? It's because they have the most to gain versus these other social media platforms that have these legacy Web 2 models. And I think Reddit is realizing that and they could gain big from this NFT and token emergence by adopting Web 3 early.

• 1:15:30David Hoffman?

  And there's a ton of overlap with like the structure of Reddit and the nature of like Ethereum communities. Like every subreddit is a community, every DAO is a community, every token is a community. There's all communities all the way down.

• 1:15:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  They're all DAO, like, yeah, they're all DAOs, right? This is subreddit DAO and they're also fairly permissionless. Like anyone can kind of spin up a new subreddit.

• 1:15:49David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so I expect the integration between Reddit and Ethereum to just be a very long story.

• 1:15:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  Me too. This is a story that's just starting, which is Twitter's integration with NFTs. We started talking about this about a month ago, but what are the updates here?

• 1:16:01David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so instead of just having a verified NFT, which is what we talked about last time, it looks like they're creating a whole new tab in Twitter. So for people familiar with Twitter, you have the tweets, you have the tweets and replies column, you have the media column, and then you have likes. It looks like they are adding a collectibles, and so you can just look at-

• 1:16:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  How big is that?

• 1:16:19David Hoffman?

  Right, that's huge. That's like very, very core features into like your Twitter profile. So like, you can just go to the collectibles tab, and you can see all the NFTs that you own, which I'm assuming would be verified. So it's just another like NFT gallery inside of like your Twitter app.

• 1:16:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is going to, this is the bull case for NFTs, by the way. Web2 just basically adopts NFTs, and then they saturate even further. So like, that's why PFPs are so valuable.

• 1:16:46David Hoffman?

  If we have this collectibles tab where we can put all of our NFTs, do we have to take our NFTs off of our picture? Because it's already there.

• 1:16:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think, no, I think the NFTs in your picture like will be verifiable too.

• 1:17:00David Hoffman?

  Yeah, right. But what I'm saying is that if there's a gallery for viewing your NFTs, like, do you really need an NFT as your profile picture anymore? Can we just all go back to being humans now?

• 1:17:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  You don't want to go back. Do you?

• 1:17:10David Hoffman?

  Absolutely not.

• 1:17:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  Would you go back?

• 1:17:11David Hoffman?

  No.

• 1:17:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  Would you ever change?

• 1:17:12David Hoffman?

  I am my punk. My punk is me.

• 1:17:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  I can tell. You look, you're starting to look, resemble your punk more and more every day. I don't know what it is. All right, let's talk about this. WordPress, NFT auction plugin powered by Zora. Okay, so WordPress is like the biggest open source website tooling in the world. Everyone uses WordPress.

• 1:17:33David Hoffman?

  Most websites are WordPress websites, yeah.

• 1:17:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  Now they have plugins for NFTs. Really cool.

• 1:17:37David Hoffman?

  Yeah, just like printer, like printing press for NFTs connected right into Zora. Really good alignment, I think, because Zora is like the most open source aligned out of all the NFT platforms, so it makes sense that they hook right into WordPress. The amount of NFTs that are about to be minted in 2022 is absolutely insane.

• 1:17:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  Another institution that's coming to crypto is the Web2 institution. They are coming to crypto in a big way. So is Photoshop, so is Adobe. What's happening here, David?

• 1:18:05David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so any user of Photoshop will know that when you are finished with a file, you can export it as a particular file type. Apparently Photoshop will get a "prepare as NFT" option. I don't know what that means, but that has, I think, some sort of verifiability with like, you can claim that you are actually the first person to make the JPEG using Photoshop. I think it's like, I think that's the vibe, but I don't know. NFT features going into software these days.

• 1:18:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Guys, that's just, in one week, all this stuff's happening. The biggest software applications in the world now adopting NFTs, now adopting crypto. Pretty crazy, pretty insane. Yeah, this is more on the Adobe thing.

• 1:18:46David Hoffman?

  I make, I make all my memes in Photoshop, so I think when I export these memes, I'll just like export them as NFTs, I guess.

• 1:18:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's, that's very professional, sir. Photoshop memes, wow, okay.

• 1:18:55David Hoffman?

  It's the only thing I know.

• 1:18:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  The Economist, last week, we mentioned that they were selling The Economist cover. Guess how much it sold for?

• 1:19:02David Hoffman?

  Not enough, $1,000 lower than it should have been. They sold it for $419,000, missing the classic $420,000, but whatever. Good haul.

• 1:19:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's amazing, right? $420,000-ish for, you know, and again, as we pointed out last time, this is, this is going to be the first of many. Everyone's going to be selling their iconic magazine titles as NFTs, magazine covers as NFTs after this.

• 1:19:29David Hoffman?

  So The Economist had their meeting where like, alright, we're gonna do a DeFi crypto cover, right? And like, one person in that meeting was like, you know what we should do? We should NFT it. Boom, $420,000 idea, like bam, like who saw that coming?

• 1:19:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  I hope that guy got a raise, or that girl got a raise, you know? Definitely worth it. Take 10% cut next time. Just work for a DAO where you get rewarded for these contributions. Okay Bitcoin, what's Bitcoin doing? Some firefighters, a pension, firefighters pension are purchasing Bitcoin.

• 1:20:04David Hoffman?

  And Ether.

• 1:20:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's pretty cool.

• 1:20:06David Hoffman?

