ROLLUP: The Institutions Are Here | Vitalik & Brady BFFs | Verge of the Merge | Senator Warren, Sup?

4th Week of March 2022 ------ 📣 ZERION | Trade Across 7 Networks and 500+ protocols https://bankless.cc/Zerion ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/ 🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/ ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 👀 POLYGON | LAYER 2 DEFI https://bankless.cc/Polygon ❎ ACROSS | BRIDGE TO LAYER 2 https://bankless.cc/Across 🦊 METAMASK | THE CRYPTO WALLET https://bankless.cc/metamask 💳 LEDGER | THE CRYPTO LIFE CARD https://bankless.cc/Ledger 🧙‍♂️ ALCHEMIX | SELF REPAYING LOANS https://bankless.cc/Alchemix 🦄 UNISWAP | DECENTRALIZED FUNDING https://bankless.cc/UniGrants ------ Timestamps: 0:00 Intro 6:30 MARKETS 7:15 BTC Price 7:30 ETH Price 11:40 ETH/BTC Ratio 13:00 $BED https://www.indexcoop.com/bed 13:25 Record 2022 ETH Outflows https://twitter.com/intotheblock/status/1504838298858045459 16:35 Do Kwon BTC Reserves https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/138892/do-kwon-reveals-plan-to-increase-usts-bitcoin-reserve-to-3-billion 20:00 $6B in ETH Burned https://decrypt.co/95574/nearly-6-billion-eth-burned-ethereum-2-0-edges-closer 20:30 7-Month Low https://thedefiant.io/ether-burn-rate-deflationary-the-merge/ https://ultrasound.money/ 21:45 Maple Finance Originates $1B of Loans https://blockworks.co/maple-finance-originates-1b-of-loans-in-10-months/ 25:20 RELEASES 25:55 GameStop NFT Marketplace 26:05 Loopring’s LRC https://t.co/LMKyctfl2I https://twitter.com/loopringorg/status/1506548697689063429 https://beta.nft.gamestop.com/ https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/loopring 29:05 Timeswap x Polygon https://twitter.com/TimeswapLabs/status/1505944790374006792 31:40 Robinhood Debit Card Crypto Rewards https://decrypt.co/95662/robinhood-new-debit-card-offer-crypto-rewards 33:20 RAISES 33:30 BAYC & a16z $450M https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/22/22991272/yuga-labs-seed-funding-a16z-bored-ape-yacht-club-bayc-metaverse-other-side 35:40 Yuga Slide Deck https://www.dropbox.com/s/k36t0v1b5ps0b9s/Yuga_deck_2.pdf?dl=0 38:10 A16z new PFP https://twitter.com/a16z/status/1506361154033045507 38:40 FTX, Animoca Bank $500M https://decrypt.co/95478/ftx-animoca-c2x-crypto-gaming-terra 39:40 FTX, Dave $100M https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/03/21/ftx-invests-100m-in-banking-app-dave-forms-partnership-for-crypto-payments/ https://dave.com/ 40:50 Worldcoin to Raise $100M https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/03/22/worldcoin-to-raise-100m-at-3b-token-valuation-report/ 45:00 Katie Haun $1.5B Crypto Fund https://decrypt.co/95715/andreessen-horowitz-vet-katie-haun-raises-billion-web3-fund 45:25 Frmr Polychain Capital Partner $125M Crypto Fund https://decrypt.co/95621/former-polychain-capital-partner-launches-125m-crypto-fund-that-will-become-a-dao 46:52 Qualcomm’s $100M Metaverse Fund https://www.theblockcrypto.com/linked/138848/chip-supplier-qualcomm-creates-100-million-metaverse-investment-fund 48:30 Mina Ecosystem $92M https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/138264/mina-protocol-ecosystem-token-sale-three-arrows-ftx 