44 - The Bull Case for Ethereum | Eric Conner, Anthony Sassano, DC Investor

🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: http://bankless.substack.com/ ✊ STARTING GUIDE BANKLESS: https://bit.ly/37Q17uI ❤️ JOIN PRIVATE DISCORD: https://bit.ly/2UVI10O 🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/ 👕 BUY BANKLESS TEE: https://merch.banklesshq.com/ ----- GO BANKLESS WITH THESE SPONSOR TOOLS: ⭐️LEDGER - BEST HARDWARE WALLET TO SECURE YOUR CRYPTO https://bankless.cc/ledger 🚀 ZERION - INVEST IN DEFI FROM ONE PLACE https://bankless.cc/zerion 💳 MONOLITH - GET THE HOLY GRAIL OF BANKLESS VISA CARDS https://bankless.cc/monolith 🤖YEARN - YIELD-SEEKING MONEY ROBOT THAT FARMS DEFI FOR YOU http://bankless.cc/yearn ------ 44 - The Bull Case for Ethereum Guests: Eric Conner, Anthony Sassano, DC Investor These three gentlemen are close to the beating heart of the Ethereum universe. They all pay attention to undercurrents of what is transpiring in Ethereum. What are the factors that contribute to bullishness on the Ethereum economy and ETH the asset? We ask our guests how they characterize the relationship between Ethereum and ETH, the interaction between scaling Ethereum and EIP1559, as well as the potential for NFTs. All, of course, underpinned by DeFi applications making the magic happen. Tune in to hear the bull case for Ethereum from good representatives from the Ethereum community ------ Don't stop at the video! Subscribe to the Bankless newsletter program http://bankless.substack.com/ Visit the official Bankless website for resources http://banklesshq.com/ Follow Bankless on Twitter https://twitter.com/BanklessHQ Follow Ryan on Twitter https://twitter.com/ryansadams Follow David on Twitter https://twitter.com/TrustlessState ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time we may add links in this channel to products we use. We may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. We'll always disclose when this is the case

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

• 0:08David Hoffman?

  Si vous voulez vivre une vie sans banque, vous devez obtenir un portefeuille de matériel. Il n'y a pas d'alternative à stocker votre crypto de façon autonome. C'est pourquoi j'ai quatre ledgers que j'utilise pour gérer mes différents actifs crypto en utilisant aussi l'account Ledger Live. Ledger Live est comme votre base de base pour gérer vos comptes Ethereum, DeFi et crypto. Il fait un très bon travail d'aggreger tous vos portefeuilles d'Ethereum si vous êtes le type de personne qui utilise plus d'un. Mais vous pouvez aussi ajouter d'autres cryptomonnaies comme Bitcoin ou Cosmos ou quoi que ce soit que votre blockchain préférée soit. Et puis il va afficher un portefeuille aggregate de tous vos comptes à la page principale. Une chose que Ledger fait un très bon travail est d'activer tous les verbes monnaies

• 0:51David Hoffman?

  dont nous et Ryan parlons avec le Cube Banque Sans Skill activé dans l'application Ledger Live. Donc maintenant dans l'application Ledger Live, vous pouvez acheter, vendre, louer, échanger et prendre en compte vos actifs crypto, ce qui fait un très bon travail d'accomplir tous les verbes monnaies dans le Cube Banque Sans Skill. Quelque chose de nouveau dans Ledger Live est le échange de portefeuilles un pour l'autre directement dans l'application Ledger Live, assurant la confiance dans votre activité financière sur Ethereum et sur Bitcoin. Si vous voulez apprendre plus sur ce que vous pouvez faire avec un ledger, allez sur le blog post "Le pouvoir de Ledger Live" sur le site Ledger où ils partagent certaines des choses plus avancées que vous pouvez faire avec votre ledger que vous n'avez peut-être pas connu. Il y a un lien dans les notes de la présentation qui vous emmènera dans la boutique Ledger

• 1:34David Hoffman?

  où vous pouvez obtenir votre portefeuille de matériel préféré. J'aime personnellement le Ledger Nano X, mais j'en ai aussi deux. Ils sont deux options super. Quand vous possédez un ledger, vous possédez vos propres actifs de la façon dont ils ont été conçus pour être gardés par le utilisateur et le utilisateur seul. Alors allez obtenir votre ledger aujourd'hui pour s'assurer que vous êtes autonome possible. The Bankless State of the Nations are brought to you by Wyarn. Wyarn is DeFi's first self-building, community-run project, which I just get really, really excited about. Wyarn is a system that seeks out yield in DeFi, and it does that in a number of different ways. A very aggressive way is with the vaults, where you can deposit your preferred asset of choice,

• 2:16David Hoffman?

  and different DeFi experts will come in and generate a strategy for what to do with your deposited token. And so it'll go find ways to get yield in that deposited token in DeFi. For those who want to just earn yield on their stablecoins, the Earn system is for you, where you can deposit your preferred stablecoin, and Wyarn will go and figure out which money market on DeFi, and DeFi is producing the best interest rate, whether it's DY, DX, it's Compound, or AVE. It looks around DeFi to see where the yield is coming from, and it directs stablecoins automatically, so you don't have to. Check them out at wyarn.finance to get started, and also check out the stats page to see what other people are doing.

• 2:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bankless Nation, we've been waiting for this episode for a long time. We have got the three most bullish people we could find, other than David and myself, about Ether on today. We've got Eric Conner, Anthony Sassano, DC Investor. These folks were bulls when it was not popular to be bullish ETH. They've been through the trenches of the bear market. We are out the other side in what looks to be the beginning of a bull market, and we are here to talk about why they are bullish Ethereum, the network, and ETH the asset. Gentlemen, fantastic to have you on Bankless. How's everyone doing? Doing great.

• 3:37Speaker 02

  Fantastic. Thanks, Ryan.

• 3:39Speaker 03

  Doing good. Thanks for having us, guys.

• 3:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  You know what? I'm gonna start, actually, with DC. So, we want this to be kind of a canonical Ethereum episode that people can refer to, and that provides some context on what Ethereum and Ether actually is. Could you kind of start us off? DC, what is Ethereum to you? How would you explain it to someone off the street?

• 4:05Speaker 02

  So well, off the street is a tough ask, but I'll do my best. And I always, the way that I think of Ethereum is that it is a, it's a network that provides a programmable and globally shared ledger of record. So it's kind of like this, it is this database for really important fiduciary grade data, which everyone in the world can access and anyone can write to permissionlessly and in a censorship resistant way. So that at its most, at its core, that's what it is. But the real question is, what does it allow? And I think what it allows is it allows this economic coordination across anybody, anywhere in the world.

• 4:46Speaker 02

  And, and that's a really powerful concept. And, and you see that embodied in modern day DeFi as well. And as far as the types of properties that Ethereum has and what it could mean, I think Ethereum will become home to the world's most important digital assets, the ones that really have financial value. And most importantly, it's home to Ether, which I believe, and I know we're going to talk about today, is going to become the world's most important programmable decentralized asset. In fact, I think it already is. And that programmability is why I think ETH is also going to emerge as a very important macro asset alongside Bitcoin, as we've already seen.

• 5:23Speaker 02

  And, and I think it's kind of in a class of one or two. And we're already seeing that with billionaires piling in to, to, to Bitcoin and into Ether, and now we're seeing CME futures. So the path for Ethereum looks incredibly bright.

• 5:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  DC, do you think it's hard for people to get their like heads wrapped around with, with Bitcoin? There's just one name, right? You say Bitcoin, it's a network, it's also an asset. But with Ethereum, you sort of have to explain, okay, well, there's this thing called Ethereum, the network, and just as you've explained it. And then there's this other thing called Ether, the asset, and both are important. Is the Ethereum narrative just like hard to understand? Or do you think this cycle, people, mainstream investors will begin to understand why both?

• 6:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  The network and the asset are important.

• 6:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I do think in some ways the narrative is certainly harder to understand than Bitcoin. And Bitcoin is a pretty simple narrative. It's a scarce supply censorship resistant digital asset. And I think Ethereum has some of those same properties as well, but Ethereum does a lot of other stuff. And I think the concept of like, what is a smart contract and what does that enable? Is difficult for a lot of people to understand unless you get into the technical details. So at its core, you know, when I really think about it, I view Ether as programmable money. And, and, and I think that, you know, I've, I've, I've discussed it that way with some people outside of the space. And I think that resonates with them. It's this decentralized programmable money where you can run applications that no one controls.

• 6:57Speaker 02

  And, and you can manipulate that value to do all kinds of incredible things. I do think that the space is also going to become more sophisticated during this cycle. I mean, it took people a cycle or two to really understand Bitcoin. Let's not forget that. And I would argue that it was really only in the 2017 cycle that people really came to understand what Bitcoin is. Prior to that, it was kind of more of a play toy for nerds. And I think Ethereum has been at that stage, but we're about to hit this moment where Ethereum is going to enter the zeitgeist during this cycle. And I'm, I'm really excited about that.

• 7:31David Hoffman?

  Eric, let's turn to you next because you've been in the Ethereum space since, you know, since day one, right? And Ethereum, you know, every, everybody has their own perspective or angle to understanding Ethereum and why it's valuable and why it's so cool. So what, what's your angle? Like, what does Ethereum mean to you and why is Ethereum so awesome?

• 7:49Speaker 04

  I think what DC just said is important to understand. And like, I'll go, you know, yeah, it's been six, seven years on the Ethereum journey now. And I think what we've realized is it takes narratives a while to not only be realized, but to take form. So Bitcoin's been around over, what, 10 years now or something like that? And they kind of went through these, at first it was like peer to peer cash. And then like, it's gone through these like seven narrative changes. And one of the most fascinating things to me about this current bull cycle we're going on is Bitcoin has seemed to have won the digital gold narrative. And I, you know, that's, that's cool. We're here to talk about Ethereum though. But what, what, what can we learn from that?

• 8:30Speaker 04

  It's that, that narrative and DC was just talking about this was not really understood until basically today. It took them four or five years to figure that out. And for, you know, the mainstream to adopt that. And I think Ethereum is two to three years behind in the DeFi narrative. And I think personally that the DeFi narrative is 10 to 20 times more powerful than the digital gold narrative. But it's also a little bit more complicated, right? And I've recently been saying and tweeting and thinking about, you know, how do we explain Ethereum to people? I think of it as, think about the internet, but the internet for finance. And ETH is that money used on the internet of finance.

• 9:10Speaker 04

  And I think as we kind of hone in onto this narrative and a lot of people will say, you know, it's complicated to explain, which it is. You know, why isn't the narrative perfect yet? It's because we're still pretty young, right? And like, even once you find that narrative, you need to kind of like have other people understand it. And, you know, sell it, maybe not the right term, but you do kind of have to sell it to people that don't understand it. Right? So I think, you know, to me, I've, I've said before multiple times, when I first saw Ethereum, this concept of DeFi, this concept of financial money, you know, being transacted easily across the internet was what captured me. It wasn't the world computer. Maybe that's 10 or 20 years down the line. But I think Ethereum is growing into its own and that we've, we have found our narrative.

• 9:55Speaker 04

  We're kind of like, you know, sculpting it now and like soon, we're, we're embarking on the early stages of pitching it and what it is. And, you know, it's not just a marketing tactic, like it is powerful, being your own bank, having someone not tell you what financial transaction you can do. Or, you know, and not like shutting you down or whatever, like that is extremely powerful. There, there was debates on Twitter today about what is Cypherpunk? I don't think Bitcoin's Cypherpunk at all. I think Cypherpunk is having true privacy solutions, being your own bank. Bitcoin offers none of that. They can be digital gold, that's fine. Their layer two is banks, but Ethereum is looking for something bigger. It's just going to take a little longer to get there and I'm totally fine with that.

• 10:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Anthony, so Eric's saying, so is DC, that Ethereum and Ether is sort of a, maybe a cycle behind Bitcoin in terms of its narrative understanding, maybe three or four years. Would you agree with that? And what would you add to the definition of Ethereum and Ether?

