ROLLUP: Facebook Meta | ENS Airdrop | McRib & Tarantino NFTs | Reddit & Matrix | Axie Ronin DEX

1st Week of November, 2021 ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/ 🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/ ------ 📣 DHARMA | Trade on Polygon! https://bankless.cc/dharma ------ 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 Permissionless: https://blockworks.co/events/permissionless/ Bankless Discount: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/discount-to-permissionless-2022 7:00 MARKETS 7:22 BTC Price 7:41 ETH Price 9:14 ETH / BTC Ratio 10:10 DeFi Action $BED: https://www.indexcoop.com/bed 13:19 Layer 2 https://l2beat.com/ 15:05 Ultra Sound Money https://ultrasound.money/ Fees: https://twitter.com/evan_van_ness/status/1453939554172301314?s=21 20:40 Market Cap https://assetdash.com/ 24:00 RELEASES 25:10 ENS https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/the-ultimate-guide-to-airdrops 32:10 Maker x stETH https://twitter.com/nomos_paradox/status/1453793036865982464?s=21 35:30 Crypto.com leveling up https://twitter.com/froggyfrogster/status/1454181118807351310?s=21 40:05 Phonon by Gridplus https://twitter.com/PhononDAO/status/1453822451436113924?t=CtbsGJIyI3ejIIirzm9UdA&s=19 https://twitter.com/PhononDAO/status/1453822451436113924?t=CtbsGJIyI3ejIIirzm9UdA&s=19 41:47 DAO Masters https://www.daomasters.xyz/ 42:55 Ronin DEX https://twitter.com/AxieInfinity/status/1456161289722548225 43:46 Optimism Upgrade https://twitter.com/optimismPBC/status/1455645114269724675 45:28 ‘Standard Oil’ of Crypto https://www.wsj.com/articles/digital-currency-group-wants-to-be-cryptos-standard-oil-11635764400 47:51 Metaverse Fund https://www.theblockcrypto.com/linked/122856/firm-backed-by-alan-howard-winklevoss-twins-closes-100-million-metaverse-fund 51:22 Sandbox Raise https://www.theblockcrypto.com/linked/122936/crypto-sandbox-93-million-softbank 52:58 Jobs https://pallet.xyz/list/bankless/jobs 54:00 NEWS 54:48 Facebook Meta https://about.fb.com/news/2021/10/facebook-company-is-now-meta/ 1:02:15 Nike https://twitter.com/joshgerben/status/1455225423411953671?s=21 1:04:22 Microsoft https://blockworks.co/microsoft-ceo-the-metaverse-will-bring-real-world-into-any-digital-space/?oly_enc_id=9918E2523689A0T 1:04:55 Reddit https://twitter.com/iamRahul20x/status/1455950490366263301 1:09:32 Quentin Tarantino https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/02/quentin-tarantino-to-offer-seven-uncut-scenes-from-pulp-fiction-as-nfts.html 1:10:26 NFT McRib https://twitter.com/chriskatje/status/1455154519491416064?s=20 1:11:32 Matrix NFTs https://twitter.com/jordanlyall/status/1455544585732640775?s=21 1:13:18 China Yes NFTs, No Crypto https://blockworks.co/chinas-tech-giants-yes-on-nfts-no-on-cryptocurrencies/?oly_enc_id=9918E2523689A0T 1:14:31 CryptoPunk Flash Loan $500M https://twitter.com/scott_lew_is/status/1454952085611589634 1:17:23 Aaron Rodgers https://www.coindesk.com/business/2021/11/01/nfl-star-aaron-rodgers-gives-ringing-endorsement-of-bitcoin/ 1:18:14 Coinbase Borrow https://twitter.com/coinbase/status/1455664736687722500 1:19:06 Stablecoin Report https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2021/11/01/biden-administration-to-congress-put-stablecoins-under-federal-supervision-or-we-will/ 1:21:33 China Digital Currency https://twitter.com/RyanSAdams/status/1456257274087763979?s=20 1:23:00 TAKES 1:24:30 NFT Breakfast https://twitter.com/zeneca_33/status/1454599139803779076?s=21 1:25:58 L1 Traffic https://twitter.com/ercwl/status/1454331785668608002?s=20 1:28:52 Play the Metaverse https://twitter.com/RyanSAdams/status/1455160580843712519?s=20 1:31:13 A Wallet is a Profile https://twitter.com/ohhshiny/status/1455270402788405254?s=21 1:32:14 Wikipedia https://twitter.com/trustlessstate/status/1455548002114879493?s=21 1:33:31 Never Seen a Bear https://twitter.com/ryansadams/status/1456001806992031755?s=21 1:37:46 Robots Use Ethereum https://twitter.com/ameensol/status/1456115235769647110?s=20 1:40:54 Gender Equality https://twitter.com/mdudas/status/1456285472326623242?s=20 1:41:31 What David’s Excited About 1:43:14 What Ryan’s Excited About 1:47:59 MEME of the Week https://twitter.com/niftynaut/status/1454142514487861251?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. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. 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 Bankless Nation, happy first week of November. David, what time is it?

• 0:12David Hoffman?

  Oh, it's a Friday weekly roll-up time because, like always, it's always a crazy week in crypto. And so we are going to roll that week up in the Friday Bankless weekly roll-up.

• 0:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  David, you're on the road right now. You're in New York City, NFT NYC. That's a NFT conference. How's that going, man? What's the vibe been like?

• 0:30David Hoffman?

  I actually don't know because I never went to a single NFT conference event. I've only been going to the peripheral satellite events and those have been absolutely fantastic. We'll talk a lot about a lot more at the end, but yeah, I listened to the famous Wu-Tang album that got bought by Pleaser Dow.

• 0:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh my God, man. How was it?

• 0:51David Hoffman?

  I mean, I wasn't, I'm not really the biggest Wu-Tang fan.

• 0:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay.

• 0:54David Hoffman?

  The first song, pretty good. Next two songs, whatever.

• 0:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  Did Wu-Tang people like it?

• 1:00David Hoffman?

  The Wu-Tang people really liked it. And then there's like the fourth song that had this great like trumpet riff. And the whole entire room was just like vibing to that song.

• 1:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  By the way, is this playing off the same, like, this is a CD, right?

• 1:12David Hoffman?

  It's a compact disc. It's a CD, yeah.

• 1:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, so like, what happens if that thing gets scratched?

• 1:17David Hoffman?

  Okay, so it is scratched because Martin freaking Skreli used it as a coaster. He used the CD as a coaster, so he scratched the shit out of the face. Sorry, I'm swearing. Yeah, dude, it's ridiculous. Because he's, that's his brand.

• 1:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  Cartoon villain.

• 1:37David Hoffman?

  Yeah, it's literally just the perfect level of villain.

• 1:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  So it has some like, I guess, some scratches in it. Does the track skip? Try to remember what CDs do.

• 1:46David Hoffman?

  It sounded great. Yeah, no, like, and the acoustics in the room were phenomenal.

• 1:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:51David Hoffman?

  Overall, it's been, it's been a great week, seeing, seeing a lot of people, like, always at all conferences that I only see online, but got to see them in, in real life. Met Kami Russo in person, so that was great. Chatted with her for a while. Yeah, always, always a good time at the crypto conferences.

• 2:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  Are people feeling like bullish on NFTs still? It's been a phenomenal year. It's got to be feeling bullish, right? But what's the vibe like?

• 2:13David Hoffman?

  People were, people were just like, oh, guys, is this the top? Remember in 2018 CoinDesk where we had the Lambos outside of the conference?

• 2:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Did you feel like that ish?

• 2:22David Hoffman?

  There's like toppy conversations going on, but there have been toppy conversations going on in crypto for like, I don't know, a year now.

• 2:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  Conversations in like, for NFT specifically, like March or April, remember? And, you know, people felt like, and then there was kind of a lull and then it came back even stronger. I don't know. What's your personal take on this?

• 2:41David Hoffman?

  Yeah, apparently at the conferences, there are a lot of people like pitching terrible NFT ideas. I heard some, some person was trying to pitch somebody else about supporting Afghan women oppressed by the Taliban using the Stellar Network. Like, when's the last time you heard about the Stellar Network, Ryan? Like, like, things, it just doesn't make any sense. Yeah.

• 3:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  That always happens.

• 3:05David Hoffman?

  There are some weird shenanigans going on. Apparently that was closer to the actual NFT conferences, not the, not the satellite events. So I didn't, I didn't get the, the full face of that. But there was a number of like parties, like the, the Audius party I was at and a few other of the like related NFT events. I didn't recognize a single person. It was extreme. And like, that was a common through line of all the friends that I've known in crypto for the last few years.

• 3:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  Different crowd.

• 3:29David Hoffman?

  Completely different crowd, like brand new, brand new people. And we have a take to talk about later at the end of the show. Brand, brand new people that are just, no one is familiar with, like getting into, into the world for the first time. Yeah.

• 3:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  I feel like that's especially true of NFTs. Anyway, guys, we have a fantastic show for you today on the roll up. We're talking about a few things. First of all, Facebook with the name change, pulling a prince on us, actually not changing their name to a symbol, but Facebook becomes Meta. What's up with that? A pivot into the metaverse. Also some airdrops coming your ways. If you are a dot ETH, have a dot ETH domain, ENS, we're going to talk about that. Also, there was a CryptoPunk that sold for $500 million.

• 4:08David Hoffman?

  Not mine sadly.

• 4:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  That wasn't yours? That's right. David would sell his crypto puck. I was, you know, gonna ask that, but we talked about that a few rollups ago. You would sell for $500 million.

• 4:20David Hoffman?

  I would sell for $500 million. Yes, I would. Let it be known. If there's any takers out there.

• 4:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  McDonald's with the McRib NFT. That doesn't feel toppy at all, does it? Quentin Tarantino as well. We mentioned that. The Matrix releasing NFTs as well. And Reddit with the biggest Web 3 pivot ever. We're gonna cover all of that in more on the weekly rollups. As you know, this comes at you every Friday morning. We try to pack as much of the week in crypto into your mind as possible. David, before we get into the main show, gotta talk about a couple of things. The first is this permissionless conference tickets. Okay, this is a big DeFi Metaverse conference that we are putting on next year with our friends at Blockworks. Website's just been updated. The tickets are now released. There might not be any left. I gotta, I gotta warn you. So tickets were released maybe a little earlier this week,

• 5:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  and I'm not sure if they're going to be left by the time you listen to this. Every two weeks-

• 5:15David Hoffman?

  They get, they get released every two weeks. There's always a new cycle. Yeah.

• 5:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, batch release. So if you didn't get it this time, get them next time. But the thing is, they increase in price every single two weeks. So you wanna get them early if you can. I think the price now is 418. When we started, the price was $15.159. You might recognize those digits. 1559, but now it's 418. Okay, this is just gonna keep going up. If you are a Bankless subscriber, of course, a premium member, you get a discount on this. A 30% discount. What's the value of that? 100, 100 and something dollars, 100 and whatever.

• 5:51David Hoffman?

  It also keeps on going up.

• 5:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Keeps on going up as well. So make sure you catch that. The speakers are gonna be hot. The tracks are amazing. David and I are helping to plan all of this. So check out that conference. Also, another thing to check out is the Dharma Wallet. David, you wanna tell them about Dharma Wallet?

• 6:10David Hoffman?

  Yeah, Dharma Wallet is the easiest way to get you and your friends into the world of crypto, into the world of DeFi. If you guys have gotten into crypto without Dharma, right? You probably went the route of sending your money to Coinbase or Gemini, which takes a while, takes like seven days. Then you have to buy Ether, send that to your, to your MetaMask or your Ledger. And then if you want to go onto Polygon, you got to send it to, make an L1 transaction to Polygon. Then you need to get gas on the Polygon network. That's a whole mess. Then you have to prove it.

• 6:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  The old days.

• 6:37David Hoffman?

  The old days, but no longer for, because the Dharma Wallet will do all of this for you in just two to three minutes. You can connect you with your actual bank account with Plaid, which again is just like logging into your bank account. And then you can send money into the Polygon network. It's a smart contract wallet and it's connected into Polygon and they have a ton of cool features. So it is the fastest portal to get fiat money into the world of crypto where it belongs.

• 6:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  No gas fees.

• 7:00David Hoffman?

  Download Dharma, no, no gas fees. There's a link in the show notes and I believe that if you sign up with the link in the show notes, you'll get airdropped $50 worth of Ether on the Polygon network to get your life on an L2 started. So go check that out.

• 7:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, you gotta make a purchase, but if you make a purchase above $500, you get $50 in free eat on Polygon. So check that out using the link in the show notes. All right, David, you ready to get to it, man?

• 7:23David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 7:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  Market time, market time. Let's talk Bitcoin. What are we doing?

• 7:27David Hoffman?

  Bitcoin had a flattish week, up a little bit, up a little bit. Started the week at $60,000, which was the low, hit a high of $64,000 and currently at $62,000. So up roughly four or 5% on the week.

• 7:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  Good job Bitcoin, four or 5%, not too bad. But ETH, another story, all time high week for ETH. A few all time highs were hit this week. I feel like celebrating every single one of them. Where are we right now and what was all time high, David?

• 7:52David Hoffman?

  Yeah, ETH started at $4,200. The new all time high of $4,675 was hit a little bit more, uh, more than 24 hours ago, roughly 36 hours ago at the time of recording. We are currently clocking in at $4,485.

• 8:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  Next milestone is 5K, I feel like, uh, you know, that, that, that's coming right up. But are we up? How much are we up on the week?

• 8:17David Hoffman?

  We are up 15% on the week. It looks like we dipped a little bit before I wrote that number down. So maybe about like 13 or 14%.