50:00 Paradigm $8.75M Ribbon Finance https://twitter.com/coindesk/status/1506254872932409354 https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/how-to-make-money-with-automated 51:10 Dalio Finally Getting Into Crypto https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/03/21/ray-dalios-bridgewater-investing-in-crypto-fund-sources/ 54:55 JOBS https://pallet.xyz/list/bankless/jobs 56:25 NEWS 56:30 Vitalik TIME Cover https://twitter.com/time/status/1504760633342021645 58:25 Awful Quote Tweets https://twitter.com/vitalikbuterin/status/1504957024345501709 https://twitter.com/RyanSAdams/status/1504954329760944136 1:01:25 Vitalik Doesn’t Know Brady https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/1504959516865138689 1:02:30 Brady is a Huge Vitalik Fan https://twitter.com/TomBrady/status/1505295283286167554 1:03:40 ETH 1:03:45 EIP 4844 - Proto-Danksharding https://www.eip4844.com 1:07:30 The Merge 1:08:55 NFTs 1:09:05 Arthur0x Phishing Scam 1:09:30 DeFiance Capital Founder $1.7M https://decrypt.co/95666/defiance-capital-founder-loses-1-7m-nfts-phishing-scam 1:09:45 How it Happened https://twitter.com/Arthur_0x/status/1506167899437686784 1:10:45 How to Stay Protected https://metaversal.banklesshq.com/p/hacker-group-stalks-nfts 1:13:05 Hollywood Disney’s Pixar Pals https://medium.com/veve-collectibles/disney-pixar-pals-25c6da53ab8e 1:13:30 The DC Universe NFTs https://www.dccomics.com/blog/2022/03/11/cartamundi-launches-dc-hybrid-physical-and-nft-trading-cards 1:14:00 REGULATION / TRADFI / MISC. 1:14:05 Goldman Sachs 1:14:10 New Website Who Dis https://twitter.com/krugermacro/status/1506785179213475843?s=20&t=PoSkEl9kUDn-miVPTXvMkg https://twitter.com/krugermacro/status/1506785179213475843?s=20&t=PoSkEl9kUDn-miVPTXvMkg 1:14:30 Bankless Analyst Take https://twitter.com/BenGiove/status/1506838000168226818 1:15:45 Elizabeth Warren 1:15:50 Bill From Warren https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2022/03/17/senator-elizabeth-warren-announces-sanctions-compliance-bill-for-crypto-companies 1:21:30 FIFA World Cup & Crypto.com https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/03/22/cryptocom-nabs-fifa-world-cup-sponsorship-for-undisclosed-sum 1:23:56 TAKES 1:24:30 Page 34 of the Cryptopians https://twitter.com/TrustlessState/status/1505984479399088128 1:27:40 JPEG vs. MP3 NFTs https://twitter.com/trustlessstate/status/1505279281139572738 1:30:15 Ethereum is Inflationary https://twitter.com/epolynya/status/1505153046455615488 1:32:45 The West’s Energy Pickle https://blog.bitmex.com/energy-cancelled/ 1:37:10 Donald Glover on NFTs https://twitter.com/unitedmasters/status/1506088529838972933 1:38:05 Future of NFTs https://twitter.com/j1mmyeth/status/1505956386571575297 1:41:30 What David’s Excited About https://twitter.com/TrustlessState/status/1507033311314845699 1:42:15 What Ryan’s Excited About 1:44:45 MEME of the Week https://twitter.com/PuffYatty/status/1506277389910872066 1:45:30 Disclaimers ​ ----- Not financial or tax advice. Do your own research. See our investment disclosures here: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/bankless-disclosures

