ROLLUP - Jack Dorsey Exits Twitter | BTC ETH Ratio | Spiderman & Ross Ulbricht NFTs

1st Week of December, 2021 ------ 📣 METMASK | YOUR HARDWARE WALLET'S BEST FRIEND https://bankless.cc/metamask-shows ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/ 🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/ ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 💰 GEMINI | FIAT & CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://bankless.cc/go-gemini​ https://bankless.cc/go-gemini%E2%80%8B 💧LIDO | DECENTRALIZED STAKING https://bankless.cc/Lido 👻 AAVE | LEND & BORROW ASSETS https://bankless.cc/aave 🦄 UNISWAP | DECENTRALIZED FUNDING https://bankless.cc/UniGrants ------ Topics Covered: 0:00 Intro Metamask: https://bankless.cc/metamask-shows Gitcoin: https://gitcoin.co/hackathon/gr12/ 5:00 MARKETS 5:55 BTC Price 6:16 ETH Price 6:42 ETH/BTC Ratio https://twitter.com/TrustlessState/status/1465868162860077062?s=20 13:32 DeFi Action 15:42 Adoption https://twitter.com/Blockworks_/status/1463965278119907331?s=20 20:34 Omicron https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2021/11/29/defi-protocol-omicrons-token-jumps-10-fold-after-namesake-covid-variant-emerges/ 23:43 Crypto Dot Com https://thedefiant.io/crypto-com-cro-tvl-1b/ 25:33 Bigger than Banks https://twitter.com/thekriskay/status/1466139868967444485 27:13 ETH on Exchanges https://twitter.com/CryptoGucci/status/1466426429332017152?s=20 30:00 RELEASES 30:30 StarkNet Alpha https://shows.banklesshq.com/p/-super-scaling-with-starkware-uri 33:32 Tornado Cash x Arbitrum https://twitter.com/TornadoCash/status/1465269558617550850 34:08 Bancor v3 https://bancor.medium.com/ 34:47 GNO and xDAI https://twitter.com/koeppelmann/status/1465779337823666188?s=12 37:54 Celsius Series B https://blockworks.co/celsius-expands-its-series-b-from-400m-to-oversubscribed-750m/?oly_enc_id=9918E2523689A0T 38:41 Fireblocks https://www.ledgerinsights.com/digital-asset-custody-firm-fireblocks-raises-400m-at-8-billion-valuation/ 40:00 1inch Series B https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/125901/1inch-network-closes-175-million-series-b-aims-to-serve-institutional-customers 42:18 Matt Zhang Fund https://www.theblockcrypto.com/linked/125664/former-wall-street-banker-launches-1-5-billion-crypto-venture-fund?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social https://www.theblockcrypto.com/linked/125664/former-wall-street-banker-launches-1-5-billion-crypto-venture-fund?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social 43:18 Jobs https://pallet.xyz/list/bankless/jobs 44:00 NEWS 44:37 Jack Resigns from Twitter https://twitter.com/jack/status/1465347002426867720?s=20 New CEO: https://www.coindesk.com/business/2021/11/30/five-things-to-know-about-twitters-new-ceo-parag-agrawal/ 49:21 $PEOPLE Boom https://blwk.omeclk.com/portal/wts/ugmcny2fmqefnqmN2q%7CRyy%7CqF8Con9r%3BGkh3a 50:36 EIP-4488 https://twitter.com/protolambda/status/1466114606036889613?s=20 53:56 Uniswap on Polygon https://twitter.com/MihailoBjelic/status/1462882559914823691?s=20 54:30 Beacon Chain Birthday https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/1466411377107558402 48:42 Beer. ETH https://twitter.com/BrantlyMillegan/status/1465336361351880711 59:30 ENS Growth https://twitter.com/BrantlyMillegan/status/1466109173385637891?s=20 1:00:44 Front-End Worries https://twitter.com/bantg/status/1466390376500105218?s=21 1:04:16 Spiderman NFT https://messari.us17.list-manage.com/track/click?u=5b89525c77acdd986027c25d1&id=aa5566375f&e=29f2240adb https://messari.us17.list-manage.com/track/click?u=5b89525c77acdd986027c25d1&id=aa5566375f&e=29f2240adb 1:05:53 Ross Ulbricht NFT https://twitter.com/realrossu/status/1465788108461514756?s=21 1:08:48 Unlocking with NFTs https://twitter.com/hm0429/status/1465241679800111107?s=20 1:11:11 Immutable & Moonpay https://twitter.com/Immutable/status/1466201337452916737?s=20 1:13:42 Salvador & Saylor https://www.coindesk.com/business/2021/11/26/el-salvador-buys-100-more-bitcoins-as-crypto-market-falls/ 1:15:58 China Censoring https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/125533/china-crypto-censorship-media-mining-pools 1:17:27 Transitory Inflation https://twitter.com/BanklessHQ/status/1466060476001968129?s=20 1:18:48 Crypto Bank Regulation https://www.theblockcrypto.com/linked/126020/congress-to-hold-hearing-with-execs-from-coinbase-ftx-paxos-and-others 1:21:00 TAKES 1:21:30 The Ethereum Pre-Mine https://twitter.com/TrustlessState/status/1466074560759943169?s=20 1:27:22 The Chain of Chains https://twitter.com/RyanSAdams/status/1465469933140131840?s=20 1:29:36 What DAOs will DO https://twitter.com/brantlymillegan/status/1464682887224217605?s=21 1:31:25 The Entire Bet https://twitter.com/squishchaos/status/1465108245589073922?s=21 1:36:30 Do Fundamentals Matter? https://twitter.com/kyled116/status/1466226155325833216?s=20 1:38:13 Metaverse Exposure https://twitter.com/TrustlessState/status/1466434553871061010?s=20 1:40:46 What David’s Excited About 1:42:30 What Ryan’s Excited About 1:45:24 MEME of the Week https://twitter.com/TrustlessState/status/1464103140597272583?s=20 ----- 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. Do your own research. See our investment disclosures here: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/bankless-disclosures

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

• 0:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  Hey guys, happy first week of December. David, what time is it?

• 0:10David Hoffman?

  Oh, it's the Friday weekly roll-up time, Ryan, where we roll up the entire week in crypto, which is always an ambitious endeavor, yet we do it anyways because we have a ton of fun doing it, and I hope you do as well. So grab your morning coffee because we are about to roll up the week.

• 0:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  It is fun. Look, crypto is never boring, guys. So you know this. How was your Thanksgiving, by the way? Was that fun? Did you get any crypto conversations in?

• 0:32David Hoffman?

  Oh, inevitably. Just like I said with the last part of last week's episode is like, everyone talks about crypto because that's like one person in the room is the known crypto person, and no one knows what crypto is, so they always got to ask about crypto. So yes, that didn't even happen.

• 0:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  Guys, we are going to get into the main events of the week. First of all, Budweiser Beer Company buys beer.eth, and now they're prominently displaying on their Twitter page. It's an NFT. More to come, maybe. Jack Dorsey, just stepped down from Twitter, David. What does this mean for crypto? We're going to dig into that. Also, all eyes on the ETH Bitcoin ratio. Ratio talk.

• 1:09David Hoffman?

  Get me hot and flustered.

• 1:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  I know you're excited about that one, alright? That's why we'll get to it first. And also, the Ethereum roadmap refresh. Of course, there's a ton of other things we're going to cover in the weekly roll-up. You do not want to miss it. Try to jam-pack this into the next hour or so. 90 minutes?

• 1:25David Hoffman?

  90 minutes. We'll see if we can do 90.

• 1:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  No promises on the hour. But before we do, gotta mention Permissionless Conference. So you know this conference is coming in May. This is happening in Florida, so if you're in the cold weather climate, you want to get down to Florida. You're thinking of it. This is going to be the crypto conference of the year, at least the DeFi conference of the year. We're going to be there. Our friends at Blockworks are putting this on. We let you know now because new tickets just went on sale. New tranche. Every two weeks, new tranche goes on sale. Price gets more every...

• 1:56David Hoffman?

  Up only.

• 1:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  It goes up every week. It's up only. So if you want to have a bankless discount on that, you can become a premium subscriber and go get your Permissionless tickets. We will see you there in the new year. I think, David, you got probably like four or five conferences? Between like now and that one, but you know, that's going to be a highlight of next year for sure.

• 2:16David Hoffman?

  At some point, the yearly subscription to Bankless is actually going to pay for itself because of the 30% off that it gets you off this ticket. So.

• 2:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  We're already close, dude.

• 2:25David Hoffman?

  Right. So like Ryan said, you can sign up for Bankless, get a 30% off discount, but the sooner you get that ticket, the cheaper it's going to be. Because like no one wants to be paying to have the, you know, April of 2022 FOMO where the tickets are over a thousand dollars a piece.

• 2:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 2:41David Hoffman?

  Get them now before, while they're like 400 something.

• 2:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  In crypto, you never want to delay things, right? You just, just ape in guys, ape into that conference. Also, we want to mention our friends at MetaMask. They are sponsoring this message. I use MetaMask all the time. David, I know you are a power user of MetaMask. The most, the safest way to use MetaMask is with a hardware wallet. So a Ledger wallet is one good option. Also, Lattice, MetaMask has recently added support for the Lattice Wallet, which is a hyper secure hardware wallet. Sits right on your desk, beautiful user interface. Also, another wallet called Keystone, which provides a QR, air gapped QR code based hardware wallet. So what MetaMask is doing right now is really doubling down on its wallet support, which is a perfect complement.

• 3:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  Because you want to use MetaMask, but you want to use it in a safe and secure way. If you've used Ledger and MetaMask before, you know, there's some, like, there's some bumps. It hasn't always worked perfectly in, in some of the browsers like Chrome. Ledger and MetaMask are partnering to iron out those issues and they've just released a whole bunch of releases. So the action item here, if you don't have MetaMask, you want a portal into Web3, go download MetaMask. There's a link in the show notes. If you haven't used MetaMask with a wallet before, then try it. It is the, the most secure, safe way to experience Web3 to date. You can get into DeFi, use it all of the time. So check that out. There is a link in the show notes to MetaMask and you can find out more about it.

• 4:12David Hoffman?

  All right, guys, the last piece of housekeeping. Gitcoin Round 12 has officially kicked off, kicked off on December 1st. We all know. Bitcoin rounds, they are the times where we can all donate towards these up and coming projects that need that support. But the cool thing about Gitcoin is that there is this massive matching pool. So when you come and donate to projects and upstarts and different things that need your support, client teams, different DeFi apps that are just getting up and running, your donations are matched, but they are not matched linearly, they are matched quadratically. We've had Kevin O'Awaki on the show before to talk about quadratic matching. Basically, if you are donating to the same grants that many, many other individuals are also donating to,

• 4:54David Hoffman?

  those individuals have outsized matching from this supply matching pool. There's also the brand new pool of crypto advocacy, all funding efforts to advocate for crypto on Capitol Hill. We just had a two-part panel yesterday on Bankless, came out on the podcast yesterday, it's also on the YouTube, where we had some just big, heavy hitters, Jake Shervinsky, Jerry Britto, Brian Quintens, Kristin from the Blockchain Association, a number of other people to really kick off this brand new advocacy round. So if you want to move the needle in Capitol Hill, go to gitcoin.co, check out the Gitcoin Rounds 12 matching round, and check out the crypto advocacy track, and donate to some really cool projects on Gitcoin.

• 5:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, crypto advocacy is where it's at, man. Didn't you guys, like, didn't Gitcoin, isn't there like an $800,000?

• 5:42David Hoffman?

  Over $900,000 now, yeah.

• 5:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  $900,000?

• 5:44David Hoffman?

  Just for the crypto advocacy round.

• 5:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Crypto advocacy, that's crazy. Crypto lobbying, this is something that we need to do. Crypto is political, whether we like it or not, so we have to get involved that way. David, let's talk about prices, though.

• 5:57David Hoffman?

  Prices!

• 5:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's market time.

• 5:58David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 5:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bitcoin price, what's happening?

• 6:01David Hoffman?

  Bitcoin, flat on the week, a little bit up on the week. Started the week at $54,000, hit a high of $59,000, currently at $57,000, up about 3% to 4% on the week.

• 6:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, flat week, okay. How about ETH? How's ETH tracking?

• 6:18David Hoffman?

  Uh, ETH, doing great. Started the week at $4,400, hit a low of $4,000 right at the bottom of that COVID, Omicron scare, which we're going to talk about, but then hit a high of $4,780 and is now clocking in at $4,500 right now and currently is up 8% on the week.

• 6:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, Bitcoin flat, but ETH going up? That has some ripple effects. That means all eyes continue to be on the ETH-Bitcoin ratio because that is doing things, things we haven't seen in a while. Tell us about the ratio story here.

• 6:52David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so the ratio hit a new high for the first time in over three years. And so hit that full chart view, Ryan. The ratio started the week at .075 and hit a high of .083, .083 and is currently coming in at .08. Overall, up 8% on the week. And again, we have not seen these levels of the ETH-BTC ratio since 2017, or maybe late 2018. And so

• 7:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  February, it looks like February.

• 7:24David Hoffman?

  February of 2018. When the ETH-BTC ratio hits new highs, to me, this is what I tweeted out, and I think my tweet is next, Ryan. The ETH-BTC ratio is the bull market signal. When ETH goes up versus Bitcoin, it's a signal of the bull market is ongoing. Not necessarily prescriptive of future returns, right? Like, we can't predict the future, but really, when ETH goes up versus BTC, it's a signal of the bull market. And making new highs, I'm saying that I think this is going to indicate a stronger continuation of the bull market into the future. A lot of the ETH people, myself included, are talking about, man, if the ETH-BTC ratio can just jump from like .08 to .1, like, the flippity

• 8:07David Hoffman?

  becomes real, real close. There is very little price discovery in Bitcoin terms above these levels right now. Breaking a three-year all-time high is a really big deal, and there's not much more left before Ether actually breaks the complete and Full all time high, which is just like in a flash of a pan claimed in 2017 at like point 01 or point 12, I think. But it's a long time coming.