• 10:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, I would totally agree with that. And I think it's not even just in terms of like narratives and awareness. It's also in terms of, in terms of like, I guess, price and market cap of these kind of assets too. It seems that if, you know, you just looking at the charts seems to be following, you know, Bitcoin's last cycle. And it's just, it's crazy when you look at it like that, because the, you know, the supplies of the coins are different. It's not like a one-to-one mapping, right? But magically, the prices are similar, right? And it seems like we're just one cycle behind, in terms of like, I guess, price, but awareness as well. And I've been saying this for a little while now, but I think, you know, Bitcoin owns the macro narrative, right? You know, when you think of crypto as someone outside of crypto, you're thinking of Bitcoin. That's

• 11:38Speaker 03

  the first thing you hear about. It's the first thing you're going to go and investigate, you're going to learn about. And it's a much easier thing to wrap your head around, right? But then, once you venture into crypto, pretty much everything is happening in Ethereum, right? Bitcoin becomes the boring asset, or the boring network within crypto. If you want to get involved and get more excited about something, then you venture onto Ethereum, then you fall down that rabbit hole, and you have DeFi, right? Which is just another even rabbit hole within the rabbit hole. So that's kind of what I've been kind of explaining to people, especially newer people that I talk to, is that get to learn about Bitcoin, get to know Bitcoin, understand what it is, and then go and venture into Ethereum, and you'll never go back. Like,

• 12:21Speaker 03

  I don't see how you can fall down the Ethereum rabbit hole and then go back to being only Bitcoin after that. You know, maybe there's a few people that have done that, but the majority of people that I talk to don't. And that's just better, that's just going to increase the awareness of Ethereum and increase kind of like, the social consciousness of Ethereum. And we're going to have more and more people being evangelists for it. And then it goes from like Bitcoin being the only kind of thing. That the media talks about, um, the mainstream media at least to, to Ethereum being alongside it. And I think we're already seeing that happen. They seen, uh, they see, uh, kind of mentioned that these billionaires are investing in BTC, right? These funds and everything. But they've also investing in ETH. If you had told me a couple of years ago that this would be happening for BTC, I would have said,

• 13:07Speaker 03

  yeah, that's, that, that, that makes sense, right? I, I can kind of see that for ETH. Oh God, no, no. Two years ago, ETH was viewed as a joke, right? As, as an asset, because we just came off the ICO boom. It was a bear market. ETH was getting kind of like destroyed in that market. And if you had told me that billionaire fund managers was going to be buying ETH alongside BTC, that would have been a crazy notion. So I guess, I think we've already come so far. And I think that it's not going to take us as long as it took Bitcoin, because we have that, that kind of infrastructure already laid out, that consciousness already laid out. You know, crypto to the mainstream is now becoming like an inevitability. It's not like, will it work? Is it a fad or, or stuff like that? People are accepting that they were wrong about Bitcoin, right? They were wrong about, um, if Bitcoin going away and going to zero.

• 13:52Speaker 03

  And they're capitulating. And I feel like that's going to happen with, with Ethereum a lot quicker, because people aren't going to get the wrong idea. They're, they're already going to accept that these networks can exist. And then once they say Ethereum, they're not going to have those initial doubts anymore. Then they're going to be like, oh, okay, this is like Bitcoin, but you can do all of this stuff with it. So I think, yeah, we're, we're one cycle behind, but it's going to be faster to play out at this point.

• 14:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  So each of us have mentioned price a few times and in kind of your intro, Anthony, uh, you were talking about price, maybe price being sort of a market cycle behind Bitcoin. But some would argue that like in Ethereum, the price of ETH doesn't really matter. And I think there have been elements of the community, even the Ethereum community that have argued that over time, like, Anthony, don't worry about, like, don't be focused on price. Price doesn't matter for Ethereum. It's, it's about the technology. It's about the network. What is your response to that? Does price actually matter? And if so, why?

• 14:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, so if we take this price doesn't matter to its logical conclusion and you think, you know, money doesn't matter, right? Money doesn't buy happiness. Money isn't important, right? That that that makes sense to me, but my my pushback is that the the money within the ecosystem, as the number goes up, we have more money to build things with, right? We saw after DeFi summer, there was a couple of months where a lot of people made a lot of money. And then it was funny, I was talking to Eric about this on on the Ether Podcast, like we were talking about fundraising, you know, multiple projects fundraising every week after that happened, right? And why do you think that happened? Because people had more money, like it's not it's not a hard thing to grasp. If people have more money, if people feel richer, they will reinvest that that money.

• 15:37Speaker 03

  They're not just going to sit on it like some dragon hoarding its gold. Like, and I think, you know, that that kind of plays into basically number go up being so important for for the ecosystem, just for that reason alone. But there's also a bunch of other reasons, right? Like the security of the network goes up if its price goes up, right? That's a fact. You cannot you cannot argue against that in my view, right? You know, it brings in new users as much as, you know, for better or worse, it brings in new users. And maybe they come for speculative reasons, they stay for other reasons later on. I mean, I'm sure I'm not alone in saying this, but like I first got into it because I saw the price of, you know, kind of ETH going up and I was like, wow, okay. I want to buy some right before I even like jumped down the rabbit hole in 2017.

• 16:22Speaker 03

  I kind of bought it and then jumped down, right? And the reason why it came on my radar is because my friend told me, hey, you know, this ETH thing is going up, you should look into it, right? So that's how a lot of people will get into the ecosystem. So if you're a builder, right, I actually see this rhetoric a lot from like developers and builders and things like that. Not to generalize, but that's who I kind of generally see it from. But if you're if you're that kind of person, just think like, okay, you know, how are you going to get funding? For starters, for the stuff that you're building, right? If there's no money around, then you're not going to get funding for it, right? And you want more users to come into the ecosystem so that they use your apps. So I mean, it it just, for me, it's like second nature to to To know that that price matters, but I I and I can't kind of square why people just don't think it matters.

• 17:07Speaker 03

  Even if you think that money doesn't matter, it it doesn't matter like you you personally can still hold that belief. You can think that money isn't everything and that's fine, but not everyone wants number to go up just to buy a Lambo, right? Or anything like that, like, you know, for me personally, I made some investments after the FIVE summer as well. Like, I want to give back. I I donated on Gitcoin. You see so many people donating on Gitcoin. The rounds are the biggest they've ever been, right? In terms of matching, so I just I don't see how number go up can be viewed negatively. Unless you view it with the lens of, oh, everyone just wants to buy a Lambo. Everyone just wants to be rich and and do extravagant things, which I think, especially within the Ethereum community, is not true. Because we reinvest the money and we see that happening kind of every few months when the the cycles play out.

• 17:51Speaker 03

  Uh, so yeah, I guess a long-winded way of saying that price matters, uh, pretty much more than anything, but not for the reasons that a lot of people think it uh it matters.

• 18:01David Hoffman?

  A a an Ethereum or crypto skeptic could illustrate, and I've seen this illustration before of Ethereum is that it's it's not this like internet native like economy. It's more of like this, this kind of like private park where there's a bunch of like, you know, financial fun games being played like it's a it's a it's a casino. It's like it's duh, it's not really globally accessible. And, you know, it's more really, really niche and it's not, it's not really going to be like this world financial platform. It's more of just like this kind of like money theme park that lives on the internet and it's just a bunch of toys. That that's that's a a DeFi skeptic or Ethereum skeptics take that I've heard. And the and so I want to ask the question is like when when, you know, ETH price goes up

• 18:44David Hoffman?

  and we're seeing all these seed investments into these DeFi projects, into these different different Ethereum protocols, into these things that are going on in the Ethereum economy. What are these things? Like, what are these, the every single entity that is receiving funds are trying to solve the problem, right? And so when we view them holistically, what are these problems that we are trying to solve, right? Like, what are what are the problems that Ethereum is trying to solve? Uh, DC, let's let's turn to you. Like, what are the overarching problems that these people that are fundraising for projects or just building something on Ethereum, like generalized? What is the problem that that, you know, each individual team or project is trying to go after?

• 19:22Speaker 02

  So I think one of the crazy things about Ethereum is the breadth of problems that are being tackled on the platform. And some of those efforts are going to be successful. Some of them are going to be failed experiments. And right now, we don't know which ones are going to be which, but I think fundamentally, something that Ethereum tries to achieve is to remove this reliance on intermediaries, which we have become very accustomed to in our financial lives and other parts of our lives as well. And when you think about the proliferation of entities like banks and how difficult they can be to deal with, other financial institutions, they can be inherently unreliable and beyond that, it can also be difficult to do things between them, right?

• 20:08Speaker 02

  And so when you're working with a financial institution in a given type of account, oftentimes that account can't quickly talk to your account at a brokerage or something like that, right? And so you've got to send the money through some antiquated system, which can take days or on the, weeks if things go wrong in some cases. And I think that is a problem because those intermediaries also extract rents in that process. And not to say that they don't provide value for a service, but if we can do that cheaper, more reliably, more transparently on Ethereum, then why wouldn't we want to? I think the other problem that Ethereum solves or is that it creates this new,

• 20:49Speaker 02

  I wouldn't say it's a problem that solves, but it creates this new opportunity with Ether as an asset in particular. The world has never seen a programmable decentralized asset with the characteristics of Ether. And especially when, and I know we're going to talk later about like EIP 51559 and fee burn and staking. I mean, that asset alone is going to create the potential for all kinds of services that frankly, we can't imagine yet. Right? I mean, who could have imagined, even if you read the Ethereum white paper, would you imagine that something like DAI from Maker would exist, you know, a few years later, based tapping into that decentralized value to create something and transmuting that value into something else?

• 21:33Speaker 02

  So, and I want to kind of riff off of what Anthony was talking about with respect to price. Price is important because it's liquidity and liquidity in the system in the Ethereum economy allows us to do more things and do more impactful things that are relevant to the world.

• 21:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'll add a little bit here. So it's, we always kind of think of like, what are we building for the end user, right? And I'll use this, I ran across this Hacker News post. Most people listening probably know what Hacker News is. Pretty popular message board around among like developers and I guess hackers, right? And it was like, someone posted like, why, why does every developer I know these days somehow have a connection to Ethereum? And that like really hit home with me. And I think like when we talk about DeFi and like open finance and Ethereum being open, we should also realize that like, not only are we building for the end users to be bankless and be able to, you know,

• 22:31Speaker 04

  transact however they want, but it also gives the ability for anybody sitting anywhere in the world to build a financial platform, to build a money Lego, like there's no barrier for anybody, right? And like now you kind of be, need to be connected, you need to know like some accredited investors and VCs and raise some money. You need to like have ends in the banking industry. Now, some kids sitting in some random country, 15 years old or whatever, can fire up a piece of code and it becomes an essential money Lego on Ethereum. And I think like that is just as powerful as, you know, having censorship resistant transactions

• 23:09Speaker 04

  and being your own bank and things like that. And I, you know, I, I think the power we're really seeing is just this like crazy reach that Ethereum has. DC just said it, like we're tackling so many use cases on chain, but the fact that anybody can just spin up a line of code, no one's telling them no, is just fascinating to me. And I've been thinking about that post I saw on Hacker News for the last few weeks. And I think it speaks to, I really do think almost all like younger developers have some toe dipped in the Ethereum ecosystem at this point, which is just insanely powerful.

• 23:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  So Eric, like as we're maybe getting into DeFi a little bit and kind of the Ethereum economy, it seems very much that Ethereum's destiny is at least partially tied to the success of DeFi, right? There's also some competitors to DeFi too, right? So if you think about, say, the Bitcoin ecosystem and doing things on Bitcoin, a lot of the money verbs, as we might call them, on Bankless that you could do on Bitcoin, you do generally through a crypto bank, right? Through like a Coinbase or a Gemini. Coinbase is now recently launched, it looks like the intent to IPO.

• 24:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  That means a larger war chest that they'll have at their disposal. How do you think this DeFi ecosystem of startups with some of the strengths that you mentioned, but also like the weaknesses, right? I mean, these are like small developers, not necessarily a lot of budget, harder in some ways, user experience at first, there's private key management, that sort of thing. How can they hope to compete against the crypto banks? Do you think DeFi versus crypto banks, do you think DeFi can come out ahead?

• 25:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's definitely an interesting battle to talk about. And I've always said, I think these universes are going to run in parallel for a while, mainly DeFi versus traditional banks. But I kind of, I'm putting Coinbase and those in the traditional banking industry at this point, like to me, they're kind of just banks, right? They're more modern banks, these crypto banks. I think, you know, it takes like having a bad experience in a traditional finance system to really start to understand the benefits of DeFi. So I don't think as like, you know, someone that lives in the US, the first world country and doesn't have too many issues with banking and finance right now, other than, you know, I graduated around the time where the financial crisis going through here and it was hard to find a job. Other than that, you know, my banking life's pretty easy.

• 25:47Speaker 04

  Now, I think we like kind of get locked into this bubble sometimes of wait, why would someone want Bitcoin as a head?

• 25:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  To monetary policy. Why would anybody want DeFi? There's a lot of people in the world that have hyperinflation currencies that have struggled to access the banking system, right? So I think it's gonna start there and grow like, you know, I guess in the US, we could have inflation, we got weakness in the dollar. We're starting to see a lot of like censorship around traditional financial transactions, regulations coming in. Those things can slowly creep in. And I think it's gonna take like the younger generation to realize the benefits. And it's gonna be the slow wave, right? I, I don't, I've never been one to expect like, the next year is gonna be like where DeFi takes over, right? I think this is a long play of these two systems running.

• 26:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  And slowly, people start to see the benefits. And just with some of the other younger generations finding benefits like technology and mobile apps and all this stuff that we've all witnessed over the last 20 years, they're gonna slowly start to realize the benefits of, you know, being your own bank and having privacy and all that kind of good stuff. So David Letterman had Bill Gates on in like 1994, and there's a clip on YouTube where like, he's asking Bill Gates about the internet, right? And Bill Gates is kind of describing like, what do you do with the internet? And Bill Gates says, well, like, who knows, you can watch videos on it, you can listen to music on it. And Letterman says something like, like, music, like, do you mean like a radio?