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

• 0:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wait, who said that? The metaverse is rendered at the periphery. Did we say that?

• 0:03David Hoffman?

  That's my line. Yeah.

• 0:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's a great line.

• 0:05David Hoffman?

  That's a David Hoffman original, brother.

• 0:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wow.

• 0:07David Hoffman?

  Yeah, you like that one?

• 0:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  No, I love that one. That's a, man, yeah, we should start a podcast.

• 0:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  Hey, Bankless Nation. Happy fourth week of March. David, it's Friday morning. What time is it?

• 0:22David Hoffman?

  Oh, it's the Bankless Friday Weekly Rollup, Ryan, where we cover the entire week in crypto, which is always an ambitious endeavor. This week's pretty tame. It's pretty, pretty okay. It's gonna, it's gonna be fun, though. There's a lot of interesting things going on. Right, there's some hot headlines. So tell us what's going down this week.

• 0:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, usually you're more intimidated by the length of this agenda, but this week maybe feels manageable, David, is that what you're telling us?

• 0:43David Hoffman?

  Yeah, this is a five out of 10 on the crazy scale, which is modest for crypto.

• 0:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  Five out of 10. All right. Okay, so here's what we're gonna talk about. Yuga Labs, the apes bought the punks. 400, well, actually, that happened last week, okay? But this week, they just got $450 million in funding. Okay, what are they gonna do with this? They're gonna build a real metaverse. A real metaverse. And a 16Z is in on this, of course. And we have the deck. We have the slide deck. We know exactly what they are planning to do. So we're gonna comment on that. Also, Vitalik Buterin made the cover of Time Magazine. This led to a lot of hilarious Twitter threads, I think.

• 1:23David Hoffman?

  Hilarious Twitter antics, yeah.

• 1:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, we're gonna talk about that. Also, GameStop released their first NFT marketplace. That's out. It's built on Loopring, and the Loopring community is absolutely stoked about this. I couldn't be more excited. Number going up a little bit, so we'll talk about that to you. And of course, more of our weekly cringe out of Elizabeth Warren. She's proposing new things in Congress, anti-crypto things, shadowy supercoater things. So of course, you know, we gotta comment on that because this sort of stuff can't happen in a free Western liberal democracy where property rights should count for something. So we're gonna talk about that, too.

• 2:04David Hoffman?

  The consistency of cringe out of Elizabeth Warren is just, it's every single week at this point.

• 2:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  But also, Elizabeth, come on the podcast, because we wanna talk to you.

• 2:13David Hoffman?

  We're friendly and we don't bite.

• 2:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's true. David, before we get in, we gotta talk about the Permissionless Conference that is coming up. We are on the road to Permissionless right now. This is gonna be the DeFi conference of the year. Not just DeFi, also the Metaverse. Also, we're gonna talk about institutional stuff as well. A lot of people are gonna be there. Who are some of the speakers you're most looking forward to seeing?

• 2:35David Hoffman?

  Oh my god, some of my best friends out there. Justin Drake, we're gonna be talking about ETH's ultrasound money, of course, on the verge of the merge.

• 2:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  Is that a panel title?

• 2:46David Hoffman?

  We're working to the verge of the merge, Ryan. Because Permissionless is in two months. Two months. You have two months to get your ticket. And in two months, we will be on the cusp of the merge. I mean, excuse me, pardon me, the verge of the merge. So Justin Drake is gonna be talking all about that. Of course, Chris Dixon from the famous Web3 Mental Models podcast. You guys know all about Chris. Nick Carter is gonna talk about stablecoins. Eric Peters, who's been on the podcast before, is gonna talk about some changing world order type content, I'm guessing. And then we also got Jiho from Axie Infinity, Jake Shrvinsky for all the legal minds out there, Ryan Selkis, Stani from Ave. It's going to be, I think, the hottest event of the summer. And this is,

• 3:29David Hoffman?

  of course, where Ryan and I will meet for the very first time. So it's gonna be a fun time. Bankless booked their Airbnb. So Bankless has an Airbnb. There's gonna be the Bankless party. It's gonna be sick as a lot. It's gonna be very sick, excuse me.

• 3:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's gonna be in Palm Beach, Florida, too. The dates are May 17th through 19th. And David said you have two months to get these tickets. You kinda do, but also you kinda don't. Because number one, they're probably gonna sell out in the coming weeks. And number two, they just get more expensive over time, alright? So there was a time you could purchase these tickets for like $15. I don't wanna tell people that, but like, the price has gone up a lot since then, and it will continue to go up until the date of the conference. So book now. Of course, if you have a Bankless Premium Membership, you get a discount on this.

• 4:17David Hoffman?

  Big discount, not a little discount, a big discount.

• 4:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  Is it 20%?

• 4:20David Hoffman?

  30%.

• 4:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  30%?

• 4:22David Hoffman?

  30%.

• 4:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  A generous, a healthy discount, so go check that out.

• 4:25David Hoffman?

  Pays for your whole entire Premium Membership.