• 8:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  There's two things that jump out at me from this chart that we're looking at, which is the ETH Bitcoin ratio. You know, the first is we haven't been at this point in the ratio for very many days either, right? Because when in 2017, it kind of the ratio spiked above where it is right now. That was relatively brief.

• 8:54David Hoffman?

  It was a flash.

• 8:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like we're talking days, right? And then also in the end of 2017 and 2019, 2018, when it did as well, that was days as well. I don't know how many days we've actually been above the ratio we are right now, but it feels like.

• 9:09David Hoffman?

  Not very many at all.

• 9:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  16, 17, 18, you know, less than a month in terms of days. So the, that's pretty remarkable. The other remarkable thing about this chart, David, is look at this, look at this trough, this trough of disillusionment between the end of 2018 and I guess the, the end of 2020, where it was like Bitcoin season. It was like Bitcoin maximalist.

• 9:34David Hoffman?

  Everything is down only versus Bitcoin.

• 9:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's what they said, and that was the narrative. And I think the thing about narratives is a lot of people sort of get biased by the most recent narrative and sort of project that extrapolate that forward. And so because that was the most popular narrative, everything was bleeding against Bitcoin. The idea was nothing aside from Bitcoin would, would ever appreciate or ever retain value. So what's interesting is the, the, the long, I guess, crawl through this trench, this trough of disillusionment. And then the like the spike up, right? Like we are well above where we were. And this feels like, I guess what I'm saying is it's a strong recovery on the Bitcoin ratio. So this is primed to do something and possibly continue increasing.

• 10:23David Hoffman?

  I hate that you're making me look at this chart. Can you click on, click on my tweet so we can have like a real chart to look at? There we go. So look at that, look at that. So for, for the listeners, if you grow and just zoom all the. Way out from 2016 to 2022 where we are now. It is a solid upwards trend. It went up real, real fast from 2016 to 2017 and 18. Because that's when like Ether had this very early ICO mania that was completely unsustainable. And then that that just flash just like, you know, leveled off for the next like two years. But after that, in 2020, like it started to to climb again. And overall, it's been painting this very up and to this right trend versus Bitcoin. Its entire lifespan.

• 11:04David Hoffman?

  And this is why people were talking about the flipping before Ethereum actually had its first block mined. Some people like read the Ethereum white paper and they're like, oh yeah, this is going to flip in Bitcoin. No one will say, tell you when, because no one actually knows. The ETH BTC trading pair is extremely hard to trade and predict. But but damn, does this chart just look good. Ryan, I did some TA, actually. I'm not really much of a TA person, but if you want to go on to the tweet that I followed this up on. You can just exit out of this picture and then scroll down. I did some TA. There it is.

• 11:35David Hoffman?

  It's a solid green arrow up into the right.

• 11:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is fantastic. This is the kind of quality TA that Bankless subscribers sign up for here.

• 11:43David Hoffman?

  That's exactly right. So I actually counted the number of weeks that Ether has been higher in Bitcoin terms. 12 weeks, only 12 weeks of price history out of Ethereum's like six years of existence.

• 11:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  Has the ratio ever been higher?

• 11:55David Hoffman?

  Has the ratio between Bitcoin and Ether ever been higher?

• 11:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  So it wasn't days, it was weeks. It was probably, you know, three, three months or so. But how big would this be? If like, this has never happened in history. Just like why we're talking about this so much is Bitcoin has never been flippant. In the history of Bitcoin is the OG coin. And so if this does happen, you can expect not just people like us, not just crypto media and people on, you know, crypto Twitter and in these circles will be talking about it. The entire world will be talking about it.

• 12:24David Hoffman?

  The entire world knows Bitcoin as crypto. But when something else takes the number one spot, that will, people will reconsider what it means to be crypto.

• 12:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  Absolutely. So that will ripple out. And I think that's, that's definitely something to watch. David, we are preparing some of our predictions for 2022 as well. I know on Bankless, we're going to publish this toward the end of the month. I'm wondering if one of your predictions is going to be a flipping in 2022. Are you going to call that?

• 12:54David Hoffman?

  Oof, I think it's a greater than 50% chance. Yeah.

• 12:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  So do I. Yeah. So do I.

• 13:01David Hoffman?

  It's really hard to have conviction about the ETH BTC ratio because like I said, it really like if you people that trade the ETH BTC ratio generally just get absolutely worked. It's one of the hardest things to trade in crypto.

• 13:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 13:13David Hoffman?

  And predicting the flipping is also really, really hard, but man, are we real, we're just.

• 13:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  Predicting when it's going to happen is the hard part, right?

• 13:21David Hoffman?

  Yes.

• 13:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's like, okay, well, if you, if you predict it, I will say, I'm not so sure. And I won't predict it. And that way one of us is right. And that would bankless is always right. That's how we maintain. That's why there's two of us.

• 13:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, let's talk about the DPI total locked. Sorry. Let's talk about DeFi pulse and total locked value in DeFi. That's at 108 billion. So we're still above 100 billion. That's feeling pretty good. That's feeling healthy too. How about the DeFi pulse index? Here's a seven day view. It didn't have the week that Ether did.

• 13:50David Hoffman?

  No, no, it's, it's down, down a little bit versus the dollar. Started at 360, ended at 330.

• 13:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  Still not DeFi season. I am curious about your predictions for DPI into 22.

• 14:05David Hoffman?

  Abstaining from any DPI related.

• 14:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, just tell me about this.

• 14:07David Hoffman?

  Look at that chart.

• 14:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  The DPI to ETH index. Okay. So this is another ratio that we track on bankless rollups.

• 14:14David Hoffman?

  Tracking it.

• 14:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  DPI to ETH, man. We have to look. You can't be mad about this. I know you're an ETH bull. You can't be mad about this.

• 14:21David Hoffman?

  Yeah, this is true.

• 14:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Why does this, why does this ratio bring you so much pain, David? First, what is it?

• 14:26David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 14:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  I'm gonna make you say it.

• 14:27David Hoffman?

  This is the ratio between the aggregate of DeFi tokens and Ether. Not all DeFi tokens, kind of the, the OG DeFi tokens.

• 14:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bootchips.

• 14:36David Hoffman?

  Aave makers, Uniswap, Sushi Swap. And just DeFi has just not been catching a bid versus Ether. Ether is ultrasound money and DeFi tokens are not. And people are really just believing in that difference, I guess. We are clocking in at point 074. I believe it was point 08 last week.

• 14:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  I guess we did our ultrasound money job too well, David. That's why this is happening. But here's, here's a sure way to win is you bet on all three. A little bit of Bitcoin, a little bit of ETH, a little bit of DPI, a third, a third, a third, and that forms the bed index. So what are we looking at on bed on the, on the week here?

• 15:15David Hoffman?

  Yeah. Started last week at $177, ended this week at roughly $165. So a little bit down on the week.

• 15:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  A little bit down on bed. That is a secure way to to get exposure into the crypto monies and also DeFi. Each have their seasons, right? Sometimes it's Bitcoin season, sometimes it's ETH season, sometimes it's a DeFi season. And the bankless bed index allows you to get exposure to all three of those things. Let's talk a little bit more about about Thanksgiving, though, right? So this is a chart from Blockworks. Actually, I think they maybe crypto.com is the source of this. And they said, show this chart to your crypto skeptical family members. This is a chart of 1990s internet adoption, David. So it's internet versus crypto.

• 16:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  And there's a green line and a blue line. The green line is internet users over time, tracking from like 1990 to the year 2000. And the blue line is total crypto users. These are both measured in millions. And what's interesting is the blue line is tracking the green line.

• 16:23David Hoffman?

  Right on top of it.

• 16:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's right on top of it. So what this is saying is like, something that we've said a lot is crypto is the internet of money. And it is tracking the adoption of the internet in the way the internet spread in the 1990s. I think this is a useful way to help your family understand crypto, to be honest, because everyone lived through the 90s, right? You know, maybe not everyone, but like lots of people remember the internet transformation and what that looked like. And so if you're looking for an analogy, you just say, look, crypto is the internet of money. And it is getting adopted like the internet was. Remember how fast that happened?

• 17:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  Remember how much transformation occurred as a result of that? Well, crypto is going to do that, except for scarce things, property things, money in a different way. I think it's a useful analogy to help people understand it. And it's interesting that the numbers are tracking. But when we were talking about this agenda, David, you were also a little bit disappointed at this graph, right?

• 17:27David Hoffman?

  Right, yeah, like I want crypto to be adopted faster than the internet because crypto is on top. Of the internet and the internet's already been adopted. So when I see crypto being adopted at the same rate of the internet, I'm like, God, like, why are we so slow? Like, let's pick up the pace here.

• 17:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  What's taking so, what is taking so long? What's, why do you think it's taking so long? I, so first of all, this makes me hyper bullish. I don't like, I, you know, to get to this point in crypto is frankly amazing, right? It's like, we lived through the internet to have a second revolution that was up on the same order of magnitude as the internet is just incredible. Like, this is beyond my wildest dreams and super excited about this, very bullish about this. But to your point, you know, crypto had the internet to propagate itself. So why is it not propagating faster? What do you think is holding crypto back when you look at this?

• 18:16David Hoffman?

  Not, not only did it have the internet, but also had the financial incentive to adopt it. Like crypto pays you to adopt it. So like, where is the juice? Like, where's the steroids? I thought, I kind of always thought that crypto would be the internet just on steroids. Granted, we are not like, you know, disrupting the internet. We're disrupting legacy financial institutions and people seem to be a lot more skeptical about crypto than they were the internet. Uh, and maybe that's because the nature of crypto has the, the nature of money in, inside of it. People generally are skeptical with value. They're like, oh, buy Bitcoin, like, oh, you're just trying to take my money.

• 18:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  But do you know what, one take here, though, is like, I don't think the, um, look, the internet, the institutions adopted the internet almost immediately, right? It's like, the US policy was pro-internet, you know? Corporate policy was like, we have to get, go on the internet. We have to do dot coms, all of these things. I think crypto has been, interestingly enough, more a bottom up movement in some ways than the internet. What I mean is like, established institutions haven't seen the value proposition, right? The banking industry adopted the internet, but the banking industry has been super slow to adopt crypto. Why? It's because they're being disrupted by crypto, right? Even like extrapolate that to governments and central banks. Maybe they're also worried that they're going to be adopted by crypto.

• 19:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  So we haven't had the institutional support that, a legacy institutional support that the internet has had. Uh, what's your take on that? And what, what else do you think is holding us back?

• 19:44David Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. The fact that it's a bottom up system, I, I think also lends itself to why it could have been adopted faster. Because like bottom up systems are just like organic and nature is really, really good at, at spreading.

• 19:58David Hoffman?

  Granted, granted, this is in log. This is a log scale. And so like deviations are actually really, really compressed in this chart. But like, damn, are those lines right on top of each other. At some point, I don't really know. We'll just have to wait for it to figure to figure itself out.

• 20:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  The story is not over, but

• 20:14David Hoffman?

  Basically, what I'm saying is like, I'm bullish. I just wanted to be hyper bullish. And I can only be bullish. Like, I wish I was more bullish.

• 20:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wow. You, uh, yeah, that's spoken like somebody who's gotten used to a lot of bullishness lately. You're spoiled, sir. You are spoiled. Let's talk about this. Omicron. What is this? This is a story of, okay, Omicron. So this is, this is a COVID variant. Maybe you should explain that. And it did kind of tank the markets a little bit, like, you know, both stock markets and crypto. Okay, so let's talk about that. And then also, we're seeing like meme tokens number go up as a result, which I don't understand. What's, what's the story here?

• 20:59David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so the Omicron variant was discovered in South America. It's apparently a new variant.

• 21:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  South Africa, right?

• 21:06David Hoffman?

  Yeah, South Africa. And, you know, apparently more transmissible, apparently more contagious. We don't really know. There's not a lot of data out there, but the markets just read the headlines new COVID variant and just got super, super spooked. And I was just so dumbfounded by this market reaction because it happened in the legacy markets. It also happened in crypto. And I'm like, guys, we've seen this story before. First off, like, we're way more prepared. Like, we already know what COVID is. We already have vaccines. We already have testing centers. We already have global mask adoption by some people. And so like, why are people more scared about another like COVID variant? Like, the way that COVID is going to get work is just we're gonna, it's gonna just morph into the common cold. And we're gonna get a bunch of booster shots over and over and over again. Like, this is how this works. So like, new variants are totally to be expected. And like,

• 21:50David Hoffman?

  and then the markets dumped, as if like, it was gonna be pandemic 2.0 all over again, forgetting about the last time the markets dumped. We just printed a bunch of money. Like, the whole market reaction was totally nonsensical to me. And so many people got really, really bearish. Like, I just did not get it. So

• 22:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  I was not bearish, sir.

• 22:06David Hoffman?

  I was not bearish in the slightest. You know, I tweeted out, like, if you, if you sold the Omicron variant news, slap yourself. We're going to 10K. And then people followed up. It's like, David, no, we're going to 20K. I'm like, oh, yeah, you're right. And meanwhile, the completely unrelated, but also interesting part of the story is there's this random token that I had no idea existed called Omicron, and it pumped like 200% because of the Omicron variant.

• 22:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  Is this a token that existed pre-Omicron variant? It was just like through happenstance?

• 22:36David Hoffman?