• 27:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, like, I already have that, so the audience laughs, right? But what he couldn't picture back in 1994 is something like Spotify, that access to the entire world's inventory of music on demand, wherever you want it, right? Maybe turning the question to Anthony's, do you think that this is some of the promise of DeFi too? That like, we've just invented these primitives that you guys have been talking about, these new money Legos, right? And so, we have the potential to leapfrog traditional finance and banks and their capabilities with this whole new thing that we've unlocked called programmable money. We haven't even seen the

• 28:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  full extent of, or can't even imagine the full extent of what's possible. Do you think there's an element of truth there? And are there any examples that come to mind?

• 28:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I think about this quite often, and you you used a good example there with with Bill Gates trying to describe the internet. I think in that moment, or around that time, Bill Gates was like, this internet thing is going to change the world. I just don't know how. I know it's going to change the world. I just don't know what way it's going to, right? And I and he couldn't really articulate it too well to people that were still stuck in the old world mindset. Right? It is definitely a mindset thing. It is something that it's kind of like a virus that needs to to spread to like a mind virus that needs to spread. For people to kind of accept a new paradigm, and that's what the internet was, right? And then, you know, twenty years later, it's like, oh, that that was obvious, right? Of course, we're going to have music on the internet. Of course, we're going to have Spotify. You know, of course, we're going to have YouTube, which is one of the biggest sites in the world.

• 29:00Speaker 03

  Um, so I think with Ethereum, we're in the same position now where we all know that there is something here, right? There is something special here. We know it's revolutionary. We see the revolution playing out in front of our eyes. But we can never quite pinpoint what how it's going to play out, or what's the what the next killer app is going to be, right? Um, you know, even even like something like Uniswap, which everyone thinks is obvious. You know, automated market makers have been a thing for like decades. Like, this is not a new concept, right? It's just that they didn't work before. But now that you have a neutral kind of composable atomic infrastructure like Ethereum. Automated market makers are the best thing you can build on Ethereum at this point, right? In terms of product market fit.

• 29:41Speaker 03

  And, you know, even people that they created Ethereum like Vitalik, right? And and the core team, they would, I mean. They wouldn't have been able to tell you exactly how it was going to play out. Like, no one saw DeFi coming. But they knew something was special was here. They knew building Ethereum was going to enable something special. They knew that decentralized applications were going to to work. And they believed that. And they just they couldn't. Yeah, they couldn't articulate it um to to to like uh to basically. Give like any accurate predictions and I don't think we can at this point either give give too too accurate prediction like we know DeFi is going to be big. We just don't know how it's going to play out. We don't know how it's going to enter into the mainstream consciousness. We kind of have, you know, theories that centralized institutions will build on top of these decentralized

• 30:26Speaker 03

  protocols, which I actually think is how it's going to play out. But we can't say for sure if DeFi will usurp kind of C-Fi as it's known or TradFi, for example. And I do agree with Eric that there will be parallel worlds for a while. People, some people, or at least maybe, maybe even most people will always prefer that kind of like security of centralization. For example, and that that experience. But the optionality is there to opt out of that, just like the internet gave you the optionality to opt out of a lot of centralized kind of things, right? You don't have to use Gmail for your email. You can have your own email server because it's on a neutral protocol, right? You can do all these sorts of things. You can basically run your entire life, you know, off centralized institutions on the internet.

• 31:11Speaker 03

  Yes, your experience may be, may be a bit worse, right? But you you get that kind of sovereignty back. I think that's the same for Ethereum with DeFi, but I also think that DeFi is going to offer a better product than than any of the centralized institutions can offer. For the sole reason that DeFi on Ethereum, all the apps and everything are open. They will all talk to each other. Centralized businesses don't want to open themselves up to other centralized businesses for for for competitive reasons. They don't want other businesses coming in and seeing all their data and being like, oh, I can see what you're doing. Okay, this is how I'll compete. This is how I how I'll outcompete you, for example. So it's just two completely different worlds that we're seeing play out.

• 31:51Speaker 03

  And I mean, my belief is that DeFi wins out in the long run against these centralized institutions.

• 31:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's so funny because like, like back in 2019 or 18, before kind of the birth of DeFi, we started to see these use cases take hold. This is part of the reason it's been hard to describe Ethereum, right? Because you inevitably say something like, yeah, this is a, you know, an open finance, open money system, and it's going to change everything about the world. Right? And somebody looks at you and thinks like, Well, show me the use cases. You're crazy. And by the way, you have to say like, I don't know how it's going to change the world. I don't know what the actual applications are going to be, but I know it's going to change everything, right?

• 32:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's what's difficult about the Ethereum narrative. Sometimes it's it's just such a blank canvas and such a white, like, open field of of potential that we can't even predict what the next applications are going to be. Sorry, I'm jumping in with with some bull case future, but David wanted to say something.

• 32:57David Hoffman?

  Yes, the the way I've I've been kind of illustrating the the uniqueness of DeFi is is as a as a as a platform is that in when it comes to building a money Lego, builders have two options. They can build one brand new from scratch, or they can build another one that connects other money Legos. And that's exactly what Anthony was just saying with like all of traditional finance, all of centralized finance is a bunch of walled gardens. And so they only had one option available to them, which is build something from scratch. No, nowhere in centralized finance is the ability to build a new company that is fundamentally based off of other companies, right? There are very little surface area for that.

• 33:37David Hoffman?

  And that's, I think, what DeFi is really optimized for is builders who want to build off of other things, right? Like that second option of like, I will build a brand new money Lego using other money Legos. And that's something that you I don't think can be replicated based off of the legacy market. Would you guys say that that's one of the perhaps the prime feature of DeFi that makes it such a thing that can grow so quickly? And I'll start with Eric.

• 34:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, I would definitely agree. I mean, if you think about the composability is absolutely insane, right? The the fact that you can, I mean, just, all right, let's take like the yield farming craze, which I know has a bit of a, you know, people are

• 34:20David Hoffman?

  Negative connotation.

• 34:20Speaker 04

  down on or whatever. But just think about the fact that Uniswap LP tokens became something, right? So you're you're providing liquidity at Uniswap, right? And all of a sudden, Uniswap came along and said, hey, what if we tokenize your liquidity? It seems so simple now, but that's not something that existed previously. And all of a sudden, you're using your pooled liquidity as liquidity and collateral on other platforms. And this is growing, right? Like, I think soon we're gonna see LP tokens used as collateral on Maker and all kinds of stuff. But the fact that we can just build on top of, like, so you have your base liquidity. All of a sudden, you can use that as collateral and liquidity. You like build up, right?

• 35:04Speaker 04

  And there's efficiencies gained in all of this. So all of a sudden, I've provided ETH. I can now take that and use that somewhere else. That protocol could go take that new somewhere else. That doesn't exist in traditional finance, right? Like, not that easily, at least. There's like contracts involved in it. Take not smart contracts, dumb contracts. Takes multiple days to like sign this stuff. So the composability is just crazy. I mean, there's obviously negatives to it where like things become too composable. They don't think about like Oracle attacks and all this stuff. So we've seen, you know, these flash loan attacks and whatnot. But I absolutely think, you know, we should start like memeing this and this should be part of the narrative. But composability is the pitch of DeFi. It truly is.

• 35:49Speaker 04

  Just what I was talking about a few minutes ago. How anybody can put a line of code out there and be a part of this ecosystem. That is composability, right? And like you were just saying, they can build a new money Lego or they can integrate one. This is the power of DeFi and it's not necess. There's two powers. There's A, anybody can come in and build composability money Legos. There's B, everybody has a trustless, you know, censorship resistant financial economy. So I think that part is kind of left out of our narrative. I think we should start doing a little bit better with that because I think it attracts developers. It attract, like, that really starts making people think. Because shit, it takes me $35 in two days just to send a wire.

• 36:34Speaker 04

  You know, sending ETH is like the most simple thing you could possibly do on Ethereum. So yeah, no, I think that's a very powerful aspect of DeFi.

• 36:42David Hoffman?

  DC, you want to hop in on that?

• 36:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think, and I want to talk a little bit about interoperability and what that really means. And I think the way that it's manifested in Ethereum very often is an app's functionality is distilled into a token, a wrapped token of some type. And the fact that you can then take that somewhere else, wrap it. You could even imagine some of these assets being used, you know, taken off of chain in some respects. And you're introducing certain trust assumptions there. But when you think about what that universe could look like and how many of the important assets are already tokenizing on Ethereum, you really start to see this picture emerge of Ethereum potentially becoming this global settlement layer for all of this economic activity.

• 37:29Speaker 02

  And yes, there are going to be parts that happen in the periphery on other chains, on centralized platforms and so on. But at the core, a lot of those apps are going to originate on Ethereum. And at the very core of a lot of them, I think is going to be Ether. Because you want to have the most trustless decentralized asset that you can possibly have at the heart of some of these things. And so I think that's the long-term vision. And I do want to riff off of what you guys were talking about earlier around technology and what's possible and where we are right now. So there's been a history in terms of, you know, technological revolutions. When new technology comes around, very often it's kind of emulating what the previous generations of technology could do. It's just making it slightly faster or cheaper or something like that.

• 38:15Speaker 02

  And I think we're seeing that with DeFi right now. That's how it started, I should say. It started mostly with services that people can like wrap their heads around. Okay, yeah, a lending app, that makes sense. Okay, an exchange app, I get that. But I think where we're headed, we're going to start seeing products that we are going to struggle to understand in some respects. And they're going to be things, they're going to be niche products that are designed for very specific types of use cases that we can't imagine. And some of the biggest consumers of those are going to be robots and machines and not necessarily humans, you know, and because they can have accounts too, they can't have bank accounts, you know. And so that's the cyber, that's the cyberpunk future that we're headed towards that Ethereum could enable.

• 38:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  Every robot gets a bank account.

• 38:58Speaker 02

  That's right. They can make one whether you want them to or not.

• 39:03Speaker 04

  That's a really important and good point, by the way, is one way this parallel DeFi universe wins is on efficiency and cost. There are so many humans involved in the traditional finance system that Ethereum can just. This sounds bad because it's replacing jobs, but it will replace and like that is one way that traditional finances realize the power of this. Is how cost effective is like the Visa USDC news the other day, they were. They were citing how most customers it costs like up to $50 to do certain transactions and they said on Ethereum it costs like 50 cents. That's, that's a good point. Like that is one way this, you know, this ecosystem can take that over.

• 39:44David Hoffman?

  Anthony, do you want to riff on that before I ask my next question?

• 39:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, I totally agree. Composability is the thing. It is what made DeFi grow so much. If you just look at the, the data itself, right? And the growth of DeFi during 2020, obviously a lot of it can be attributed to yield farming. But why did yield farming work? Well, because of composability. Without the composability, yield farming will not have been a thing ever. And that's for the same reasons that the other, the other guy spoke about in that we can tokenize these positions. Use them to, you know, earn other tokens, for example. It's like, it's just crazy, right? Tokenize your LP position, put it into a contract, earn tokens in another protocol, right? We saw crazy things like vampire attacks happening where sushi swaps stole liquidity from Uniswap and things like that.

• 40:33Speaker 03

  Like these are not things you see in the traditional finance system and they don't play out this fast. Like if, if there is, it's normally called like a hostile takeover in the traditional system, right? Not a vampire attack, but that, that takes a long time to play out. This played out in a week, like if, if people remember the sushi swap saga, like the, the main part of it lasted one week, right? And, and this, and, and it's because of that efficiency as kind of Eric was speaking to, right? It's because of that composability, the incentives, the, the fact that you can move liquidity as quickly as you can move data, um, right on the internet. It's just i- i- i- it's insane. And I think, I mean, we are definitely undersell it because it's like second nature to us now. We understand it.

• 41:16Speaker 03

  But if we want to sell Ethereum to people, uh, you know, using those examples is is the first place to go, I think. But at the same time, you know, maybe not a lot of people think about the inefficiencies of the traditional system until they're exposed to Ethereum. I actually think that's another thing Ethereum does. It kind of exposes all the flaws in the old world to people. And they're like, okay, well, why am I doing it like this when I can do it like this? And i- it takes power away from the incumbents through that kind of mind virus of there is a better way. And I think that's what the internet did as well, right? To to traditional media, it showed people, it's like, oh, I don't have to listen to like the traditional media. I could just go online and and and listen to whoever I want to listen to.

• 41:56Speaker 03

  For better or worse, right? There are there are problems with that too. But um, so I think that's another thing that Ethereum unlocks uh with with DeFi specifically. Uh, but yeah, composability is is the thing. Without it, none of this would work.

• 42:09David Hoffman?

  Moving value as fast as data, I think, is a really awesome line that I think we've all heard before, but I think we forget how powerful that is. Um, but but guys, but but you know, there's a bunch of twenty, there's like thirty billion dollars worth of stable coins on Ethereum. Also, BTC on Ethereum is like at all time highs. Like, why do we need Ether? Like, you know, we can just use the other monies. What what about what about Ether? Um, uh, DC, let's start with you.

• 42:39David Hoffman?

  You're muted, DC.