• 4:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  It really does. Some no brainers there. Also, another no brainer. Connect your wallet to Xerion. Xerion is like the best. Like, when I first discovered Xerion, getting into crypto, right? It's just like, oh my god, I can bring my assets to the interface rather than being locked inside of the interface, like with a Wells Fargo account. And they were adding features all of the time. Some of my favorite features that they've added recently is like multi-chain support, Ethereum, optimism, so L2s, avalanches, alternative L1s. They also have phantom support, the just added Solana support. So this is like their first non-EVM chain. So you know how you have your assets scattered all over the crypto universe here? You can organize

• 5:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  that. You can track them all in one single mission control center user interface for your DeFi antics. Also, David, there's some bridging capability here.

• 5:22David Hoffman?

  Bridor, time to be a Bridor.

• 5:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  I knew you liked to bridge. Yeah, so what can you do here?

• 5:27David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so we're going to be in a multi-chain world, whether with multi-layer one, multi-layer two, it's going to happen. And you shouldn't have to go to the optimism website or the Arbitrum website to go and use their portals. You should just go to Xerion because they got it all for you. Imagine just like, you know, a triple monitor, five monitor setup, and you have like all, this is what Xerion does. It's your battle station for the multi-chain world, and it makes it extremely easy to bridge to all the other layer twos. One of the fun stories I like to tell about why people should load up their address to something like Xerion, like the first time I did it, Ryan.

• 6:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  You discovered things?

• 6:05David Hoffman?

  Yeah, you know how you, sometimes you discover $20 in your pocket? Yeah, like Xerion will tell you everything about the state of the tokens that you have. So there's a decent chance you have tokens that you don't, aren't even aware of. So go check your pants pockets by loading up your address into Xerion.

• 6:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  All that change in the cushions of your couch, you know, shake all that out. Go find it.

• 6:26David Hoffman?

  Go turn it into ETH.

• 6:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I honestly, I found some NFTs this way too, because they have an NFT viewer. These are not my NFTs, but I was like, oh, I own some okay NFTs, and they're actually like worth something, which is kind of cool to know, especially NFTs aren't worth as much as they were maybe a month or two ago.

• 6:45David Hoffman?

  And then what happened next was Ryan pulled out his tax document and started uploading it.

• 6:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's true too. True story. Anyway, guys, go check that out. Go connect your wallets to Zirion and get this all in one place. Of course, we will include a link in the show notes because that's what we do for you. Market time, David. Bitcoin. What do you got to say about Bitcoin?

• 7:03David Hoffman?

  Happy Bitcoin. Happy Bitcoin. Happy crypto prices this week. Yeah, Bitcoin started the week at $41,000, ending the week right where it is right now at $44,000, up 7% on the week. A little bit of chop from A to B, but here we are at $44,000. So the bulls are bullish.

• 7:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  I thought we were down only. How are we doing this? This is like almost, you know, it's rising above some of these local peaks, the last like early March peak. Is this a pre-war, conflict peak here?

• 7:33David Hoffman?

  Yeah, that's exactly right. We are starting to get higher than where we were pre-Russian invasion of Ukraine.

• 7:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  That is crazy. And how about ETH? What's that looking like?

• 7:41David Hoffman?

  Same, same, same. Yeah, started the week at 2,800. That was the low and we are currently just below 3,100. Basically, call it 3,100. We got up to 3,120 right before recording, dipped a little bit down right below it. But again, chop between the A to the B at the start of the week to the end of the week. But you know, overall, when you zoom out and look at it smoothly, it is a line up.

• 8:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  You know, I think I've told you before that like that 3K number is really important to me. Anytime it's above 3K, it's a good day, right? It's like feels bullish. It feels like we're escaping the pull of the bear market. So wow, up on the week. And is this on any news or anything, David? Like, why are we going up?

• 8:22David Hoffman?

  There's a bunch of reasons I could hypothesize about. But I don't really have any strong conviction about any of them. So I think like the trade, if you're a trader, putting on your trader hat is just an overall mean reversion. So like Ryan, zoom out to like the four month timeframe or something like that. Three months, yeah. Yeah. So I guess the mean reversion trade has actually started to already kind of play out, going from 2,600 to like 3,200. But there's also the mean reversion trade of going from like 3,000 back to 4,000. And so like two different trade timeframes for trades on the menu. But you know, sometimes people are like, well, the sellers just got exhausted and there's

• 9:02David Hoffman?

  not enough sellers to keep on making price go down. And even though macro is still super bearish, crypto, like whenever crypto disassociates from macro, it's usually to the bullish side. And I think that's perhaps what's going on.