  And Ether, yep.

• 1:20:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  And Ether too?

• 1:20:08David Hoffman?

  Yeah, look at that.

• 1:20:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh wow, okay. Wherever you see Bitcoin, you see Ether these days. This fund has invested $25 million into crypto. This is the first US public pension plan. People are familiar with pension plans. They have a lot of money, a whole lot of money. In fact, that is the vast majority of wealth in the US. Aside from like individuals, you know, rich like mega billionaires. A lot of the money of the middle class, of the working class is held inside of these big pension plans. And now the pension plans, who are historically very conservative, are starting to invest in crypto. Makes sense. I'm glad the firefighters are first, you know? There may be more, a bit less risk averse.

• 1:20:51David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Good job firefighters.

• 1:20:53David Hoffman?

  Firefighters own Bitcoin, alright.

• 1:20:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  El Salvador, what did they just do?

• 1:20:57David Hoffman?

  They bought 420 more Bitcoins. 420, we like the 420 number. Yay. Recent, this recent purchase brings the Latin American nation stash to about 1,120 Bitcoins. So, El Salvador laser eyes.

• 1:21:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  Stack and sat still, El Salvador, okay. We've talked about the implications of that many times, no need to get into it, but let's talk a little bit about regulatory stuff. So Coinbase is spending $800,000 on lobbying in the third quarter. That's how much they spent in the third quarter. So that's one quarter. So I'm glad to see that Coinbase is getting involved to help educate and protect this industry from aggressors in DC. It's fantastic. I hope that number increases over time. So this is just a tiny fraction of revenue. But if you took even just like 0.1% of the total market cap of crypto, the total revenue

• 1:21:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  of crypto, and applied that to lobbying in the US, what kind of a difference would that make, do you think?

• 1:21:58David Hoffman?

  Yeah, we have money printers. We can make money. We should just funnel that money into fighting for having the ability to keep the money printers that we made.

• 1:22:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is, I mean, I guess, I hate that we have to do this. But this is also how the game is played. This is what Andrew Yang said in the podcast. Like, he's like, "I'm here to tell you that lobbying works."

• 1:22:18David Hoffman?

  Yep.

• 1:22:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  That spending money in Washington actually works.

• 1:22:20David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 1:22:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  And I wish that wasn't the case. I wish the protocol would change, but like, that's how the game is played.

• 1:22:27David Hoffman?

  Yep.

• 1:22:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  So, good job Coinbase. I hope we continue to spend in DC. I guess that's what we're going to have to do. Also, this was an interesting story, David. Can you maybe?

• 1:22:36David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 1:22:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  Give us some context. So, this was a story that came out of Missouri Mainnet. You were actually there when it happened. So, what was the story and then what's happening now?

• 1:22:43David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so Do Kwan of Terra was on an escalator down to give his talk at Mainnet. And waiting for him at the bottom of the escalator were a bunch of suits and ties with a subpoena. So, they served him his subpoena at Missouri Mainnet. People thought like, what, did they do that because like, they knew that he was going to be on United States soil? And so, like, took this opportunity to serve him? Did they do it inside of Mainnet to flex and like, scare the industry? Anyways, Do Kwan has done the reverse Uno card. And Do Kwan is now suing the SEC. I actually don't know why. Do you know why he's suing the SEC?

• 1:23:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, he's saying that, basically, I, this is the entire document that defines. I think he's basically saying the SEC was completely out of line, not within its rights, to approach him like that and apprehend him in public at the Mainnet conference. And the lawyer goes over the case as to why that's the case, why it's an infringement on Do Kwan's rights, why it is a breach of power by the SEC. And I gotta say, some of these points make a lot of sense. Again, I'm not a lawyer. I don't know how this will stand up. But like, what a mad lad move.

• 1:23:52David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 1:23:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  I'm like, you're subpoenaing me, SEC? No, I'm suing you. I'll see you in court. Wow, that takes a lot of audacity.

• 1:24:03David Hoffman?

  I'm reminded of the insanity wolf meme that was like, five, 10 years ago from the old days. It's just like, sue the SEC.

• 1:24:13David Hoffman?

  Like, bold strategy, I hope it works out for him.

• 1:24:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, you know, he's got some points, but not gonna make friends and influence people at the SEC, that's for sure. But, look, I don't know, I don't know how I feel about this. I mean, maybe some pushback is warranted for this sort of thing. Regardless, this kind of stuff's gonna end up in court, so.

• 1:24:32David Hoffman?

  You bully us? No, we bully you.

• 1:24:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  We have lawyers, too. Mastercard says, "Any bank or merchant on its vast network can soon offer crypto services." So Visa's been hard in the game lately. I guess Mastercard now following suit, going down the crypto rabbit hole, starting to offer crypto payment options to all of its merchants and customers. Pretty cool.

• 1:24:57David Hoffman?

  Yeah, just a reminder, Visa, Mastercard, these are payment networks. They're not specific about any currency. They are payment messaging networks. You can put any currency you want on Mastercard. And so, Mastercard wants more than just the dollars. It wants Bitcoin and other cryptos.