• 42:42Speaker 02

  Sorry, um, I, you know, I don't view stable coins or WBTC or any other assets as displacing ETH on Ethereum. Um, I think if anything, and we'll start with stable coins, they're really taking on some of that medium of exchange role of money. And I think that's that's appropriate um in the world that we live in today. You denominate, most people denominate their salary in in dollars or whatever fiat currency they use. They make purchases in that currency. So it makes sense for a medium of exchange for a lot of different assets to to be done. In in in stable coins. I also think, though, that you're seeing, you're still seeing Ether used as a medium of exchange for a lot of those assets. And if you look at like the NFT

• 43:27Speaker 02

  market, you know, the non-fungible tokens, which are like these artworks, these in-game items and so on, they're tokenized on Ethereum. Almost all of those are denominated in Ether, which I think is really interesting. It's kind of like a native economy to Ethereum. So I wouldn't be surprised to see more of that. But I think what that allows us to do is increasingly use Ether as this programmable store of value, which I think is really Ether's kind of ultimate destiny. It's really going to become the store of value. And that value through the magic of smart contracts can be transmuted into so many different use cases. And I think the other thing is, we need to remember that almost all of these stable coins, certainly the custodial stable coins, have real trade-offs. And I think it's easy

• 44:12Speaker 02

  to forget that sometimes, right? And it's easy to get lazy and just be like, oh, yeah, I'm just going to keep X amount of dollars in USDC. Well, don't ever forget that USDC, USDT, Tether, all of those are custodial stable coins, and they're backed by US dollars in a bank account, hopefully somewhere. And USDC, I'm pretty confident that they are. With Tether, you know, a little less confident. But remember that those platforms can be censored. And if you're dealing with really high-value transactions, and you want to minimize trust, they're not going to be suitable for you. And so that's where I think Ether still has to play a role in this actual decentralized economy, which I do think,

• 44:54Speaker 02

  credibly, is going to take longer to emerge, right? And we've been developing pieces and parts of that. But it's natural that we go for the low-hanging fruit custodial stuff first. But as we perfect those models, it gives us more insight into how to develop stronger decentralized models. So I think it really is a synergistic relationship. It's bringing more economic activity to Ethereum. And I think, at the end of the day, you'll hear me harp on this, the two most important things to me are bringing more economic activity to Ethereum, and watching that result in more liquidity for Ether. If we do those two things, I'm very confident that Ethereum is going to change the world.

• 45:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  So DC, I recently tweeted out the question like, "Why aren't you an ETH Bull yet?" So that was like last week, of course, it's Twitter, so I got a whole bunch of shit posts, right? Like ETH has no scarcity, all of these things, right? But one of the replies, which actually is a relatively popular belief, is that ETH is maybe the internet of money, as you've been talking about, as you've been saying. DeFi is the apps built on top, so think of that as like the Apple, or the Facebook, or the Amazon, or whatever. The wealth didn't go to the internet, to TCP IP, it went to those businesses on top, it went to the application layer.

• 46:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  So this one reply says, "I'm a DeFi Bull, but an ETH Bear." What's your response to that? All the people are like, "Yeah, permissionless, open finance, DeFi Bull, I think YFI is great, but ETH the asset, meh, not so sure about."

• 46:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, and I understand the point of view of some of those folks. They're viewing everything from the orientation of like the legacy system. They're not thinking about the decentralized world that we are creating here. And I think, you know, I recently wrote some tweets on this, but the value of an asset is something that is emergent. It's not something that you can like dictate in advance, right? And when the Ethereum devs first created Ethereum, all the public perception was that ETH was gas, right? And it's like, "Oh yeah, we're using ETH as gas." And ETH is still gas, you know, it's still, but the gas fees, and I do think this is important for listeners to understand, the fee market floats independently of the ETH price.

• 47:16Speaker 02

  So, you know, just because ETH price goes up doesn't mean gas becomes more expensive in US dollar terms, or whatever fiat currency you're using. But I think just being able to kind of think about, you know, Ether is this unique asset in this ecosystem. There is no other asset on Ethereum that will ever have the properties of ETH. Ether and and and I think that when you really want to get at that decentralized, parallel decentralized economy that we're talking about, ether is going to be at the central center of that. Has that been fully developed right now? No, but is it developing? I think it's absolutely developing.

• 47:57Speaker 02

  I mean, and I think the biggest example is actually in these decentralized lending platforms, where the most popular collateral by far is ether. And people are actually depositing and locking up their ether as a store of value, literally, and they are borrowing stable coins against it. And and that and I think that's or they're creating stable coins through maker maker die. And I think that is fascinating because it completely changes the psychology around ether from something that you burn as gas to something that you're hoarding. And so I go back to my what I said at the top. The the value of an asset is emergent in how people use it in the market.

• 48:38Speaker 02

  And maybe the Ethereum developers who created Ethereum never thought that people would be using ether in this way. But people realized the properties of ether and are using it in this way. And I think that is that is fascinating. And I think we've again barely scratched the surface of that kind of use case.

• 48:55David Hoffman?

  In an older article, I wrote about how all roads on Ethereum lead to ether. And Eric, I'm wondering if you want to vet that statement.

• 49:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, I totally agree. And I think it goes with what Ryan just asked, what DC was responding with. And I'll respond to that initial tweet comment that Ryan was saying. And I think it fits David, what you just asked, but you couldn't use the internet. Okay, let me put it this way. You can't use Ethereum without ETH. You can't, you have to have it for gas. It's if you want to go a little bit beyond that, you pretty much need it for collateral. That's arguable, but even if you just want to transact with stable coins, you need ETH. You don't need internet coin to use internet. And if you did, people imagine what the price of that would be at this point. I don't even know, right? Like if you had like the smallest percent of that, you would live in a, you know.

• 49:49David Hoffman?

  If connecting to your wife. Why you had to pay internet coins?

• 49:53Speaker 04

  Exactly, right? So you do need ETH to transact and that will never change. There's been attempts at economic abstraction. That's not going to happen, right? Especially with proof of stake. You are going to have to have ETH to transact on Ethereum. That alone is, you know, is strong enough. And David, what you're just saying, you know, with the relationship between ETH and Ethereum, they go hand in hand to me. I don't understand people that think of it any differently. If you, if you are like using Ethereum and let's, let's say you come into Ethereum through USDC, right? What are you going to do? You're going to start exploring DeFi.

• 50:34Speaker 04

  Slowly, you're going to start to think about, okay, what are the benefits of ETH? Okay, you know, it's trustless, that the monetary policy is eventually going down to deflationary, we're moving to proof of stake. You're going to start getting sucked into this, right? You might start thinking about, okay, there's inflation scares in the US. Or if I lived in a third world country, my currency, like you're going to start falling into listening to these type of podcasts and people that are into Ethereum, you're not going to just like go on and be like, oh yeah, USDC is cool. I'm going to start using DeFi and keep it. Like, I don't think that's going to happen. So I think anybody that's coming into DeFi through stablecoins and thinking they're just going to stay there is, you know,

• 51:16Speaker 04

  delusional to themselves. And I think, you know, the, the most important part is you're always going to need ETH to transact on Ethereum. If that is it, that's already a bull case for ETH. You know, people falling into the trap of realizing the traps, probably people falling into the DeFi like realization and, you know, how valuable ETH could be. And oh, hey, I could have this asset that, you know, my government or someone doesn't tell me that I have to have, but I could have it and I could use this as collateral and take out a loan. That, you know, people start to realize how powerful that is.

• 51:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  You know, it's funny to me, Eric, is there does seem to be like a double standard in, in crypto where no one would ever say that about Bitcoin. Oh, like, like Bitcoin, the network, but not Bitcoin, the asset. Bitcoin, the network would be fine without Bitcoin, the asset. Yet the standard is applied to Ethereum. And really Bitcoin as an asset on the Bitcoin network does the same thing. It pays for blocks. Why do you think this double standard exists?

• 52:20Speaker 04

  Scared Bitcoin maximalists. I mean, this is what, I mean, seriously, this is what like We just went out and said it, huh? Yeah, I mean, this is what Anthony and I have been fighting with ETH hub forever now at this point, basically. It's true though, right? Like the questions that we were just talking about, if you said that to someone into Bitcoin, they would just shrug you off, right? Like, oh, what if someone come up with USDC and like, you know, it just doesn't make sense. So I, this is amazing to me that these are the narratives. I think the Ethereum community, you know, Anthony was talking about earlier, since 2018, we've come a long way. And I think people are realizing that ETH is to Ethereum as BTC is to Bitcoin.

• 53:03Speaker 04

  It's the same thing. Bitcoin is gas money. It just is, right? And like where we jump 10x over that is ETH is trustless collateral. ETH is the staking asset. ETH is going to be burned using 1559. So we're, we're taking those leaps further. And you know what? The, these like FUD narratives from Maximus, they're fine. They come and go like we fight them, move on. I agree, we're one cycle behind, but that just means we're going to go to freaking whatever 10K next cycle. And we're at 1K now, but that's fine. But they're the same thing at the end of the day. And ETH can be used for more than Bitcoin can right now.

• 53:43David Hoffman?

  If you are looking for the front page of DeFi, look no further than zerion.io. Zerion is your home base for managing your DeFi portfolios. Zerion offers a central place for you to engage with all of the DeFi protocols and assets that you engage with on a daily basis, but all in one central spot. Here you can see I've loaded up a wallet and Zerion is giving me the portfolio performance of all the assets in this wallet over time, as well as a breakdown of all the assets that I own, as well as all of my transaction history that I've ever done in an easy to view fashion. Zerion also lets you invest right into DeFi's best yielding financial opportunities right from their homepage.

• 54:24David Hoffman?

  Zerion also makes it super easy to access interest in DeFi using applications like Compound and Ave in the background and you can also exchange your assets using the Xerion app, using an exchange aggregator in the background to make sure that you always get the best rates. You can even use the Xerion mobile wallet to add your MetaMask or Argent or another Ethereum address right into your mobile wallet. So you can see your portfolio and engage in DeFi on the go. Here I just loaded up my Argent wallet and now I'm going to load up my MetaMask as well. And Xerion will do the same thing. It will add all of my assets and wallets together all in one space and give me a portfolio summary of what's going on. Adding wallets is trivially easy. If you already have a MetaMask, you can get it right into the

• 55:08David Hoffman?

  Xerion app and it can sync with your desktop app as well. And the best part is you can also buy Ether right into the app itself. Use the Invest tab to look at all the things that you have invested in as well as other opportunities. And coming soon to the Xerion app is the ability to buy and sell your assets straight from your mobile device as well. So download the app. It works on iOS and Android. Go to xerion.io, plug in your wallets and get a historical report of your portfolio over time, as well as a comprehensive breakdown of all the assets that you own and how much yield they're generating for you. We're also brought to you by Monolith. Monolith is your cool new DeFi account, your DeFi savings account, your DeFi checking account, except the cool thing about

• 55:51David Hoffman?

  the Monolith DeFi account is that it gets software updates, right? You actually get to increase the usefulness of this over time. So here are some of the features. Monolith is a smart contract wallet with a lot of the features that you would expect if you've come to know DeFi and what it is. You can, you can add money to it. You can put that money to work in Compound and accessing yield, but you can, and you can also swap through Uniswap. What was cool with Monolith is that they will send you a very sexy Monolith Visa card that connects to your smart Monolith smart contract wallet on Ethereum. So it's a really awesome tool to live a bankless life with a savings account that gets software updates. So this is something that you're never going to

• 56:33David Hoffman?

  find out in the real world, but you can still do real world things with, you know, real money and like buy your groceries. That's just fantastic. Coming soon to Monolith, actually already here to Monolith is now you can buy, die and get it sent to your wallet directly, right? So it's also being an on-ramp. So you don't have to go through your centralized exchange like Coinbase or Gemini or wherever. You can just go straight from your bank account right into your Monolith checking account smart contract wallet. So check them out at monolith.xyz.

• 57:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Anthony, what do you want to add to that?

• 57:07Speaker 03

  I had, I had a lot of thoughts listening to the other guys, but I'm just, I'm just going to come right and say it. ETH is the most amazing asset in crypto. It, it will get more amazing as time goes on. There is a extremely strong plan to make it the best asset and to make Ethereum and ETH into, and DeFi on all the apps built on top. Into what I like to call a symbiotic relationship. So there are three value accrual pillars for ETH, right? There is use as trustless collateral within DeFi or whatever else you want to use it with. Uh, staking, right? That just went live and we've already seen 1.1, 1.5 million ETH kind of locked up there, which is a billion dollars worth of ETH. And finally, EIP1559 and paying, paying gas fees.

• 57:52Speaker 03

  But I think the payment for gas fees is, you know, I mean, it's bullish because the more use, the more ETH needs to be bought to, to kind of pay gas fees. But I think it becomes like way more bullish. Once we have fee burning in place. So, once we have proof of stake, uh, a proof of stake network, so no more proof of work with Ethereum 1.0, we just have Ethereum 2.0. Proof of stake network with credibly low issuance, less than 1% in the worst case, like if there's like 30 million ETH stake, it's still going to be 1% or less, right? And I don't think we're ever going to get to 30 million ETH stake. Um, if we did, the ETH price would probably be at 10K. But, uh, so we have that happening, right? Then take all the activity happening on Ethereum across absolutely everything. Doesn't matter what you're doing.