• 8:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  Why? Do you think this is like the Facebook meta news? Not to front run that. We're going to talk about that in news a little bit, but do you think there's a metaverse story connected here? Or do you think this is just the market kind of catching up to what ETH should be?

• 8:36David Hoffman?

  There are so many stories about what ETH should be. There's NFTs, there's the metaverse, metaverse, there's, there's DeFi, there's scaling, there's the merge, ultra scalable Ethereum, like people are getting that wrapped, their heads wrapped around that. There's so many stories to tell you, to tell why this number is going up. And, you know, a lot of stories means a lot of reasons for a number to go up.

• 8:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  I still think it's low, to be honest. I still think the price of ETH is undervalued, even at these prices. But you guys know that if you've been hanging out with bankless for any time soon, we are ultra bullish on this asset.

• 9:08David Hoffman?

  The listeners are like, we know, guys.

• 9:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's like, shut up already, okay? We know, we already have our bags packed. All right, ETH Bitcoin ratio, what that, what is that looking like, David?

• 9:18David Hoffman?

  Yeah, again, three green weeks in a row for the ETH Bitcoin ratio, clocking in at 0.0734. And so ever since the Bitcoin ETF, the Bitcoin Ether ratio has done really, really well. And again, the has, has not spent very, very little time higher than this, especially in the last six months, but also definitely ever.

• 9:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wow, David, are we getting close to, we're getting close to like the two-year, three-year, maybe all-time high for the ratio?

• 9:47David Hoffman?

  Exactly. Yeah. So that's a lot, a lot of people I know, I know Anthony Cizano pays attention to this ratio a lot. And like, I know he's like, he's like waiting for that to break through.

• 9:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  He's frothing at the mouth.

• 9:56David Hoffman?

  Yeah, he's like, he's like, just don't tweet, don't tweet, don't tweet.

• 10:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, this is one to continue watching, but like, this is also an indicator, I would say of the continued crypto bull run, right? If this ratio is gaining steam, then it means bull run in full effect. This is another bull run indicator, but dude, wait, this number's way down today. Total locked value in DeFi.

• 10:18David Hoffman?

  That's a bug on DeFi Pulse page.

• 10:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, this did not happen.

• 10:22David Hoffman?

  I'm gonna go with a broken graph. Oh, you know, actually, you know what that was? Go down to AVE. That might have been a lot of people withdrawing from AVE.

• 10:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  No way.

• 10:30David Hoffman?

  Uh, yeah, because they're AVE's number two now. Uh, AVE had that bug exploit which got fixed. So nothing bad happened, but a lot of people pulled funds out of AVE.

• 10:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  This happened from November 3rd to, to the 4th, right? And we went down 105 billion to 87 billion. For those of you can't see on the screen.

• 10:48David Hoffman?

  Um, AVE certainly went down. That's a, that's a bug on the DeFi page.

• 10:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  But, uh, so let's call it, we're still above, I think we're still above 100 billion. Let's say that.

• 10:56David Hoffman?

  That means we can make up these numbers, right?

• 10:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  We want it to be over 100 billion. So therefore it is this week.

• 11:02David Hoffman?

  How do you feel like it should be, Ryan?

• 11:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Hmm, I feel like this should be a trillion to be honest, but you know, I'm going to be conservative on today's episode. We'll wait, we'll bide our time. How about the, uh, DeFi Pulse Index? This is an index of the top DeFi tokens, the blue chips, as it were, up or down on the week?

• 11:20David Hoffman?

  Up, up, up on the week. Finally, the DPI had a great week this week, up 9% on the week. Started the week at $330, ended the week at roughly $375.

• 11:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Signs of life, David. Are you liking that? Some signs of life here. Uh, how about this?

• 11:35David Hoffman?

  Like Ether has way more signs of life than DPI.

• 11:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  So we're still going down on the DPI to ETH ratio, huh?

• 11:43David Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, it, it put, it put a little bit of a bottom. Again, not a bottom bottom, but like hit point 078, uh, climbed up to point 085. But again, it is a nice linear slope down.

• 11:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  But just remember folks, David reminded us last time, if you swap out those DeFi tokens for another set of DeFi tokens and retrofit the data, then David was still right about this ratio.

• 12:06David Hoffman?

  Exactly right. Never, David's never wrong. Never ever.

• 12:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  Takeaway here. Uh, not DeFi season yet, or at least it's more ETH season than it is DeFi season. So, uh, to the extent that remains the case, this ratio continues to, uh, drop a little bit. But let's talk about the best of all worlds, which is the bed index, bankless bed index. That is Bitcoin ETH and the DPI all inside one token. That's a third, a third, a third. What are we looking at on the week?

• 12:33David Hoffman?

  Yeah, Bed had a good week because it is the best index in all of DeFi. Started the week at $172, hit a new high of $192, currently clocking in at $181. Overall, up, how much percent on the week? I don't know, 5%?

• 12:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  5%, call that 5%. So guys, of course, you know, you can get into Bed with this index. It's a simple purchase. Go to the indexcoop.com/bed and purchase that. It's actually up 60% for the 90 days in terms of, or close to 60% in terms of, you know, the 90-day increase in this index. So it's starting to get closer to being sort of a staple-type index of the crypto markets, which is awesome to see. All right, let's look at Layer 2 Beat as well. This tracks how much value is locked inside of true Layer 2s. Those are chains that are backed by the economic security guarantees of the Ethereum network.

• 13:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  David just added a cool $1 billion in the past week. From last week to this week, getting close to $5 billion, pretty crazy.

• 13:40David Hoffman?

  Clocking in at $4.93 billion, up 21% on the week. Arbitrum up 20% in total value locked in Layer 2s. Optimism clocking in at plus 85% on the week, almost doubling the value locked in Arbitrum. Optimism, a lot of cool things are happening on Optimism. Optimism breaking through that $500 million level. So congratulations to the team. Also, Loopring, clocking in at a doubling at 98% off of, I think, speculation because something to do with GameStop and Loopring integration.

• 14:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  They did make some key hires of Loopring.

• 14:17David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so that's interesting. And also, again, my one equity that I don't, that my, the one thing that I own that's not crypto, GME stocks doing very, very well, by the way.

• 14:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's all related, isn't it? It's all, it all comes back to crypto. What's cool about this, I think, is particularly with Arbitrum and Optimism, we're seeing this growth without a token incentive, right? So we're seeing so many other Layer 1 communities, so different Layer 1s, not Ethereum. Giving away like millions, hundreds of millions of dollars in token incentives to come yield farm on their on their chains. And optimism and Arbitrum are not doing this and they're still getting like massive growth week over week. So that's good to see. Wait till they dial up the tokens if they ever do. We'll see what happens there. Also, ultrasound money, ETH is becoming ultrasound money and just passed a big milestone. What is that, David?

• 15:10David Hoffman?

  Three quarters of 1 million Ether has been burned as of this week. 761,000 Ether. That's more Ether than I have. Closing in on the 1 million Ether mark.

• 15:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  A little bit more, huh? Just a little bit. Just past, just past David's bags here. This is cool, too. I wanted to actually correct this because I think I said that last week, I think I said that ETH had 10x the transaction fees over the past seven days with Bitcoin. And I was actually wrong. And someone reminded me of this. Ethereum actually had 100x the transaction fee revenue of Bitcoin over a seven day period of time. So I was like, you know, 10x off on that number. I knew it was a lot bigger. But over the last seven days, look, man, Ethereum had 50, almost $50 million worth of transaction fee revenue. And back to what we

• 16:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  said last week, what do blockchains do? Blockchains sell blocks. This is their transaction fee revenue. And I guess a year ago, two years ago, it was like a fight between Bitcoin and ETH. Like every day, like who's kind of going to have more transaction fee revenue. Here's Bitcoin, a very distant number on this chart. Not even, not even $1 million in transaction fee revenue over the past seven days. So it's super interesting to see, right? The thesis for Ethereum has always been you make block space more valuable, then the asset becomes more valuable. And of course, EIP 1559 kicked that into into high gears so that there's this immediate feedback loop.

• 16:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  But it's, it seems to be the case that this is happening. Revenue numbers going up for Ethereum block space. Any other takes on this, David?

• 16:59David Hoffman?

  Yeah, there is a direct connection between the amount of fees your blockchain collects and the soundness of the money. And if you have not yet learned how to articulate that association, there's a ton of stuff to go and read on the Bankless Newsletter, Ultra Scalable Ethereum, Ultrasound Money with Justin Drake, tons of things. So make sure you understand the relationship between block-based demand and soundness of the money. It's a really important concept.

• 17:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  Really one of the closest is Binance Smart Chain, and like, I don't even know what they do with their numbers.

• 17:29David Hoffman?

  It's watch rated.

• 17:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay. Um, let's talk about this too. Last week was actually the first week that Ethereum actually had negative issuance, David. And we've seen some milestones on this ultrasound money thing in the past. In fact, like, the first day, I remember a, an individual block, maybe it was the first day or the first two days after EIP 1559, an individual block that had negative issuance. I remember being really excited to see that, like, it's happening. But now we are hitting all of these milestones. Talk about this for a minute.

• 18:04David Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah. I think it was like just a couple hours after EIP 1559, everyone was scraping the block EtherScan, trying to find the first ultrasound block.

• 18:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, that's right. That's right.

• 18:13David Hoffman?

  Took people a couple hours. And then, I think just a couple weeks later, we had our first ultrasound day, where the full, or no, we had, just a couple, yeah, a couple weeks later, we had our first ultrasound hour, where every, all the blocks over the hour were ultrasound, they're burning collectively more ether than was being issued. Couple weeks after that, we had our first ultrasound day, 24 hours of more ether being burned than was being issued. We have now hit our first week of total issuance going down rather than up due to ether burn. And so at some point, we're going to be repeating this, but it's going to be a month. And then, at some point, it'll just be every month moving forward into the future. Ryan, are we seeing the current limit of the ether

• 18:56David Hoffman?

  supply right now? Like, that could, that could be happening as of this week. The total supply of ether capped out. That is a possibility.

• 19:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's true. I mean, Justin Drake, when he puts the numbers on this, predicted this in April. He's, he thought that ether supply would never get above 120 million. And I don't know what the total supply looks like, but, but you're right.

• 19:14David Hoffman?

  I'm looking at it right now. The total supply is 118.2 million. So.

• 19:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  Over, under, on, do we ever hit 120 million? What do you think?

• 19:23David Hoffman?

  Oh, under.

• 19:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I definitely under for sure because this isn't even getting started yet. Okay. Once the merge happens, so like we're maybe six months away for that. It's over. It's done. It's gone, right? So a reduction of 4%. This is an immediate reduction of 4% annualized issuance. So we're going to be ultrasound month, every single month, every year. Wouldn't be surprised if we start to get ultrasound decades, David, under our belts with this. I mean, we'll see what this looks like.

• 19:53David Hoffman?

  As soon as we hit the merge, it's just ultrasound now and for forever. Right? So it's just, it's just a race to get to the merge.

• 19:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  Unless you think block space, Ethereum block space is going to drastically decrease in demand. Is there any world where that happens?

• 20:07David Hoffman?

  I, I don't think so. And there's a, there's a take that we have later to talk about what happens when you increase the block space available. People just use more of it.

• 20:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 20:15David Hoffman?

  Uh, and so like even with charting, we're, we're going to increase the amount of block space available. People are just going to use more. They're going to transact more.

• 20:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  And that's the thing. It's not even going to be humans. It's going to be other chains that are actually using this block space and being secured by it.

• 20:28David Hoffman?

  Absolutely. There's a, there's no coincidence that we are breaking all time highs this week. And this is all time high week and then also ETH burn ultrasound week as well. Like that is not as a coincidence, like bull markets bring in fees. And so like, really, this is a game of are like, are we in all time high season, right? Like, are we in bull market season? Are we out of the crab season and we're just going to keep on eating into new all time highs? If that's true, then we might actually be in ultrasound territory now and for forever. If that bull market can carry us into the merge, like that's, that's a possibility.

• 20:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Heating into all time highs, eating into the bull markets, what we're doing right now. I, I love it. Yeah. Top assets by market cap. This is all top assets by market cap. It doesn't have things like gold, but it has things that you can like use generally trade on exchanges. So number one, of course, actually not of course, I was surprised to see this. The top asset in the world worth $2.5 trillion to the T is Microsoft now. No longer Apple. It's Microsoft, actually. Then after that, it's Apple and Google. And then some like oil and gas companies, Amazon, et cetera. All the way down to number seven is Bitcoin. Bitcoin is the seventh largest asset in the world that you can buy on an exchange of this type.

• 21:38David Hoffman?

  Right behind Tesla, yeah.

• 21:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right behind Tesla. Well, that's interesting. And then right ahead of Facebook. And then if you keep scrolling past Berkshire, past Navita, Nvidia, you get to Ethereum at number 13, almost breaching into the top 10 assets in the world. That's pretty cool to see.

• 21:59David Hoffman?

  Yeah, Ether is within striking distance. I think it's just like something like 12 or 15 more percent, which is just like, hey, that's just like one good week away from becoming a top 10 global asset. So.

• 22:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  You gotta love this. You think Jamie Dimon's looking at this and being like, oh, I'm number 14 and Ethereum just passed me. Now it's over for JP Morgan. It's like, I was wrong about, I was wrong about crypto.

• 22:23David Hoffman?

  I don't think he's saying that.

• 22:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  Probably not, but maybe he should be. And along with the rest of the banks, even Visa's behind Ethereum at this point, which all makes sense because Ethereum is a network of networks. It is a global settlement layer. It is a monetary system. It is a money. It is not like all of these other things. Aside, maybe a little bit like Bitcoin. I think they'll continue rising in the charts. David, that's it for the markets and we've got some hot releases coming up for folks. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible.