• 1:25:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, and also, I think it's going to use stablecoins as well. We're actually gonna have some folks from Visa on the show later in November to talk about some of the plans for Visa and talk about the DeFi mullet, David. That's what we do. Some regulation rumors as well. A lot of people in Treasury are talking about, apparently some rumors, they're talking about a push from Gary Gensler and others in SEC and Treasury to increase the amount of regulatory scrutiny on stablecoins in particular. So, feels very much to me like the Eye of Sauron has sort of turned towards stablecoins. I'm like, personally, I'm glad it's not fully on DeFi right now.

• 1:25:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  And they've given Bitcoin and ETH kind of a pass with the ETF. But it definitely feels like the Eye of Sauron is turning on stablecoins, and that's going to be a next target. I'm not sure how that's going to play out. The SEC apparently is claiming some jurisdiction. Some folks, even at the CFTC, want jurisdiction. There's talk of making, like, essentially making stablecoin issuers apply by bank rules. So, FDIC insurance and all of these other things. And of course, there's not a lot of clarity in this industry. So, I don't know how this is all going to play out. Seems like various regulatory bodies are all fighting for some jurisdiction here. David, do you have any takes?

• 1:26:37David Hoffman?

  No, no takes here.

• 1:26:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I think this goes back to you, you know, basically our conversation with Eric Peters, where he was like, hey, in the short run, this sort of stuff is going to happen. But in the long run, nation states will get on board with this and have to capitulate. And so like, I'm less worried about, this is another example of probably regulatory FUD, that's all going to be okay for crypto, we'll keep marching on.

• 1:27:03David Hoffman?

  Yeah, the regulation is going to happen and the crypto world will exist exactly as it intends to regardless, just got to wait and watch it happen.

• 1:27:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  Speaking of Eric Peters, David, let's talk about this real quick. What did Eric Peters say on our podcast that's being reported in crypto media?

• 1:27:18David Hoffman?

  Yeah, Eric Peters says crypto is the most interesting macro opportunity and investment of Eric's recent title that he ever knows of. And so Eric Peters, again, on the podcast, a very big deal in the legacy world. So when they were buying Bitcoin and Ether, they were keeping it a secret because they knew that once it got out that One River Capital Management was buying crypto, it would be a shot heard around the world. As soon as it was announced, Bitcoin set its all time highs of like $63,000 like earlier this year. And so people listen to Eric Peters, and Eric Peters, on this podcast that I listen to called Bankless, said that crypto is the most interesting macro investment ever.

• 1:28:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Do you know, that was one of my favorite podcasts that we've done this year? I just thought it was phenomenal, it was a really great podcast. Yeah, and you know, Eric is definitely leading the charge in the traditional institutional world here. Last thing for you, and then we will get to takes of the week. Leading DeFi prediction market, Polymarket, is said to be under investigation by the CFTC. They're also in talks to raise money at a $1 billion valuation. That's an interesting contrast, isn't it?

• 1:28:25David Hoffman?

  Right, yeah. The alleged thing that the CFTC is saying about Polymarket is that it's letting customers improperly trade swaps or binary options, and it should be registered with the agency. So it's basically just finding them or under investigation for just not registering, which they probably don't want to do anyways.

• 1:28:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  Just kind of, kind of, you know, regulators cracking down and crypto companies raising war chests to fight that. And I think this all gets resolved in the courts, hopefully.

• 1:28:54David Hoffman?

  Is it gonna, here's how this is gonna end up. Again, I don't know anything, but like, it's gonna be like a two, three, four million dollar fine. And they just raised at a billion dollar valuation. So like, okay.

• 1:29:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  You think that, that, that's kind of what we've seen traditionally, right?

• 1:29:08David Hoffman?

  And the CFTC isn't the SEC. The CFTC is nice.

• 1:29:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. All right, guys, we will be back with the takes of the week and some more. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible.

• 1:29:21David Hoffman?

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

• 1:30:02David Hoffman?

  If you're a developer and you want to save on gas costs and overall make a better user experience, go to developers off chain labs.com to get started building on Arbitrum. And if you're a user, keep an eye out for your favorite DeFi apps being built on Arbitrum. Many DeFi applications on the Ethereum L1 are migrating over to layer twos like Arbitrum, and some are even skipping over the layer ones entirely and deploying directly on layer two. There's so many apps coming online to Arbitrum, so go to bridge dot arbitrum.io now and start bridging over your ETH or any of the tokens listed. And start having the DeFi or NFT experience that you've always wanted. Living a bankless life requires taking control over your own private keys. Not your keys, not your crypto. That's why so many in the bankless nation already have their Ledger hardware wallet, which makes proper private key management a breeze.

• 1:30:47David Hoffman?

  But the Ledger ecosystem is much more than just a secure hardware wallet. Ledger is the combination of the Ledger hardware wallet and the Ledger live. App and if you're used to seeing all of your crypto services and favorite DeFi apps all in one spot, Ledger Live is where you want to be. Not only does Ledger let you buy your crypto assets straight from the app, but it also hooks into all of the DeFi apps and services that you're used to. Using Ledger Live, you can stake your ETH in Lido, swap on DEXs like Paraswap, or display your NFTs with Rainbow. You can also use Wallet Connect inside of Ledger Live to connect to all the other DeFi apps that keep coming online. DeFi never stops growing and the Ledger Live app grows alongside with it.

• 1:31:28David Hoffman?

  So click the link in the show notes to see all of the DeFi apps that Ledger Live has and stay tuned as more apps come online. And if you don't have a Ledger hardware wallet, what are you even waiting for? Go to ledger.com, grab a Ledger, download Ledger Live and get all of your DeFi apps all in one space.