• 9:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, that's at some point, I'm definitely far from calling this sort of thing, right? I still believe we're very much in like, kind of like a crab, crab market season sideways action. But like, at some point, prices get high enough, it does break the back of, of the bear market and the bear market fears. I don't know what price point that is for ETH.

• 9:36David Hoffman?

  Certainly higher than 3100.

• 9:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, certainly higher.

• 9:39David Hoffman?

  We still have room to go.

• 9:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  Do you think it's all time high? Like, what are we all time high for ETH?

• 9:44David Hoffman?

  I mean, okay, so we're gonna look at some, we can definitely look at some trends, right?

• 9:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  4600.

• 9:48David Hoffman?

  4600, but also, like, if you, can we make that window go away? Like, the 3300 number is kind of where, we were hanging around 3300 between August and September of 2021. We were hanging around 3300 at the start of 2022 before we broke down. So I would say breaking 3300 and getting into the area between 3300 and 4000 is like-

• 10:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  Starts to feel on the verge of healing?

• 10:14David Hoffman?

  That's the next window. And then, and then it's just absolutely confirmed by the time we get above 4000, obviously, because, you know, bullishness begets bullishness. But like, there's very little price action above 4000. Like, we haven't spent a lot of time, only a couple of months of time, above 4000. And so, like, above 4000 is price discovery. And so, like, if you're not into the trade by then, you've, like, kind of missed out on it a lot, but like, that's when you can kind of start to ask yourself, like, well, there's not really much information here about what happens next, therefore, you're, you have permission to be bullish about, you know, price discovery, once again, especially because it's not gonna just, like, zoom from 3000 to 4000 and, like, it's not gonna do it in one month.

• 10:57David Hoffman?

  I mean, it's done it before, it could do it, but like, it's probably not. But like, you know, you start to look out at the two, three, four month time horizons and like, that's when the merge happens. So, once again, the alignment between the timing of the merge and the shape of the charts is interesting, and we will actually be able to see that, Ryan, when we look at the ETH BTC ratio.

• 11:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think that's where we're going next, but I gotta say, this is kind of not supposed to happen that way, right?

• 11:21David Hoffman?

  What do you mean?

• 11:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  According to a lot of, according to the sentiment that I'm feeling, like, it's like, the sentiment is, we're in kind of this crab market and we're still destined to go down. But it seems like we're kind of starting to reverse those trends, and we'll see if that continues, but what's the ratio?

• 11:36David Hoffman?

  The sentiment doesn't cause market action. It generally follows it. Okay, so this is the long-term view of the ETH BTC ratio. Back when things are really, really crazy in 2017, 2018, and then we had the 2018 to 2020 bear market, and now you can see this channel that we're forming. And the ETH BTC ratio, we were talking about how for like, there was three to four months of straight downwards price action, both in dollar terms and in ETH BTC terms, starting in like, November, December of 2021 to basically like, three weeks ago. And we bounced off the bottom of that trend line, and like, kind of the self-fulfilling prophecy meme is that you bounce from trend line to trend line.

• 12:17David Hoffman?

  And so we go from .07, .065, where we at the bottom, to like, something like .09, .095, which is really bullish.

• 12:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  What's our flippity watch number for this?

• 12:31David Hoffman?

  Oh, I know that one. .158, Ryan. I do have it memorized.

• 12:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wow, nerd alert.

• 12:38David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so we need, we need a basically a doubling, a little bit more than a doubling of the ETH price with the current Bitcoin price stinks.

• 12:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's up here, huh?

• 12:45David Hoffman?

  Yeah, it's pretty high. It's pretty high up there.

• 12:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  Never been there before.

• 12:49David Hoffman?

  Never, no, no, we have not. The spikes on the very far left, this is Coinbase, the spikes on the very far left are noise, you don't see that on any other chart, fun fact.

• 12:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  I got it, okay, cool. That's somebody who observes this ratio, right there.

• 13:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bankless bed index, a third, a third, a third, Bitcoin ETH and DPI, what are we doing there?