• 22:56David 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. Just look

• 23:40David Hoffman?

  at the size of the Uniswap treasury. 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 UniGrant at unigiants.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. Gemini is the world's most trusted cryptocurrency exchange. I've been a customer of Gemini since I first got into crypto in 2017, and it's been my main exchange of choice to make my crypto buys and sells. Gemini is available in all 50 states and in over 50 countries worldwide.

• 24:23David Hoffman?

  And on Gemini, there are markets for over 30 various different crypto assets, including many of the hot DeFi tokens. And it's one of the few exchanges that has liquid DAI 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,

• 25:06David Hoffman?

  I get a little bit of ETH bonus back to me at the same time. You can open up a free account in under 3 minutes at gemini.com/goBankless. 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/goBankless.

• 25:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, guys, we are back with the hot releases of the week. The first is this, ENS, which is the Ethereum Name Service. You might have seen those .eths all over Twitter. You might have a .eth yourself that is registered to the ENS, Ethereum Name Service. Well, now, ENS is issuing a token. They are doing an airdrop to all holders of .eth accounts. What's going on here, David?

• 25:48David Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah. So we need to, I mean, I was talking to Brantley even forever ago. He was always saying like, they would receive money from selling the ENS names.

• 25:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  Lots of money, right?

• 25:59David Hoffman?

  Lots of money, tons of money. And like, they consider themselves like a public goods, right? Not a private company. They don't want to be a private company that is just like operating what is a core function of the Ethereum system, which is .eth names. And so they've been sitting on all of this ether, not knowing what to do with it, not knowing how to structure like this company. And then the whole DAO revolution starts. And I think it's just very, very obvious that the .eth side of Ethereum becomes community operated, community governed. And so what's so fantastic about .eth names is that it's so easy to identify who has them. And so they just airdropped some, or they will be airdropping some ENS governance tokens to .eth holders. And so there are some different parameters as to how much you are getting. You are getting, you are getting, one, if

• 26:44David Hoffman?

  you own a .eth, you are getting double that if you actually linked that .eth name to an actually Ethereum address. And then you are also getting a multiplier based on how long you've actually had that linked. And so if you have linked your ENS Ethereum address and you've done it for a long time, you might get some nice airdrops coming your way soon.

• 27:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Hell, yeah, man. That means if you've been listening to Bankless, when we started talking about ENS addresses back in 2019, and we created tactics on how to actually register them and set them up correctly, then you will definitely get this airdrop, which is super exciting. 137,000 accounts, .eth holders, which is great. One important note, though, is they're not rewarding like squatters in this mechanism, right? So if you bought like, I don't know, 100 names and you're just sitting on them, you're not getting any amplifier for owning more .eth names. Is that correct?

• 27:42David Hoffman?

  That is correct. Yeah. So if you bought 100 ENS names and you're just sitting on them, you're not, then link them to your Ethereum address, you are just getting one shares worth of an airdrop. And so it's, it's unique addresses that linked their ENS name to their, to their Ethereum wallet for amount of time. I think it's a great, great mechanism. There's a link in the show notes if you want to check out more details on that. Overall, 25% of the total airdrop will be given out to, in 2.ETH holders. 25% will go to the ENS contributors and then 50% to the DAO community treasury, which I really like that model. This is, Kevin Iwaki shared this model and I, and put this idea in my head where it's 50% for the past and then 50% for

• 28:25David Hoffman?

  the future, right? So everyone who's worked on the project so far, so 25% to the airdrop, 25% to the team, and then 50% to the community treasury, which goes and funds the future DAO, right? Actually, people that wants to start the DAO.

• 28:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is super cool. I think this is one of the ones I'm most excited about since probably Uniswap. And the reason is because of such a large distribution. I mean, there's so many .ETH holders, so many ENS users, and so this is getting out there. But like in general, they kind of had to go down this path, right? Because they had a multi-sig, they had a treasury, and they had a small set of individuals who are really responsible for that multi-sig. I don't know, it was like seven to 10 members of the Ethereum community who had access to that multi-sig. And of course, you know, it requires, you know, some majority of owners to sign off on transactions. But this turns that multi-sig over to the DAO, over to governance, over to the users, over to the community. It's a very web three concept and it's super cool to see. So we are actually

• 29:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  having Nick and Brantley from ENS on our State of the Nation on Tuesday. I think more details will come early next week on how you can pick up this airdrop. Of course, if you are a Bankless Premium member, we dropped the Ultimate Guide to Airdrops last week. And if you did, number,

• 29:41David Hoffman?

  Number twenty?

• 29:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  Number sixteen.

• 29:44David Hoffman?

  Number sixteen.

• 29:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  These are twenty-five hypothetical potential. We're not sure if they're going to airdrop, but you might want to check them out in case they do. Sort of opportunities. Number sixteen was Ethereum Name Service. Had some folks ping us earlier in the week and be like, oh my God, I'm glad I saw that. Registered dot ETH domain, got started on it. Now I'm eligible for that airdrop. So Bankless Premium members get that. We will include a link in the show notes so you can check that resource out. It's evergreen. Twenty-four more on this list potentials. So take a look at that.

• 30:16David Hoffman?

  You can be damn sure that every time an airdrop happens, we will be reminding you that this airdrop.

• 30:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, I'm just saying, it's just like, why not go?

• 30:25David Hoffman?

  Do your homework. Do your homework.

• 30:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  Why not get free airdrops, folks? Like, why not just put in some effort? Crypto pays you to learn about crypto. So take the extra step here. Anyway.

• 30:37David Hoffman?

  Before we move on, there are a couple more dynamics about the ENS DAO now that I think are worth pulling apart. DAOs inherently have like a funding problem at Genesis because like they just mint a token. They don't really have any money yet. That's not true with ENS. They have that very large stack of Ether from all of the ENS sales. And so the ENS DAO is going to have a very large treasury of Ether behind it. And so they are going to be able to fund themselves right off the bat. The ENS team is giving all of that Ether to the DAO. So that's pretty cool. I don't know how much that is.

• 31:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  I forgot about that too. But it's like, it's gotta be a lot because when we said the DAO has a lot of money, all of that money is in ETH, as you said. So when you register a dot ETH domain, you're paying for it in ETH. And if you paid for it in ETH back in like 2018, 2019, that ETH is worth a heck of a lot more in dollar values. So like your five dollars, your $10 to register is now a 10x from that, right? So I'm sure it's a substantial treasury.

• 31:36David Hoffman?

  Yeah. And then the other, the other side of this is that the ENS team, they never raised anything from any funds at all.

• 31:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 31:43David Hoffman?

  So zero funds own ENS, right? Like this token was just born. No, there were no VCs, no, no one backing it. And so it's going to be one of the coolest, I think it's going to be one of the coolest launches of all time.

• 31:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  I did too.

• 31:55David Hoffman?

  Top, top 10 launches.

• 31:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  Top 10 launches, top 10 launches. Sounds like another bankless blog post, but this is like, yeah, the distribution is great. I'm, I'm excited about this one, the way I was with Uniswap. So anyway, next week, more details on that. Uh, let's talk about this. Maker Governance just onboarded Lido's staked ETH, that's S T ETH, as a collateral type. It's really cool because staked ETH is kind of like, um, treasuries and T-bills are to dollars, right? It's sort of like, you know, you, you take your dollars, you put it in a risk-free asset, which is a treasury. And the reason it's risk-free is because the US government can always pay you back. Why? Because they are the mint. Of course,

• 32:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  they can print more money and always pay you back. So it's called risk-free rate of return. That's what staked ETH is, or it can be, it does have some risk. The risk with the staking provider like Lido has some risk on it. So there are various forms of, of staked ETH. But anyway, it's really cool to see staked ETH tokenized and available as collateral. So you can get a loan against it. You can start to use it as a composable money Lego inside of the DeFi economy. Any takes here, David?

• 33:08David Hoffman?

  Yeah, this is, uh, this is, A, it's just a great integration. It's a great collateral. But this is a first step of a very, very large story, which is eventually all ETH is, all ETH inside of DeFi is going to turn into staked ETH inside of DeFi, because why wouldn't you? Well, you could have two collateral types, ETH and staked ETH. One stays the same and one goes up like five, four, five, six percent a year.

• 33:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  And they're both equally liquid.

• 33:33David Hoffman?

  And they're both equally liquid.

• 33:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's the difference, right? So like with the T-bill, it's like, it's locked up, but you can't do anything with it. Like your money is kind of parked inside of that instrument. You can't, you know, do very much with it. At least an individual can't do very much with it. But with this, you, you could do anything in the DeFi economy that you could do with any ERC20.

• 33:54David Hoffman?

  And that's exactly right. And then this is the really the important story here is there's going to be a network effects competition for this staked ETH derivative token, right? Coinbase as a centralized staking as a service operator, probably going to release Coinbase staked ETH as a secondary currency. Any staking as a service operator, in order to compete with all the other ones, they need to generate liquidity on their staked ETH token. So they will all generate the staked ETH derivative token. Who can get their staked ETH derivative token integrated into DeFi the best is going to win. And so like, because monies have network effects. And so this is a competition that all staking as a service providers are playing in this game. Rocketpool also has our ETH as well. And so it's really nice

• 34:39David Hoffman?

  to see these decentralized, committed to decentralized versus the centralized ones, start to make those moves before the centralized companies do.

• 34:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, that's the collateral types I'm going to support most are the ones that are the most decentralized. Yeah, the most trustless forms, because those are the truly the most risk-free forms and in the best interest of the network.

• 35:00David Hoffman?

  And that's specifically the bull case for Rocketpool and our ETH. This Rocketpool is trying to be the most decentralized, like technically risk-free that there is. Lido has done a few compromises to get there, but they are still committed to decentralization and they just want to go to market first. And that's how they have done that. Both of those are far superior than anything a centralized staking as a service company could offer.

• 35:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  When launched, Rocketpool, come on, come on, guys. Let's see you soon.

• 35:27David Hoffman?

  Let's go.

• 35:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is really cool. Look at this, a release from crypto.com. So we think of the crypto.com's of the world as like crypto banks. So right. So there's sort of infrastructure that sit on top of chains. They are now supporting direct deposits and withdrawals to and from Arbitrum, a roll up.

• 35:46David Hoffman?

  Nice.

• 35:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  We said this is going to happen. It's starting to happen. Crypto.com. I believe they were in the top like five or something apps in the like the Apple iTunes. You know, this is Google Android I saw. This is the Android App Store, top five apps. So like crypto.com has a ton of customers and consumers. And now they are enabling layer two fiat withdrawals. This is fantastic to see, a much needed bridge into these ecosystems. Any thoughts here, David?

• 36:16David Hoffman?

  Yeah, there's going to be another race between all of these centralized companies to figure out how can they drop their users off onto much more user-friendly environments. We asked Brian Armstrong the same question on the podcast that comes out on Monday. Brian Armstrong on the podcast Monday, by the way. And so stay tuned for that.

• 36:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  Such a good episode. Oh, my God.

• 36:33David Hoffman?

  It was really good. Yeah. And so like, every single exchange needs to be playing this game right now and figuring out how to, and it's not that hard. Just do it. Just kiss the user. Put it on the side chain. Allow users to withdraw it. Like, what? I don't get why this is so hard.

• 36:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, Shia LaBeouf me, man. Just do it. Just do it. Just do it right now. Okay, exchanges? And look, we're going to support you if you do, right? The exchanges that I care about, it's like, this is a conversation we had with Brian Armstrong, just to tease that episode a little bit more, by the way. Premium members get that tomorrow, or today, if you're listening to it.

• 37:08David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 37:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  But we asked him the question of like, a couple of questions, I guess, related. One was, do you regret not building Coinbase chain? Was the question we asked him in the podcast. His answer to that was phenomenal. The other question we asked is, Binance is building a Binance chain, right? FTX is really partnering with Solana. It feels very much like most exchanges are playing this Web 2 game. Like, they onboard you to crypto and then they try to lock you into an ecosystem that they control, right? It's like, like the Facebook. We've seen this before. And then we kind of asked Brian Armstrong, are you going to be the crypto bank that's going

• 37:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  to build on open, credibly neutral protocols? That was the question we posed to him. For the answer to that question, you have to stay tuned to the podcast coming on Monday. But it's such a good answer, and it's so worthwhile. Anyway, I think very much the crypto banks and exchanges will be competing, and hopefully they are competing for consumers in a very Web 3 way that is positive, building on top of credibly neutral, open infrastructure. Layer 2 is one essential layer in that stack, and so maybe we see Coinbase support for Layer 2 next.

• 38:29David Hoffman?

  Ryan, I actually saw Brian Armstrong last night.

• 38:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  You did?

• 38:33David Hoffman?

  Yeah, he was, he was there. Yeah. And so again, so we were, I saw him yesterday, the day before we were recording with him in Zoom. And so I go up to him and was like, oh, hey, hey, Brian. And he looks at my name tag and the name tags, okay, this didn't be an NFC NYC, sorry. When you were, when you were in line and somebody was filling out your name tag for you, they were asking you like, what is your, what was your AIM screen name? Not your name. What was your AIM screen name? Which, and mine was Blackjack Davy. So like, I go up to Brian and I say, oh, hey, hey, Brian, like, hey, it's great. It's great to meet you. And he just, he looks at me and then looks at my name tag and goes, oh, hey Blackjack Davy. And like, no, Brian, it's David from, from Bankless.

• 39:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, my God.

• 39:10David Hoffman?