• 1:31:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Alright guys, we are back with the takes of the week. The Turtle and the Punk are here to give you the freshest takes in crypto. David, let's start with the Punk take. This is your take. This is all about the modular blockchain and kind of the handshake between ETH as ultrasound money and Ethereum as ultrasound scalability. What's the feedback loop here and what's the tweet?

• 1:32:06David Hoffman?

  Yeah, this is, this is why the ultra scalable Ethereum design structure is so incredibly awesome. And the modular design thesis with sharding, when you add more proof of stake validators, when more people spin up 32, stake 32 ETH and spin up a validator, the more people that do that, the more validators there are, the more shards that we can add to the Ethereum blockchain, right? So if we double the number of validators, we can just have more shards, which actually associates Ethereum's security and decentralization with its scale. Meaning it can become more secure, more decentralized, while also becoming more scalable. This is the big unlock. Previously, we had the blockchain trilemma where it said like, well, if you want to be decentralized,

• 1:32:48David Hoffman?

  you have to sacrifice scale. With sharding, it inverts it where we get more decentralization, we actually add more scale. Okay, so more validators get spun up, we get more shards providing more data. If we get more data on the shards, like the, because rollups compress data and before they deploy- Down to the L1 shards. So adding one megabyte of data down to the Ethereum L1 adds like a gigabyte of data onto a rollup because it's compressed. So when you add any amount of small amount of data to the Ethereum L1, you add orders of magnitude more data to the Ethereum L2s, which makes transactions go faster. You can do more of them. They're cheaper. They go faster. So faster, cheaper rollups, that allows for creating net new economic activity. We talk about how congestion in Ethereum

• 1:33:31David Hoffman?

  pushes economic activity elsewhere. It goes on to Polygon, it goes on to Solana. Well, when you actually recapture those things by having super fast, cheap transactions, you create more net economic activity that is happening on Ethereum. More net economic activity means more fees for validators because more total fees are being pushed down to the L1. If we have more fees for validators, you have a larger incentive to spin up a new validator because you are getting more Ether-denominated APY on your validators. And so when there's more fees being paid to validators, more validators will spin up. We started this whole thread at this point where if you start up more validators, you get more data shards, which adds to more scale of the rollups, which adds more economic activity, which adds more fees, which adds more proof of stake validators, which adds

• 1:34:14David Hoffman?

  more data. The positive feedback loop is absolutely insane. And so really, the growth of Ethereum, as it grows in decentralization, it becomes more scalable. The cool thing about this is that when we have a bunch of fees, I don't include this in the tweet, but when you have a bunch of fees because of the economic activity, you're making Ether more valuable, which increases the value of what is being paid out to validators. And so because of ultra scalable Ethereum, we make Ether more scarce, and because Ether is more valuable, you have the incentive to spin up more nodes. And so ultrasound money, me, ultra scalable Ethereum, your identical sibling. One is the network, one's the money, and they are both ultra. So that is where we are today.

• 1:34:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  So make it simple for this turtle here, David. You tell me we should buy ETH then.

• 1:34:59David Hoffman?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:35:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  You tell me ETH is a good investment here.

• 1:35:02David Hoffman?

  Yeah. And not only is it a fantastic investment, but Ethereum is a fantastic platform to hold that investment on.

• 1:35:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is not investment advice, of course, never is, but you can infer what you like by the bullishness of that statement. This is Ron Paul. He is not bullish on the Fed.

• 1:35:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Never has been. I'll read the tweet out. "By creating many trillions of new dollars out of thin air, the Fed set in motion an economic disaster. The warnings are over, inflation is now here. Every excuse will be offered up as the reason for the economic pain. Don't be deceived, the unconstitutional Fed is the reason." Ron Paul has always been, like, long been saying this, that the Fed is basically inflating money supply. I feel like a lot of people were listening to this message in 2000, after 2008 crisis, and thought inflation was imminent, and were kind of proven wrong, in a way, because they thought CPI inflation was imminent. But they were actually, like, retrospectively proven right,

• 1:36:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  because money supply inflation actually happened, and asset price inflation happened as well. And now we're starting to see the inflation that everybody else notices, and everyone else calls inflation, which is actually like Consumer Price Index inflation. And so now, a bunch of people are saying like, "Hey, see? We told you, you know, the chickens would come home to roost. We told you that this was going to happen." And Ron Paul, of course, is blaming the central banks and the Fed. I don't think he's wrong, but, you know, yeah, what's your take on this?

• 1:36:36David Hoffman?

  I really just like the color of the unconstitutional Fed. We didn't, we didn't elect the Fed. We didn't, we don't, as a democracy, get to choose the monetary policy that the Fed bestows upon us. We also, by the way, didn't elect any members of the SEC. It's a, it's a nice reminder that, like, money is a public good, and it's actually been captured by like 12 dudes behind closed doors. And Janet Yellen.

• 1:36:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's not part of the governance protocol of the United, the Republic of the United States.

• 1:37:04David Hoffman?

  We are governed by, yeah, we are, we are governed by the central bank, and we are governed without representation in the government, in the central bank.

• 1:37:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  Here's another take that I think is related. This is Jack Dorsey saying, "Hyperinflation is going to change everything. It's happening." This, this term "hyperinflation."

• 1:37:23David Hoffman?