• 58:35Speaker 03

  If you are doing a transaction and you're paying ETH gas fees, a portion, a portion of that ETH is getting burnt, right? If we can increase the transactional activity to a point where more ETH is being burnt that is being issued a year, ETH becomes deflationary. There is no. Other asset that can claim that within crypto, a lot of, I, I, I mean, assets that are viewed as store of values within kind of like the meat space, like gold cannot claim this, it is not deflationary. ETH becomes the world's best store of value, uh, i- in my view, um, out of, out of absolutely anything, right? So, once we have those pieces all in place and we are, we are doing that, that is the ultimate bull case. And that's exactly why I keep buying ETH even at these prices, right?

• 59:17Speaker 03

  I am not buying just for today, I am buying for the future because that is a future that I'm extremely confident in that's gonna happen. So to go back to the original question about things displacing ETH, that's not, that's not gonna happen. Just because foreign assets come over, they fill other niches, like, uh, well, fill other use cases, like stablecoins obviously took the medium of exchange use case away from ETH, which is a good thing. We don't, like, you, you know, like ETH is money, but it is not like great money, right? It is not stable, so i- it's not, it's not like the best money that we can have on the network. So, a USD stablecoin kind of fits that, right? WBTC is collateral, I mean, that's centralized collateral, and that's fine, right? That's just more liquidity, as DC was saying, to come into the Ethereum ecosystem.

• 1:00:00Speaker 03

  And as I said, once we have fee burning in place, all of these assets just increase Ethereum's network effect and increase ETH's value because it's burning ETH. So, yes, you're a foreign asset, but you've got to pay taxes to the network, right? If someone is using that asset, you're paying, you're essentially paying taxes to the Ethereum network, right? Through burning these fees, and you're, um, a- and you know, it's funny because if there's people on the network that don't even like ETH as an asset, well, too bad. If you want to use our network, you need to, uh, burn ETH and you need to, uh, accrue value to ETH. So, that's like the whole bull case there, and to me, it's obvious, and as I said, like, still buying ETH based on that thesis.

• 1:00:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  What you described sounds like an extremely, um, you know, disinflationary Austrian-style economy, which always like blows my mind when Bitcoiners who would subscribe to like Austrian sort of scarce money principles completely reject ETH's role as a deflationary currency.

• 1:01:00Speaker 02

  I don't understand it. Blows my mind, but we don't have to solve that today. This is the bookcase.

• 1:01:05Speaker 03

  Just, I mean, it's, it's just like, everyone has a bias, right? Um, you know, and it's all, it's all human psychology, but I think the more middle of the road Bitcoiners, from what I've seen, the, the more centrist, they see this vision and they, they kind of like, understand it. And they think that fee burning for a network token, uh, so like the, the protocol token of Ethereum, um, makes a lot of sense and, and, and increases a lot of value. I am a hundred percent sure that, um, you know, Bitcoiners would love to have fee burning in, in, in Bitcoin for BTC, but they know that it, that bringing, just bringing that up as an idea would be kind of like sacrilege. It would never happen because Bitcoin's too ossified, right? So they push back against it. They're like, oh,

• 1:01:47Speaker 03

  if we can't do it, then it's a bad idea. Well, looks like we're gonna do it, guys. And you can keep dealing with that as, as you like.

• 1:01:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:01:54Speaker 04

  They're not gonna do it. They're not gonna do anything until they have to add inflation.

• 1:01:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:02:00David Hoffman?

  And then, and then do we have Bitcoin anymore, really?

• 1:02:03Speaker 02

  Whole, whole separate can of worms, but I will say, you know, I, I'll say that what we're creating in Ethereum is not for Bitcoin maximus. It's for everyone else in the world. And, and I think that's really important to remember because a lot of the narratives that have been pushed over the past couple of years around Ethereum and Ether as an asset, they're not gonna hold up for all of the new entrants that are coming into this market. And when they take the time to understand, even now with Ether's pretty modest issuance, which is, which is fairly actually on par with Bitcoin, um, more or less, um, you know, it's, it's, it's already a lot better than fiat currency, first of all. But once they understand this concept that Anthony's described around fee

• 1:02:46Speaker 02

  burning, and as the network is used more, it's burned and, and because of perpetual issuance, security will always be guaranteed. Um, that's, that's when the sophisticated investors, and you already see some of the sophisticated investors, like Raul Powell and some of the people that he advises, they're paying attention to this stuff, right? The people who are bringing millions and eventually billions of dollars in the space are paying attention to this stuff. They're not just gonna be told the maximus drivel that has been perpetrated for the past two, three years and take it as sacrosanct. So I think that, that is a huge opportunity for Ether as it starts to really go mainstream.

• 1:03:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think that's an A plus point, to be honest. I don't think Ethereum should fall into trying to be Bitcoin. Like, the narratives can be different. We can do things different. There's no reason for ETH to try to fall in the footsteps. We'll be fine on our own.

• 1:03:42David Hoffman?

  Speaking of not following in the footsteps of Bitcoin, and I do want to turn to what Anthony accidentally gave was the future roadmap for the rest of this podcast with his bull case. I want to turn to staking. And so here's the pessimistic take on staking, and maybe you guys can answer this. No one wants yield on a volatile cryptocurrency. Like, staking doesn't have mass appeal. Like, who? People that are interested in yield aren't interested in earning it denominated in this volatile crypto asset that they haven't heard of before. Why does staking have mass appeal? Let's start with you, Anthony.

• 1:04:19Speaker 03

  I mean, a billion dollars worth of ETH wants yield on the ETH, so I think we can throw out that argument. I mean, no, part of that argument, especially because that ETH is also locked, right? So you don't need, like, not all of it, but like, a lot of it, right, is locked for one to two years. So you don't even have exit liquidity on that, right? Unless you do some fancy things like with derivatives. But most people aren't going to do that, I assume. So, like, we've already seen such a strong outpouring of support for ETH staking, right? And people who want to stake for various reasons. Not everyone is like a profit maximalist who's going to min-max their profits and like, try and optimize and squeeze out every last cent, right?

• 1:05:00Speaker 03

  People are, humans are different. Humans have different ways of doing things. They're pragmatic creatures. They're going to do what makes sense in their position, right? So, you know, I have a few friends who would never touch DeFi yield farming, but they went straight into staking. They didn't even think about it. They're just like, staking is what I'm going to do. I'm putting my ETH in there. That's it, right? And they have their own reasons for doing that. So, I don't, I mean, and it's the same thing with like, I think with Bitcoin mining too, or mining in general. Like, why mine a volatile asset, right? Well, because that, you know, you get to a point where it makes sense to do so. Because you're profiting from it outside of your expenses too, right? So I I mean, I don't think that the volatility of the asset really matters too much.

• 1:05:41Speaker 03

  And it matters even less for proof of stake because you don't have those exorbitant ongoing costs as well, right? You can weather the storm much better in a bear market for ETH, right? Even if ETH price drops a lot, your ongoing costs are a lot less. So you can weather the storm. It means you don't have to like dump lots and lots of ETH to cover your costs. You don't have to like do all these sorts of weird hedging and and kind of like worrying about things. So I I mean, I don't think the volatility matters too much. And I think we've already seen evidence of that. And you know, I I believe if there was a two way bridge between ETH one and ETH two, we would be at a lot more than 1.5 million ETH staked. Uh, probably up at like 5 million or something, something crazy. So yeah, I mean, that's that's kind of like my view on it.

• 1:06:25David Hoffman?

  Eric, I know you're running a validator or two. I'm going to start that over. Eric, I know that you've gotten into validating in the Ethereum world. Why? What makes you so bullish about state? God damn. One more time, here we go. Eric, I know that you've gotten into the world of of staking and tinkering with your validators. What gets you so excited about the concept of staking ether?

• 1:06:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of depth to this question and like what Anthony was just saying too. And I think, you know, we we need to realize we've been talking about very nascent technologies, right? Like, we're talking about investing in something that over the next, I don't know, 20, 30 years. Like, we're already, what, six, seven years in this journey? It's doing very well. I think it can do much better over the next coming years. So why does staking matter, right? You can take an asset that you're taking a risk on, you know.

• 1:07:21Speaker 04

  Volatility and all of this is actually something that attracts people to crypto. You can take this and apply like a traditional finance thing of dividends to it. So not only are you kind of investing in this and and you're probably okay at this point with it going up and down, like, you know, 80% of here or whatever it might be. You can also earn yield on that. So That is something that attracts traditional finance people. You say to someone, hey, so let me just take an example. I've talked to a lot of family and friends about investing crypto over the years. I'm not someone that goes and reaches out to people and says, hey, you should invest in crypto. If someone comes to me, I'll respond to them.

• 1:08:02Speaker 04

  It's much easier for me to pitch, hey, you can invest and also earn a dividend or yield on your crypto. Then just saying, hey, you can invest and it might go up or down. Now, it seems a little ridiculous to say that, given that it's only like thirteen percent and crypto can go up and down so much. But I've realized how valuable that is to people and just knowing that you're going to get some type of return on top of the crypto, which they think is hard to value, has been a nice pitch for people to get in. Um, so for me personally, I'll say one more thing. It's obvious. There's a lot of tax reasons for this. You go into crypto.

• 1:08:44Speaker 04

  It's going up and down. It might go up a lot in a year. To cash that out, at least in the US, you're probably paying anywhere between twenty-five to fifty percent in taxes. You take that ETH and instead you just hold it, you stake it, you earn a yield on top of that. Yes, you're paying yield on that, but you're not paying on the sell amount. So I think there's multiple facets to this. I think it attracts people to say, hey, look, there's this dividend you can get that it, a lot of people like that. Um, and also if you are a long-term investor, it helps you like avoid taxes and still get some profit out of ETH.

• 1:09:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  There's something about that passive income element that you're talking about, Eric, right? Like we, uh, like, um, we did, we did kind of a show and just with the ETH calculator to figure out how much it would actually take to retire on ETH. Where you just have enough ETH in capital and you're producing enough ETH, uh, from a yield perspective to just cash it out and kind of ride each year in, in retirement. And I think people, I think you're absolutely right. That's probably an underrated aspect of, of staking. I mean, people buy rental properties, they do all sorts of things that, that, um, like, might make different levels of financial sense, but they do it for this passive income aspect.

• 1:10:04David Hoffman?

  I wanna, so one, putting on my Bitcoiner hat, because I'm good at that. Dividends or yield from Ether is actually dilution, right? We are diluting people that are not staking in favor of the people that are staking. And so the Bitcoiner criticism would be like, well, that you're just creating yield from seniorage. You're actually just diluting away the values of other people's Ether for your value of staked Ether, making Ether not a very compelling asset to hold, because if you aren't staking it, you're getting diluted. How would you guys, let's start with you, DC. How would you, how do you respond to a criticism like that?

• 1:10:47Speaker 02

  So I think the first point in a proof of stake system is that issuance is far lower than it would be in a proof of work system. And you do have, I mean, you do have, you have a form of dilution, even in a proof of work system, in the sense of if there's issuance of supply without a burning mechanism, that's introducing new supply, and guess what? Most miners are just dumping it. So for all intents and purposes, that is creating that dynamic. But I think another important and the sister kind of proposal that's going to be baked into ETH2 is there's going to be fee burning in ETH2. And that fee burning actually creates a mechanism by which it creates a benefit for all ETH holders.

• 1:11:31Speaker 02

  And I think that's critically important to understand. So yes, if you're staking your ETH, you're going to earn a reward. But remember that in this fee burning model, fees are going to be burned. And there's going to be 200 EIP 1559 as well. And as those fees are burned, the Ethereum supply will contract or it will stay relatively stable. You know, there'll be periods where it'll oscillate a little bit. But the expectation is over time that the Ethereum supply stays stable or declines. And as that supply declines, all holders of ETH benefit from the economic hardening of the asset. So it actually creates, the fee burning is actually a very democratic proposal in that respect, because it distributes a benefit to all ETH holders.

• 1:12:13Speaker 02

  Eric, do you guys want to riff on that?

• 1:12:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I'm not gonna claim to be a master of like economics or anything like that, or like totally understand the intricacies of how fiat system works. But I think to DC's point, I mean, I described before, right? How ETH can potentially become a deflationary due to fee burning and all that good stuff. And, you know, DC mentioned that under proof of stake, the issuance is much lower than in a proof of work system. But the thing is, is that we expect ETH to go up in price, right? Maybe not to go up 100% a year into perpetuity or whatever, you know, but we do expect it to keep going up, right? As the network becomes more valuable, and it obviously won't go up forever.

• 1:12:57Speaker 03

  But if the overall issuance is 0.5%, right? For the whole network, but the ETH price goes up much more than that, then do people really care that they're being diluted, right? I mean, I wouldn't, like, why would I care that I'm being quote unquote diluted? People care about it with fiat because fiat is pegged and stable, right? And you are getting kind of like inflated away. And your dollar is worth less, it has less purchasing power. But if ETH's going up, right? And it's going up more than the new issuance in terms of like percentage wise, then your purchasing power goes up, and that's what really matters. It doesn't really matter about the, there's more tokens in circulation or anything like that. So, yeah, that would be my main pushback. As I said, I'm not an expert on all the intricacies here,

• 1:13:40Speaker 03

  but that's how I understand it, and that's how I think a lot of people will view it as well.