  We were just recording and it took him a while, like, it's a loud party. It took him a while to,

• 39:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  To hear you?

• 39:16David Hoffman?

  connect the dots. But yeah, you know, he did not recognize me at all.

• 39:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, the other thing, it was funny though, because we were joking with Brian on the podcast. We were like, he's like, look, we've hired so many people. Dunbar's number is like 150 people. I don't even know the employees that we hired on Coinbase. So, yeah, it's hard. It's hard when you meet so many people, like for that facial recognition software to keep up and like remember and put names with faces. And it's difficult, but.

• 39:42David Hoffman?

  Crypto, crypto conferences, there's the running joke that is just so impossible. And like, I will never knock him for not recognizing me because I do the same thing for so many people. It's like, dude, we've met like three times.

• 39:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like, I recognize people in the digital world by their Twitter avatars, honestly.

• 39:57David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 39:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's like, that is more recognizable to me. And I know some people change their Twitter avatars a lot. So that throws me off. But anyway, digital games, let's talk about this next one. Running PhoneOn, what is this? This is a product by Gridplus. What does it allow you to do, David?

• 40:12David Hoffman?

  Yeah, PhoneOn is a, I guess this new kind of primitive that is being built by Gridplus. Gridplus, again, has the Lattice hardware wallet. And what they have done is they have made a, what they are calling a PhoneOn transfer. Now, the details for this, as to how this works, I do not know, but I know the gist. And so the gist is that they sent Bitcoin, 100 satoshis of Bitcoin, from one Gridplus hardware wallet to another Gridplus hardware wallet. Not using Bitcoin, using the hardware. And so basically it mimics the properties of cash. It's like if I were to actually be able to give you, go and hand you physical Bitcoin. It's like that. And so Bitcoin was sent over the internet from one hardware wallet to another hardware wallet,

• 40:56David Hoffman?

  but not using the Bitcoin blockchain. And this is also works for Ethereum too. And so we are now able to mimic the properties of physical cash and then also send it over the internet, but not actually using the networks. It's, it's pretty crazy. Yeah. So like trust, like trustless bearer assets and private too. Privacy is a really important, because like I can just like DM you some like bytes of data in this Zoom chat. And that those bytes of data will be like a Bitcoin, a hundred satoshis of Bitcoin, right? And you can go redeem.

• 41:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  All this sounds magic and I don't know how it works, but it sounds super interesting. And I know GridPlus is very much in the cutting edge of hardware wallets. Like the most secure enclaves possible, which is super cool. I feel like I want to learn more after this, David. And if you want to learn more, there's a link in the show notes to check out some of the technical details of this. Also, DAO infrastructure tools. Man, where do you go? Is there one place you can go where you can see all of the infrastructure tools available for you? Now there is, it's called dowemasters.xyz. And you could look at all of the tools that are required to spin up a DAO. Discord, of course. Mintgate, Gardens, OpenLaw, Investing, Recruiting, Marketing, Fundraising, Payroll, all, Community Management,

• 42:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  all of these various tools in one place, kind of cool to see.

• 42:17David Hoffman?

  This is all the infrastructure I wish I had in 2017, 2018. Oh, I wish, I'd like to make a token. And then I would like how to mint an ERC20 token. Oh, it's gotten so much better. Like I've always wanted just like drag and drop, push button Ethereum smart contract infrastructure. And this is that. And not only that, but a bunch of infrastructure around that infrastructure too. So.

• 42:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is that.

• 42:40David Hoffman?

  The golden age of infrastructure right now.

• 42:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's gotten better, but it's still going to get so much more better. Like better, like better. It's like. It's going to be another 10x a year from now in terms of the tooling we'll have. So stay tuned for that, guys. Also, stay tuned, Axie Infinity, continue to crank it out. They just released on their Ronin sidechain, something called Katana, which is a DEX for AEXs tokens and SLP tokens tradable with ETH. David, what's going on here?

• 43:12David Hoffman?

  Yeah, Axie Infinity, famously the Axie Nation, has their total entire GDP on the Ronin sidechain, but it didn't have a DEX. And so if you wanted to swap stuff, you would have to take it back to Ethereum. So they just built their own DEX on their Ronin sidechain. So it's like Axie Infinity Nation's got its own New York Stock Exchange natively on their sidechain. And so that's probably a huge upgrade for all the Axie Infinity players out there that don't have to go back to Ethereum to start using the DeFi there.

• 43:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  God, look at this video, man. These Axies are so cute. The cutest creatures I've ever seen. Digital creatures, that is. Optimism. What are they doing? EVM equivalence. We talked about that a little bit next week, but they're releasing that as a release in probably just like seven days or so.

• 43:55David Hoffman?

  That's exactly right. Optimistic Ethereum coming to optimism itself. They're upgrading their own system, going into EVM equivalence. They released a fantastic blog post. If you want to understand EVM equivalence and Alpha Lake, you do, you do want to understand EVM equivalence. So go check out that blog post. It puts it into really simple language. There is a fundamental difference between EVM compatibility and EVM equivalence. EVM equivalence allows optimism to ride the network effects of Ethereum. All the infrastructure tooling, the dev tooling, the node tooling, everything that's already been built out just gets to be immediately repurposed for optimism. And that is their big competitive advantage. So

• 44:37David Hoffman?

  congrats to the optimism team. We're going EVM equivalent in just about seven days.

• 44:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it's really interesting because I think the real chain wars are actually going to be the chain wars between Layer 2s that will need to carve out their place and carve out their niche. And I feel like our optimism stake is we are going to be the most Ethereum-aligned rollup of them all, basically. So other rollups might adopt, you know, other technical implementations. They might even go to other chains, but optimism is really aiming to be an extension of Ethereum, which is a really neat niche and is something that I expect they'll be able to carve out quite successfully. David, let's move to the raises of the week. Every week in crypto, there's always a massive amount of raises. We can't cover them all anymore, but we do try to cover some of the big ones.

• 45:26David Hoffman?

  This one's different, though.

• 45:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. So what is this? DCG, this is Digital Currency Group. So Barry Silbert's firm, of course, you might know many of his products. CoinDesk is one of his products. Another one of his products is GBDC and all of the grayscale funds that you might buy in a brokerage.

• 45:45David Hoffman?

  All grayscale. Yeah, grayscale's the thing.

• 45:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 45:48David Hoffman?

  The whole thing.

• 45:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  So what are they doing here? What's this raise?

• 45:51David Hoffman?

  Just raising a casual $700 million.

• 45:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay.

• 45:56David Hoffman?

  Yeah. $700 million at a $10 billion valuation.

• 46:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, well, 10x unicorn.

• 46:03David Hoffman?

  Yeah, this is the second largest crypto raise ever. I actually don't know what the first is, but I mean, this is just absolutely massive. Naturally, SoftBank is behind this because they have all the currency in the world. So yeah, congratulations to Barry Silbert. This is absolutely massive raise.

• 46:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Weird headline, though, I think. I don't know who gave them this moniker. DCG wants to be crypto's standard oil. Standard oil? We don't want standard oil. We don't want robber barons in the crypto industry.

• 46:34David Hoffman?

  That's a little weird.

• 46:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I don't know where that's coming from, but whatever, metaphors aside.

• 46:39David Hoffman?

  Quick facts about Barry Silbert. Like, he was originally super supportive of Ethereum Classic for some reason. He put a ton of Ethereum Classic on his treasury. I don't know why. Also, he's also, previously, this is no longer the case from what I've gathered, but there was a conflicts of interest between Coinbase and Digital Currency, or CoinDesk and Digital Currency Group because they didn't put up a firewall between the news arm and the fund arm of the same company. So that's raised some eyebrows. Overall, like... A what is it called? A conglomerate, I guess, is what this is. It's an empire. The DCG is an absolute massive empire.

• 47:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Standard Oil. It doesn't not fit, right? Yeah. And they're definitely raking in cash. I think they've done a lot for crypto adoption. I'll totally give them that. And yeah, I think overall they're, they're, they're healthy. They're a good actor. I think they definitely skew a bit more banker, old world, Bitcoin maximalist type. But still, I mean, this is all part of the, the adoption story. And I mean, wow, $10 billion valuation. That's got to raise some eyebrows. SoftBank jumping in as well. This is another one that's, that's pretty big. The firm backed by Alan Howard, which remember he's the massive hedge fund manager

• 47:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  that is also backing Eric Peters' firm. We talked to Eric Peters from One River Capital Management a couple of weeks ago on the podcast. Anyway, they just closed $100 million investment in a major metaverse fund with our friend Andrew Steinwald, who a year ago, about a year ago at this time, came on the Bankless Podcast. Andrew has his own podcast, had his own firm. It was a very small firm at the time. And I'm going to butcher the name, David. Can you say the name for me?

• 48:30David Hoffman?

  Yeah, Sofmion.

• 48:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Sofmion. Okay, thank you. Sofmion. And at the time, he was on a podcast with, he and who was it? Jake?

• 48:39David Hoffman?

  It was Jake, Jake Berkman.

• 48:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  Jake Berkman. And he basically gave the pitch for NFTs in the metaverse. And he was like, guys, you're not going to believe us when we say this, but NFTs are going to be bigger than DeFi. And we'd just come off of DeFi summer and it felt like very much like-

• 48:56David Hoffman?

  Both Ryan and I were like, what?

• 48:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, like, yeah, eventually, you know, in 10 years or something, sure. Like, I did believe him, but you know, I thought it would take a longer time for it to play out. And to be fair, he probably did too. Well-

• 49:11David Hoffman?

  He definitely, he definitely thought it was, it did not happen as, or it happened way faster than he thought it would.

• 49:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, so now his firm just got $100 million. In funding, his fund. So congrats to Andrew. Congrats to the people preaching NFTs.

• 49:25David Hoffman?

  Andrew, you were right. We were wrong.

• 49:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  And like, I think a lot of the people who were right about NFTs and the metaverse a year ago are now reaping the rewards on this side. It's like market validation. Now you get $100 million in your fund. Go invest for us. So congrats Andrew Steinwald and his entire team. And congrats for being right on the thesis. It's really cool to see.

• 49:50David Hoffman?

  Yep. And again, like believing in NFTs before there was any real market validation about them, right? Crypto punks were still like below two ether, right? Like there was no excitement about NFTs. They were just a concept. And he believed in it before anyone was actually bullish on anything about NFTs.

• 50:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  You know what? Something really gets me excited, gets me going is like investors with conviction. Okay. There are so many people on YouTube and I feel like in Twitter, some of these are traders, self proclaimed traders, but some of these are like crypto influencers and like investors in the space. And they don't really invest with any conviction. They don't really have a long-term thesis. They just play on whatever's popular in the narrative, right? Three months in, six months in. Okay. I hate that. Like it's just not, it's not something that I gravitate towards. Like I like the Andrew Steinwalds of the world. I like the Olaf Carlson wees in 2013. I like the

• 50:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Brian Armstrongs in 2012 who were like, oh, I see what this can become. I have conviction. When everyone else is going in a different direction, no one else believes, I'm going to put my flag in the ground. I'm going to build something cool and I'm going to like invest in this space and build in this space with conviction. Those are my favorite people in crypto because all of them are playing long-term games and you should go and follow what they do at every single step. And I think Andrew is one of those people. Have we said enough good things about Andrew? I wonder if he's listening.

• 51:18David Hoffman?

  Andrew, we like you.

• 51:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, what's, uh, what's next, David? What's this one?

• 51:24David Hoffman?

  Sandbox. Yeah, this is the company that Snoop Dogg is associated with. So that's how Snoop Dogg came into the world of crypto with like partnering with the Sandbox, Metaverse type avatar-ish, second life type game. Haven't played, it hasn't been opened yet, but you can build stuff on it so far. Just raised $93 million again by SoftBank. So SoftBank really putting, injecting a ton of cash into this space.

• 51:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, they just raised a couple of months ago, $140 million? I don't know what the valuation is. This particular article doesn't say. It's got to be unicorn status already. Building on Ethereum, which is interesting. I know you've, you've taken a look at the, the tech. You think it looks cool, but I think a lot of this comes off of the, the Facebook meta pivot, right? Facebook, the biggest social media, fifth largest company, we're just looking at that in the world, is now pivoting to the Metaverse and Sandbox has a SAN token. Has that, how, what has that done on this news?

• 52:23David Hoffman?

  It's done some things.

• 52:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  Some big things.

• 52:25David Hoffman?

  So yeah, it's been hanging around like 75 cents. And then as soon as the Facebook meta pivot, SAN just went from 75 cents to like three plus dollars. And then at the same time, it also raised, you know, you know, $93 million. So good things, good tailwinds for this, for this Sandbox company.

• 52:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Geez, market cap, close to $3 billion. And this is just a leg up. We've seen that ever since the Facebook announcement and a lot of like, anything that is classified as the Metaverse as a token, that's a narrative that is happening in DeFi tokens right now. Another narrative that doesn't get old is the narrative of.

• 53:01David Hoffman?

  Get a job.

• 53:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Getting a job in crypto, of course. Time for the, this is the time when we remind you that there are all sorts of fantastic job opportunities in crypto. All of these fantastic protocols and companies are hiring. We have a bankless job board where we try to consolidate as much as possible, some of the coolest opportunities. This week, head of growth at Dex Guru, a technical lead at Daftly. Incorporated accountant, accountant at Smart DeFi, product manager at Smart DeFi as well, head of Ethereum research at Immutable. David, you had Immutable on the podcast earlier this week. Also, head of tokens, community manager at Dexable, a lead engineer at hats.finance, community manager at eAgronom. Did I get it right this week?

• 53:47David Hoffman?