  It's a big word.

• 1:37:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it's a big word. A lot of people were angry at his use of this word. Said it was like hyperbole, said it was exaggeration, said he was just pumping his, his Bitcoin bags. I have maybe a kind of a nuanced take where I partially agree but partially disagree. But what's your take?

• 1:37:41David Hoffman?

  It's a very polarizing, right? Like, hyperinflation causes fear. It's a scary thing. Like, hyperinflation basically is a broken economy. Like, your economy cannot function.

• 1:37:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  Your money no longer works.

• 1:37:52David Hoffman?

  Money no longer works. So therefore, nothing works. That's exactly right. Hyperinflation is a bold claim because lots are talking about, like, oh, basically, the destruction of the United States economy, which would be the destruction of the entire world. So it's, yeah, it's a big deal to make this sort of thing. And I think the reason why he can make this kind of claim is because inflation has been really, really low for a very long amount of time. And so markets and basically entire economy has operated under like a less than 2% paradigm for a decade now. And so if we ever saw like larger than that, which we are currently seeing, that it breaks a lot of things. And so that's kind of why he gets to say hyperinflation in my mind.

• 1:38:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, my take on it is like, hyperinflation still is too, it's too much, right? It's too alarmist for what's going on. Like, you don't have to use that word. I think when people think of hyperinflation, they think of like, you know, Zimbabwe, you know, crisis and people using wheelbarrows of money to just buy their daily goods and like using money as wallpaper and like completely broken. I don't think that's where the US is headed. And I think it's a bit of hyperbole to think that overnight the dollar is like suddenly going to be like a collapse. Absent the US losing a major war, I don't see that happening. That said, that doesn't mean there won't be very high levels of consumer price index inflation.

• 1:39:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  I just don't think of that as like hyperinflation, like the money is just kind of dying overnight. But I think we could get to like double-digit CPI, for instance.

• 1:39:22David Hoffman?

  Which would break a lot of people's brains. That's a really high number.

• 1:39:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, and some people would say, well, that is hyperinflation. So it is kind of a subjective definition of what hyperinflation, I guess, is. But interesting that people are like just blatantly tweeting this in 2021, right? Now you know inflation is here is because this can be tweeted with a lot of, a lot of support by a major CEO.

• 1:39:44David Hoffman?

  Agreed. I think hyperinflation, we can say that it arrives when like people really start moving, talking about not storing their money in dollars anymore. So like taking their paychecks and then turning it into something else. That is, in my mind, hyperinflation. Which I've been doing ever since 2017.

• 1:40:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is kind of my take on some of the talk about inflation. It's just this take on fiat. Fiat only works because no one actually knows how fiat really works. This was fine for decades. Then crypto came. Crypto pays people to learn about how money actually works. It's gamified economics. And when a new generation learns how money really works, do you think they'll hold crypto or fiat? David, you hold crypto?

• 1:40:30David Hoffman?

  Crypto. Crypto only.

• 1:40:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  As much crypto as possible fiat to pay your bills.

• 1:40:34David Hoffman?

  Gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble. Yeah.

• 1:40:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  And part of the reason, like, and like, I feel the same way. And the reason why is because I actually learned about money. And I wouldn't have learned about money if Bitcoin and Ether didn't pay me to go learn about money. Like, and by pay me, I mean a tremendous amount of upside in terms of like figuring out what the next monetary regime is. And in order to figure that out, you actually have to understand the nature of money. I think older generations just take money for granted. Like, they don't actually have to think about it. It's not a thing that actually matters to them because they lived in a stasis monetary regime. We live in a transition period where monetary regimes are not in stasis. They are changing. Like, things are happening. This is a different time period.

• 1:41:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  And what's also happening is now that crypto is here, it is gamifying. It is like rewarding you to go learn what money actually is. And the more people who learn what money is, the less they'll trust fiat. And then the less people who trust fiat. It's like the reverse of what you just said, that positive feedback loop for Ether. It's like an unwinding of that, right? Which is actually like, I love many of Andrew Yang's policies, right? And I love particularly his governance protocol policies. I worry a little bit about UBI, right? Like, it's not that I don't believe in that as a wealth distribution function. Like, I think it could service that. But like, what if it also serves to collapse faith in fiat?

• 1:42:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  What do you lose as the nation state in like? Like if you do that, if you cause that and people are suddenly getting checks, where does it come from? Well, it comes from the money printer unless you're like taxing this. If you're just printing that UBI, then maybe that further erodes faith in money. So yeah, I think crypto is just unravel, is going to start unraveling the entire fiat experiment. And maybe that does lead to some hyperinflation. I don't know. It's not in the US, but you know, we'll see.

• 1:42:31David Hoffman?

  It would be interesting to run the A B test as to like inflation in this world as it currently stands with crypto and then also without crypto. Like what if the crypto industry didn't actually exist? And we had COVID and we had the money printer go brrr. There are probably a lot less inflation because you, the, like you say, like you, you talk about how like crypto comes in and teaches people about money. But also importantly, it's an exit, it's an escape hatch out of fiat money, right? And so that escape hatch actually can leak out a lot of value and cause the hyperinflation simply by having the option to sell your dollars and buy Bitcoin and buy Ether, buy Shib. Like you can, you actually create the hyperinflation that is actually the narrative that Bitcoiners like run with. Like, like they say, hey, the dollar is going to, to hyperinflate one day.