• 1:13:45Speaker 02

  I also, I want to add a thought, and this has been really, I've noticed this in the market, really in the past few weeks, is we're seeing a lot more stakes to Ether tokens as well that are going to be hitting the market. And the demand for that is frankly a lot higher than I thought it would be. And the space has emerged way faster than I thought it would. And I'm definitely not going to make any recommendations to use any of those, because I think there's a lot of risks with that. And your basic, most of them follow some kind of custodial model. Some of them are decentralized pools. But you could actually imagine that there's a whole bunch of ETH that get staked. And even if you're not running a validator, you might be holding staked Ether. And I think it's actually going to get easier and easier to run validators over time

• 1:14:30Speaker 02

  and to do more of these decentralized pools, where even if you don't have 32 ETH, you can still stake.

• 1:14:39David Hoffman?

  Guys, ready to move on?

• 1:14:42David Hoffman?

  Cool. All right. So we've been dancing around the subject of EIP 1559. So let's just go ahead and dive right into it. And one of the things that fascinates me about EIP 1559 is not just the fee burning, but the combination of EIP 1559 and sharding. Like, what happens when we both get scale and also fee burning? And then this is something I don't know the answer to, and I want to pose to the group. If we increase the amount of block space, we'll increase the amount of block supply, which means we'll probably burn less fees at the start. But does that scale that we have from shards, from having 64 shards? Does that increase the potential of total fee burn over time?

• 1:15:27David Hoffman?

  Eric, we'll start with you.

• 1:15:29Speaker 04

  So this is one of my favorite questions in the space right now. And I'll say, I don't know the answer. I don't know how this is going to play out. But traditionally, it's been the bullish case that there's demand for block space. If your block space is filled up, that's bullish. The reason for that is no one has actually scaled. No blockchain in demand has scaled. Ethereum and Bitcoin are in demand. They haven't scaled yet. We don't really know how this is going to react when we scale. So let's say we increase Ethereum's capacity 64 times, right? We're not really sure, are we going to get like two times the current demand or 64 times the current demand?

• 1:16:12Speaker 04

  And neither of those cases is bearish in the old world view of block space needs to be at 100% demand, right? Because in each of those cases, Ethereum is more in demand. So now let's put this in the 1559 use case where 1559 is burning fees. If block space is pretty full, we're burning more. Yes, we would want a more in-demand blockchain. But just being two times more in demand is not the worst thing, right? You're still burning a little bit more. I truly don't know how this is gonna play out. Where's we saw like today, average gas price was like 330 Gwei, which is insane. Most people using DeFi, I think we're paying 20 to 30 dollars for a transaction.

• 1:16:58Speaker 04

  So the demand is there in high demand times, you know? Maybe tomorrow, the next day it comes back down to 20 or something like that. I don't know what it is right now. Let's see 74. So it's still super high. But I think this old narrative of, you know, and I've pushed this narrative on a theorem. So I'm not gonna lie, I'm part of this, but this, this current narrative of block space needs to be in demand for the asset to be bullish is gonna get thrown out the window when sharding comes along and when layer two comes along. Because what actually matters is how many people are using your blockchain. And we just like kind of package that in this weird narrative of, oh, we're limited. So, you know, people were at X amount of users.

• 1:17:42Speaker 04

  That's our cap. That's bullish. It's actually more bullish if you're under your cap, but you're doing five times as many users. 10 times, 25, 50. We've just never seen a blockchain actually do that yet. Because the ones that have promised it don't have users and the ones that have users haven't scaled. So this is gonna be one of the more fascinating things to watch for me in this space.

• 1:18:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  The interesting thing about all the scaling too is like more transactions, probably more users, more users exposed to Ethereum. What asset are they going to want to buy ETH, right? So that also has a like some sort of like byproduct effect. But I want to ask you this, Eric, because probably the biggest criticism I've seen about EIP 1559 is that it's not here yet. You know, like there's some doubt that it will ever come to Ethereum. And I want to ask that question. So if we define Ethereum as both like that, we probably all do both ETH 1 and ETH 2, that is Ethereum, Ethereum network.

• 1:18:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  What is the probability that we don't get EIP 1559? Cause it's not here yet.

• 1:18:55Speaker 04

  I would, if you asked me this question six months ago, I would say 25%. Today, I'm going to answer 95%. So I think Tim Byko has, should be championed among the entire Ethereum space for taking the lead on 1559. You know, all the client teams and everything, the EF, everyone's helped here. And I think finally, the community has realized we're all on the same page. Tim Roughgarden's report came out, and I think that flipped some of the naysayers. I think this is going to happen. I actually will go on record and say, I think it's going to happen in 2021 as well. So there's been a lot of bullish momentum around 1559 in the last few weeks.

• 1:19:37Speaker 04

  And I think it's like a lot of things coming together so that it's not just one happening. But I just want to throw a shout out to Tim because I think, you know, Anthony and I talked about this last week on the podcast, but it's not that we have a lack of like genius people in the Ethereum space to make this stuff happen. We actually have a lack of people that are capable of coordinating people to come together and build these things. And I feel like Tim has done that with 1559, and I'm very bullish on it getting in at this point.

• 1:20:08David Hoffman?

  Anthony, I want to ask the next question to you. How does EIP 1559 change the characterization of Ether the asset? Like, what is Ether the asset before fee burning? And what does that, what does the addition of fee burning, how does that change Ether the asset? What does that change it into?

• 1:20:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I think I described this a bit before, how it kind of may, you know, potentially, I'm not, I'm not going to say that it's 100% going to be net deflationary at all times, but it potentially turns, you know, ETH into this net deflationary kind of asset. And, you know, fee burning isn't anything new. There are, there are apps that use this, you know, MakerDAO being the famous example. And they're actually criticized for this, right? Where that, that, that people believe that the fee burning mechanism of MakerDAO doesn't actually make sense. But it make, but people, the same people praise Ethereum and say, and 1559 and say that it makes sense for that. And David, you put out a tweet the other day and you, you were kind of having troubles. You know, squaring this in in your head.

• 1:21:06Speaker 03

  But I think it it, I mean, I don't think that if ETH was just a token that was burnt and that was all, it would work, right? The thing is, is that ETH is a lot more than that, you know, whereas the MKR token really isn't, right? MKR is not a store of value, right? It's none of that stuff. Um, whereas ETH is, right? Um, ETH is is used to stake, MKR isn't. So if you do those kind of comparisons there, then you can kind of find the difference and why fee burning makes a lot more sense, right? But on top of that, Ethereum as a network, right, is a lot bigger than than Maker as a as a protocol. Um, so if we're looking at the fee burning, so uh, you know, there's just, there's not going to just be those who who use the maker system paying um, MKR fees and getting those burnt.

• 1:21:51Speaker 03

  It's going to be absolutely everyone on Ethereum doing anything that's going to be paying those that that that fee burning. Um, so yeah, it it has to be taken as a holistic thing. It can't just be looked at as, you know, one five five nine comes in, we burn ETH, ETH number go up. No, because I mean ETH number went up before we had even staking, right? We only had ETH as, I guess you could call it like gas or ETH as um, you know, emergent store of value, all that sort of stuff. Uh, and we and then all those use cases come together and then fee burning just reinforces that and adds another value accrual pillar for ETH.

• 1:22:24David Hoffman?

  DC, if somebody wants exposure to Ethereum, the economy, does fee burning allow for that to happen in in Ether, the asset? Or is Ether the asset already tracking the Ethereum, the economy? Or how do you, how do you think about uh, whether or not fee burning enables Ether the asset to be more reflective of Ethereum, the economy or not?

• 1:22:44Speaker 02

  I I I think it does to an extent because I think certainly the more economic activity there is on Ethereum, the more ETH is going to get burned under a fee burning mechanism. And I, you know, I was thinking about Eric's response to your question on on how sharding will affect things. And and I agree, it's hard to predict, but my general hypothesis is there will never be enough Ethereum block space on L1. No matter how much you have, it will get used up and and if you're talking. In order of if you're talking an increase of even sixty four X, which I and I think most of the current proposals aren't saying we're gonna make it sixty four X overnight. It's gonna be like a rollout process where you're adding shards as capacity as demand comes online.

• 1:23:28Speaker 02

  But basically, I think a lot of activity realistically is gonna eventually shift to L two anyway. And when you think about that, that enables even more transactions. And so, I mean, the goal eventually is millions of transactions on these additional layers. And what does that make? That makes those layer one commits by those layer twos even more valuable in terms of the block space that they're willing to pay for and how much they're willing to pay. So I think that if you're interested in Ethereum as an economy, as a platform, Ether is still the best way to gain access to that investment upside. And it's the most diversified way. Because I mean, while I think DeFi will continue to be a big driver, and I do think there's some great DeFi projects which I'm invested in.

• 1:24:13Speaker 02

  There's gonna be other things that come up like the N F T economy, which is actually denominated primarily in Ether, as I mentioned earlier. There's gonna be all kinds of other use cases. We don't know which project token is going to necessarily do best over five years or ten years. I don't even know if any of these projects will necessarily be the ones that are dominant then. I do know that the network will still use Ether. And I do know that Ether will still be the hardest, you know, with E I P fifteen fifty nine and the most ubiquitous and the most used and useful asset on the platform.

• 1:24:44David Hoffman?

  There's a bunch of debate as to how do we get access to exposure to Ethereum, right? And we have the the D P I token, which is the tracker of DeFi. It's like a DeFi index. And then there's been debate as to like, does Ether get you a share of the Ethereum economy? Does it give you upside exposure to the growth of Ethereum? Eric, how do you see the relationship between Ether, the asset and Ethereum, the economy?

• 1:25:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, as far as like getting exposure to ETH and DeFi, I would still pick ETH first. I think, you know, earlier we talked about cycles, right? So it starts with Bitcoin is in a mature cycle. ETH to me is in a mid to mature cycle. DeFi is in a young to mid maturity cycle. So if you, it all depends on like your risk tolerance, how old you are, how much you have to invest, how much you have to lose, like all these things, right? So if you want exposure to ETH and DeFi, it's ETH in like DPI, right? But as far as like, I totally agree with what DC just said.

• 1:25:54Speaker 04

  If you want just true exposure to Ethereum, it's ETH, right? It is always going to be used for gas. It's always going to be the base collateral. It's going to be what you use to stake. So if you're looking for just a safe, let's put these in huge quotes, safe first, like, you know, traditional investments, right? It's ETH. If you want to add a little riskier portfolio, something that sure, maybe it could go to zero. Maybe we're all crazy. There is the 1% scenario where that exists, right? You hop into DeFi Pulse Index, or you hop into, you know, WiFi, or whatever your favorite DeFi coin is these days. Put that as a part of your portfolio.

• 1:26:36Speaker 04

  But if you want exposure to a new financial economy, to DeFi, to a trustless financial internet, just hold ETH. You're not going to be disappointed. Maybe you're chasing some things one day or the other, but trust me, you're not going to be disappointed in that.

• 1:26:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  Eric, I think you made someone's head explode when we just called Ether and Bitcoin, the conservative, less risky assets.

• 1:26:59Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:27:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  But it's all relative. It's relative to the rest of the crypto economy.

• 1:27:04Speaker 03

  I I think, yeah, I mean, I think on the risk thing, I think that's a really good point. But, you know, I think the reason why it takes big money so long to come into things is because they don't like risk, right? They want things to be quote unquote de-risked. And I guess BTC is at that point now for a lot of people, right? Where it's like, you know, it's it's it's not going to zero. We're we're we're confident in that. We're confident that the narratives make sense and that, you know, everything around it makes sense. We're going to buy it because we feel like it's de-risked. Ethel, as as Eric said, Ethel will move into that on the maturity scale over time. And then DeFi will as well. But it's it's it's not like rocket science. Like, if you're investing in an early-stage company, no matter if it's like a DeFi kind of company or a traditional company or whatever, it's still risky, right? It's a risky venture.

• 1:27:49Speaker 03

  There's there's the same set of risks. So you're you're you're basically taking on that risk for a higher potential upside. And, you know, it's it's very hard to outperform the the the indexes in the traditional finance system, just like it's very hard to outperform the kind of, I guess, whatever on indexes to in crypto BTC ETH and maybe potentially the DeFi Pulse Index as well. So it's just it's it's literally always all about risk. And that's how you should manage, you know, yourself and your investments. And that's not investment advice, but I think that's just common sense.

• 1:28:23David Hoffman?

  This has been a really awesome conversation about Ethereum, the economy and Ether, the asset. And I think we would be remiss if we didn't talk about NFTs, because that is a whole its own conversation in of itself. We've dedicated entire podcasts to this. We'll probably dedicate more entire podcasts to this, but it definitely belongs in the conversation of what Ethereum is as an economy. And I and I think DC, out of the three people here, you are the one most focused in on on NFTs, although we all are in some respect. So I want to start with you with with this conversation. What are NFTs? And as a tool for Ethereum, what do they allow Ethereum as an economy to do?