• 13:09David Hoffman?

  Yeah, started the week at 97, ended the week where we are now at 113? Wow, that's higher than when I wrote it down a couple of minutes ago. We are up roughly 8.5% bullish, overall bullish on the market.

• 13:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, we'll take that. Let's talk about these outflows. It's really cool when we see big outflows, I think. You can track it all on Chain, this is Into the Block doing it. The largest outflows in 2022 so far, over 180k ETH was withdrawn from centralized exchanges in a single day. The last time such a magnitude of ETH left exchanges was in October 2021, preceding a 15% price increase within 10 days. Also of note, 190k. ETH was also deposited into Lido's staking ETH contract into the Lido staking pool. What's happening here? Are people withdrawing their ETH to stake it? Is this like merge hype catching up with the actions of the market now?

• 14:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  Is this what we're seeing?

• 14:08David Hoffman?

  Well, I mean, this happened at around the same time that we saw a very large increase in the validator queue, the queue to get into e-staking. For those who don't know, you can't just go and send your ETH to a smart contract and begin staking. You have to enter and exit out of a queue. And that queue is just meant to stabilize the security around the proof of stake chain, right? Like, we want to make sure that this security of the chain doesn't go up and down too fast. So they have like a bottleneck to you got to wait to get in and out. The wait to get in, I think, is about a couple of weeks.

• 14:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  By the way, you can't get out right now, just for everyone. So it's a one-way ticket now, but there will be a way out and we'll also have a queue out.

• 14:46David Hoffman?

  Yes, yeah. And so, I mean, you tell me that there were significant outflows out of exchanges and there's significant ETH queuing for the validator, like, well, I mean, I know how to interpret data.

• 14:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Do you? Do you know how to interpret bullish data, David?

• 15:01David Hoffman?

  I think so. I think so, yeah. Plus, like, the other reason why this is always bullish. We always like to see, for a number of reasons, Ether leaving exchanges. Same with Bitcoin, Bitcoin leaving exchanges, going into either like private keys, self-custodied addresses, or smart contracts. One is bullish just because a lot of price discovery happens on centralized exchanges. Centralized exchanges determine what the price is. So any new buying demand goes on to centralized exchanges first. And so any new demand for Ether is now, now that there's 180,000 less Ether on centralized exchanges, a dollar worth of ETH purchase means a lot more to the price, just because things are a lot more sensitive when there's a lot less Ether on secondary markets.

• 15:46David Hoffman?

  There's a lot less volume. And so that's the bullish, the bullish side of things. There's also the philosophical side of things is we have 180,000 more Ether. That's bankless. There are bankless Ether. There's people using smart contracts, people using D. People moving their ether out of centralized exchanges, which definitely seems to fit the narrative, the trend of the last two months or so of nation states like looking over at crypto and being like, I don't like what you guys are doing. And so then, you know what we do? We withdraw our ether.

• 16:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Sanction you. Yeah, that's the name of the show is bankless. So 180K in one day just went bankless. More assets, more bankless. It's awesome.

• 16:28David Hoffman?

  This is why we're here. We're here to build.

• 16:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Decentralization, absolutely. Let's talk about the world Do Kwon is here to build. We talked about this a little bit. You like these segues. They're getting better, David. Do Kwon reveals a plan to increase USTs. That's the stablecoin on the Luna network, the Terra network, I should say. Bitcoin reserve, just jack that up to $3 billion. So last week, we talked about Do Kwon saying, hey, eventually I want at least $10 billion worth of Bitcoin backing UST. So UST is like an algorithmic stablecoin. Primarily, it's backed by Luna, the value of Luna. And we've seen a lot of algo stablecoins, like not to be like the

• 17:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  the old geezers on the podcast, but like you and I have seen a lot of algorithmic stablecoins rise and fall in our day. Many of them, right? And I've always thought of them as interesting experiments, right? And like, maybe we can get one right at some point in time. But haven't yet. There's always been sort of a crash in it, cataclysm. I think Do is wanting to

• 17:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  like mitigate that a little bit by adding multiple collaterals to his algorithmic stablecoin, not just Luna, but also Bitcoin. So increasing to 3 billion Bitcoin that is going to be backing this. What are your thoughts here, David?