• 1:43:14David Hoffman?

  Buy Bitcoin so you can protect yourself from that. The mere actually existence of Bitcoin can actually make it a self fulfilling prophecy, right? Because it can actually cause the inflation that is being discussed.

• 1:43:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, totally. There's an ape in the middle of, you know, Wall Street. Coinbase is the number one app, rampant inflation. Like what do all of these things have in common, right? It's a, it's all kind of the story of crypto. Um, let's talk about this take. This is from, from Matt.

• 1:43:42David Hoffman?

  Matt, Matt, Matt Huang from Paradigm. He goes, stocks are worth a hundred dollars. Print a lot of money. Now stocks are worth $200. Tax the unrealized gain of $100. Rinse and repeat. And so this is kind of like the very pernicious nature of like the association between having the ability to print money and also having the ability to tax money. We are unburdening the economy, unburdening our massive debt by printing our way out of it by just devaluing the debt. But at the same time, the, in order to actually fund the government, like they need taxes. And so there's, there's very insipidous like method of taxation, which is going on, which is like, well, just pump out a bunch of money to pay for things and then all your asset prices are going to go up because we inflated the money. But now that we made the asset prices go up, we're going to tax your unrealized gains.

• 1:44:25David Hoffman?

  There's that conversation going around in Congress about like taxing unrealized capital gains.

• 1:44:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's a huge change. That would be a massive change.

• 1:44:33David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  How tax regime works.

• 1:44:34David Hoffman?

  So that's like if your assets go up, you actually have to pay the taxes on your assets, even if you didn't sell them, which is crazy. I think it's only being confined to like the top 700 richest people in the United States, but still as like a it's kind of a slippery slope. Like first it's the top 1%, then it's the top 10%, then it's everyone. And like you, your wealth is just taxed inherently. Do you own something? Well, like now you have to give some something to the government. So don't like the dynamics going on right now.

• 1:45:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, there's a lot there, right? So like, I think what what Congress, something Congress are trying to react to is this massive wealth inequality, where it feels like billionaires are barely getting taxed, right? And rather than raise tax capital gains, they're talking about this ability to tax unrealized capital gains.

• 1:45:18David Hoffman?

  Because if you raise capital gains, you just incentivize people like Jeff Bezos to stop selling. And they're not even selling anymore. They're just collateralizing their equity.

• 1:45:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  He collateralizes his equity and then he borrows against us so he never realizes a taxable gain. Like, and I see that loophole, right? That that so so people are saying, well, what if we tax unrealized gains? But what are the downstream implications and ramifications of taxing unrealized gains? But there's also, I think, the subpoint, and this goes back to our conversation with Eric Peters. He's just like, hey, if crypto takes off and fiat starts to collapse, the government's still going to get theirs. And you know how they're going to do that? They're going to raise taxes on some winning element of the economy. And if you don't pay those taxes, they'll throw you in jail. Remember, governments still have the ability to put people in cages. And they have, you know, unlimited

• 1:46:08David Hoffman?

  Resources, yeah.

• 1:46:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  resources to do that. And they have like basically violence. We've given them the stick of violence. That that's kind of the Faustine bargain we've made with with our governments. And so, you know, I wouldn't be surprised if this kind of tax policy starts to gain in in popularity in this over the next decade. I don't I don't know what. It means for for everything, but yeah, it's the government will try to get it theirs. That's for sure.

• 1:46:34David Hoffman?

  I said this in the Eric Peters debrief, so all the premium subscribers to Bankless heard this. And but for all the free subscribers, I'll say it here. I hope that the way that they tax crypto is via the off ramps. So if you have a bunch of gains and you sell your money into dollars for your bank account, they'll tax you then. And so they should put that tax there so that it just incentivizes everyone to go into the world of crypto and only stay and stays there. I think that's the best path forward.

• 1:46:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, we'll have to see. I mean, there's so much that needs to get resolved in this decade, including this, including Facebook and social media surveillance.

• 1:47:08David Hoffman?

  This is awesome.

• 1:47:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  So to talk about this, this is Francis.

• 1:47:12David Hoffman?

  The Facebook whistleblower that talked about, hey, there's like this internal structure at Facebook that everyone in Facebook knows that it's tearing apart the seams of society and everyone's okay with that inside of Facebook. So that was the whistleblower. So basically, Facebook knows that it's bad for like mental health. It's bad for society. And then she also says like, and everyone knows that and they aren't doing choosing to do anything about it. So that was like.

• 1:47:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  And this was big news this this month, right? Like she was on Francis was on 60 Minutes talking about this and like, you know, Facebook was freaking out and all sorts of things. So go on.

• 1:47:43David Hoffman?

  So the tweet says, the Facebook whistleblower says she doesn't need financial support. Everyone's trying to give her financial support for being a whistleblower, I guess. Because she doesn't need financial support because she bought crypto at the right time. She is in Puerto Rico in part to join her crypto friends who are there seeking as a tax shelter. You don't have to pay any capital gains in Puerto Rico. The cool thing about this is that like, well, crypto is also web three, like web three is part of this whole thing. And so the web three world funded the lady that blew the whistle about the web two world. It was it's like, it's perfect. It's perfect. Such a great story.