• 1:29:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, so you know, NFT stands for non-fungible tokens. And that's in contrast to this concept of fungible tokens. So I think it's helpful to define by exclusion a little bit. So fungible tokens are like Ether or like DAI or even like USDC and other tokens where it doesn't matter if you get one or the other. They're all basically equivalent and can be used for the same purposes. NFTs are different in the sense of each one that is tokenized is unique in some way or has the ability to be unique. And I think we've seen NFTs emerge in a few different areas that are interesting. And fundamentally, I think there's three areas that people should be keeping an eye out for. So first is like artwork and gaming.

• 1:29:45Speaker 02

  And I think that's the easiest to kind of understand. At this point, everyone's seen these NFTs on Rarible and other marketplaces like OpenSea, where you can go on and you can buy ownership rights to a digital artwork. Now, of course, anyone can view the GIF or whatever file format backs that, but you're the one that owns it and you're the one that has the right to kind of sell that token to someone else. And there's some exclusivity within that. And I think that's why these things have value, which is also why I think the traditional art market has value. And I think the other side of that are these gaming NFTs, which are also super exciting. And we see that in games like Axie Infinity and God's Unchained, where these are in-game items that you can basically use as part of the game.

• 1:30:30Speaker 02

  In some cases, you can level them up. You can mate them with each other and create new NFTs, you know, CryptoKitty style, the first NFT game. But there's a ton of potential there. And some of those axes are going for huge amounts of dollars. I mean, I think there was one that sold for like $100,000 and we've seen CryptoKitties go for huge amounts too. So they border this line, they bridge this gap between like a piece of artwork slash status symbol and an in-game item. And I think we've barely scratched the surface there. A second category, I think, is going to be around like access rights. And having an NFT in your wallet allows you to do certain things. It's like a membership token, right? And I think there's a lot of value.

• 1:31:11Speaker 02

  You to that too, because you could imagine someone issuing a membership token, limiting the amount and saying, we're only going to have a thousand members. But you can sell your token to whomever you want, and you gotta, you gotta sell the whole thing. You can't sell like a part of it. And I think that is, that's a very interesting set of use cases that I think we'll also see a lot of activity on. And then the third is really around kind of financial products. And some people don't think of NFTs within that context, but we've seen in the urine ecosystem, they put a lot of effort into kind of thinking about how to create these unique financial contracts, which are insured and are tradable. And they're NFTs in the sense of they have to be unique because each contract has unique properties. But that's another fundamental use of NFTs.

• 1:31:56Speaker 02

  So I, and I think a lot, when a lot of people talk about NFTs, they're just talking about gaming, but you really need to think about all those use cases. And I think in order for NFTs to really take off on Ethereum, that is where we need some ability to scale. And I think we are seeing some roll up centric solutions like God's Unchained is rolling out immutable X, which is going to be an NFT focused L2, and that's going to be available for others to use. So I'm really excited to see what happens in the space.

• 1:32:25David Hoffman?

  Yeah, to me, the way I see NFTs is, is exactly how you described at the start where like first there's cash and monies. And we call Ethereum the Internet of Money. But I also, I rather prefer the term Internet of Value. Because if you have just money, like you're not, then we're not talking about specific assets, right? Your, your house, the deed to your house is a real world NFT, right? It's, it's very unique. It is registered to one specific thing and it's not cash. And so as Ethereum as an Internet of Value, especially when we start to integrate the conversation of like more economic activity plus EIP 1559. Having, having like this surface area of NFTs where any type of asset can be represented, any unique asset can be represented.

• 1:33:09David Hoffman?

  Could add just more overall transactional volume on to the Ethereum economy. Eric, Anthony, either of you want to riff off that?

• 1:33:18Speaker 04

  So yeah, it's the financial internet, David. Get with the new memes. Come on.

• 1:33:22Speaker 03

  Oh, I have not heard that one. That is new.

• 1:33:26Speaker 04

  No, no, I totally agree with you. And like, just, I'll just say quickly. I think where we were talking earlier, where we're burning transaction fees and why do you need ETH? It's these use cases that are going to branch out from Ethereum. NFTs, we're going to branch out and all of a sudden you're like, wait, people need ETH to transact to get NFTs? You're wait, we're burning ETH to like, all of a sudden, these use cases count up. And the amount of burnt ETH, the amount of ETH people need to accumulate to use Ethereum starts going up. So I totally agree. It's not just, it goes beyond, and we're talking about now the financial internet. And probably even going beyond that once, you know, I shit on the neural computer,

• 1:34:09Speaker 04

  but we could bring that back someday when we're ready. So I think we'll get there, but these use cases just start blossoming and you start realizing how important ETH actually is.

• 1:34:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'd basically mirror exactly what Eric and DC have said there. I think, I mean, it's going to bring in a new cohort of people, NFTs for sure. We're already seeing that, right? With people doing collaborations with Nifty Gateway. I'm sure many of the people that came in and saw what he was doing did not know what crypto was beforehand, did not know what Ethereum was and any of that sort of stuff. So I'm bullish on that, you know, on that bringing in a whole cohort of new people. Because, I mean, you know, DeFi is fun and everything, but it only, I mean, the deep in the weeds DeFi stuff only attracts a certain kind of person, one that is happy to take on a lot of risk, right? Do a lot of speculation and everything like that. At least DeFi as it exists today. Obviously, we want to get DeFi to a point where it's like, you know, has all kind of the economy running through it

• 1:35:06Speaker 03

  and it appeals to everyone, but it's not what it is today. Whereas, you know, NFTs appeal to a whole entire subset of people that are in the art ecosystem, the gaming ecosystem, right? Interested in like insurance products too. I mean, you know, NFTs, we saw you could tokenize insurance positions, right? And things like that. So I'm just really bullish on that.

• 1:35:26Speaker 04

  How about interested in collecting?

• 1:35:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  Figureines.

• 1:35:32Speaker 03

  I mean, you could tokenize the, I guess, like, the ownership of them. That would, that would work to represent.

• 1:35:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  I'm just looking at Anthony's shelves of figurines behind him on a zoo background here. Well, guys, this, this has been fantastic. And I, I think we kind of want to end with this because I think we're all like Bitcoin hit all time highs. Ethereum Ether is back over 600 in price, like

• 1:35:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  the highest price it's been two years, two and a half years, something like that.

• 1:36:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, two and a half years.

• 1:36:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  I feel like we all realize that we have come out of the, the bear market, right? We're, we're kind of on the other side, right? Now we're on the ascent. Last time we had an ascent like this was Ethereum of 2017. And now we're Ethereum 2020. I guess my question is, what's different? 2017 versus 2020? What are some of the, the new strengths we have, the new weaknesses? What's kind of different about this bull run and the Ethereum of 2020? Maybe we'll start with you, Anthony.

• 1:36:40Speaker 03

  I think everything is different. I think I'd like, I, I can't really, like I was in Ethereum in 2017 throughout the whole bull market then. I can't really find too many similarities. I think maybe the community is quite similar in terms of like the, the, the core community in terms of their values, what they want to see happen and everything like that. But the network has evolved to, to kind of like be a home for so many new use cases. I mean, Maker DAO didn't launch until December 2017. So essentially, we didn't really have anything really DeFi within 2017, right? That we know as DeFi today. The main use case was ICOs, right? Which obviously ended very badly for a lot of people and ended very badly for the ETH price after ETH went up because of that.

• 1:37:25Speaker 03

  So, I mean, yeah, without going into like everything that, that, that has changed, I, I do really think that, that it's a totally different game now. Everyone that was in Ethereum in 2017 that, that may have left and comes back now. We'll see that and be like, wow, this is like nothing like I remember for for good reasons. It's not like we got worse. We got like so much better, right? And we became a serious kind of financial network rather than a plaything or a casino. Cause really, I I believe that twenty seventeen Ethereum was a casino, even though people like to call DeFi a casino. That it's nothing compared to what happened in twenty seventeen, right? Um, and and all the speculation that went on then, I think back then the price got way ahead of where the technology was. You know, people legitimately thought ETH two was launching in twenty seventeen, right?

• 1:38:09Speaker 03

  I bought ETH because of that, and that was another hype narrative at the time. So this time we're delivering all the things that were promised back then, right? And more. So yeah, to- just totally different ecosystems. You you can compare absolutely everything that happened and and find a difference there.

• 1:38:26David Hoffman?

  Eric, same question to you.

• 1:38:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, I would say I think we earned this. Like, so the famous metallic tweet is, did we earn this when Ethereum went above around a thousand last time? I think we earned it this time. I truly do believe that. Like, I think we've built very cool products, products that can be used by people across the world. You know, innovative products, interesting products. Um, I think we have years to go still, but I I think we can say at this point we've earned it. And I I think, you know, looking at ETH price six fifty two right now, who knows what it is when this podcast goes out? Um, probably anywhere between four hundred and a thousand.

• 1:39:06Speaker 04

  I I do, I feel good about looking at it now. Truly, when it first went up to that fourteen hundred, I I, you know, it was, it felt like just pure speculation and all that. And I I think this feels good. And I think, I don't, I'm not gonna, I'm not a price predictor. I don't know where it's going, but I I think we're building something great here.

• 1:39:25David Hoffman?

  Well, Eric, we're definitely getting to price predictions, so maybe you should start chewing on your answers to that question soon. But, uh, while while you chew on that answer, I want to turn to DC and get his take on that, on the same, uh, same question.

• 1:39:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, back at the height of the 2017 bull market, the most exciting thing was like CryptoKitties. And that was all the rage. And just think how far we've come since then in terms of impactful apps. And by the way, I think CryptoKitties was actually really cool for its time and very innovative and chartered a lot of really interesting things in the NFT space. But DeFi in general did not really exist in the way that it does today. And I think Anthony touched on this too, like during the last cycle, ETH was really being used primarily as that medium of exchange to buy tokens. And being stuffed into project treasuries, just waiting to be sold, basically, in a lot of cases.

• 1:40:18Speaker 02

  And I don't think that was really the most compelling or most valuable use of Ether as a financial asset. I think what's really different to me this time is how ETH is being used as a financial asset now, which is increasingly as the store of value. You know, two years ago or three years ago, Ether to most people was still gas and that sometimes MLE money. Now Ether is on the verge of becoming a macro asset that's being sought after by very wealthy investors to diversify their portfolios into alternative assets. And soon they're going to realize it's something that's becoming more scarce and can generate income. So, you know, to me, it's really the emergence of Ether as a financial asset that I think is going to be the defining feature of this bull run.

• 1:41:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  You know, DC, before we get to price predictions for everyone, because those are fun. For a lot of people listening, especially because I think this bull market will play out over months and people might refer back to this episode. They weren't around in 2017. This will be their first crypto bull market, right? You guys have been through bull markets. What advice do you have for someone who's going through their first bull market? What would you say to them? What would you say to a younger you?

• 1:41:35Speaker 02

  I'll start us off, and I think that it's important to keep your head on straight, and it's important to not take on risk that you can't afford to take on. And I think that's really important because it can be very easy to get caught up in the hype as things are going up in value. And honestly, no one knows really where the top is or how far it will fall and when it will fall. You know, people don't know exactly when those things will occur. But at some point, if this builds up like other crypto cycles, it will have a huge blow off top. And, you know, you need to keep a level head. And certainly, you know, for me, Ether is a long-term investment. I want to stake as much of it as I can. I want to keep it because I know it's going to be over multiple cycles that we really establish the value of Ether. But you need to be careful, especially if you're getting in now.

• 1:42:18Speaker 02

  I think this is a great time to be paying attention, first of all. I think if you're coming in a year from now, it's probably going to be a lot more frenzied. And there's going to be a lot of people making promises on projects. You know, and Ethereum is a permissionless platform, too. Just because something is created on Ethereum or any other chain doesn't necessarily make it good. Anyone can build anything on Ethereum. So I think be careful for people who are trying to part you from your money.

• 1:42:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Good, Eric. How about you?

• 1:42:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, I would say this is a game of survival. Survive and advance, survive the years. You know, take some profits every once in a while. There's nothing wrong with taking some Fiat profits and, you know, making your life a little bit better. But hold on to your ETH, don't lose it, don't leverage, totally agree with DC, don't overextend yourself. Survive and advance.

• 1:43:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  Anthony?

• 1:43:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I'll say the same thing. Practice good risk management. I think, you know, actually in 2017, I didn't actually get too ahead of myself. I held most of my ETH and I didn't speculate with most of it. I maybe used 10% of my stack or something to speculate on ICOs and things like that. But in general, yeah, practice, practice proper, proper risk management. Don't feel kind of regret when you see, you know, you put money into something and then it goes like 10 times, for example, right? And then you say to yourself, I should have put more money in, right? Don't let that take hold because then you'll do it on the next investment and you'll get wrecked.

• 1:43:44Speaker 03

  Right? So be sure to always be comfortable with the decision you're making at the time and and and understand that, yes, you know, you're investing in something and you're investing in it because you believe it can go up. But you also realize that there's downside involved too, and it can go down, right? So you don't want to over invest and over expose yourself to any one investment. You know, depending, I mean, as Eric said before, in massive quotes, the safer investments within crypto, obviously BTC and ETH compared to the rest of crypto, right? But the safest investment, and it's not even an investment, the safest place to be is cash, but there's hardly any risk there, right? Unless you talk to Bitcoiners, they'll say cash is gonna, is gonna collapse. But yeah, just in general, manage your risk.