  Yeah, nice job, nice job.

• 53:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  That was like four weeks in.

• 53:49David Hoffman?

  Also, I don't know if that's correct, but that's just how I do it.

• 53:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, that's how David has always said it. Also, they're looking for a CTO, eAgronom, senior backend engineer at Smart DeFi, blockchain technical CTO interim role at Merit, community manager at Argon, founding blockchain engineer at Highlight. Oh my God, I'm almost out of breath. Senior software engineer at Popcorn and a community lead at Popcorn as well. I rattled off just the top ones that I could list, but there are dozens more on the job board. Sign up for that and make sure you check this weekly for opportunities in crypto that could fit your skillset.

• 54:24David Hoffman?

  Yeah, as these raises have come in, in the last few weeks that we keep on talking about, raise after raise after raise, like it was no wonder there's so many jobs available on the job board.

• 54:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  We just raised $700 million. We're a digital currency group. I think we need to hire some people to spend that on. They gotta be doing some of that, right? Where else is the money going with all of these raises? Yeah, that's where it's going, folks. All right, David, let's get to the news. The big one of the week is the Facebook Metaverse pivot. They're changing, they're rebranding. No longer Facebook, they are now called Meta. That is the company name. That is the ticker symbol. That is the meta.com website. A social technology company is what they're saying in their press release. David, what's happening here?

• 55:09David Hoffman?

  I like this little graphic where they have like WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, all of their products, and then it forms into the M of the Meta. Basically, I think, we talked about this a few times, where like sometimes people start building stuff and they don't know explicitly what they're building towards until they actually get there. So I think the idea here is that Facebook has been building out parts of the Metaverse in different little pieces, like the Facebook is like the first virtual online social. Media thing that really took the world by storm. It was the first iteration of, you know, V1 Metaverse. Add in Instagram, add in WhatsApp, add in all these social elements now with Oculus VR.

• 55:49David Hoffman?

  I think this pivot makes a ton of sense, right? They are already making like virtual online experiences in different silos and now they're just branding this under the single umbrella. Also doing a fantastic job of aligning their branding with the Metaverse, which is getting a just absolutely ton of attention as a word, even though no one still knows what it actually is.

• 56:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, I feel like we know what it is.

• 56:11David Hoffman?

  Yeah, we do know what it is. We all, yeah, yeah.

• 56:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  We have some direction there.

• 56:15David Hoffman?

  Yeah. But, uh, I mean, obviously like there's basically nothing that Facebook and Zuck can do that has positive light on it. Like, sure, you can call it the Metaverse. I'm gonna call it the Zuckverse. It's the Zuckverse.

• 56:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, deservedly so. I mean, they have, um, it feels very much like use their command and control to abuse users in the past. Maybe abuse even ecosystem participants.

• 56:40David Hoffman?

  Countries, entire countries.

• 56:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it does feel like Zuck deserves, maybe Facebook deserves a lot of the flak that they get. But Chris Dixon pointed out in our podcast, like he is one of the only original big web two founders that are still actively involved in making bets and managing their companies, right? It's just kind of Zuckerberg. I guess Jack Dorsey and Zuckerberg, but like the Google founders, you know, uh, they're gone. Microsoft, of course, like they're gone. All of the original big tech companies are mostly gone. I guess Bezos is still there. I don't know why Dixon didn't include them. But it enables somebody like Zuck to make a big bet. And that's what this is. This is a big bet on the future. It's gonna cost a lot of money for them to get here into the Metaverse.

• 57:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  Uh, and there is so many different takes on this, right? So like, one take I felt like was, um, the political take, right? Maybe political Twitter was very much like, oh yeah, this is just Zuck trying to deflect from his bad PR, right? Everyone hates the name Facebook, so now you're becoming meta. Okay, you know, whatever. I think crypto Twitter, much of crypto Twitter saw this as a co-opting of crypto, a co-opting of the Metaverse. Yeah, okay, you're trying to duplicate our thing, but just make it decentralized or centralized.

• 57:58David Hoffman?

  Decentralized.

• 58:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Brian Armstrong's take was interesting, which he was very much like, you know, Zuck knows what he's doing. He's smart. He's founder led. He actually believes that somewhat like, like I think I do, maybe you do too, David, that this is going to force Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook to build on top of crypto, right? It's like in the metaverse, where do you get your property rights layer? We can't have Meta, Facebook be the property rights layer of this entire economy. This is a universe that we're building. So where does that come from? Well, it has to come from NFTs, tokens, settlement on systems like Ethereum. So maybe this is actually just Zuckerberg kind of capitulating and being like, okay,

• 58:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  I'll build my universe, right? I'll own the front end, but I'm going to build it on this open standard, which is crypto. And maybe that's a super bullish thing for crypto. What's, uh, what's your take on all of these things?

• 58:56David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I, I, I'm going to go with Occam's razor here. I don't think there's much of a crypto story here at all. Um, I, I think this is just about, cause there was a video I saw of, um, the whole like presentation of the pivot and what they were going to do with it. And everything was cut out for it, except for the words experiences. And so it's just Zuckerberg saying experiences, experiences, experiences over and over. The word experiences was built into this thing. I truly think it's more, more of web two stuff, less about crypto, property rights, NFTs, stuff like that. And more just literally about like, it's a, a big pivot into Oculus, into VR, into the online social experiences. Uh, and so may like, maybe the crypto part does come, but I don't think that's the specific strategy

• 59:41David Hoffman?

  that's being communicated here. I could be wrong.

• 59:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, no, I, I, I think there's some truth to what you said. I just think the reason it's bullish crypto is because I think, um,

• 59:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Many people in Silicon Valley, no, it's like, it's more than that. So many people in Silicon Valley, if you ask them what their, we have a different definition of the metaverse than them. Okay? If you ask them what their definition of the metaverse is, it's experience. It's augmented reality. It's virtual reality. It's this new realm that you can go to. Okay? The crypto definition of the metaverse is strong property rights. It's self-sovereignty. It's like the difference between New York City, a neighborhood where you can own private property and set up commercial shops and business, and Disneyland, which is an experience. And where are you actually going to set, yeah, it's manicured. Where are you actually going to create

• 1:00:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  a real organic digital universe? It's not in Disneyland. You don't build a house and raise your kids in Disneyland. Okay? And that if the metaverse is going to be a human experience, if it's going to be a real organic thing, then it has to have property rights. It has to feel real. It has to like live. So that's why I'm kind of of the mind that, yeah, Zuck thinks it's about experience, maybe, because that's the only hammer in their tool belts. But what this really is about is like, they can build the front end on top of this thing. I don't care. They'll be forced to settle on top of crypto money systems and crypto property rights systems. So that's why I am, I guess, bullish. And I do think that there is a crypto story here underlying, even though they don't see it yet.

• 1:01:21David Hoffman?

  Sure. Yeah, I do like that take. You said that they think it's all about experiences and we think it's all about property rights. And I will say, when you have property rights, you also have the culture come out of the property rights, like CryptoPunks, Bored Apes, like property rights about those things. And that is also experiences. And those experiences are vibes that I've been feeling all week here at NFT NYC. And you're not going to be able to, that's a bottom up vibe, not a top down experience. And so that is the difference.

• 1:01:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's, it's, it, yeah, it's, it's totally right. And it's like, back to what we were talking about. It's like, let's make the internet weird again. The internet is like boring and sterile and not weird. Let's make it weird again. I think that's what crypto is doing. Nike is getting on it too, dude.

• 1:02:05David Hoffman?

  There's no risk in Disneyland, but there's a bunch of risk in NFTs.

• 1:02:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  There's no risk in Disneyland? You can't get kidnapped to Disneyland, huh? It is locked down, very secure, very safe. Nike is heading to the metaverse as well. They are filing trademarks in the metaverse and they are hiring metaverse designers. So here's an interesting thought for you, okay? It's like, all of the growth for the mega brands, particularly the premium luxury brands, is going to be growth in the digital product space rather than the physical product space over the next 10 years. Remember when we had Kathy Wood on, we were like, well, like, for the banks, you know, they could start doing more in crypto, but it would just be such a marginal, small part of their business because they're so large.

• 1:02:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  And she was like, oh, that's where you're wrong. Chris Berninski said this too, because it's not about the proportion of total revenue, it's about the proportion of future growth. All right? So, all of the other business lines could be stagnant, and if you have 90% of the growth on the digital side, on the crypto side, then the banks are going to start taking notice and capitulating. I feel like that's going to happen with brands too. It's like Nike, you've got all this IP, you've got all this fanbase, this brand equity, all these athletes, how are you actually going to grow your revenue over the next decade? And the massive amount of growth is going to come from digital products rather than physical products. So, they're going to start piling in, David. That's what I see here.

• 1:03:34David Hoffman?

  Yeah, and the whole Facebook pivoting to meta, I think there's a lot of companies behind the scenes doing virtual goods, metaverse type things, and this is just, again, going to turn this into an absolute rat race of who can be the most metaverse the fastest.

• 1:03:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  These are awesome shoes, by the way. What are these?

• 1:03:51David Hoffman?

  Like virtual Nikes.

• 1:03:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  God, they look awesome. I would.

• 1:03:54David Hoffman?

  I don't think, I don't get it.

• 1:03:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  I want these. I want these.

• 1:03:57David Hoffman?

  What?

• 1:03:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  In my life.

• 1:03:58David Hoffman?

  Nikes.

• 1:03:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  How do you know that? Have you ever seen my shoes?

• 1:04:01David Hoffman?

  I have never seen, I have never seen.

• 1:04:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  You've even seen the bottom half of me.

• 1:04:05David Hoffman?

  I, uh, it's weird when I do.

• 1:04:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  I'll show you my shoes sometime. I do have a pair of Nikes. Uh, not that cool, though. Um, yeah, I, I said this take, but that's the take. The, the, the virtual goods are gonna dwarf the physical goods before long. Microsoft getting in on the action too. Microsoft CEO, it's the biggest company in the world, apparently. Uh, the metaverse will bring real world, the real world into any digital space. So they're going all in. They plan to introduce 90 new services and updates in three major areas, including the metaverse. You can absolutely expect this to do things in gaming, of course, they said. No, no surprise there. They own the Xbox. So are they just gonna fast follow Facebook into this thing, David?

• 1:04:48David Hoffman?

  Uh, yeah, yeah, everyone, everyone, everyone's going to the metaverse. We're all going, see you there.

• 1:04:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  See you in the metaverse. What's Reddit doing, David? This is super exciting. This is, uh, an engineer who just joined their team, going to the metaverse. Um, three words, he says, decentralize, period, social, period, media. What does this mean?

• 1:05:08David Hoffman?

  This is huge. Okay, Reddit is, I think Reddit is on the cusp of perhaps one of the biggest pivots of all time. Uh, from a web two company to a web three company, not just a little bit, but going heads first. Uh, so we know that Reddit has always been curious with Ethereum. They had the Reddit scaling bake-off competition forever ago. Arbitrum won it. Uh, and so Reddit is now using Arbitrum to scale out NFTs and tokens inside of the Reddit platform. And so this, uh, this, this thread and this, the, the, uh, runner, uh, the writer of this thread has the ultrasound money, uh, icons in his handle. Um, just wanted to throw that out there.

• 1:05:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:05:44David Hoffman?

  Uh, and so he makes, he makes a fantastic thread. So, so let's go through it. Your karma points will soon be tokens. Think community-based decisions, forking subreddits in disagreements, which is. Oh my God, that's so cool. That's so amazingly cool. First off, like incentivizing good content via valid contributions. That's amazing. But also, a very dark part about Bitcoin's history and crypto's history at large, is that the Bitcoin had a civil war inside of the our Bitcoin subreddit, and for they forked it off into our BTC and our Bitcoin, because there was this, I can't remember his name, but Ahmad, Ahmad subreddit that was like silencing anyone that wanted big blocks,

• 1:06:25David Hoffman?

  and only for small blocks. And there was a massive, massive civil war that ultimately created the block, the block, they forked, block sized wars, the fork wars, right? And it was just a conspiracy and espionage. It was crazy back then. Some of the stories, Griff Green told, told me some of these stories in the layer zero. And like, if we can just figure out how to like, in like how we fork our blockchain, we can just fork our subreddits, like with more like instantiated assets inside of them that go and have governance votes and allow the communities to have voice, that is amazing. And that's exactly what DAOs do, when tokens do. And so I think, I think the, what this could become is one of the coolest things of all time. The threat continues. Reddit

• 1:07:09David Hoffman?

  has 500 million monthly active users. When we all pull this off, we will onboard 500 million Web 2 users into Web 3, and then there is no going back. We are all gonna make it. And then he just continues saying crypto culture things. It's time to take back control, make the internet truly open and break free, give us each ownership of everything. And so I think this could be one of the most groundbreaking pivots of all time.

• 1:07:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I do too, David. I'm super bullish on this. Like we said in the last episode, Reddit actually has, they don't monetize their user base very well, right? And maybe that's because they don't really prey on their user base, the way other social media platforms kind of do through advertising, through like mining them for all of this information. It's a bit more open, bit more free, but as a result, it's not as profitable. Well, this gives them incentive to jump into Web 3 first, because they don't have to cannibalize a large existing business model. There's just opportunity. They don't have much to lose. There's just Opportunity on the other side. And the thing is, the technology is here too. So this thread goes on to say, Reddit has partnered with Arbitrum, which you mentioned, created our own separate instance of Arbitrum,

• 1:08:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  community points for two subreddits. 80,000 users are already on Ring B testnet and our Arbitrum network. So remember Arbitrum when we had them on? They have Arbitrum one, which they're rolling out, which is live right now. But Arbitrum doesn't have to be just one rollup, okay? You can use the Arbitrum code and create your own rollup. And that's what Reddit is doing here. They're just forking, they're creating a separate instance of a rollup that all settles on top of Ethereum. So super exciting to see an engineer talk about the technology being ready for this too. Overall, this is just ultra, ultra bullish, web two companies becoming web three companies. They have everything to gain.