  Correct. It was just a coincidence of the names. And it just started pumping. And I think that this is kind of just a small, little microcosm of just the world's, the state of the world at large. People just like to invest in memes. Like, oh, the word Omicron is in the news? Let me go to CoinGecko, type in Omicron, and buy the first token that comes up. Like fundamentals just don't matter for a decent portion of the population anymore. And so like, welcome to the meme economy. Like, the words that are in the news are going to be turned into tokens that are going to pump. Like, we saw this with Doge. Like, this is the meme economy. Welcome to the meme economy.

• 23:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  So, do you think this is going to happen with other news items and other memes that propagate? They're all going to have tokens that will temporarily pump?

• 23:20David Hoffman?

  Yep. Just like, because traders are going to be like, oh, the word Omicron is in the news a bunch? I'm going to go buy the Omicron token because other people are thinking of the word Omicron.

• 23:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  Why is Omicron? Like, what was it originally?

• 23:31David Hoffman?

  It doesn't matter.

• 23:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  It doesn't even matter originally?

• 23:33David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 23:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, good job.

• 23:34David Hoffman?

  Sorry to the Omicron team.

• 23:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  Omicron, yeah. Omicron users, like, you know, just got your payday there. That was a lucky event. Let's talk about this, too. CRO token has been on an absolute tear. This is crypto.com's Kronos chain token. It's just locked up 1 billion total locked value. Token has jumped 350%. Crypto.com has recently, I believe, gotten naming rights for a major sports arena, too. That might be part of...

• 24:03David Hoffman?

  Staples Center, yeah.

• 24:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, part of this. But this chain seems to me very much like a kind of a, it's a proof of stake, Binance-type chain from a crypto bank, right? Kind of ETH killer or sidechain, whatever your perspective is on that. And it's very much, you know, sidechain season, I guess, ETH killer season. So, we're seeing a pump here. Anything else that...

• 24:27David Hoffman?

  Authority consensus mechanism, even more central.

• 24:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, so it's not even proof of state.

• 24:30David Hoffman?

  They must not be doing any sort of decentralization theater unlike the other ones. They're like, oh yeah, no, this is like a consortium blockchain. We own this thing.

• 24:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  I gotta be honest, like, so I understand CRO token as sort of a loyalty token. If you're a crypto.com user, right? And that does have some value, but like the, its value as it relates to this side chain? I don't really understand.

• 24:52David Hoffman?

  It's, it's just to be in the club in my mind. It's like, oh, people are building chains and issuing tokens. Like, oh, we have the crypto.com URL. Like, we can do the same thing in the URL. The value of the URL can sustain the whole entire ecosystem. That's what's in my mind was happening.

• 25:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 25:08David Hoffman?

  In my mind, that entire business is just centered around the URL.

• 25:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right, right. Well, I mean, they, they, like, they are doing a lot in this space. Like, they have partnerships with Visa. I've actually used a crypto.com card. Like, it works, it's cool. But it's, it's kind of an example of sort of a crypto bank play on this. And like,

• 25:27David Hoffman?

  It's, in my mind, it's co-opting crypto.

• 25:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it's, it's definitely, I, I hear that too. Let's talk about ETH a little bit. So this is a tweet from Chris Clay, says, so ETH has surpassed every global bank's market cap. And you're still not sure if this whole blockchain crypto thing is here to stay? This is a chart of ETH versus JP Morgan, versus Bank of America, versus ICBC and Wells Fargo and CM Bank and all the banks that you love to hate. Ethereum is on top with 550 billion. The next closest is JP Morgan with 480 billion. At this point, I feel like calling it two, right? Like, guys, wake up to Ethereum. Crypto is bigger than all of the banks.

• 26:12David Hoffman?

  Now you feel like calling it, Ron?

• 26:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  I'm just like, no, I think, you know, I felt like this for a while, I suppose, David. But like, yeah, this is, now it's self-evident. Now it's like, maybe, maybe I'm at the point of a zen where I don't even feel like I have to explain this anymore.

• 26:27David Hoffman?

  Exasperation by people who don't get it, yeah.

• 26:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I'm just like, okay, well, like, explain this chart then. How about, how about rather than me explain crypto? How about you explain why Ethereum market cap is larger than all the banks? Start from there, explain that.

• 26:41David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 26:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  And then we'll have a discussion about it. I feel like a bit more like that. Maybe it's vindication that I'm feeling.

• 26:48David Hoffman?

  I won't be satisfied until Ethereum market cap is bigger than all the banks combined. And then we can say that Ether is undervalued, just not misunderstood. Like, oh, people now understand Ethereum. It's now, now it's in the realm of some sort of fair valuation. It's still low, but at least people understand it. That's where I'm at.

• 27:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's just a fad, David. Just a fad. Let's talk about this. Another cool fad, I suppose, is Ether on exchanges hitting a three-year low. So as the the ratio, the ETH to Bitcoin ratio hits a three-year high, we're seeing a low on the amount of ETH on exchanges. And that's bullish. Why is that bullish, David?

• 27:32David Hoffman?

  Because if any institution or any newcomer wants to buy Ether, they gotta do it on exchanges. And so the lower of ETH supply on exchanges, the more a dollar, a dollar has on the impact of ETH price when it is bought on exchanges. And so this is just going into any sort of just new inflows has outsized impact upon ETH price. Bullish, bullish. I'm really bullish.

• 27:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  Also bullish on going bankless as well. It's like more of this, more of this ETH becomes non-custodial, the better for the bankless journey. Guys, we will be right back with the release of the week. We're going to talk about the hot news items and of course, get to the takes and the memes. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible.

• 28:16David Hoffman?

  Bankless is proud to be supported by Uniswap. Uniswap is a new paradigm in asset exchange infrastructure. Instead of a cumbersome order book system where trades are matched with other humans, Uniswap is an autonomous piece of software on Ethereum, which is what Ryan and I call a money robot. No human counterparties or centralized intermediaries, just autonomous code on Ethereum. Input the token you want to sell and receive the token you want to buy. Something brand new in the Uniswap ecosystem is the Uniswap Grants Program is now accepting applications for grants. We have been saying this for a while and we'll say it again. DAOs have money and they are in need of labor. If you think that you have something to contribute to the Uniswap DAO, apply for a grant to Uniswap.

• 29:01David Hoffman?

  Just look at the size of the Uniswap treasury. It's almost $3 billion. This mountain of capital is looking for labor. Do you have something of value to contribute to the Uniswap DAO? No matter how big or small your idea is, you can apply for a UNI grant at unigrants.org and help steer Uniswap in the direction that you think it should go. That's exactly what we did to get Uniswap to be a sponsor for Bankless, and you can do the same for your project. Thank you, Uniswap, for sponsoring Bankless. The era of proof-of-stake is upon us. Proof-of-stake systems like Ethereum, Terra, and Solana allow the industry to move away from the hot, loud, and wasteful proof-of-work systems and return back to a cottage industry of individual stakers and individual validators.

• 29:43David Hoffman?

  And that is what we need to make this industry stay decentralized. Individuals must play their part in crypto network validation, and that is what Lido is here to do. Lido makes staking accessible to everyone at the click of a button. By delegating your stake to Lido's network of nodes, you can access the yield offered by proof-of-stake systems and claim your share of the network transaction rewards. Do you have 32 ETH and want to stake it to Ethereum, but running a node sounds intimidating? Or maybe you have less than 32 ETH and you need to pool your ETH with others so you can access staking yields? Lido offers a solution for both. Simply go to lido.fi, choose which assets you want to stake, and deposit them to the Lido validating network. Lido is working to make sure proof-of-stake stays as decentralized as possible

• 30:28David Hoffman?

  and is committed to decentralizing its own validating network to eventually become a completely permissionless protocol. So if you want to stake your ETH, Terra, or Sol and get liquidity on your stake, go to lido.fi to get started.

• 30:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, guys, we are back with the releases of the week. The first is the Starkware. David, we were just talking to Starkware last week about Starknet, and now here it is, it's launched. What is in Starknet? Give us the TLDR.

• 30:52David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so think optimism, just like they have their optimistic rollup in Arbitrum, they have their optimistic rollup as well. Starknet is a ZK rollup. And we've seen ZK rollups before, but this one is different in that it is the public permissionless censorship resistant version of what Starkware has to offer. So this is the one single rollup where everyone can permissionlessly come and deploy on Starknet. ZK rollups, they are much more complicated than optimistic rollups, but also a lot faster and a lot cheaper because of the power of zero knowledge cryptography. Starknet Alpha, the first implementation of that is live on mainnet. So this is the first of a number of rollout progressions in this Starknet story.

• 31:35David Hoffman?

  And so ZK EVM is now here on Ethereum, which is really, really awesome. Congratulations to the Starkware team. We had them on the show recently. If you missed that episode, you gotta go watch it.

• 31:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's another bullish episode, absolutely. And these are all, of course, this is a general purpose. They didn't quite call it a chain, but like we call it a chain, for sure. And so it can run essentially something like the EVM. And so you can have multiple applications interacting. You preserve that composability and the more apps that join Starknet, the cheaper the transactions get.

• 32:07David Hoffman?

  So cool.

• 32:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  How about that for a virtuous cycle?

• 32:09David Hoffman?

  Yeah, the more users and more applications that are on Starknet, the cheaper the per user transaction gets. That is not something that you can ever find on an L1. That's one of the beauties of L2 is that costs are amortized across all the users. So the more, more users that use it, the cheaper the transactions get, rather than like the L1s of crypto where the more people that use it, the more expensive the transactions get. This is what, why we call it inverting the blockchain trilemma. Another piece of content that you need to watch, if you haven't watched it, is super scaling with ultra scalable Ethereum. Is that what we called it?

• 32:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. Ultra scalable Ethereum, absolutely. Yeah. This is a super scaling with Starkware was the, the, the other episode you're thinking of the Starkware folks. You know, it's so funny is when we were talking about, hey, when are ZK rollups coming? When's this feature functionality? The co-founders of Starkware were like, uh, guys, it's here. Like we're delivering it like next week it's happening. And then over the next six months, this is going to get smoother and smoother and smoother until maybe you don't even know you're on a rollup at all. So, uh, super exciting there. Also this Argent is maybe launching on Starknet before the end of the year, I believe.

• 33:20David Hoffman?

  Yep.

• 33:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is what I've heard.

• 33:21David Hoffman?

  Hint as well. Somebody was saying, all I want for Christmas is Argent on Starkware. And Argent responded in a tweet, your wish shall be granted. So, uh, sometime before Christmas, guys.

• 33:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  Saying it's coming. All right. Uh, let's talk about this too. Tornado Cash moving to Arbitrum. What does this mean?

• 33:36David Hoffman?

  Yeah, Tornado Cash, which is an ETH mixer. In case you are docs and want to undox yourself for whatever reasons, you can now do it in a much cheaper fashion on Arbitrum. Tornado Cash is generally a gas intensive application on the Ethereum L1, but now it's on Arbitrum. Uh, so you can get your privacy on Arbitrum.

• 33:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Privacy solutions coming to Ethereum. Another one to watch is Aztec, the Aztec Protocol, of course. That is whole ZK rollup that is dedicated to privacy, but I'm really glad to see some of these privacy solutions continuing to be pursued by, by the Ethereum network. Um, Bankor 3 has just released the third version of Bankor. These are one of the original automated market makers. They had a big ICO in 2017, and they've continued to plug away at this protocol. What's new in the release, David?

• 34:21David Hoffman?

  A bunch of new things. They have impermanent loss protection, which they already had, I think, in Bankor 2, but maybe that's updated in tweet. Um, there is L2 support. There's, so there's Bankor on layer twos. And they also have an Omni pool that allows for all trades on the network to occur in a single transaction. Probably some gas efficiencies and some trading efficiencies there, as well as a number of other features as well. So check out the link in the show notes to get the full digest of Bankor 3.

• 34:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is cool too. Nosis making some moves here. So they have a token called GNO. There's also a sidechain called XDi that I've used before, and I'm sure you've used as well, David.

• 34:57David Hoffman?

  That was my first sidechain I ever used. Yeah, back in like 2018 or something.

• 35:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Is it, so I think it started as a proof of authority sidechain, maybe moved to sort of a proof of stake type of sidechain. Anyway, it's kind of been overshadowed, I feel like recently by the polygons of the world and, and some of the other sidechain type solutions. I'm not sure exactly why, but there is a proposal from one of the, the co-founders of, of Nosis, Martin Koppelman, who is actually proposing a merger between XDi and GNO. And what I think they are doing, David, is they are putting together sort of a, almost like an ETH 2 testnet. So it's like a beacon chain. Type of environment that is going to provide

• 35:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  ETH to like functionality with a bit more centralization. Okay. So it won't be nearly as decentralized as Ethereum mainnet, but it'll almost operate as kind of a, I guess, a staking sidechain like to Ethereum. And the idea is they're going to propel, I guess, you know, the development track of Ethereum clients and sort of be have a relationship that way. Anyway, this is, this is a governance proposal, so this has not happened yet, but was interesting nonetheless and caught our attention this week. What else would you add?

• 36:16David Hoffman?

  Yeah, there, I think we're really just gonna have to wait and see really what the, what happens with this and what the utility of this sidechain actually would do. I wouldn't, there is some things to be concerned about because since there is a brand new token that's securing this sidechain, that kind of does like, you know, Sazil on the Daily Wave put it nicely, splits the communities, right? So you have the one token validating the sidechain and the Ether token validating Ethereum. There's a difference there.

• 36:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  And that's by, what you meant by like a split token, right? It's like, so.

• 36:50David Hoffman?

  One is for one chain and it doesn't actually formally link it to Ethereum in any particular way.