• 1:44:29Speaker 03

  And don't get too ahead of yourself and don't let FOMO take hold because FOMO means wrecked really in my eyes because you don't think straight. And I, you know, we've all been there, you know, I'm not going to say that I'm like the perfect risk manager or anything like that. But you know, prepare yourself for what's coming because the frenzies, I think, is going to get quite crazy as we, as we move into this new bull market.

• 1:44:51David Hoffman?

  Turning into the last question I want to ask before we get into price predictions, it's often said that Ethereum and Ether is just one cycle behind Bitcoin. And I think that's a pretty easy thing for people to get their heads wrapped around, but also if you peel back the layers, there seems to be some incongruencies with that. Because in this current cycle for Bitcoin is the time, is the cycle where a lot of big institutions are putting their balance sheets into Bitcoin. And now we are also seeing that with Ether at the same moment of time, and that's Ether ahead, one cycle ahead of Bitcoin. And then at the same time, you know, Ethereum has development, like we have this whole ETH two thing. There's just at some point in time, like this whole like one cycle behind Bitcoin, I think is going to run out.

• 1:45:36David Hoffman?

  So like when Ethereum, when you guys see Ethereum and its trajectory as an ecosystem. How, how do you guys see like, is, are we able to actually like quote unquote skip ahead a cycle? Or what does like the future adoption of Ethereum look like, especially in a world where, you know, 2020 just shook up everyone's mind about how the world works? Like, how quickly could we actually see some of these things adopted? Eric, I think you've been through the most cycles out of all of us. Let's start with you.

• 1:46:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, I would say it can happen faster than we think. And I do think what happened in 2020 with COVID and all this stuff like remote life, remote banking, this plays into the Ethereum narrative, right? There's no doubt about that. And yeah, just because you're one cycle behind doesn't mean you can't hop five cycles ahead, right? That just means like your narrative so far hasn't been adopted. It hasn't been understood. That's fine. Like, we're on this podcast helping the narrative, right? Let's not kid ourselves. We're trying to like push this along and, you know, make people understand it. But I think we could accelerate way past. And I think, you know, I said earlier Bitcoin has done a good job at capturing the digital gold narrative.

• 1:46:44Speaker 04

  To me, that's boring. I think we can blow 10, 100 times past that. And that could happen all at once. But you know, you never, markets are never about fundamentals in the present. Markets are about fundamentals of their current cycle. So markets go through cycles, right? Multiple year bear cycles, multiple year bear bull cycles and bear cycles, you build your narrative. And bull cycles, you talk about them, you build on them, and then it happens again, right? Like, this is every market, not just crypto. So we'll see where the Ethereum narrative gets us at the end of this cycle. We're very, very, very early, in my opinion, still in this cycle. It's maybe not price, but narrative wise, we are.

• 1:47:27Speaker 04

  So I think we could hop ahead. Do I think we're, you know, I'm not going to make like floating price predictions. I'm more going to talk about, does mainstream understand the narrative of Ethereum versus the narrative of Bitcoin digital? Do I think we're going to get there this bull cycle? No. That's not a prediction of where price is going to be. I think next cycle is where Ethereum takes over. And I think that's because Bitcoin's kind of the gateway drug that, you know, brings people in and, oh, this crypto thing, and they start to learn. But I think he's time to shine is next bull cycle.

• 1:48:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Anthony, I was waiting for Eric to drop the F word and he said flipping.

• 1:48:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  Is it possible this cycle, Anthony?

• 1:48:11Speaker 03

  Oh, man, I'm gonna, I mean, I've always believed in it. But I mean, it is something that I'd love to see happen, but I wouldn't put a high kind of probability anytime soon. Just, I mean, simply because of the amount of money pouring into like Bitcoin as opposed to Ethereum, right? You know, I mean, maybe it could briefly happen during some really crazy mania. But in terms of like a sustainable flipping, right, where ETH is literally number one. And it shows no signs of being, you know, re-flipped by Bitcoin, for example. I don't see that happening for quite a while. Bitcoin has a lot more momentum behind it, a lot more years under its belt. As Eric was saying, with kind of cycles and things like that.

• 1:48:53Speaker 03

  I think, you know, I actually think Ethereum, like, so what I was saying earlier is gonna play, that its cycle is gonna play out a lot faster than than than Bitcoin has, just because it's later on. Within the kind of overall crypto cycle, for example, right? Like Bitcoin is the gateway drug and then, you know, once you have one drug, you, you know, you're more prone to trying the other ones, right? So it's, it's the same thing here. And that's what I was saying at the start, where I was like, you know, once you're outside of crypto, Bitcoin is what you hear about, you know, it's what you come into it with. But then, once you're in crypto, you discover Ethereum, DeFi, DeFi tokens, all this sort of stuff. And you're a lot more comfortable getting involved with it once you have entered through through Bitcoin. So, yeah, Bitcoin took, what, 11, 12 years to get to this point where it is today?

• 1:49:37Speaker 03

  Ethereum is gonna do it in one to two, I reckon, in terms of like getting that mainstream consciousness in terms of those big fund managers, right? They're already allocating to ETH. And I believe that they're not gonna, any other assets that they consider. I mean, I can't see any other asset that even comes close to BTC and ETH in terms of like appealing to those people. So, yeah, it's gonna happen a lot faster, even though I still think, you know, ETH is one cycle behind Bitcoin. It's just, it's not gonna take like many years as it has for Bitcoin.

• 1:50:10David Hoffman?

  DC, you want to riff on that?

• 1:50:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, I would echo what the guys have said here, and I would also kind of, you know, I'll frame it this way. I really think Bitcoin has helped prime the environment for for the crypto revolution. And in a lot of ways, it's proved the value proposition of the entire asset class, which is really all about digital scarcity. And I think it took several cycles for people to understand that because it's completely counter to everything they've ever grown up with in this digital revolution, which really started in the 90s. Everything's copy paste. Most people grew up, most even most, most nerds like you guys grew up downloading illegal software, you know, because you couldn't afford to buy

• 1:50:53Speaker 02

  it or whatever, you know, I mean, that's the whole mindset of how a lot of people viewed digital, digital assets was they're all copy pasteable. So the idea of digital scarcity took some time for people to understand. But now that they understand that, I think that sophisticated investors, especially at first, are going to very quickly grasp the value proposition of Ethereum, and they're very quickly going to see the value proposition of DeFi. And I think even in DeFi, you're going to see legacy institutions enter into it, not because they're just trying to draft off a hot crypto narrative, you'll see that too, but because it's cheaper and then because they can offer services they couldn't offer before. So I think there's a real value proposition here and the understanding will

• 1:51:35Speaker 02

  come as people start to see the value in these products. So I think we could definitely move a lot faster than Bitcoin did over, say, 10 years.

• 1:51:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  Gentlemen, this has been great. I think Eric is still preparing his answer. So we'll start with DC. Price prediction.

• 1:51:52Speaker 02

  Oh, man.

• 1:51:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  At the top of the cycle.

• 1:51:55Speaker 02

  I don't typically give price predictions. I want to start with a 30 second anecdote. So I was at a blockchain, I was at a blockchain conference in DC in April 2017, and Bitcoin had just retaken its previous like all time high fairly durably. It broke through like a thousand, you know, the previous high back in 2013, 14 was about a thousand. And so they asked the audience, what are your price predictions? And, and one guy, at the end of the year, and one guy was like 2,000, someone else was like 5,000. So one person said 10,000, and everybody looked at him and gasped. And so, so, so I think my broader point is bull markets can get a lot crazier than you think they can. And, and, and they, they also might not all fulfill all of your hopes and dreams.

• 1:52:38Speaker 02

  But I'm going to put out a range of somewhere between 4,000 and 20,000.

• 1:52:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wow. ETH price 4,000, 20,000.

• 1:52:47David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  Anthony.

• 1:52:49David Hoffman?

  In most of those numbers, yeah.

• 1:52:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  Can you top that, Anthony? Can you meet that?

• 1:52:53David Hoffman?

  Can you be more bullish, Anthony?

• 1:52:55Speaker 03

  I, I, I have not been shy about my price prediction for ETH, for anyone that follows me on Twitter, especially of $10,000. And I have on-chain proof of my bullishness because I created a set on token sets called the ETH Maximus Set on, in January of this year, when ETH was basically, so creating that at January of this year, I don't think people understand how, how hard that was to do because ETH was in the low hundreds and 2019 was a terrible year for ETH. It basically returned like 2% on the year or something. So I created that in January saying, this set will basically sell all of its ETH only when ETH gets to $10,000. And obviously, I was called crazy back then. I'm still called crazy now, we're up at the 650s, right?

• 1:53:40Speaker 03

  And I, I mean, I'm going to be called crazy. And then one day, you know, I believe we're going to get to 10,000 and people are going to be like, wow, wow, you were right. And I'm no longer crazy. So when, I, I, I can agree with DC that we could see a 20K as well because of the craziness of bull markets. But in terms of like, I guess, maybe a conservative estimate?

• 1:54:01Speaker 03

  $10,000 is what I've stuck to. And what I've tried to like, I guess, kind of meme about, but, and I actually believe in it, right? I, I, I don't say it just to, just to kind of like, you know, get engagement, whatever. I say it because I believe it. And as I said, I have on-chain proof that I've believed it for quite a while.

• 1:54:19David Hoffman?

  Yeah, Anthony has been the person beating the ETH to 10K from when it wasn't a popular thing to, to, I, I remember talking to Anthony way back when and saying like, you know, ETH is never going to go to 10K. That's way too high. And then all of a sudden, when DeFi summer came around, I saw my like mental modeling around the price of Ether shift. I was like, 10K is way too low.

• 1:54:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's how it happens. Hashtag road to 10K. Is that the right hashtag, Anthony?

• 1:54:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, let's see. I gotta, I gotta start using it more. I'm actually curious to hear Eric now, because Eric actually.

• 1:54:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  I don't know if he's gonna, I don't know if he's getting ready to sober us up, or like.

• 1:54:56Speaker 04

  I mean, I guess I'm the bear, I guess I'm the bear in the room here. So I'm going with 2,500. And so I, I think every cycle that goes on in crypto is gonna be harder to go higher and higher. The markets are more mature, there's more shorting options, there's more, you know, options in general to short, long, whatever, straddle, whatever your position is. I think when ETH went from $6 to 1420, there was no way to short it. It was pretty much just a bull's game, right? And I don't think we live in that world now. I'm not expecting Bitcoin to go to 500K like some people.

• 1:55:36Speaker 04

  I'm also not expecting the same downside that we saw recently. So I think that the floor is moving up. I don't think we're gonna see 90% retraces in Bitcoin and ETH like we saw in the past. So just because I'm saying 2,500 for this cycle doesn't mean that we're going back to, you know, whatever, 200 and waiting three years. I personally think we're past that, but I think the market's a little bit more mature now where we're not gonna see these absolute insane rallies. So I'll go with 2,500.

• 1:56:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  There you have it, guys.

• 1:56:07David Hoffman?

  That is so bearish.

• 1:56:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. Our, our three ETH bulls.

• 1:56:12Speaker 04

  If you bought at 30 cents.

• 1:56:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. Well, okay, there you go. You know, cool, cool way to end the show. 2,500 to 20K is the prediction from our three ETH bulls. Guys, I think this episode delivered what we promised. I think we were a bit bullish ETH. This is not the episode to listen to if you're trying to stop buying ETH. Someone recently tweeted this out that, like they, every time they listen to Bankless, they have to buy more ETH. And I feel like this is not going to help that individual.

• 1:56:44Speaker 03

  I feel sorry for them after listening to this. If they've got a house, they're probably gonna sell it.

• 1:56:50Speaker 04

  2,500 is bearish somehow.

• 1:56:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, guys, it's been a fantastic year and we are looking forward so much to 2021. Some action items, of course. This is not financial advice, but maybe you should consider some ETH for your portfolio. Obviously, of course, guys, number two, enjoy the holidays, catch up on some previous podcasts, follow these gentlemen. We will include their Twitter handles in the show notes. And of course, if you've got time, you want to give Bankless a gift, you can always give us a five-star review on iTunes. How are we doing with those five stars, David?

• 1:57:29David Hoffman?

  We are not at 200 yet, and that is our near-tune goal. We want 200 five-star reviews. Because let's be real here, if we get five-star reviews, more people will listen to the Bankless podcast and more people will specifically listen to this episode, which will make ETH 10K, just all of us an assured reality. So if you could go to wherever you listen to your podcasts and give us those five-star reviews, so we could get ETH to 10K, that would be greatly appreciated by everyone here.

• 1:57:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  You heard it, it's a prereq. All right, guys, risks and disclaimers, of course, none of this was financial advice. We never claim that it was. ETH is risky, crypto is risky, so is DeFi. You could lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but thanks for joining us on the Bankless program.