• 1:08:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  As Chris Dixon said, web three is ownership. He actually quotes him in this thread. And I mean, man, web two's

• 1:09:06David Hoffman?

  It's great.

• 1:09:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  Web two's peaked, man. I like, I really feel like that.

• 1:09:11David Hoffman?

  Absolutely.

• 1:09:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is, uh, is this the Wall Street? New York Times. New York Times says they are hiring a crypto and fintech reporter. Must be able to explain what web three is. Apply here. New York Times.

• 1:09:23David Hoffman?

  Look at that.

• 1:09:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  Getting in on the action too.

• 1:09:25David Hoffman?

  Also going web three? Everyone's going with three. Everyone's going to the metaverse. We're all going there.

• 1:09:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  They want to talk about it anyway. So, uh, super cool stuff to see. David, let's talk about some NFT action. You saw some of it.

• 1:09:36David Hoffman?

  Loss of NFT action.

• 1:09:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  This week. Yeah. What's this Quentin Tarantino thing?

• 1:09:40David Hoffman?

  Yeah, Quentin Tarantino, seven uncut scenes from Pulp Fiction released as NFTs. So he was at NFT NYC on a panel with some of our fellow like community members, a coin artist, G money, Quentin Tarantino, all sitting in chairs together, talking about NFTs. That's a, that's a big name getting into NFTs. So NFTs, like, got another one.

• 1:10:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, got got another one. What's your favorite Quentin Tarantino movie, by the way? Do you watch any?

• 1:10:06David Hoffman?

  Oof, oof. Oh, I was not prepared for that question. Um, I, I, can I defer to next week?

• 1:10:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, you go watch a few and we'll talk about it next week. Go watch Inglourious Basterds.

• 1:10:17David Hoffman?

  Oh, Inglourious Basterds is a good one, yeah. Oh, no, it's Django Unchained. It's Django Unchained.

• 1:10:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Uh, that's mine. That's mine, dude. Yeah, totally. It's easy for me. I love that movie. Um, all right, let's talk about McRib, David. McRib is issuing an NFT, okay? Uh, top signal, uh, global adoption, new paradigm?

• 1:10:39David Hoffman?

  It's it's top top signals all the way down. Um, yeah, it it's just like a rotating like trading card, but it's a McRib. Uh, McRib has this like cult following McDonald's. It's a pretty big deal that McDonald's is releasing an NFT of a McRib. Uh, again, just legitimizing the technology, like, hey, someone's gonna buy it.

• 1:10:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  Have you ever eaten a McRib?

• 1:11:00David Hoffman?

  I have never, and I've never eaten a McRib.

• 1:11:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  I've never eaten a McRib. Do you know what it's made out of? Because I don't.

• 1:11:05David Hoffman?

  I've heard it's made out of a bunch of BS that I don't want to know.

• 1:11:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  So it's not an actual rib?

• 1:11:11David Hoffman?

  Like fake filler.

• 1:11:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  And like the ripples in it are not actual, like, it's not an actual rib, right? Like, it's just a

• 1:11:17David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 1:11:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Synthesized rib?

• 1:11:19David Hoffman?

  Fake rib, fake rib.

• 1:11:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Fake rib, okay. Well, I'll probably enjoy it more in NFT form.

• 1:11:22David Hoffman?

  Real NFT, though.

• 1:11:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  Real NFT. That's great. All right. Well, I don't know if we peaked or not, but McRib is on the blockchain. So, uh, that's great. Um, how about The Matrix, dude? That, um, actually, yeah, let's let's skip to that. We'll get back to this. So The Matrix, the new movie coming out, they are actually issuing NFTs as well, right? PFP NFTs?

• 1:11:44David Hoffman?

  Profile picture NFTs, a hundred thousand of them, which is crazy.

• 1:11:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  On a side chain, right?

• 1:11:51David Hoffman?

  You on a side chain, yeah, on on a Ethereum linked side chain, not not a roll up, just a side chain. Uh, it's called Palm. Uh, but yeah, a hundred thousand profile pictures for the Matrix avatar. Is this the new style of marketing? It's like, oh, yeah.

• 1:12:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  It is.

• 1:12:04David Hoffman?

  Yeah, it's like, oh, our movie's coming out. Let's try and get everyone to wear our avatars as the movie gets released. If people get hyped about it, right? So that's pretty cool.

• 1:12:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  And the numbers here, you pointed out, David, a hundred thousand, that's big for crypto, right? Because usually these PFPs are like 10,000 or something is pretty common. But like, that's pretty small for all of the moviegoers who see The Matrix, right? What are the box office sales?

• 1:12:27David Hoffman?

  Millions and millions of people that go and will see it box opening weekend.

• 1:12:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's pretty small and it's, it's very easy for them to re-release this digital NFT merchandise. I wouldn't be surprised in the future, David, this is successful, every single release. We're certainly seeing, last week, we talked about Disney getting on it. Every single movie release, you're going to see NFT digital merchandise that you can purchase on top of this too.

• 1:12:49David Hoffman?

  Here, here's like a possibility that I could see happening. You know how Twitter is integrating verifiable NFTs?

• 1:12:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:55David Hoffman?

  Well, what if you get an airdrop for verifying your Matrix NFT and having it on your profile picture for like two weeks? Because they want you to do that to market the movie. And if you do that and like market the movie, then you get an airdrop after the fact. Like imagine those games that could be played.

• 1:13:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, marketers are going to come up with basically every, every sort of iteration of what you're talking about, David. Yeah, I could totally see that playing out. What's interesting too is in China, the tech giants are saying yes on NFTs, but no on cryptocurrencies, right? We've sort of seen this in the US where web two companies are like, we're not going to do crypto payments. That's a little scary, but NFTs, oh yeah, easy. Let's add some features, you know, TikTok, Twitter, all of these things. We're seeing that in China play out too.

• 1:13:37David Hoffman?

  Yeah, from, think about this from a regulatory perspective, like it's the same thing, like, no, get the currencies out of here. But NFTs, like, sure, whatever.

• 1:13:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, sure. We're not threatened by that. We're not threatened by your.

• 1:13:46David Hoffman?

  I don't care about JPEGs.

• 1:13:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  By your Axie.

• 1:13:49David Hoffman?

  It's a Trojan horse.

• 1:13:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh my God, that's what I was about to say.

• 1:13:51David Hoffman?

  It's the biggest Trojan horse.

• 1:13:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's the biggest because without cryptocurrencies, NFTs actually don't work. Like, did you know NFTs are actually secured by the cryptocurrencies on the chain, right? Like, that is the security mechanism, the value of cryptocurrency. That is a security mechanism for NFTs. And if they're not secured by cryptocurrency, then they're not NFTs. They're just entries in a centralized database. So tricked you. We tricked you guys.

• 1:14:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  You are, by adopting NFTs, you are adopting cryptocurrencies, maybe without knowing it. So thank you very much.

• 1:14:27David Hoffman?

  The NFT rug pull. I love it.

• 1:14:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Let's talk about this. Was this a rug pull or what? There was some CryptoPunk that sold for $500 million.

• 1:14:38David Hoffman?

  $500 million. For FYI, I think the biggest CryptoPunk sale ever was something like $7 or $8 million, something very, very high, but not $500 million. So what the hell happened? Turns out this guy wrote a smart contract, guy or girl, unknown person, wrote a smart contract that when the smart contract would receive the Ether, it would immediately send it back. And so what would, what happens is this guy put his CryptoPunk into a smart contract, borrowed a flash loan from AVE, just borrowed all the, all money possible. And a flash loan, a flash loan, unless you borrow all the money that's in the vault, so long as you also return it in the same transaction, which is why you actually don't have to put up any collateral to do a flash loan.

• 1:15:19David Hoffman?

  So this person just borrowed $532 million to buy a CryptoPunk. Once in that same block, the CryptoPunk was bought, the contract returned all the money. So this person basically bought their own CryptoPunk for themselves for, it wasn't a sale. They just, they just.

• 1:15:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's like a wash trade kind of thing, right?

• 1:15:35David Hoffman?

  It's a wash trade, right? And they, but they did set like the all time high sale of a CryptoPunk ever. And so what happened was that the CryptoPunk bought that goes out, the notifications that a CryptoPunk was sold. One bot goes out and say, somebody bought a CryptoPunk for $532 million. Everyone started freaking out. It's not even that cool of a CryptoPunk. What the hell's going on? And then they realized that this guy just made like a circular loop and it caused a bunch of storm. But yeah, it's good meme, good joke, good riff. Now we're all talking about it.

• 1:16:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's, yeah, that's the thing. We're all talking about it. And we're all getting educated on flash loans. Because this one person, I don't know who this is, Ryan Patrick Kerlin. He says, who the hell gives out $532 million loan to an individual even for an instant? Who does that? And then Scott Lewis is like, uh, the Ethereum virtual machine does that. It's magic. That's how we do it. And so what just happened?

• 1:16:25David Hoffman?

  We do it with code.

• 1:16:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, this guy washed traded. It wasn't a real sale, right? But like. These numbers, the amount of money that we're talking about gets headlines. And then those headlines further propel this conversation and mainstream to start learning what flash loans are, what Ethereum is, what NFTs actually are, and what this transaction was really about. So, kind of cool, kind of genius, I guess, from a PR perspective.

• 1:16:51David Hoffman?

  Ryan, since you're the tax optimizer between the two of us, is this a taxable event?

• 1:16:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, my God. I don't even, huh, that's, you just ruined the rest of the episode. I'm gonna be thinking about this the whole time.

• 1:17:04David Hoffman?

  $200 million in taxes?

• 1:17:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  No, I mean, if you're moving from one wallet that you own to another wallet you own, it's not a taxable event. There you go. Tax optimizer answer for the week.

• 1:17:13David Hoffman?

  Thank you, sir.

• 1:17:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  No taxable event, David. You could do that. It's fine.

• 1:17:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  Check with your CPA. No, this was financial advice, tax advice. Bitcoin stuff. Man, quarterbacks sure do love getting their payment in Bitcoin. This is NFL star Aaron Rodgers. He is of the Green Bay Packers. He is getting some of his salary in Bitcoin. What's going on?

• 1:17:37David Hoffman?

  Yep. It's not the first time that that's happened. Some NBA players have also done this. Some people just want to be paid in Bitcoin. And players, like, they have a lot of money, right? And so they like to, they like to play in the money games, too. They play in the markets, but, and they like crypto markets, right?

• 1:17:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  Just saves you a step, I guess. Rather than buying Bitcoin, you get paid in Bitcoin. You don't have to do that step.

• 1:17:57David Hoffman?

  Good marketing.

• 1:17:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  You still have to pay your taxes in fiat, unfortunately, but, you know.

• 1:18:01David Hoffman?

  That's true.

• 1:18:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. They won't be changing that anytime soon. Coinbase-

• 1:18:03David Hoffman?

  Maybe that's why they want to be paid in Bitcoin, so they can just, like, get it immediately, you know?

• 1:18:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I guess so, yeah. I see that. You know, I guess I'd rather be paid in crypto in a lot of cases. Coinbase is doing Bitcoin loans now. So, the SEC shut down Coinbase Lend, right? Well, threatened them, and Coinbase decided to withdraw.

• 1:18:23David Hoffman?

  Said, okay.

• 1:18:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  But Coinbase Borrow? Yeah, that's what this is? That's okay? So, what is this product, David? What's it doing?

• 1:18:30David Hoffman?

  Yeah, well, famously, you can't do DeFi on Bitcoin. That's not what Bitcoin's for. You can take your Bitcoin on to Ethereum and then do the DeFi stuff there. Or now you can also take your Bitcoin to Coinbase and get your loans, your Bitcoin collateralized loans from Coinbase. And this is kind of how we've always said Bitcoin is going to like scale out as a currency. It's going to use crypto banks and that's what's going on here. So $1 million loans from Coinbase on your Bitcoin collateral.

• 1:18:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, that's cool. It's interesting that they can borrow, but they can't lend according to the SEC regulations.

• 1:19:00David Hoffman?

  Completely nonsensical.

• 1:19:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  One half of BlockFi, but we talked about that with Brian Armstrong too. You can listen to that on Monday. What is the Biden administration doing next? They might be putting stablecoins under federal supervision. If you don't do that to Congress, Biden administration says, we will, we will do that. What, what's your take on this message coming from the executive branch?

• 1:19:23David Hoffman?

  Relatively sensical, sensical regulation. What I got from this is that the stablecoin issuers need to be regulated as banks. That makes sense. The other thing that's also really nice about this is that Biden is saying, hey, Congress, hey legislators, the people that were elected, please do legislation, which I like way more than the SEC, which I did not elect to impose regulation upon me.

• 1:19:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  What about this or we will part though, David?

• 1:19:49David Hoffman?

  Yeah, or I think it's by or executive order, which like, yeah, okay.

• 1:19:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, they might do it anyway.

• 1:19:54David Hoffman?

  Yeah. But also it's Congress. So like, don't hold your breath. Like Congress doesn't go very fast.

• 1:20:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it's doesn't go fast at all, especially these days. Jake Trivinsky, I think, had a, had a, had his take here. He's a great, you know, crypto lawyer. Somebody's been on Bankless many times. There's lots to pick apart in the new stablecoin report. This is a report that was put out, I believe by Treasury, I think, that's kind of related to that headline that we just read. But the TLDR of this is basically Congress has to, has to act in order to act, enact the new legislation. Right? And so I think what the Treasury is saying is basically like, Hey, we'd like to do some things, but we really can't unless Congress acts.