• 36:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, there's some disalignment there when you have something like this. And, but people said this about Polygon as well in the early days, and they've managed to say it's kind of socially connected to Ethereum.

• 37:04David Hoffman?

  Yeah, the difference there is that Polygon actually has economic, it's bit economic slashing for any malicious activity between the bridge. And that Polygon staking is actually occurring on the Ethereum L1, not on the Polygon sidechain. And I believe if this, if I understanding this correctly, is that the, the X-Di-Nosis sidechain will, will not have staking on the Ethereum mainchain. It'll be its own independent self-sovereign system. And then also Polygon is very, very committed to ZK rollups, which by definition are hooked right into Ethereum itself. So there is some differences there.

• 37:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it's interesting though, because also, you know, Martin and the team at Nosis have been very socially plugged into Ethereum, right?

• 37:44David Hoffman?

  Yes, very much so.

• 37:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  And it's like, very socially connected. So we'll have to see where this project evolves, but I like the experimentation of it, and I think it's cool to kind of resurrect X-Di in a new way and see where that goes. Let's talk about some raises, David. Celsius crypto banks are raising. They just got a Series B, $400 million is oversubscribed. So actually, I think maybe they were asking for 400 million, they got 750 million.

• 38:06David Hoffman?

  Wow.

• 38:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  I'm not sure how that works.

• 38:08David Hoffman?

  Wow.

• 38:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  But it's a lot of money for crypto banks these days, and he takes.

• 38:11David Hoffman?

  That is a lot of money. Yeah. Why is Celsius so highly valued? Like, I mean, I haven't used it, but it's just, isn't it just like DeFi products, but in C-Fi form? 3.5?

• 38:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes, sir. That's what it is. It's 3.25 billion. And look, it's kind of a crypto bank, right? Borrowing and lending your tokens and your Bitcoin, your ETH. And there's a lot of value in that.

• 38:35David Hoffman?

  I bet you they're gonna buy a stadium.

• 38:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  They probably should, right? Join the club. Join crypto. How about this? Fireblocks, man, I feel like they just raised. We had the founder of Fireblocks on, I don't know, had to be less than six months ago, and they had just come off a raise. Now here's another raise. I don't remember what the previous raise was, but I feel like it was like a $2 billion valuation. It was multiple billions, maybe. Now it's an $8 billion valuation. Okay? And they just raised $400 million. Fireblocks, of course, provides kind of institutional-friendly DeFi. They provide the custody layer and the APIs, so institutions can hook into the crypto experience, and particularly in DeFi. So it's a really interesting company from that perspective. And another crazy raise. This is a Series E, David. So I don't know

• 39:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  how many letters of the alphabet we get until you go public, but like, we're already on E.

• 39:25David Hoffman?

  So on July 27th, they raised $310 million for a $2 billion valuation. Now they are raising $400 million for, sorry, again, $8 billion valuation. So they

• 39:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 39:39David Hoffman?

  They Forexed their market cap in under less than six months.

• 39:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  Crypto is absolutely tearing right now. I don't know. Does that make you worried?

• 39:48David Hoffman?

  There's a lot of money out there. Remember how much money we printed? It was in the trillions.

• 39:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  God, money has become meaningless, I suppose. It's not crypto that's the bubble. It's money that's meaningless. One Inch Network just closes $175 million in their Series B. They're moving into institutional customers as well. That will really change. Like, One Inch was kind of like, I guess, kind of a niche DeFi project in the beginning. It looks like they're really scaling up for institutions, really commercializing, you know? It's like, last experience I've had with One Inch, I actually couldn't use it because I was based in the US, right? You had to like turn a VPN on or something like this before you could connect. But this is a pretty massive valuation as well. What do you make of this?

• 40:35David Hoffman?

  It's interesting when I see teams raising that also have a token. Like intuitively, you kind of want to say, well, you only get to pick one. Like either you raise or you do a token, but you don't get to do both. But actually, that's just like kind of the gut reaction. You can totally do both because nothing's stopping you. But you do have to ask, like, where is the value being captured? Because if there's a centralized private entity and then a public traded token, where's the value gonna go?

• 41:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, are you starting to worry about this? It's kind of like CRO and crypto.com, right?

• 41:07David Hoffman?

  Yeah, it's something to pay attention to. I'm not yet concerned about. I think it's just gonna be an interesting subject matter with tokens. Where like, tokens don't actually have any regulatory commitments. Like, you don't actually have any investor rights. As a token owner, there's just the token on the blockchain and that does whatever it does. And then there's a centralized company that can do whatever it does. So like, you know, TBD on what the dynamics behind private equity and public tokens are like. But again, there's no actual limits as to why you can't do both. Just intuitively, it seems kind of weird. But again, it's just like, you know, we've just got to experiment.

• 41:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  It seems like the higher risk, maybe higher return, but definitely higher risk asset, particularly if there's a centralized company involved. So if it's a centralized company and it also has a Token, right? Like, at least if you're buying equity in that company, you have some sort of legal right.

• 42:01David Hoffman?

  Yes.

• 42:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  If you just have a token,

• 42:03David Hoffman?

  You just have a token.

• 42:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  What do you actually own? You just have a token. So maybe that goes up higher, you know, zooms in the, in the bull run. But when things turn, that's got to be the riskier asset. We'll have to see how all of that plays out, David. This is a raise from a former Wall Street banker who just launched a $1.5 billion crypto venture fund. This reminds me of 2017 a little bit too, where everyone was launching a fund. This is someone from a fund called Hive Mind Capital Partners, a former Citigroup executive. So former banker Matt Zhang has launched this fund and he takes here.

• 42:39David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so I think there's two quick takes here. This is an example as to why crypto doesn't fix, you know, wealth distribution. Wealthy people can just take their wealth and buy crypto with it and they are still wealthy and now they're in crypto. But what it does fix is long-term incentives. And so getting wealthy people into the world of crypto makes them abide by our rules and our values. While crypto is not a panacea for fixing wealth distribution, wealth inequality in the world, it does actually force people onto the same equal playing fields, which is something that we can't say about the TradFi world.

• 43:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  If they adopt crypto, they adopt crypto values. We say this often on Bankless. Speaking of crypto values, let's talk about jobs. Imagine having a job that aligned with your crypto values. If you're listening to Bankless, which I know you are, then you probably have crypto values like us. So go check out the job board. If you want to make the full-time commitment, make the leap. Look, look towards 2022. What are you going to be doing in 2022? You'll be sitting at a corporate job? Are you going to look and see what's available in crypto? There's lots you could do here. Here's a senior backend engineer from Smart DeFi, product manager, as well as an accountant from Smart DeFi. It's pretty diverse. Senior software engineer at Popcorn, community ecosystem lead at DYDX,

• 43:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  crypto research analyst, you got to be an NFT specialist for this, also a smart contract research analyst, and a governance specialist at Bitwise, a head of Growth at Dex Guru, Technical Lead at Draftly, Head of Ethereum Research at Immutable, Head of Tokens at Immutable as well, Community Manager, Dexable, Lead Engineer, Hats. Finance, Community Manager, E Agronom, CTO E Agronom, Senior Back End Engineer, Smart DeFi. Guys, those are a lot of jobs and we just scratched the surface, okay? There's a whole list here. Go to check out the Bankless Job Board, sign up for that, get these jobs posted to you in your email address, you're first to know, and get a job in crypto.

• 44:32David Hoffman?

  Get a goddamn job.

• 44:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  Anyway. All right, let's talk news, David. Big news, item of the week, we promised this. Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter, also CEO of Square, he's like a co-CEO, he just resigned from Twitter. Here's his letter, very transparent, he posts on Twitter, as is fitting. And yeah, what do you make of this? Jack Dorsey, gone from Twitter, feels like he is maybe committing full-time to Square, which now is a new name, David. What's the new name?

• 45:03David Hoffman?

  Square has a new name called Block because it wants to lean in towards blockchain infrastructure and Square Crypto is now called Spiral. So Jack is really just like leaving Twitter, I think, to really double down on, I mean, for Jack, it's Bitcoin, Square Crypto is called Square Crypto, but with Jack leading it, it's really about Bitcoin. And there's been a bunch of speculation as to, well, why did Jack leave Twitter? Did he really want to actually do this? Or was he kindly asked to leave because he was putting up frictions for Twitter, putting up, adopting Web 3 things. Jack is a famous Bitcoin maximalist, he really only cares about Bitcoin.

• 45:46David Hoffman?

  He has publicly retweeted tweets calling Ethereum a scam and really only believes in Bitcoin. And all these Web 2 companies, Twitter especially, all kind of see Web 3 on the horizon and see this wave of adoption happening. And so the speculation from the Ethereum people, who have the Ethereum bias, and so they are just biased towards thinking this, is that Jack Dorsey got pushed out because he wasn't adopting Web 3.

• 46:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  Do you know the interesting thing, though? I feel like saying, "Jack, you can run, but you can't hide." Do you know why? Like, so you just named Square Block, okay? Like, you didn't name it Bitcoin. Square really can't, Square faces the same dilemma that Twitter does, which is if, if Jack does take Square in the Bitcoin maximalist direction, which he kind of has so far, we'll have to see what happens next. He's gonna miss out on all the cool DeFi stuff, right? I mean, we had Visa on, we had Anchorage on, we were talking about the DeFi mullet and fintech and Visa and it's all like, it's stable coins.

• 46:47David Hoffman?

  Right. Whereas Square's a payments company and people don't pay with Bitcoin, they pay with stable coins that are on Ethereum. Like, what?

• 46:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like Lightning, just, it's just a small fraction of, of kind of the block. So it's gonna continue chasing him there, I think. But let's talk about the new person who's taken over for Jack, because that's important. Look, Twitter is a very important platform. So the new person, I think, was Jack's number two.

• 47:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Parag Agarwal. He is a champion at Twitter. So Five Things About Him, this is a CoinDesk story. He was the leading force in Twitter's decentralization projects. I'm not sure how much progress they actually made, but there was a project at Twitter called Blue Sky, just kind of protocolized Twitter. So maybe he's an advocate there. He also led Twitter's migration to cloud services. He's very concerned about the ethics of tech, which is sort of interesting, because as a web two company, you have to, it's refreshing, but also like, I mean, I'm kind of at the, I very much feel like protocols should be as credibly neutral as possible and actually shouldn't be injecting political bias into

• 48:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  their platform. And it's, it's interesting that like Twitter has had a, I guess, a recent run of what some would say, kind of erosion of free speech. And just earlier this week, they actually banned the ability for individuals to post public images without consent. So unless you're a public figure, if I just, you know, take a photo of you, David, and I post it on Twitter, that's like a bannable offense, a censorable type of offense, which is somewhat interesting, right? So like, who has to kind of make these decisions? Okay, can I get that in writing, sir? Because I don't want to get in trouble.

• 48:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, he also rose up quickly in Twitter's ranks. He doesn't use Twitter very much, but I think part of the summary from this new CEO is I think he'll be very friendly web three, right? So like the NFT initiatives, the Ethereum initiatives, that's like full steam ahead. And maybe it needed Jack to kind of set step aside to your point for this to really take off. So it's, you know, I think it's bullish for NFTs and web three from that perspective.

• 49:08David Hoffman?

  Hopefully, hopefully, hopefully, we're just not reading into it just too much.

• 49:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  We will see. Square becoming Block though, like, okay, Facebook becoming Meta, Square becoming Block? What's next, man?

• 49:18David Hoffman?

  I don't know.

• 49:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  What's Alphabet gonna become?

• 49:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Constitution Dow, it's gonna, it's shut down. We've reported on that. We talked about that last week. They raised $50 million almost to buy the Constitution, a copy of the Constitution. Now they shut down, but something crazy happened. Okay, which is their people token, which was a people, which was a token associated with this project, has been mooning.

• 49:42David Hoffman?

  Yeah. Do you know why?

• 49:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  No. Can you tell me? Cause I sold right before that happened, sir. Where I redeemed. I was like, so like going to Thanksgiving, I was like, ah, I want to get everything off my plate. I don't want to have to worry about this thing. And, you know, I had a little bit of funds in the Constitution Dow, because that, you know, that was fun. It was a really interesting thing. And I was like, ah, just I'll withdraw this. Biggest mistake I've made this year, this month.

• 50:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  The week of the week.

• 50:11David Hoffman?

  It's only because the people token started mooning for God knows why, what, what reason?

• 50:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's memes. Back to what you were saying with the Omicron. Right?

• 50:19David Hoffman?

  Just because it can?

• 50:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  I don't know. What do you think?

• 50:21David Hoffman?

  I have no clue. I have no clue. I have no clue.

• 50:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  What is this reinforcing you? For me, it reinforces that, like, I still know nothing in the short run in crypto. As far as what's gonna happen.

• 50:31David Hoffman?

  Crypto will always surprise you.

• 50:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like I had no way to predict this. Neither did anyone else. Let's talk about EIP 4488. This is a new EIP. We talked about this a little bit briefly on the last rollup, but what is this, David?

• 50:44David Hoffman?

  This is a proto Lambda, a very, very long time ETH developer, now also working on the optimism team and also with the ultrasound money emojis in his header. And he goes, "I support EIP 4488. Let's make rollups cheaper. Let me explain what this is about." He goes, "Technical TLDR: EIP 4488 reduces the call data gas cost from 16 to 3 gas per byte with a cap on call data per block to mitigate security risks. End-user TLDR is that rollups cost overhead decreases, thus lowering L2 fees." So basically, we talked about this last week. This was a rebalancing of gas. And we haven't actually really talked about how gas is calculated, but there are arbitrary values associated to certain calculations that comes up with what a gas cost is. And we can

• 51:29David Hoffman?

  tinker with those numbers in order to balance the economic resources of the network. And EIP 4488 reduces the cost of call data, which is something that rollups all definitely use very, very heavily from 16 to 3. And so really, this is Ethereum executing on its rollup-centric roadmap from the get-go by making, by really just like allowing us to take off the brakes on rollups. So rollup transactions just become meaningfully cheaper and also therefore faster. And yeah, and so that's what EIP 4488 is all about.