• 1:48:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  Web three really is taking down web two. It's already happening. I wonder what her thoughts would be on web three's ability to actually create a different incentive mechanism for the social media surveillance that's going on. Let's talk about this. This is a tweet from Blau. It's him at a concert, looking like he's performing in front of thousands of people.

• 1:48:38David Hoffman?

  Yeah, it looks like a massive conference and it's not conference, concert. And so, yeah, it's a selfie. He's not taking the photo, but it's Blau in front of just a massive crowd. And then he tweets out this photo and he just says, one day they'll all own NFTs. Damn right, they will, Blau.

• 1:48:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  Part of the fan experience. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, David, let's talk about what you're excited about this week, other than the physical manifestation of your Crypto Punk. What do you have for us?

• 1:49:04David Hoffman?

  I'm excited about two things. First thing, NFT NYC on Sunday. I packed my bags going into New York for the whole week for NFT NYC. So if you're out there, make sure to find me. I won't be looking like my punk.

• 1:49:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  How will we know who you are?

• 1:49:20David Hoffman?

  I have no clue. I'll be carrying around an iPad and maybe I can get Ryan to join me at times on the iPad.

• 1:49:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, my God. Yeah, I'll zoom in for you.

• 1:49:28David Hoffman?

  And I already talked about this, but I'm just, the last time I was this excited about Ethereum, it was, we were on the cusp of like the whole ultrasound money revolution. And like, nothing's really different anymore, except for the fact that like we are progressing in Ethereum's roadmap. But having the ability to name something is really, really powerful. And I think with ultra scalable Ethereum, go read the blog post, we can finally talk about the way that Ethereum has gone after its scaling strategy. So I'm just really, really excited just to see like, it's going to be ultra, ultra scalable Ethereum. It was ultra scalable Ethereum week this week. It'll be ultra scalable Ethereum next week, ultra scalable Ethereum now and forever.

• 1:50:07David Hoffman?

  And I think I'm just excited to see this like work its way into the brains of people in the same way that ultrasound money did, ultra scalable Ethereum is following in its footsteps. And that's what I'm excited about.

• 1:50:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  Definitely a powerful narrative. I share that excitement, David.

• 1:50:20David Hoffman?

  Ryan, what are you excited about?

• 1:50:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  I am really excited about crypto games in the metaverse. Okay, so we had a great conversation with Chris Dixon. He talked about, and you'll hear this on the podcast on Monday, he talked about what crypto gives you the ability to own your own inventory and move it from website to website, right? This idea of owning your own inventory, that is the primitive we've unlocked with crypto. And I think that, that new property right, that hasn't been available on the internet, that digital property right is now available to us. And this is what's going to create the metaverse. But in the near run, I think the metaverse will probably emerge through gaming, crypto gaming, like these virtual worlds, right? Like I think Ready Player One is not that wrong in that a lot of the Metaverse at first will feel like an immersive gaming type experience.

• 1:51:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  And we're starting to see some of that activity start. Like, I think the crypto gaming industry is just in its first inning. Like, Axie was the first breakout success. Now, we're going to see an entire new wave of crypto games I'm super excited about. In particular, I'm excited about crypto games on Layer 2. Okay, because I think that unlocks something special. So we're seeing crypto games being built on immutable.

• 1:51:30David Hoffman?

  They have to be on Layer 2, yeah.

• 1:51:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is a roll up. We're also seeing crypto games starting to emerge on Starkware's new solution, which is cool. There's two that I know of. I'm also excited about this other experiment, which is like bottom-up building, where you actually start with the inventory and you build the game around the inventory. You start with the inventory, you create a DAO, you create a community, and the community kind of builds the game. Okay, so Loot started to pioneer this. There's also a game called Dope Wars. This is doing like a loot idea, but it's like Grand Theft Auto kind of loot, rather than like fantasy world loot. And they're doing it on Layer 2, which is super interesting. I have no idea if these experiments will be successful, but this is a new model for the world.

• 1:52:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  And again, it starts in crypto gaming, turns into a metaverse, and all of these people will be DeFi-pilled in the process. They will start to do their banking on crypto. This will be good and synergistic with DeFi. And it all leads back to Ether as money! I mean, like, so watch the Chris Dixon video show on Monday for some more details on some of this stuff. But I've been messing around with some things this week in kind of that space. And I just see the very first seedling of the metaverse starting to emerge. And I think some big unlocks are coming in the future, too. So that's what I'm excited about.

• 1:52:52David Hoffman?

  I'm as excited as anyone when it comes to the metaverse. But for the sake of the conversation, I'll be the devil's advocate here. I'm actually kind of worried that like these, because the market cap, the total addressable market cap of crypto game is absolutely massive. It's, we talked about this with Arianna Simpson. Like, games are going to be the new economies. And this just means you're going to be paid to play these games. Going to make them really, really financially incentivized to play these games. What happens to the world when like, we can just make our money playing games? Like, are we going to stop going to work?

• 1:53:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  Do we do anything real?

• 1:53:24David Hoffman?

  Yeah, what else do we do? We stop going to work, like, we're just going to shut down Bankless because I'm having way too much fun playing this game and I'm making plenty of money doing it, like...

• 1:53:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, what are we doing now, David? Are we doing anything productive? Are we like, are we playing a game?

• 1:53:38David Hoffman?

  Well, I mean, no, I'm not literally playing WASD games. I'm talking about actual WASD games.