• 1:20:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  And Jake's point is like prompt action from this Congress on anything is unlikely, let alone on something like stablecoins. Like, this is not that big of a deal on the congressional agenda. They can't get any of the the main initiatives passed that they that the Congress wants to get passed. Are they going to do anything with stablecoins? No. So this is kind of a, I guess, a sigh of relief for people in the industry who are worried about some harsh action being taken against stablecoins. That might be a bit, you know, we talked to Brian Quintez, Quintens. He talked about like, you know, Congress is either doing like not enough or like way too much. And so you got to watch that pendulum swing. And that was the worry that suddenly they would get draconian on stablecoins and do way too much.

• 1:21:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  It doesn't look like that is likely, at least at this point, according to Jake.

• 1:21:30David Hoffman?

  Yep, I agree.

• 1:21:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, very cool. David, let's talk about what China's doing. China is continuing to roll out its central bank digital currency. Did you know 10% of China's population now has a digital wand wallet?

• 1:21:46David Hoffman?

  Yeah, that's crazy.

• 1:21:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Big moves.

• 1:21:48David Hoffman?

  That's way more like, there's not 10, how many, 10% of people inside the United States play with crypto? How much, how much do you think people play with crypto inside the United States?

• 1:21:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, Coinbase has 30, 65 million customers. I guess some of that's worldwide. So yeah, 10 to 15%. Let's call it that.

• 1:22:05David Hoffman?

  Okay, okay. Well, anyways, no one's touching the United States central bank digital currency. So if, you know, the United States would like to latch on to this excessive DeFi, they could actually be trying in this, but you know, not holding my breath there either.

• 1:22:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, they really should. I put out this tweet, meanwhile, in the US, back to our favorite screenshot here. Congressional hearing cryptocurrencies, what are they good for? That's what the US is still debating while China is like rolling out a central bank digital currency. All right, guys, we are going to be right back with the takes of the week. But before we do, we want to thank the fantastic sponsors who made this episode possible.

• 1:22:39David Hoffman?

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• 1:23:22David Hoffman?

  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, 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. The Aave protocol is a decentralized liquidity protocol on Ethereum, which allows users to supply and borrow certain crypto assets. Aave version 2 has a ton of cool features that makes using the Aave protocol even more powerful.

• 1:24:07David Hoffman?

  With Aave, you can leverage the full power of DeFi money legos, yield, and composability all in one application. On Aave, there are a ton of assets that you can supply to the protocol in order to gain yield. And all of those same assets can also be borrowed from the protocol if you have supplied collateral. Here, you can see me borrowing 200 USDC against my portfolio of a number of different DeFi tokens in ETH. I'll choose a variable interest rate, because it's a lower rate than the stable interest rate option. But I could choose the stable interest rate option if I wanted to lock in that interest rate in permanently. V2 also features the ability for users to swap collateral without having to withdraw their assets, trade them on Uniswap, and then deposit them back into Aave.

• 1:24:50David Hoffman?

  With Aave, users can do this in one seamless transaction, saving you time and gas costs. Check out the power of Aave at ave.com. That's A-A-V-E dot com.

• 1:25:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, guys. Welcome back. We are here with the takes of the week. We go, we search the Twitter sphere. We search for all of the great takes that are happening in crypto this week. We try to dish them out to you. This is the first one. David, you want to read this out from Zenica once again. It made it last week, making it this week, too. What's this take?

• 1:25:16David Hoffman?

  Yeah, Zenica says, "On the calendar year of NFTs, we are still having breakfast on January 1st." What he means is like, if you take all of NFT lifetime, like the whole entire progress and development and the stories of NFTs, we are just eating breakfast on the very first day. Basically, he's saying NFTs have a long, long road runway ahead of them.

• 1:25:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  Have you ever seen like, you know, that reminds me of, it's like the lifespan of humanity. And if you like, project like the entire history of the universe and make that a calendar year, then how long would humans be alive? Or it's something like some sort of a pico second.

• 1:25:50David Hoffman?

  It's like, nothing.

• 1:25:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's always nothing. Yeah, we're very early. Not quite there, but maybe we're just still on day one of NFTs. David, what's this take from Eric Wall?

• 1:26:00David Hoffman?

  Yeah, Eric Wall says, "Making a high throughput L1 to reduce gas costs is a bit like making a road wider to reduce traffic. In reality, the wider road makes people think, oh, I can take my car to work now instead of commuting." And then boom, traffic reclogs. It takes exactly as long as it took to get to work as it did before. And he is quote retweeting Kyle Samani when somebody was asking, hey, can like Solana do rollups too? And yeah, sure, of course Solana can do rollups. But the point is like, if you can do rollups, why do you scale the L1? Right? And so it's just what Eric's saying, he made a great thread about this, is that it doesn't make any sense to both scale the L1 and the L2, because you're putting an L2, which is really, really, really scalable, on top of

• 1:26:45David Hoffman?

  an L1, which is also scalable, but also not decentralized. And so what he's saying is like Kyle Samani is saying like, oh yeah, Solana will eventually have to go to rollups because it'll eventually congest. Kyle said that, which goes against the whole entire point of why Solana exists in the first place. And is just being like, like, hey, we can just like, use penetrative pricing, cheap gas fees to undermine Ethereum. And then we're going to be the thing that goes to rollups because we are all, we totally know that we're going to be congested in the future.

• 1:27:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's a total pivot, by the way. That's a total pivot. Because the entire purpose of chains like Solana, monolithic chain design, was high throughput on layer one, so that you wouldn't need rollups. Why? Because the advocates of Solana would argue... In rollups, you lose composability, right? You lose this kind of atomic DeFi to DeFi sort of transaction ability. And so you need massive amounts of throughput on the monolithic chain on the layer one. And this is a pivot from that, a departure, a change, a 360, a, I don't know, sorry, 180. Like, what else is this? I mean, it doesn't make any sense to me either. And Eric Wall is, I think rightly calling it out.

• 1:27:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think there is a path, as we said before, for the Solanas of the world to get, you know, to move into the rollup design. And it's like twofold. Either you become a rollup on top of some other high, highly economic consensus layer, like an Ethereum or something else, right? So you become the execution layer. Or you move to become more decentralized over time, right? And like, you become a bit more Ethereum-like and you prioritize, rather than scalability on layer one, you prioritize decentralization a bit more and security, right? And then, in which case, you're just kind of following Ethereum toward the path that it's taking. So this is what we've been saying, right?

• 1:28:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  With the ultrasound Ethereum, ultrasound network, modular blockchain kind of thesis that we've been putting out there and others like Paulie and I have been putting out there too.

• 1:28:50David Hoffman?

  That's exactly right. Yep.

• 1:28:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, let's talk about this. I read a letter earlier this week because Metaverse was all the rage, right? You know, Zuck and Facebook moving to the Metaverse, what does this mean? And this is like an investor letter that said, oh, hey, if you're an investor and you want to play the Metaverse, the thing you should do is go buy Facebook and go buy Roblox. All right? It's so crazy to me that people still think that the Metaverse will emerge from this old world, that it will emerge from like, one, old capital formation tools, like stocks, and like, two, old Web 2 companies that don't really get it. It's like, folks, the best way to play the Metaverse is to buy ETH, okay?

• 1:29:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's to buy the property rights layer of the Metaverse. Okay, so if you believe the thesis that we believe, which is this entire metaverse thing has to be backed by strong settlement guarantees, strong property rights, like actual digital scarcity that's open incredibly neutral, you're buying things like ETH, you're buying things like Bitcoin, you're buying the banking layer of this new economy, which is DeFi, like you're buying Web 3 type things, you're buying crypto money things, you're not buying Facebook and Roblox. My God, I mean, you could buy those things. They're not terrible. It's just like, why would you allocate capital to those old things when you have this new thing? That's how I see it anyway. And so I just, it was just like

• 1:30:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  a connection is people think, oh, the metaverse is hot, and they really don't know what to buy or what to invest in, in the space. And I think, once again, the answer is really it's crypto.

• 1:30:33David Hoffman?

  Yeah, 100%. And we don't talk about it, we haven't talked about this angle a lot lately, but Ether is one of the most fantastic indexes of what Ethereum is. And if you read our Metaverse emerges article, or our Metaverse podcast, everything when the metaverse is built as a property rights layer, everything ultimately converges on Ether. And I, yeah, and you finish this up with this with exactly what I was about to say, ETH is metaverse money. That's the whole thing.

• 1:31:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yep, absolutely. That is the whole thing. And I don't think traditional investors and traditional media get it yet. So that is an opportunity to front run. Of course, we're still the ability to front run the metaverse now. David, do this take, it's really good from Twitter.

• 1:31:15David Hoffman?

  Yeah, this is funny. The first company to call it a profile instead of a wallet will win. If you still think it's a wallet, you don't understand its capabilities. This is just lending itself to like, you know, your Ethereum address is more than just like, you know, the place that you store your money. It's your metaverse identity. It is your Web 3 identity layer for the world. My davidhoffman.eth connects to my specific Ethereum address, and that is, you've called this before, my passport into the, into the digital nation, into the metaverse. So it's not, these aren't wallets. These are profiles.

• 1:31:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  I love I love these small little paradigm shifts like that, right? Like wallet is a really good mental model, but also profile self sovereign identity is a really good mental model. And I think that is starting to emerge in crypto as well. Hey, these things aren't just places where you can store assets. These can actually be like the ability to log in with an ETH address is a real thing. Really cool to see the decentralized identity narrative, you know, taking form some more. David, this is your take. Why don't you say it?

• 1:32:16David Hoffman?

  Yeah, Facebook's metaverse is Encyclopedia Britannica. Ethereum's metaverse is Wikipedia. And this is just basically saying, hey, Facebook is going to build their own metaverse, their own Disneyland, and they're going to invite you into it. Ethereum's metaverse is everyone's going to contribute and put their pieces of the metaverse into this larger and growing and open and free larger metaverse, right? And so this is just a fundamental analogy that we always use in the free and open source software world. Like, why did Wikipedia win? Well, it allowed anyone to write for it.

• 1:32:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I think it's the difference between like, like the United States versus Disneyland, right? It's like you couldn't fit the United States inside of Disneyland, could you?

• 1:32:59David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  But like Disneyland has to rest on something like the United States, right? So it's like Facebook's metaverse really is going to be an app on top of this larger metaverse that we think of.

• 1:33:11David Hoffman?

  It'll be the Disneyland version of the metaverse.

• 1:33:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, exactly. Exactly right. It'll still be there and people can go there. People can visit.

• 1:33:17David Hoffman?

  It'll be in the metaverse. It'll just be in our metaverse and it'll be the metaverse inside of the metaverse, the Disneyland metaverse.

• 1:33:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I don't think it's it's just not that complicated. It's just like Facebook is an app on the internet. It is not the internet, right? It's just that. Here's a scary thought. I was thinking about this earlier this week. As bullish as I am, David, and you know, I'm bullish, right? And you know, I don't think the bear market is coming anytime soon. I think we've still got a run in us. But it is a scary thought to me sometimes when I see all of these token thoughts, probably close to 50% of people right now.

• 1:33:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  Have never seen a bear market. They don't even know what that looks like. Their their only experience with crypto is, oh, I buy the thing and the number goes up. Oh, and it doesn't really matter what I buy, because anything I buy, the number goes up. Right? And like, oh.

• 1:34:10David Hoffman?

  JPGs go up?

• 1:34:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, everything goes up. All right. And some things just go up faster than other things. And so what do I want to do? I want to get in the the assets and tokens that go up the fastest. Right? These are like little babies in crypto, like, and I don't mean that in a condescending way. I'm just, they're so new. They're like newborn babies and they've never seen the real shit. Okay, they haven't really like, until you've been through a bear market and like, everything gets tested. Your conviction gets tested, all of your theses get tested, and you've seen kind of the recovery of that the other side. You don't really know what you own. So many people, like your friends and family, people you like, go to Thanksgiving with.

• 1:34:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  They many of them will probably own some crypto, but very few of them probably know what they own or why they own it. Right? So this is actually a little scary to me, a little concerning, because,

• 1:35:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  you know, bear markets can come. And then what happens when people don't have conviction in the things that they bought? And they start to see a 20%, 30% decline, they're going to head for the exits. So.

• 1:35:19David Hoffman?

  And then it's going to make it worse.

• 1:35:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's gonna make it worse.

• 1:35:21David Hoffman?

  Feedback loop, yeah.

• 1:35:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Anyway, that that just struck me. I guess like, at some point in time, you get a certain amount of people who buy in, and they don't really know why they bought in. And then it kind of like, there's a tipping point reached where, like, something bad could happen, right? I guess that's what speculative bubbles are at the end of the day.

• 1:35:39David Hoffman?

  Absolutely.

• 1:35:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  You have any thoughts on that?

• 1:35:41David Hoffman?

  Yeah, one of the guts that I that I try and listen to is like the euphoria, pain like spectrum. Like sometimes I'm like, oh, it's been a while since I've felt any pain. I've been feeling a lot of euphoria lately. Like that usually means that pain's like around the corner.

• 1:35:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:57David Hoffman?

  Like you don't get to be in markets and don't feel like both. Like you you get equal amounts of pain and equal amounts of euphoria. And there's been a lot of euphoria lately. And as you can definitely tell that in like how many strangers there are at this NFC NYC event, like a lot of these people are just here for the first time. And like they've been coming in when the times are good. Not there are very few people that have felt pain. And so

• 1:36:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  So does this worry you, sir? Are you worried right now? Are we getting a little long in the tooth in this run?