• 52:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  You know what I find so endlessly fascinating about this? This reminds me of just like public policy changes to incent a certain behavior. Like, the government does this all the time with its tax policy, right? So if you want more corn, you provide a subsidy for corn. You want more dairy, you provide a dairy subsidy, right? You encourage this behavior, you subsidize it economically. This is the Ethereum protocol encouraging migration to rollups, encouraging users and usage to get off of Layer 1 and to move over to rollups in a big way. So what's your take on this? Like, do you support this?

• 52:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, there are some trade offs, David, which is one is it does kind of increase block size. Right? And so this could, if, if without further solutions in the future, this could make nodes a bit more difficult to run for individual users, which obviously can't go unchecked or you have another problem. Are you pro EIP 448A or no?

• 53:09David Hoffman?

  I mean, the pros and cons are definitely like way more technical than I can get into. But Proto Lambda, I think as a proxy for me, as a delegate of my beliefs, if he supports it, then I 100% support it. And we've seen Ethereum measure, have measured increases in block space plenty of times before. And you block the quick trivia fact is that I think the Ethereum block space is over like three to four times higher than it was at Genesis, because our clients got more efficient, our network had got more efficient, things just improved. And so Ethereum is actually like three to four times more scaled than it started at Genesis, because we were able to measuredly and responsibly and sustainably increase block space. And so, sure, let's just do it again.

• 53:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  There you go. That's David's take. Mahalo. This is about Uniswap and Polygon. What's, what's happening here?

• 54:01David Hoffman?

  Yeah. So last week, the Polygon proposal to onboard Uniswap onto Polygon had overwhelming support. That vote did in fact pass. So they are moving on to the second phase of the governance process, which is a temperature check poll. And then there's another phase after that. There's just a lot of hurdles, but we're on to the second one. So Polygon, perhaps eventually getting Uniswap once it goes.

• 54:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's gonna happen, right? I mean, that had overwhelming support. So it's definitely gonna happen. Do you know, yesterday, the time people read this would be the Beacon Chain birthday?

• 54:35David Hoffman?

  Happy birthday to Beacon Chain.

• 54:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  Proof of stake on Ethereum was born. And do you remember that call when we were on as that was launching? That was, that was a lot of fun.

• 54:43David Hoffman?

  Yeah, my roommate chewed me out for waking him up because it was at like four in the morning.

• 54:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, he wasn't as excited as you were?

• 54:48David Hoffman?

  And now I live alone.

• 54:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bye roommate, sorry. Uh, well, Vitalik put together a happy birthday beacon chain post with a handy roadmap. And this is really interesting. This is the roadmap for Ethereum in the future. This is the most consolidated roadmap I think I've seen, and it comes complete with timelines. And there are really five things going on that are going to happen with Ethereum. One is the merge. I have to. Okay, I'll just read them fast. The merge, the surge, the verge, the purge, and then the splurge. Okay? And this is like memetic as well, because you know, it's crypto. The merge we've talked about so often, that that happens next year, proof of stake, uh, becomes the consensus layer, proof of work goes away. Uh, the surge is data sharding.

• 55:35David Hoffman?

  Sharding, yep.

• 55:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  The verge is providing state-

• 55:38David Hoffman?

  Merkel trees.

• 55:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  Merkel trees, verkal trees. So providing more stateless, uh, ways to run a node, right? So it's easier for users to run a node. Again, each of these, by the way, are like efforts to continue decentralizing the network, right? The proof of stake and also data availability and the verge too. Uh, the purge, this is eliminating historical data and technical debt. Uh, I'm a bit more fuzzy on this. And then the splurge seems like it's everything that's left over, just all the, you know, cherries on top and the bits and pieces that are going to be important in the future of Ethereum. Uh, yeah. What do you make this roadmap?

• 56:14David Hoffman?

  Uh, it's just really, really nice to see everything all in one spot. Vitalik of all people is one of the few people that actually has the ability to kind of have this bird's eye view upon everything. Uh, these progress bars that you're seeing are definitely just completely subjective from the brain of Vitalik, but Vitalik's just known to be good at stuff like this. Uh, and so it's just nice to see like, what is all left to do? And it's kind of overwhelming how much there is left to do. Uh, and there's been, it is nice to see that all of these progress is happening in so many different directions at once. But like Ethereum has always had this very, very ambitious roadmap. And, you know, while we get to the merge soon, and then data shards after that, those are kind of close. There's still so much left to do. There's, there's statelessness, there's stateless clients, there's meta transactions, there's Z case-

• 57:01David Hoffman?

  Parking the whole entire blockchain. My God, that sounds hard and complicated. I'm glad I'm not the one having to do that, but I'll just talk about it along the way. But yeah, there's a lot left to do and this is cool. The, when we had Justin Drake on, on our first episode with him, the Moon Math cryptography episode, he talked about how Ethereum is just like this cryptographers playground. And so like cryptography finally has a place to actually get meaningfully implemented and put into practice. And that's why Ethereum has attracted so many deep cryptographers because Ethereum needs cryptography. And that's also one of the big things that really separates Ethereum from every other ecosystem is all the cryptographers are here. And our industry is based on cryptography, I will remind you. It's called cryptocurrency for a reason.

• 57:46David Hoffman?

  And the all like useful bits of cryptography are eventually becoming integrated into Ethereum in this roadmap.

• 57:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  Do you know what, what, what hits me with this roadmap too is I, I feel like Ethereum's roadmap has never been more clear. So it's, it's always been incredibly ambitious, but it's never been as solidified and clear as it has been in, in 2020. One, I feel, I feel like we've gotten that clarity. So like, I remember back in 2017, 2018, I was like pining for a roadmap in the future, like, like what's going to happen and when? And how is this all going to work? And it just like, it wasn't available at the time.

• 58:25David Hoffman?

  It's like, oh yeah, we're going to have proof of sake in the future. Okay. Okay. How? Like, yeah, what does that mean? Like sharding, cool sharding. Like what? More details, please.

• 58:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is incredible progress and that makes me bullish as well. So the Ethereum roadmap has never been more clear. Budweiser did it. Beer dot ETH.

• 58:46David Hoffman?

  In their Twitter handle. They've owned beer dot ETH for a while, but now.

• 58:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's right. I forgot about that.

• 58:50David Hoffman?

  Now it's in their Twitter handle.

• 58:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, wow. What does that mean? So can we send Budweiser some ETH?

• 58:55David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 58:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  Send him some money?

• 58:56David Hoffman?

  Totally.

• 58:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  They send us some beer?

• 58:59David Hoffman?

  Probably.

• 59:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  I don't want Budweiser. I don't want any beer from Budweiser personally, but...

• 59:04David Hoffman?

  That's the right answer.

• 59:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, that's cool, man. It's like a huge brand, though. Budweiser is like the brand of beer. Uh, and one of the major ones. Uh, I wonder if we'll, we'll see others following suits. Pretty cool that putting it in their handle. How many, how many followers?

• 59:18David Hoffman?

  Wow, not that much. Yeah, what? Weird. Only 230,000.

• 59:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  230,000 followers?

• 59:23David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 59:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  You have something like that, David?

• 59:25David Hoffman?

  Oh, yeah.

• 59:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  Are you close to that?

• 59:26David Hoffman?

  Way more than that, way more than that. My, my alt has more than that.

• 59:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's, what's this? Uh, a month for ENS. What's happening?

• 59:32David Hoffman?

  Yeah. So this is just a summary of the activity on ENS. Brently sums it up nicely. 90,000 new dot ETH registrations in November, all on the Ethereum L1. Uh, 7.6 million in protocol revenue. So like when you buy an ETH domain from ENS, it goes to now the ENS DAO. Uh, so the ENS DAO got 7. million dollars in ETH revenue this last month. Uh, and then 99% of OpenSea volume,

• 1:00:00David Hoffman?

  uh, ENS trading activity is on OpenSea. Uh, so that's pretty crazy. And now there are 200,000 unique individual owners with an ENS name.

• 1:00:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Is this the token effect, David?

• 1:00:10David Hoffman?

  Probably. This is definitely the token effect. Definitely the token effect.

• 1:00:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's funny. It's like, like, I feel like, uh, Brently's gotten a lot more popular too, like post-token effect, right? Like I'm seeing, like, I, I just think a community's rally around tokens.

• 1:00:21David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's just what happens. It injects energy into whatever you're doing.

• 1:00:25David Hoffman?

  Tokens are the place that communities can deposit energy and attention and alignment into. Without a token, there is no coherence. Tokens align communities.

• 1:00:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, Brently's always been cool. He's just got like post-token, man.

• 1:00:37David Hoffman?

  Yeah, but now he's token Brently.

• 1:00:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  He's hitting it. Token Brently. TokenBrently.E. Brently, I hope you're listening. Uh, this is a PSA. Watch out for front-ends. I think front-ends can become centralization vectors. And this is a tweet from Bantag saying, "Anyone know when Uniswap front-end has started snitching on users?" That's some harsh language, but, uh, what the... App is saying is it's actually notifying you this is the Uniswap front end app. It's saying the app securely connects your wallet address and shares it with TRM Labs Incorporated for risk and compliance reasons. Okay, TRM Labs, it looks like they are some sort of apparatus that collects information for risk and compliance, which basically means for the government.

• 1:01:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  If this is for the IRS, if this is for the SEC, who this is for, what compliance, what risk this is covering. But that is happening on the Uniswap front end. And I expect teams that are based in various jurisdictions, Uniswap, of course, is based in the US, to be like arm twisted into doing this sort of thing on their front ends. Of course, this doesn't affect the smart contracts, the underlying smart contracts.

• 1:01:49David Hoffman?

  This is not Uniswap, this is the Uniswap Labs centralized company, their website.

• 1:01:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, this is, that's a huge distinction. Why don't you get into what that distinction means?

• 1:01:58David Hoffman?

  Right, so we have the Uniswap smart contracts on Ethereum, which allow anyone to swap tokens through their liquidity, through their, their factory contracts. The front end of very, of a very large number of websites allow, make it easy for users to use those smart contracts. Cause no one's actually going and writing the code themselves. We have these front ends that do it for us. Uniswap spun up the first one, but there's plenty of others. There's one on Zapper is a front end, Zirion is a front end. All the Dex aggregators can tap into Uniswap, so they count as a front end. There's infinite front ends for Uniswap, but the Uniswap Labs version of the front end collects your wallet address for compliance reasons. And like, you know what's interesting, Ryan, is like, there used to be, there, there was a time where the Uniswap Labs

• 1:02:43David Hoffman?

  front end also like banned a bunch of tokens and also banned a bunch of countries. And then the Bitcoin Maxies were like, see, we told you Uniswap was centralized, not understanding the difference between the front end and the contracts. And now this time, maybe, maybe this hasn't made it into Bitcoin or circles yet, or maybe they've just given up.

• 1:03:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Should I tag someone?

• 1:03:01David Hoffman?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:03:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  Should I tag on this?

• 1:03:02David Hoffman?

  Tag Anthony Pompliano.

• 1:03:06David Hoffman?

  But like, you know, usually this would get some sort of attention from Bitcoiners talking about, "Oh, like, oh, I knew Ethereum was centralized." This one hasn't happened yet.

• 1:03:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think they're feeling a little defeated on the ratio, maybe. It went out of their sails.

• 1:03:17David Hoffman?

  I think they have, are fully relegated into, into gold bugs. But anyways, that used to happen all the time for those that are new to crypto. No longer happening now because people, I think, are understanding the difference between a centralized website and an application on Ethereum.

• 1:03:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, that's important, and I think this is an important PSA. And I also think it's, it's sort of a reminder that, you know, centralization aggregation, you know, centralized websites can become vectors for this sort of thing, right? And they're going to. So we, we've, we've kind of decentralized the protocol. We've decentralized the money robots, and that's all good. That's all smart contract code. We have more work to do in crypto to make sure our front ends remain decentralized as well. And of course, anyone can spin up a front end. This is not stopping anyone, but, you know, having the ability to have like decentralized storage, decentralized compute sort of layers is going to be incredibly important. And that's kind of where we're journeying because things tend to centralize unless you actively push against that force of gravity. Let's talk about this.

• 1:04:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  NFT land. AMC Sony, they're launching NFT rewards for the Spider-Man movie launch. David, I'm seeing this in theaters, man. I'm a big Spider-Man fan. I know, look, you are a classic Peter Parker. Yeah, I'm gonna see you. But like, you don't watch the new ones, right?

• 1:04:32David Hoffman?

  Oh, sure.

• 1:04:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  You're not new Spider-Man? You do? Okay. Well, I've seen this in theaters. Apparently, there's an NFT associated with this. It's on the Wax blockchain. It's kind of a, an NFT sidechain. But what's interesting to me is like, are all movies going to start having NFT releases? Like, why not? Of course they are. What do you think?

• 1:04:51David Hoffman?

  I remember when we were talking with Diogo and Kai from our Visa Anchorage podcast, where they talked about how like the volatility of crypto actually is really, really attractive for a lot of companies because the volatility of crypto makes a lot of their users open up their app and check it.

• 1:05:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, yeah. That was such a good point.

• 1:05:07David Hoffman?

  Yeah. And so like, NFTs, NFTs are just engagement magnets.

• 1:05:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  It boosts engagement, doesn't it?