• 1:53:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  I guess like, what is the difference between? Like, what is the definition of like, adding value? Like, I have a lot of fun doing this, right? This doesn't feel like a job. This kind of feels like a game. And oh my God, like, if we think about it, like, from a meta perspective, you and I play games all day. We talk to our friends in Discord groups and we collect coins.

• 1:54:05David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 1:54:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right? And we tell people about those coins. Like, we're kind of playing a game in a way, right?

• 1:54:11David Hoffman?

  But that's different than what I was going after. And we're very privileged because we're in the crypto space. Imagine like, all of the broken supply chain people. There's lack of shipping containers. There's not enough labor at the ports. Like, what happened? We have a shortage of labor. And what happens when that shortage of labor gets 10 times worse? Because the metaverse is paying a bunch of people to play games, like...

• 1:54:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  So you're worried about like, this idea of like escapism? And like, people aren't, like, we still need physical things. There still needs to be real human interaction.

• 1:54:40David Hoffman?

  We still got to grow the food.

• 1:54:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, we still, we'll still need all these things. And, but what happens if everyone is like, just plugged into a computer? And, um, yeah, I get that take too.

• 1:54:52David Hoffman?

  I think it's a cool future. Like, I want that future to happen, but I'm just worried that there's going to be a lot of industries that get gutted because of the magnitude of crypto gaming.

• 1:55:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, that's for sure. And at the same time, there also needs to be a whole bunch of new jobs for human beings, right? Well, like, artificial intelligence and, you know, you know, takes so many of the jobs that we're doing today. Anyway, that's it. Takes the week, guys. Let's get to the meme of the week and close this down, David. So, meme of the week, what's the first one we're looking at here?

• 1:55:19David Hoffman?

  Uh, I think we only have one this week. This one, I made this when I was... And Luke at Bankless tweeted out after reading the ultra scalable Ethereum, the modular blockchain thesis, Luke just says, like, can you scroll up so I can actually just read it? He goes, I don't know about you folks, but at some point, all this stuff just starts to become obvious. Really stoked to be taking the journey with Bankless. And I read that tweet, I'm like, oh, it must be so nice coming into the world of crypto in 2021, where things have just been like digested and like put into like articles and mental models. But coming into the world of crypto in 2017 was an absolute shit show. No one knew what was true. No one knew what was real. Everything was like, there was competing narratives, competing technologies like Polytrain, like Crosschain, blah, blah, blah, blah.

• 1:56:04David Hoffman?

  And so I decided to slap together this meme where this is the army man protecting the sleeping child from a bunch of like raining grenades and knives. The raining grenades knives are titled, "A Bunch of Confusing Bullshit." And then the, sorry for the language, and then the army man is Bankless. And so it's a little self congratulatory, but that's what we try and do at Bankless is there's a lot of just crazy bullshit out in the industry and we try and sift through the mess and make sure that we don't let confusing bullshit hit the ears of anyone.

• 1:56:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  Are you worried though that we're protecting people from the ships of the world and they could be making insane gains?

• 1:56:40David Hoffman?

  Well, podcasts are permissionless, so they are free to listen to a different podcast.

• 1:56:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, that's true. We do try our best, though. We try to parse and like figure out what the truth of these situations are.

• 1:56:50David Hoffman?

  Oh, there are two memes. There are two memes, yeah.

• 1:56:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  Here's the second meme of the week. What's this, David?

• 1:56:53David Hoffman?

  Yeah, this is a Ryan Tron Adams classic I've now learned where he slaps on a headline onto a picture of a regulator and everyone believes it. And that's kind of the sad part. The comments here or the caption is, "Regulators worried that crypto might improve banking system." Quote, "Crypto might put the banks out of business." And then the tweet is, "I'm worried that crypto might improve things."

• 1:57:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is a depiction of Janet Yellen as well as a central banker. A lot of people thought this was real, but you know, the fact that everyone assumes this is the meme is the real problem. That's what we'd say, guys. This has been a special Halloween edition. I think this is the last time you will see me in an NFT turtle costume anytime soon. I don't know if we'll be seeing the CryptoPunk again, David. Do you have plans for this?

• 1:57:40David Hoffman?

  Yeah, maybe I do take my CryptoPunk to NFT NYC. It'll be in good company, I feel like.

• 1:57:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  You probably should. Guys, none of this, of course, was financial advice. ETH is risky, DeFi is risky, so is Shib. You could lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the Bankless journey. Thanks a lot.

• 1:57:59David Hoffman?

  And now, a moment of zen.

• 1:58:01Speaker 02

  If you had 24 hours with me and I couldn't say no, what would we do?

• 1:58:07David Hoffman?

  I just released "Bonding Together" on the Bankless newsletter, and so we are going to read it together. Let's dive right in. Back in 2017, I discovered that my gaming computer with a single AMD GPU could produce roughly $5 a day in mining this thing called ETH. I thought that was pretty cool. 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

• 1:58:50David Hoffman?

  even the Bankless token for airdrops, raffles, and unlocks. If you're interested in crypto, the Bankless community is where you want to be. Click the link in the description to become a Bankless premium subscriber today. Also, don't forget to subscribe to the channel for in-depth interviews with industry leaders, Ask Me Anythings, and weekly rollups where we summarize the week in crypto and other fantastic content. Thanks, everyone, for watching and being on the journey as we build out the Bankless nation.