• 1:36:26David Hoffman?

  The thing is, like, I'm I always leave room for a new paradigm. And so like, I think like, all of the pain that the collective crypto community felt during 2018, 2019, like, it's it's that the meme of the army man protecting the sleeping child from the from the knives and the swords and the grenades and stuff like

• 1:36:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:44David Hoffman?

  I think we maybe there's a world where we took that pain and like, you know, shielded the 2020, the 2021 ers from having to worry about that because we built all the infrastructure in the bear market.

• 1:36:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think the other thing is, once you go through a bear market, right? Like, you're not worried about that. You don't you don't worry about the next one anymore. It's like, what's the worst that could happen? Right?

• 1:37:06David Hoffman?

  Oh, I was making so many jokes this week as well. Like, oh, yeah, all the all the crypto people that I met in 2019, 2018, like, a lot of us are like, gosh, the bear market was nice. Like, it was quiet back then. Like, it felt

• 1:37:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  It was quiet, good time to make friends, good time to start things, good time to build, right? And like, if you didn't leave in 2018, 2019, are you gonna leave in the great bear market of 2024?

• 1:37:30David Hoffman?

  No. It'll still be a bull market to us.

• 1:37:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  Exactly. Anyway, I just, you know, it's something I'm thinking about. And again, I don't think this is imminent personally, but but you never know. And markets can certainly turn in a hurry, at least in the short run. David, this is a means taken. It's actually a riff on the Reddit thread that we were tugging on from that engineer who just recently joined Reddit. What does he mean say here?

• 1:37:54David Hoffman?

  Amin says, "The end users of Ethereum are no longer individual humans. It's roll-up dev teams building ecosystems. Let 1,000 roll-ups bloom. Ethereum as a civilizational trust anchor." And Ethereum is specifically talking about the Ethereum L1. He's saying, "The end users of the Ethereum L1 are no longer individual humans." And Amin Soleimani, he's one of those guys that memed Moloch into existence. And this angle of Ethereum as a civilizational trust anchor is so great. And so Reddit, when it uses Arbitrum to scale all of its stuff, it, all of the world, the entire universe of Reddit comes and settles on Ethereum. And that is why Ethereum is a civilizational trust anchor. Because it's not just Reddit.

• 1:38:36David Hoffman?

  It's going to be, everything is on a roll-up, settled by Ethereum, secured by Ethereum, allowing coordination to happen. So, great take.

• 1:38:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I really like that take. And also, "Let 1,000 roll-ups bloom," right? And like, a roll-up can be whatever you want it to be. And this is Reddit, you know, creating its own roll-up. Super cool. I have actually a question for you, Dave. This is just something I've been thinking about recently. So, let's assume as we are, that the main chain is completely occupied by roll-ups in the future, right? So like, large pools of capital that are settling on Ethereum. That means gas fees are not going down on Ethereum mainnet anytime soon. Transaction fees on roll-ups will go down in the future, but gas fees on mainnet will not. Does this mean there could be a lot of NFTs, like stranded on Ethereum in the future, right? Like, and I say like tokens too, but NFTs specifically, because some of these are pretty,

• 1:39:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  like, some of them can be very low value and they cost more to trade. Has there been any talk at NFT NYC, that sort of thing?

• 1:39:37David Hoffman?

  No, no, I haven't, I haven't thought about that, but that is a good point. I do believe that L1 gas fees are up only. And so like, damn, like, NFTs might, a lot of cool stuff might get stranded on the L1, simply because it's just not viable to get it off there.

• 1:39:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's something I'm going to think about some more, but yeah, anyway.

• 1:39:53David Hoffman?

  Also, when Amin Soleimani says, "Let 1,000 roll-ups bloom," that should be in stark contrast to what Kyle Soleimani was talking about and with, when Eric Wallt retweeted him. Talking about like, oh yeah, if you add more lanes to a road, the road just gets congested. The way you add more lanes is you add more rollups because they're separate roads.

• 1:40:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  More roads?

• 1:40:13David Hoffman?

  Anyways.

• 1:40:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  More roads rather than one super big road?

• 1:40:16David Hoffman?

  Make more roads on the L2. That's what the L2s do. That's where the extra roads go.

• 1:40:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  Roads and bridges and all sorts of things. Uh, this is Scott Lewis take Ethereum isn't going to be a consumer facing blockchain for all that much longer. That's what he means on the main chain, right? Specifically. So I was asking that question about NFTs on main chain.

• 1:40:33David Hoffman?

  And it's always been, it's always been Ethereum's plan to be in the background. It's not supposed to be in your face. It's supposed to be invisible, just like TCP IP. Uh, and if Ethereum hides behind these rollups, that's perfect. That's where it's supposed to be.

• 1:40:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. You don't even know, like it's DYDX. I mean, this exists in practice. You don't even know you're using Ethereum. Uh, David, you do this take, this is from NFT NYC again.

• 1:40:57David Hoffman?

  Yeah, somebody, uh, somebody tweets out, the pro of being a woman at an NFT event is that there are no bathroom lines ever. And so Mike Dudis, uh, who I actually met this week, great to meet you, Mike. Uh, he goes crypto, bringing equality to bathroom line waits. I experienced this for myself. I had to wait behind like seven other dudes to go to the bathroom while like the ladies room had no one in there.

• 1:41:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's funny. Maybe another push for this, like unisex gender neutral bathrooms edge, right? It's like this even things out anyway. Okay. David, before we get to, uh, what, what you're excited about, actually we're, we're about to get to what you're excited about. So let me just ask you, what are you excited about this week? Uh, yeah, tell me.

• 1:41:35David Hoffman?

  Well, I've teased it throughout all of this rollup, but NFT NYC was great. I met Kami Russo there, met her in person. So I thought that was funny. It's nice in crypto. We're like, you know, you know, defiant bankless, like we're not, we're not the same, we're not different, but yeah, friend, some friendly competition there. Like she's got a great newsletter. We've got a great newsletter. She's got a great podcast. We've got a great podcast, but in crypto, like it's all love. It's all love. So got to, got to meet, uh, Kami Russo. That was fantastic. Like I said, met Brian Armstrong. Got to, uh, shout out to the pleaser Dow family, which we call ourselves a Dow, but we're really a family, uh, even though I'm like the least active member of the town. And but like, you know, hanging out, listening to the Wu-Tang album. I keep on chilling in real life events. Maybe Ryan will come to one.

• 1:42:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  Maybe one day, definitely next year. Okay.

• 1:42:21David Hoffman?

  The culture and vibes are really, really great. And again, you got to find your clan. You got to find your community.

• 1:42:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  Find your people.

• 1:42:30David Hoffman?

  There's somebody, the first ever crypto event I ever went to was ETH Denver 2018. I met two people there from the brave team, Luke and Jenny. I saw Jenny for the first time in four years this year here in New York. So that was pretty cool. Yeah, like again, the crypto world, the longer you're here, the more it feels like family.

• 1:42:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's really cool too. A bunch of people shared values as well. And I'm glad Kami probably recognized you, unlike Brian Armstrong, right? But I see, I see your AIM username, AOL username there Blackjack Davies.

• 1:43:06David Hoffman?

  Blackjack Davies, yeah.

• 1:43:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it's a totally different persona.

• 1:43:08David Hoffman?

  Shout out to Jack White and the Blackjack Davies song that I named myself after.

• 1:43:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's awesome, man.

• 1:43:14David Hoffman?

  Ryan, I think I just got a tease about what you're excited about. So tell me about it.

• 1:43:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Too quickly, but you know this, okay? Bankless Dow, the Dow punk kind of project that spun out of bankless Dow had an NFT drop. And that happened last Friday. It was awesome, dude. It was just really fun. I, I mean, you know me, look, I'm into turtles. Okay. Like, but I haven't jumped two feet into the whole NFT game. So this was the first time I got to experience a whole NFT minting from the ground up. And what was cool about this was like, it's really started with the community first. So there was a culture and community for Dow punks. And what is that culture in the community?

• 1:43:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's like a bunch of people who want to say F the nine to five, right? Like, we want to self organize in these new capital structures and social structures and work for DAOs full time, right? This is about going bankless, which of course we are fully into bankless culture and saying like, no to the establishment. This is about going west. And so a lot of this culture and these values were really imbued in these Dow punks. And so I minted some NFTs. And then I purchased a few NFTs like on the on the secondary market. And again, I don't do this a lot, so it's just really fun, man. And I love the NFTs. All of these are going to be actual physical merchandise, too. So this is the bridge of the real world.

• 1:44:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  And what I saw in the community was, you know, not a lot of shilling, not a lot of like, what's the floor price checking? Not a lot of like, it was just a very long term kind of thinking, new vibe, new culture, right?

• 1:44:54David Hoffman?

  Very sustainable culture.

• 1:44:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  Sustainable culture. And you talked a lot about like, what's a Dow? It's all about like flow. It's all about like the vibes of the Dow.

• 1:45:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  And I think I felt that in a in a in a cool way and, you know, tying that to NFTs is cool. So what do you think of my collection here? Not too bad, right?

• 1:45:09David Hoffman?

  Oh, I love it, Ryan.

• 1:45:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:11David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I'm trying to pull up mine right now, but I don't think I'll be able to do it in time.

• 1:45:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Trying to.

• 1:45:16David Hoffman?

  You've got some good ones. Wait.

• 1:45:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  Some good ones. Okay.

• 1:45:19David Hoffman?

  That one's awesome.

• 1:45:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  These two. Look, I minted this one and that one, right? Which are great. They're great. But like, I really wanted a I wanted one of these either Crypto Natives or a shadowy supercoater. And I wanted one specifically with like a bankless, bankless box. And so anyway, I found somebody in the Dow channel who's willing to like, just, you know, sell me one. That wasn't posted in the market. So I did that. And then I also bought this, which is.

• 1:45:45David Hoffman?

  Great one.

• 1:45:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it's like, you know, it's rare. It's got this interesting skin. It's a creative number 35. Anyway, it's really fun. I know you had a lot of fun, too. So do you have yours? Can I pull yours up?

• 1:45:58David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I just sent you my my NFT address in the chat. So if you want to put paste that into OpenSea, it'll take you there because I also like mine. One of the cool things and cool things like, like you said, in the Discord, felt very sustainable. It felt really good.

• 1:46:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, there it is. Trustless state. Okay.

• 1:46:11David Hoffman?

  Yeah. And like, the thing is, like, I made a joke in the Discord, like, these Dow punks are going to simultaneously be with Zero and also Infinity.

• 1:46:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:18David Hoffman?

  Because.

• 1:46:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  No one wants to sell.

• 1:46:20David Hoffman?

  Oh, someone sold me one. Oh, I got a new one. Oh, the.

• 1:46:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Which one? Oh, these ones?

• 1:46:25David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  The PJs?

• 1:46:26David Hoffman?

  Ultrasound summer. Yeah.

• 1:46:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  These are PJs. This is ultrasound summer. Yeah, that's a good one, man. That was another one on top of my list. But yeah, tell me about which ones did you mint?

• 1:46:36David Hoffman?

  I'm into the left, the top left two, the ones with the orange backgrounds. Yeah. And then the, the other three that, that I bought. I, I offered a guy 3.5 ETH and a trade on one of the crypto or Dow Punks that I already had. And he was like, no, man, like, I, I, it would be really nice to, to have that ETH, but uh, it just, it meant it was too, too sentimental value. Like when the, I had this conversation like three times, like another person's like, no, like I, I, that's a nice offer, but like, I want to give it to my wife. Uh, and so like, no one's selling me the Dow Punks that I want, right?

• 1:47:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  I have a list of a few others that I'd love to get, but I'm just not seeing them on the, on the secondary market and offers aren't going through. This is, uh, this is probably my favorite in your collection here.

• 1:47:22David Hoffman?

  That, that's my, that's my bankless ninja. I call that my V for Vendetta Dow Punk. Cause he looks like he's about to hack a bank.

• 1:47:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's awesome. This one looks good too. That looks like a pretty neat one. Anyway, look, I'm, I guess I'm down the NFT rabbit hole now, like, you know, I guess turtles was kind of my, my first experience with the Dow Punks, you know, I got some like a few other things, but um, yeah.

• 1:47:44David Hoffman?

  I'm glad, I'm glad the turtles are in the rearview mirror, Ryan.

• 1:47:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  Hey, I haven't sold a turtle. I will, look, it's turtles will, will come back. Okay, David, but you know, gotta give it a rest after dressing like a turtle last week.

• 1:47:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right. I hope listeners are ready for the meme of the week. Let's finish this thing out. Meme of the week. What is this from Nifty Not, David?

• 1:48:05David Hoffman?

  Yeah. He, the, he says, can't see it any, can't unsee it anymore. And we have Netflix, Google, Meta, Instagram. And if you are looking at this, it very clearly spells out NGMI as in not gonna make it. Now, I think Netflix might've got some collateral damage here. I don't have any problems with Netflix. Uh, I mean,

• 1:48:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  It was an N. We needed an N. Okay.

• 1:48:26David Hoffman?

  We needed an N, but yeah. All, all these web two companies, not gonna make it. I'm just not gonna make it.

• 1:48:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's awesome. Definitely the meme of the week. I think maybe the meme of the next era, the next decade. We'll have to see what happens. Of course, guys, none of this has been financial advice. ETH is risky. DeFi is risky. You could lose what you put in. All of crypto is risky, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but thanks for joining us on the Bankless journey.

• 1:48:54David Hoffman?

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

• 1:49:37David Hoffman?

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