• 1:05:12David Hoffman?

  It boosts engagement, like, for, for some reason. And this is why everyone is like, Macy's Day Parade had NFTs. It boosts engagement.

• 1:05:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it's like, it's like, we're just talking about Token, Token Brantley. What about Token Spider-Man?

• 1:05:23David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 1:05:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's even better, right?

• 1:05:25David Hoffman?

  He's way better than the original Spider-Man. He's Token Spider-Man.

• 1:05:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  Token Peter Parker.

• 1:05:30David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's what I want.

• 1:05:31David Hoffman?

  So like, all, all big movies are like trending towards just like, oh, and we will issue tokens during the box office, office weekends because that's what people want, I guess. There's token engagement.

• 1:05:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, that's interesting and everyone's gonna follow suit. We'll have to see how that, that progresses. I'm gonna see the movie. I'm not gonna get this NFT because like, oh, how exhausting. Too many NFTs, man. This is Ross Ulbricht. This is an NFT to watch though, okay? So, uh, people probably familiar with Ross's story.

• 1:05:59David Hoffman?

  Maybe not, actually.

• 1:06:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, give him the, yeah. Give him the short form and then he's starting an NFT auction in two days from jail? Is that what's happening? Okay.

• 1:06:08David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so his mom is his liaison between him in jail and his Twitter account. So this is actually his mom talking through, uh, on his behalf through his Twitter account. Ross Ulbricht is the famous Dread Pirate Roberts from, uh, the Silk Road days. Uh, so the Silk Road was started by this guy Ross Ulbricht. Uh, he is in jail for basically life, uh, on ridiculous trumped up charges in my mind and he should absolutely be freed right now. Uh, but he's not, uh, and he's been paying, he's kept in touch with the world of crypto. His mom prints out the front page of Reddit and like gives it to him so he can review it, uh, and also feeds him other crypto news and he's launching an NFT. Uh, and so Ross Ulbricht is launching an NFT auction.

• 1:06:49David Hoffman?

  So Ross Ulbricht says in his post, "With this NFT, I see a chance to make a difference where it really counts in the lives of kids who did not ask for any of this. There is a lot that we can do with the proceeds of the auction, but one idea I'm committed to is to help kids travel to visit their moms and dads in prison." Ross Ulbricht, again, in prison for basically life, uh, very peaceful, nice guy. Uh, mom has to come and visit him in prison all the time. And so, uh, the proceeds of this NFT are going to help, uh, just help maintain connections between loved ones in prison.

• 1:07:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  Are people hating on this, though?

• 1:07:21David Hoffman?

  Bitcoiners are, yeah, because it's, because it's an NFT. So Ross Ulbricht, uh, went to jail before Ethereum was really a thing, uh, and so he was always a Bitcoiner, uh, and, uh, a lot of Bitcoiners are very, very upset that Ross Ulbricht, their beloved, like, you know, jailed martyr, is using non-Bitcoin tech to do stuff. And so there are Bitcoiners following up on this tweet saying, "God effing damn it, Ross." Uh, and then another one saying, "How to ruin your base in one fellow's swoop." For just touching NFTs. Bitcoiners have absolutely lost the plot.

• 1:07:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's a

• 1:07:56David Hoffman?

  Absolutely lost the plot.

• 1:07:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Definitely purity tests have gotten more and more extreme, right? Until you can't even like touch an NFT. This is, this is Udi being satirical though, right? He's kind of joking on this.

• 1:08:06David Hoffman?

  No, no, no, he is.

• 1:08:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  This?

• 1:08:07David Hoffman?

  This is Udi being serious.

• 1:08:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  No.

• 1:08:10David Hoffman?

  Yes, 100%.

• 1:08:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  Are you serious?

• 1:08:11David Hoffman?

  Yes, this is Udi being serious.

• 1:08:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  Are you sure?

• 1:08:13David Hoffman?

  Yes.

• 1:08:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  I can never tell.

• 1:08:14David Hoffman?

  Yes, no, Udi's being 100% serious.

• 1:08:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  He says, he says effing disgusting, effing cult disgusting.

• 1:08:19David Hoffman?

  Right. Talking about the Bitcoiners reacting to Ross Ulbricht.

• 1:08:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. Talking about the Bitcoiners?

• 1:08:24David Hoffman?

  He's talking about the Bitcoiners, yes.

• 1:08:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like, he's not anti Ross.

• 1:08:27David Hoffman?

  Udi's being surrealist. No, he is, he's telling the Bitcoiners they're a disgusting effing cult.

• 1:08:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, okay, okay, okay. I thought he was saying effing disgusting, like effing cult, about the NFT itself, about Ross doing the NFT. Okay.

• 1:08:40David Hoffman?

  No, he's, he's saying the Bitcoiners are being

• 1:08:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Call him out, man.

• 1:08:43David Hoffman?

  Love you, Udi.

• 1:08:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  Sometimes I love you.

• 1:08:46David Hoffman?

  Most of the time, most of the time.

• 1:08:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  Uh, let's talk about this, man. This is like a Reddit post. Uh, I'm gonna full screen this. This is some dude unlocking his house with an NFT.

• 1:08:56David Hoffman?

  Hmm, yeah, an NFT that he has in his Ethereum wallet, connecting to the internet somehow, and then unlocking a door to his house. Uh, there's also another example of this for the same thing with a car. Uh, and here's a fun piece of Ethereum trivia. This is why our shows go on so long, because we have so many stories to tell. Um, there's this old, old organization called Slockit that I don't think is around anymore, that wanted to do exactly this, where you could go and like, open up a locker and the locker would have the thing that you would need in it, and like drones could come and it would all be based on Ethereum and public, private key cryptography.

• 1:09:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  Very Ethereum 2016 sci-fi stuff.

• 1:09:32David Hoffman?

  When we didn't really know what Ethereum would do, when we thought we could just do anything, right?

• 1:09:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  Unlock bikes and unlock houses.

• 1:09:37David Hoffman?

  Yeah, right, like, you know, communal sharing, communal resources, stuff like that. Slockit, the three guys behind Slockit are, they, they, they wanted this to not be a centralized company, so they wanted to start a DAO back in 2017. But then the idea kind of morphed from there. It's like, well, why'd have this DAO just be about Slockit? Let's just have a DAO of DAOs. And I think you can see Where this go is going, this was the genesis of the DAO. Slocket, the three guys behind the start, Slocket started to write the codes for the DAO, which turned into the DAO and then created the whole Ethereum classic mess. So yeah, that's a fun piece of Ethereum trivia. We are coming full circle to some of the utility

• 1:10:17David Hoffman?

  and use cases that we were dreaming of in 2016, now being, happening just through the maturation of mobile wallets and also ENS and also NFTs.

• 1:10:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's funny. You're not wrong, you're just early.

• 1:10:30David Hoffman?

  Yep.

• 1:10:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Is really the phrase here. So many things have happened in the history of technology where, you know, ideas are good, it's just not their time. And I think Slocket was one of them. And now here we are, starting to unlock various locks with our NFTs and it looks somewhat normal. I mean, this looks like a pretty good user experience. I'm not saying this is ready for mainstream, but it's a lot closer than it was in 2016. If you want to hear that full story, by the way, Griff Green, Layer Zero Podcast, I listened to that one, David, I was laughing out loud in some spots. That was just a lot of fun. Tells the story of the DAO, everything that went on with Slocket. I guess this is the internet of things, huh? The internet of scarce things, maybe. Very cool. Let's talk about Immutable now. Immutable X.

• 1:11:14David Hoffman?

  Making waves.

• 1:11:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  Actually crushing it. Okay, so the first thing we want to talk about is they're getting a fiat on-ramp. So Moonpay is a fiat on-ramp. They're getting a fiat on-ramp directly to Immutable on and off-ramp, which is something we need so dearly. So that's happening and that means instant credit card purchases of your NFTs on top of Immutable. This is mainstream ready.

• 1:11:38David Hoffman?

  Completely abstracting away, like, oh, NFT, where can I, where can I swipe my credit card? Like, that is, that's what this partnership creates. And the awesome thing is, gas fees on Immutable X are so incredibly low that you just don't actually have to be.

• 1:11:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  They're zero, right?

• 1:11:53David Hoffman?

  They're, they're not zero, but they are zero because they are so low because the Immutable team's just paying for them.

• 1:11:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes, right, exactly.

• 1:11:59David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  So there's zero from the perspective of a user. I just like, I could buy my NFT with a credit card and it's all secured by Ethereum.

• 1:12:06David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 1:12:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is the difference. This is what we've been waiting for.

• 1:12:08David Hoffman?

  Yep.

• 1:12:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  We don't sacrifice decentralization. These are some immutable stats, too. Oh, well, first, let's talk about their business development.

• 1:12:16David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so Immutable tweets out, "We're getting 50-plus inbounds a day from the largest companies in the world wanting to use NFTs, and we need help. NFTs are eating the world, come accelerate it. Hiring 30-plus business developers and CSMs." I don't know what CSM is. DMs open and reply here. They are also on our jobs board as well.

• 1:12:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, they are. Some really cool jobs, too. Head of Ethereum Research, is that one of them?

• 1:12:37David Hoffman?

  Yep.

• 1:12:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Awesome jobs. Blockbuster month, too.

• 1:12:40David Hoffman?

  God, Head of Tokens.

• 1:12:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  Head of Tokens?

• 1:12:42David Hoffman?

  What a great name.

• 1:12:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Lord of Tokens?

• 1:12:43David Hoffman?

  Yeah, what's the Game of Thrones name? Master of Coin?

• 1:12:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Master of Coin, yeah. Master of Tokens? That's what I want.

• 1:12:49David Hoffman?

  Okay, a third Immutable tweet that says, "October was a blockbuster month for community projects on Immutable X. US $30 million in US dollar trading fee volume, gas-free. 20 new NFT collections dropped." And then a link to a blog post with some of the most innovative NFTs projects that dropped last month. Overall, Immutable X is absolutely killing it. Congrats, guys.

• 1:13:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  We're about to find out what happens when you make block space virtually free and you allow fiat on-ramps on top of that as well. So mainstream the user experience.

• 1:13:22David Hoffman?

  Earlier, we were talking about Starknet and Starkware. Immutable X is built on StarkX, which is the pre-version of Starknet. Again, that's a topic to go into the Starkware team, the show that we talked about with them. Also, disclaimer, Ryan and I are angel investors into one of the Immutable seed rounds.

• 1:13:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  Absolutely. Bitcoin, Bitcoin news. Same news every week, okay? El Salvador is buying 100 more Bitcoins as the market falls. Buy the dip, man. Buy the dip. El Salvador is present doing that. So is Michael Saylor. So that's what happened last week and the week before. It's happening this week again. El Salvador and Saylor buying the dip. I honestly, David, I think this is going to pay off for them.

• 1:14:04David Hoffman?

  Probably.

• 1:14:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like, I don't hate it. It's going to pay off for them. It's just kind of funny to me that these are the things we're reporting week after week. It feels like we got paralyzed in time around February of this year and like... Not much has happened in Bitcoin land since.

• 1:14:22David Hoffman?

  Hey, but like, again, according to the Bitcoin or value prop, that's the only thing that needs to happen. It is kind of funny seeing El Salvador buying 100 more Bitcoins and Michael Saylor coming in and buying 7,005 more Bitcoins. There are some difference in numbers there.

• 1:14:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, well, he's, you know, Michael Saylor has a company in, you know.

• 1:14:41David Hoffman?

  Michael Saylor can never sell his Bitcoin because A, he has way too much of it. And if he does start to sell it, it's going to start to signal to the market that this massive Bitcoin whale. I don't know how much Bitcoin Michael Saylor has.

• 1:14:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  He doesn't have to sell it, though. Just if you believe in like the monetization of Bitcoin, right? Then you could just start using it, just lend against it, borrow against it. It's just collateral in the balance sheet, you never have to sell. And the thing is, like, his trade, he's getting basically free money because he's borrowing it from like bonds, right? It's like, you know, this is sort of a nice little arbitrage, as long as Bitcoin continues to appreciate in value. Funny to me that he hasn't like looked at Ether or some other alternatives out there at all. He's just laser, laser-eyed focused on Bitcoin.

• 1:15:28David Hoffman?

  Some quick stats is that MicroStrategy has bought $3.5 million worth of Bitcoin. That's currently clocking in at $6.8 billion, so almost a 2X. They've got 121,000 Bitcoins, which is roughly a little bit over half of the total, one half of 1% of the total supply of Bitcoins. One day, maybe, he turns that into WBTC because no one else will give him a loan on his Bitcoins. And so he has to defy to do it.

• 1:15:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's possible, it's possible. He might just buy a crypto bank, though, and do it himself, we'll see. China's crypto censorship reached, is now reaching not just mining companies, of course, which have mass moved. There was a mass exodus of mining companies, private work mining companies out of China. But now it's pouring into news outlets. So there's the banning of crypto media companies in China as well as they continue the crackdown. What are your thoughts?

• 1:16:19David Hoffman?

  Yeah, overall, China just slowly pushing out everything to do with crypto, to their loss. I think it's pretty a reasonable claim to say that in the long term, 10, 15, 20 years. Years, China will lose its power because of its pushing out of crypto. I think this is going to be, this is a catastrophic error on China that's going to come back to bite them in the butt. Maybe in 15, 20, 20 years or so, something like that.

• 1:16:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think that's how the game theory works out, but if you're, this is why it's an acid test of how authoritarian your country is with respect to how it responds to crypto. Right. It's like, we're seeing this acid test play out in every, in every government worldwide. And I don't think the US is immune. We'll see what the US continues to do with crypto. But like China, which is a bit more authoritarian, top down, they are going all out banning crypto. Like get it out of here. And I think in the process, you're exactly right. They're being outplayed by crypto. This is a strategic mishap, but they have big aspirations for their centralized, you know, money system. You know, crypto and quotes money system. So we'll see how that plays out as well.

• 1:17:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  Let's talk about Powell. He's redefining what he means by transitory inflation. Do you remember this meme over the summer? It's like, not inflation, it's just transitory inflation.

• 1:17:39David Hoffman?

  All the crypto people were like, we know.

• 1:17:43David Hoffman?

  There was that, there was the, I can't remember where I saw this, but something along the lines of like, the Federal Reserve has finally admitted that inflation is finally here. And then there was meanwhile crypto Twitter a year ago, and there was that animation of the money printers going burr. And like this anime girl was like dancing. It's like, we were making memes about inflation a year ago. And finally the Fed is like, yo, guys, I think inflation might be here.

• 1:18:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  He says he's done with the term. This is a quote from Jerome Powell. I think it's probably a good time to retire that term, transitory, and try to explain more clearly what we mean. And then he goes on to try to explain that it's not going to be so transitory after all.

• 1:18:22David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is, this is a meme I put out, David. I just thought it was funny. It's kind of like an Onion style meme. This is like breaking news. Powell clarifies transitory inflation. From the perspective of our 13.8 billion year old universe, humanity itself is transitory.

• 1:18:39David Hoffman?

  Yeah. What is transitory? It's relative. Everything's relative.

• 1:18:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  Everything's relative, of course. Transitory, not so transitory after all. Congress is still holding hearings on crypto. This one with Coinbase, FTX, Paxos, some other crypto banks as well. What's happening here?

• 1:18:57David Hoffman?

  Centralized crypto banks being summoned to Congress for a centralized hearing from the centralized forms of government. But you know what's not? Anything DeFi related, because you can't summon DeFi. And that's the story there. Anyways, the government is looking at crypto more and more and more. So it's going to be interesting to see what is actually discussed at these hearings.

• 1:19:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, guys, we're going to be back with the hot takes of the week. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible.

• 1:19:27David Hoffman?

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• 1:20:11David Hoffman?

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• 1:20:53David Hoffman?

  Various different crypto assets, including many of the hot DeFi tokens. And it's one of the few exchanges that has liquid die markets. Gemini just launched their Earn program where you can earn up to 7.4% interest on 26 various crypto assets. If you're tired of paying fees in DeFi, or you don't want to worry about DeFi exploits, but you still want to earn interest on your crypto assets, Gemini Earn is the product for you. Another product I'm stoked to get my hands on is the Gemini Crypto Back Credit Card, which gives you 3% cash back on all of your purchases, but paid to you in your preferred crypto asset. When I get my Gemini credit card, I'm going to make sure that I get my cash back in ETH. So whenever I buy something, I get a little bit of ETH bonus back to me at the same time.

• 1:21:36David Hoffman?

  You can open up a free account in under three minutes at gemini.com/go-bankless. And if you trade more than $100 within the first 30 days after signup, you'll be gifted a free $15 Bitcoin bonus. Check them out at gemini.com/go-bankless.

• 1:21:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, guys, we are back with the takes of the week. Let's start with this. Is this going to be the last time we talk about the Ethereum pre-mine, David? Damn, I hope so.

• 1:21:59David Hoffman?

  No, no.

• 1:22:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, it's not going to be. This is a detailed pie chart of ETH Genesis allocations. Why don't you guide us through this? And then maybe we can refer people to this clip when they ask the next time.

• 1:22:09David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so there's a bunch of different colors here. There's also 45.9 million Ether that's been mined since the pre-Genesis allocations. Everything else is the pre-Genesis allocations. And then the $46 million Ether that's also mined has been mined since the pre-sale. So, starting from the biggest to the smallest, a little over 60 million Ether was sold. 60.1 million was acquired. Ether was acquired by sending, in 2014, by sending BTC to a widely publicized Ether sale address. Again, no KYC, no registration, just sending in Bitcoin to an address. The next largest slice, not including the mining, is allocation to early contributors. And those are people like the Ethereum co-founders. I believe there was eight of them.

• 1:22:54David Hoffman?

  That is 8.4 million of those as well. And then 3.4 million Ether got sent towards the EF. And that is the next Largest slice today, the EF only holds 350,000. So the EF has reduced their Ether holdings by 10x. Like 1/10 is what they currently own of their initial distributions. And then the largest single recipient, Vitalik Buterin himself, an accidental meme lord, received 696,900 Ether from the Genesis event. I don't know how much he holds, but he's definitely distributed a bunch of his tokens as well. To me, Ryan, this seems very, very fair, and this was the intent of the Ethereum pre-sale.

• 1:23:37David Hoffman?

  Over 50%, well, well over 50%. It was something like 70, 75% of all Ether at Genesis was sold freely and openly to the public without any sort of registration or KYC or private pre-sale or whatever. Then we got the early contributors, like the eight-ish, maybe there's more of the Ethereum co-founders, and then the EF. The amount that was given away to the public, and it was only raised, like they only raised like $14 million, was like 75% of the total supply.

• 1:24:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, and the allocation early contributors wasn't just like co-founders. It was just a whole slew of other workers. There were hundreds of different developers and people involved. Yeah, and so what's interesting to me is like some of the takeaways are, okay, like 55% or so, something around that range, went to the pre-sale of like the total supply now, right?

• 1:24:28David Hoffman?

  Way more, way, wait, what are you talking about at the time of the sale or now?

• 1:24:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  Not now, in now's, in now's supply terms, right? If you just like zoom out and look at the supply, and then you had another like 40% or so, like 35, 40% or so, that were like fairly distributed via proof of work mining.

• 1:24:46David Hoffman?

  I got, I got some of those.

• 1:24:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, exactly. And that's part of the reason you came into crypto, right David?

• 1:24:52David Hoffman?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:24:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  And a lot of other coins that start with proof of state do not have this proof of work distribution for like this period of time. There's a massive amount that was distributed this way. What's interesting to me too is like, you talk about like the centralization of the Ethereum foundation, like some people do, I don't know if anyone does anymore. Look, man, they have like 0.4% of supply, something like this, right? Like less than half a percent of the total supply. Vitalik himself, right? After you dilute through all this proof of work, he's got far less than 1%. I don't know, it's like 0.4%, 0.3%.

• 1:25:26David Hoffman?

  He never had 1%, yeah.

• 1:25:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. Well, in what world does the founder of a thing, of anything, have that kind of like, I, so if Satoshi was smart, he was mining Bitcoin from inception, right? I'm sure he was. Okay?

• 1:25:42David Hoffman?

  Certainly.

• 1:25:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  He probably had a far higher percentage, and it's impossible to know, but like if you look at Satoshi's addresses, that sort of thing, things that might be linked to him, than Vitalik does of Ethereum. It's like, Michael Saylor owns more freaking Bitcoin than Vitalik owns of the supply of Ether. So, I don't know, I guess this is maybe the last time we talk about this. It just seems to me like such a, the pre-mine thing seems like such a non-issue to me. Looks like a pretty fair distribution.

• 1:26:14David Hoffman?

  And for the newer listeners, the pre-mine, pre-sale thing is really just ticked off a lot of Bitcoiners who are able to contrast it with the whole fair launch of Bitcoin. But fair is just relative. It's really just a subjective argument as to what is fair or not. So you really have to do your own critical thinking and ask yourself what is fair. And then the other side of this is the whole VC chains and the way that they got bootstrapped. The really the hot ones, the ones that we were talking about last week are the Avalanche and Solana chains where far greater, like 2/3 of the supply was sold in private pre-sales, so financially well-capitalized VC firms. In that, in my mind, when we talk about public permissionless blockchains with public, open money as a

• 1:26:56David Hoffman?

  public utility, that is extremely unfair. And so there is, there is these differences. The first impressions of these chains are really, really important. And I think the way that Ethereum, the Ether distribution happened from day one, and then what happened with proof of work mining over the next six years is as fair as we could have ever have hoped for.

• 1:27:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  It could probably only happen one time too.

• 1:27:18David Hoffman?

  Yep.

• 1:27:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's right. It's like, you know,

• 1:27:19David Hoffman?

  Once you do it once.

• 1:27:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Ever after ICOs were kind of diluted. Here's a take two, David. Optimism is Ethereum, Arbitrum is Ethereum, Starkware is Ethereum, ZK Sync is Ethereum, Immutable is Ethereum. Why? Because Ethereum is the chain of chains. When we were looking at, you know, transactions last week, the total transaction throughput of Ethereum from that website, I can't recall it off the top of my head, but I'd like to, you know, talk about it maybe next week a little bit and rollups. Just shows you that the total transaction throughput of Ethereum is not just what happens on mainnet, it's what happens on mainnet plus. Optimism, Arbitrum, Starkware, ZK Sync, Immutable, all of these things, if they're secured by Ethereum are Ethereum.

• 1:28:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's like California, Texas, Nevada, all of these things, they're different states, but they're all part of the United States, right? And so when we talk about like the US being a union of states, Ethereum is like a union of chains. It's the Ethereum Union, it's the EU. Ethereum, the chain of chains. I think that's important for people to start understanding that more of this activity is going to happen in layer twos and Ethereum will be, the mainnet at least, will be a settlement layer of all of these chains. But the entire collection of these chains will also be Ethereum, the Ethereum Union.

• 1:28:40David Hoffman?

  The website that Ryan was talking about is ethtps.info if you want to check that out. The other cool thing is that like you can actually deploy rollups on top of rollups and then you can deploy rollups on top of those rollups. So like you can deploy rollups all the way down and like think of just like a gigantic fractal like root system or just like branches of a tree where these rollups spin off of rollups, spin off of rollups because of why not? And eventually like everything settles down, down to the very base protocol, the Ethereum protocol. So no wonder gas fees are so incredibly high. The, the weights of all L2s are pushing pressure on the gas fees on L1. That's why users got to get off the L1 and go to L2s. Shout out to everyone that played Borderlands 2, the lava is rising meme.

• 1:29:26David Hoffman?

  That one's a big one in that, that, that, that community. The lava is rising on layer one. You gotta get off, you gotta get off at some point.

• 1:29:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yep, mainchain is lava.

• 1:29:35David Hoffman?

  Mainchain is lava.

• 1:29:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's Bradley again. Hey Bradley, token Bradley. What's he saying?

• 1:29:40David Hoffman?

  Brantley says, "Things I expect to see with DAOs." DAO splits, DAOs firing people, hostile takeovers, governance attacks, cross DAO coalitions, DAOs going bankrupt, lawsuits against DAOs, DAOs reorging to cut people out, quote, "going centralized, like going private," DAOs merging with acquiring other DAOs." Basically, the same exact behavior that we have seen throughout all of human organizational efforts, but now we're just doing it in DAOs because, again, DAOs are nothing new under the sun. They're just, they're just humans organizing in a different vehicle and a different way, this time on Ethereum, this time with tokens. And so, the same sort of behaviors that we've seen before are probably going to play out again. At least, that's what Token Brantley is saying.

• 1:30:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, then, it begs the question, are DAOs any different than corporations? Than our, you know, corporate organizations?

• 1:30:29David Hoffman?

  In some ways, they are a complete paradigm shift, and in others, they are exactly the same.

• 1:30:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I think that's the right take. I think that's a good take. And, you know, I do hope we can invent some things that are different from a governance perspective as well as we go on. But a lot of what we've seen is less DAO, I guess, and more digital organization.

• 1:30:52David Hoffman?

  Brantley, he follows up, saying, "We are currently living in the golden age, in an early naive golden age of DAOs, when none of the above has really happened yet, but it will. The next decade is going to be fun."

• 1:31:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's a good take.

• 1:31:05David Hoffman?

  Oh, and then somebody also responded, saying, "This has actually already happened with Steamit, which is a different, what was once a blockchain, and there was this attempted hostile takeover by Justin's son, and then the Steamit DAO was like, yoinked his funds by forking themselves."

• 1:31:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  The ability to fork, the ability to fork is definitely a new governance, you know, paradigm shift, I think.

• 1:31:25David Hoffman?

  That's true.

• 1:31:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  Let's talk about this. Squish Chaos, what's he saying?

• 1:31:28David Hoffman?

  Squish Chaos, "L2s or L1s is the entire crypto bet right now. You may think you're betting on ETH, but really, you're betting on ZK Sync, Starkware, Arbitrum, and Optimism. Or alternatively, you may be thinking that you're betting on Avalanche or Solana, but really, you're betting on the multi-chain L1." I thought this was really, really good take.

• 1:31:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  I agree.

• 1:31:47David Hoffman?

  There needs to be many, many, many, many blockchains. And as I've said, I've said before, where I kind of think the whole multi-chain world is going to start to mean multi-chain on Ethereum, multi-L2s. And like these L2s will be bridged by things like Connects and Hop and all these other like cross-chain liquidity providers. Or you can bet on the multi-layer-one ecosystem where you have Solana and Avalanche and Ethereum and Bitcoin. And then maybe something like Polkadot or Cosmos is like the connecting layer. I think listeners know where I've placed my bets. I'm betting that it's easier to actually just implement layer twos on one single chain and that allow that one chain to optimize for decentralization.

• 1:32:29David Hoffman?

  And the reason why is because in a multi-L1 world, you have multi-sig bridges. Whereas in a layer-two world that's all built on one single L1, you have the world of cryptographically secured rollups. And remember, this industry is about cryptography at the end of the day, not multi-sigs. Remember to listen to our Ruin Christensen podcast where we went through the full game theory, unpacking the differences between an L2 world and a and a multi-sig side-chain world. One is just way better, way more efficient, way more liquid. And in that world, only one chain needs to focus on decentralization. And that one chain can sell its decentralization to every single other layer-two via rollups, and that is Ethereum.

• 1:33:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, this is, I think it's a really interesting take, right? So like, the other side of this take is like, so first of all, I wonder if people realize that this is actually what they're betting on. Okay, like when they purchase ETH or when they purchase Avalanche. The second thing I wonder about this is, do you think it's a good bet to bet on ZK Sync and Starkware and Arbitrum and, you know, optimism? Because Squish is also right when he's saying that a bet on Ethereum and ETH, the asset, is you're actually, ETH is actually outsourcing its execution layer to all of these other chains.

• 1:33:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  And so that means these rollup chains will own the user experience, they'll own the fiat onboarding. It's like, almost in a way, giving up a lot of control that it had previously in its monolithic model. And is that a safe bet, is the question? Because now Ethereum is more dependent on these other chains to carry it forward. What's your take on that?

• 1:34:19David Hoffman?

  It's kind of like whack-a-mole where like maybe one L2 doesn't work, but you can have many, many L2s, right? Not all of them have to work for Ethereum to be successful. But if you're betting on Avalanche and DC Investor follows this take up saying, "Well, Squish says if you're betting on Avalanche, you're actually betting on a multi-chain world." And DC Investor says, "Well, if you're betting on Avalanche, no, you're actually just betting on Avalanche. There can be a multi-chain future where Avalanche doesn't succeed." And so, yeah, many, many L2s can come, Ryan, and then not work. But Ethereum, the L1, can still work because only some of the L2s need to work. Whereas if you're betting on L1s, you are making a very specific bet upon a specific L1. When you bet on Ethereum, you're not betting on a specific L2.

• 1:35:02David Hoffman?

  You're betting on the concept of L2s at large.

• 1:35:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I've been obsessed recently, David, about this analogy between the United States and Ethereum. It's like with the idea of a union of states, basically. Think of every single rollup as a different state, right? And when I say state, I'm talking about a state in the United States, right? So it has its own set of laws. It has kind of its own economy.

• 1:35:29David Hoffman?

  Heavily skewed towards state rights, by the way.

• 1:35:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Exactly, and it has its own jurisdiction and where do people move? Well, they just move to a state where good laws, decent taxes, reasonable taxes, good services and lots of jobs, right? So the population migrates from state to state. And the economic output of the United States is just an amalgamation, an aggregation of the economic output of all of its individual 50 states. Isn't that interesting? And like some states have done better than others, right? Economically or from a variety of other factors, depending on how you measure the metrics. But you've got 50 separate experiments. That's what's happening with Ethereum is basically like, all of these rollups will have their own experiments,

• 1:36:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  but the economic output of all of these rollups will actually end up partially an ETH asset. ETH as the money and the store of value and the chief utility across all of these states, too. Yeah, I'm obsessed with that analogy.

• 1:36:28David Hoffman?

  Love it.

• 1:36:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  Won't be the end of it. Kyle Davies. Fundamentals are a joke.

• 1:36:33David Hoffman?

  Kyle Davies from Three Arrows Capital, which is the entity that was kind of the subject of a lot of the ire of the Ethereum community last week. Yeah.

• 1:36:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  Fundamentals are a joke.

• 1:36:42David Hoffman?

  Fundamentals are a joke. And granted, we just talked about Omicron, this token that has nothing to do with COVID or anything pumping.

• 1:36:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  People.

• 1:36:50David Hoffman?

  Huh? And people. Yeah. Dogecoin, for that matter. So like, granted, there are a lot of things that are pumping that don't have any fundamentals. But in my mind, you can't just say that fundamentals are a joke. That's equivalent in my mind of saying, real life is a joke. Like, fundamentals are based in real life. And so I followed up and says, and I said, "Nothing matters," said the nihilist. And then Kyle Davies responds to me, "Long live the memes."

• 1:37:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  So he's agreeing, "Nothing matters."

• 1:37:17David Hoffman?

  Yeah. And then I go, "Without fundamentals, memes are just fads. Memes with fundamentals, however, can last forever." I'm acknowledging the power of memes. But what's even more powerful is memes that are backed by fundamentals.

• 1:37:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  Totally agree with those takes. Yeah, totally agree. I also think-

• 1:37:32David Hoffman?

  There's a reason why we do a podcast together, Ryan.

• 1:37:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  I know, man. Look, it also, I think it also depends on your time horizon, right? So it's like, that's another way to say the same thing. Fundamentals are a joke in the short run, but they matter a lot in the long run. Try to survive a bear cycle on just memes alone and narratives alone, right? Like, no, you go back down to the base, you boil it all down to the fundamentals, and then you rebuild every bear cycle. That's what happens.

• 1:37:58David Hoffman?

  Without fundamentals.

• 1:37:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  I don't think a trader needs to have conviction. That's the thing. It's just back to the Ryan Selkis tweets. Like, everyone's arguing and they're just arguing about timelines and time horizons rather than actual substantive, you know, issues. David, this is your take. I'm gonna read it out. ETH is the best way to get exposure to the metaverse. Nothing else comes close.

• 1:38:18David Hoffman?

  Yeah. So the metaverse, if you guys remember listening to our Metaverse Defined podcast, which you should definitely go back and listen to, the metaverse isn't one thing. The metaverse is not going to be having exposure by Facebook stock or, you know, Decentraland or Sandbox token. The metaverse is going to be a collection of very, many, many, many different micro metaverses. The overall- Aggregat metaverse is going to be a collection of many, many different things. The only way that I see possible to actually have direct exposure to the growth of the metaverse is with ether because ether is metaverse money. I think in hindsight, in like 2030, people will look at Ethereum and be, and while we see it as a

• 1:38:58David Hoffman?

  parallel financial system, people in 2030 will see Ethereum as the metaverse, the thing that supports the single shared registry of all known objects in the metaverse. And ether will be metaverse money because it will be the liquidity currency for all of these objects. I think ether as the asset is going to track the growth of the metaverse far better than any other asset possible. And that includes the MV, sorry index co-op people, that includes the MVI metaverse index fund, because the problem with that is that you actually have to put in metaverse assets into the metaverse index, but after they are established, after some of them have grown, and they're not going to be able to capture all of the growth of the metaverse by

• 1:39:41David Hoffman?

  definition, because it is reactive rather than being proactive where ether already exists today, and we know that the metaverse will exist tomorrow. Therefore, you can buy ether today on the back of the growth of the metaverse. If you want to have exposure to the metaverse, buy the money that people are going to use in the metaverse. Like, it's that simple.

• 1:40:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I, I think it's that simple as well. And look, man, I'm gonna go back to my US analogy, like, one more time, okay? One more time this podcast, right? So like, if you want economic exposure to the, to the United States in the 1900s, it would have been a bad play to just buy the dollar and T bills or something, treasuries, right? But it would have been a good play to buy some of those things, maybe, but also the S and P, like, all of the, all of the companies that are bid. And that's kind of what you're getting with ETH, right? You're getting exposure to the economic output of Ethereum and all of its nation states and the entire metaverse, right? And you're getting that an index level, like, performance of that.

• 1:40:41David Hoffman?

  ETH is an index of everything that's happening on top of Ethereum.

• 1:40:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  Ah, pretty much, pretty much. All right, Dave, it's that time. What are you excited about this week, man?

• 1:40:48David Hoffman?

  Ah, man, yesterday, last night, I recorded a layer zero with Justin Aversano. Justin is the photographer behind the Twin Flames project. And man, was that guy's story really, really cool. I usually slay out 90 minutes for these episodes, but we almost went for two hours just because the story wasn't over by the time we hit the end. Justin has this insanely cool story where he's connecting his, I don't want to spoil too much of it. His mom died of ovarian cancer right after he started getting into photography. The reason why, one of the reasons why his mom had ovarian cancer is because he lost his twin in the womb. And he also made this twin project, which he took 100 pictures of 100 different twins all over the world

• 1:41:33David Hoffman?

  and got into the world of NFTs by selling this project. There's so much more to the story. It's a crazy story and this story is one of the reasons why I started doing Layer Zero in the first place to get some of these stories out. And the cool thing about this is that Layer Zero, I started with people like Vitalik's dad, Dimitri and Eric Connor, who has been with Ethereum since day one, and Danny Ryan and Tim Bako, all the protocol people. But I also want to talk to the people that didn't care about Ethereum, but got pulled into Ethereum because something about Ethereum changed their life. And that's what happened on this week's, next week's episode of Layer Zero. So do not miss that one. It's a great story.

• 1:42:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's hype, man. That's great. I'm looking forward to that. It's like, you're a cultural, a crypto cultural anthropologist is sort of what Layer Zero is.

• 1:42:19David Hoffman?

  I have a ton of fun doing them.

• 1:42:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Surfacing these stories, yeah.

• 1:42:22David Hoffman?

  Yeah. Layers Zero is just some of my favorites because like I just pull someone into Zoom and they just tell me a story for an hour and a half. And I'm like, oh, this is great.

• 1:42:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's like no prep. You just have a conversation. It's nice.

• 1:42:31David Hoffman?

  What are you excited about this week, Brian?

• 1:42:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  I was just thankful for like two days of rest. Like I got off screens, had some, you know, fun in real life, just hanging out with my family over Thanksgiving and just like, sometimes we forget, like real life is good. Do you know, like we're digital all the time, but real life matters. There's always this, this counterforce in crypto. And I don't know if you're the same way, David, but it's like, it's always like, what did you miss? Like I missed a couple of days. What did I miss? Did I miss any alpha? Did I miss any opportunities? And the truth is like, if you're away for too long in crypto, you will miss out on some opportunities, right? But then you have to like reevaluate what's important in your life. And I think it was important for me to remind myself. This crypto thing is a marathon. It's not a sprint.

• 1:43:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like, you don't have to be first on every single opportunity. You don't have to like, get the alpha from day one, right? It's like, don't, don't play that game. Don't exhaust yourself that way. There's, there's no way to live. Uh, and then like, what's really important? And wealth is not the most important thing at the end of the day. I think Kevin O'Wakie said, it's like, optimize for freedom. We're optimizing for freedom here, not wealth, right? And it's like, if you're a slave to your screen, you're a slave to crypto prices, Blockfolio, that's not freedom, right? You know, so like, reevaluate what wealth actually is. And you make sure you're looking at it through the lens of, of freedom is sort of another thing. I kind of took away from a couple of days of rest.

• 1:44:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  And the other thing is always important to remember is like, comparison is the thief of joy. Okay? We're like, just, there's always going to be someone who's doing better, right? Ever play a video game like, you know, Fortnite or something? It's like, there's always someone who is just 10 times better than you. Uh, they always will be like, just enjoy the game though. You don't have to be as good as that. And you don't have to be first in crypto. You don't have to get the, every hundred X upside that you see. So it's just a time to reflect and help me stay grounded and realize like, maybe this is a message someone needs to hear today. Like, stop chasing all the time. Just enjoy the ride and have fun. That's what this is about. And I hope this year has been like that for you.

• 1:44:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  When it's not, just zoom out and reevaluate, realize what's important. Cause those are the things that, that are important, at least to me. And it helped me realize that.

• 1:44:54David Hoffman?

  Yeah, the, the story of the progression of crypto is going to last for our entire lifetimes. So you have to sustain yourself so you can watch that story unfold. Because that's, to me, like, this is just a, one of the best movies ever that's ever happened, which is the story of crypto. And the cool thing about this movie is that it's going to last 60, 70, 80 years, however long I do, the whole time. Uh, and so again, you, you got, you gotta sustain yourself. Cause like you said, it's a marathon, not a sprint.

• 1:45:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  There you go, guys. That's the message. All right, meme of the week.

• 1:45:25David Hoffman?

  Meme of the week.

• 1:45:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's meme time. David, this is a Thanksgiving meme too. Good timing on this.

• 1:45:30David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so I said, this is a tweet. I said, "GM to you if this was you." And then in 2017, we have that crypto dude at Thanksgiving, and this is Charlie from Always Sunny in the Philadelphia, doing the whole crazy eyes, connecting all the different crazy things, like, "Oh, the crypto's gonna change the world." "It's so amazing." But he looks absolutely insane doing it. And then in 2021, we have like this royalty guy, like, looking over the banister of some, like, deck, dressed in some, like, royal-looking stuff, just very, very superior-looking, and the label's 2021. So if you were the crypto crazy guy in 2017, and then you also felt

• 1:46:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  You're now royalty.

• 1:46:10David Hoffman?

  Very, very, very proven in 2021, "GM to you."

• 1:46:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, absolutely. That's very much what it felt like in 2017 versus 2021. Do you know where this image is from, the second one?

• 1:46:21David Hoffman?

  I do not.

• 1:46:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, fun fact. I won't tell you, I know. It's from the Twilight movies, David. I'm embarrassed I know that. I'm embarrassed I know that. These are the vampires in the Twilight movies.

• 1:46:30David Hoffman?

  Do your kids watch Twilight, Ryan?

• 1:46:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, that's it. My kids watch Twilight, guys.

• 1:46:34David Hoffman?

  Oh, that's not it.

• 1:46:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  Let's run it back. Moment of Zen. We'll never know. Moment of Zen, guys.

• 1:46:40David Hoffman?

  Oh my god, Ryan's a Twilight fan.

• 1:46:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Beef is risky, Bitcoin is risky. You could definitely lose what you put in. I'm fading out on that. But we are going bankless. Thanks for joining us on the journey. David, you got me all flustered. I screwed up the ending. See you later, guys. This is your moment of Zen.

• 1:47:37David Hoffman?

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

• 1:48:22David Hoffman?

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