• 17:58David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I mean, it makes sense, right? Multi-collateral backed stablecoins. I've heard this one before. Maker Dao is this model. I'm currently in a little bit of a Twitter tussle with Do Kwon because he made this tweet saying, by my hand, Dai, the Dai stablecoin will die, like have a death.

• 18:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wait, what did he say?

• 18:16David Hoffman?

  He said, by my hand, Dai will die. As in like, he wants to kill Dai. He wants to like outcompete Dai. And I'm like,

• 18:25David Hoffman?

  I know the

• 18:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's some Eager Musk shit, man.

• 18:27David Hoffman?

  Right, right? It's some Icarus level stuff, dude. Like, what he's really saying is like, MKR price is gonna go down while, while Luna price is gonna go up. But like, dude, you can't kill Dye. It's like one of the most battle-tested decentralized stablecoins of all time. Like, sure, we can talk-

• 18:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  Respect your elders.

• 18:44David Hoffman?

  We can talk, we can talk, yeah. Plus, you're just recreating the Maker Down model in a different way. Anyways.

• 18:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  There's more, more, like, more steps in some ways, right? There's more custody. Although, although, you know, Maker and Dye, to be fair, has a lot of, like, centralized stablecoin backing it at this point in time.

• 19:01David Hoffman?

  Certainly.

• 19:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  But go on. Do tell. Say more.

• 19:05David Hoffman?

  Okay, so I tweeted after, to his response, "My money's on Dye." As in, like, "No, DoKwon, you're not gonna kill Dye." And so, on Twitter, he gives me this. Let's see if I can, uh, that's, no, that's not gonna work.

• 19:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  Is that Nick Cage, like?

• 19:17David Hoffman?

  Yeah, it's Nick Cage, like, "Oh, really?" And then does like, the, the empty brain, like, empty brain meme, just making fun of me. And like, it's just always funny when I see, like, L1 founders engaging in just like, uh, kinda degenerate Twitter antics. Anyways, I have DMs out to DoKwon to do an AMA on Bankless, all about what he's up to with, uh, with Terra and, and all this. So, all of the, uh, the Luna shills that are in my DMs trying to get me to get, uh, DoKwon on Bankless. Go to him, go to, go to him, tell him, cuz, cuz he has the invite. He has the invite.

• 19:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  DMs inbound, Do. We'd love to have you on the show. Wanna talk a little bit more about, uh-

• 19:55David Hoffman?

  Let's talk about this.

• 19:57David Hoffman?

  Hear about your plan to kill Dye. I'd love to hear it.

• 20:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Also, what's going on here? Uh, we've got, um, I guess, a burn watch we should talk a little bit about. So, 6 billion ETH has been burnt to date. 6 billion dollars' worth of ETH has been burnt. We're not even a year into EIP1559, David. We got 6 billion ETH burnt. But also, uh, this, the burn rate right now, as of when we are talking about this, this, this week and the last couple of weeks, is plunged, has plunged to a seven-month low. That is wild. Because gas fees are low, because block space demand has decreased. So transactions are cheaper. A byproduct of that is we actually burn less ETH.

• 20:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  Even though we're burning less ETH, though, we're still burning a lot. This is ultrasound dot money again, where you can simulate the burn on the one day. For instance, in a post-merge world, when's the merge going to happen? I don't know. Is it June, David?

• 21:00David Hoffman?

  June to August.

• 21:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Maybe we'll talk about that. June to August. We'll talk about that. We would be still burning 0.9% of total ETH supply per year. So that would be deflationary. That would be ultrasound ETH in this scenario, in a post-merge world. So still a lot of ETH being burnt, but not as much as before. What are your thoughts here?

• 21:23David Hoffman?

  Ryan, if the amount of ether that was burnt was a token on CoinMarketCap or CoinGecko, it would come in 2024, right ahead of Bitcoin Cash. It would be the 24th highest market cap token, the amount of ether that's burnt. So there's your fun fact for the day.

• 21:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, that is a fun fact. We haven't talked about the burn in like at least like three or four shows. So, you know, got to bring it back because it happens.

• 21:50David Hoffman?

  I bet we have.

• 21:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  On a weekly basis. Don't fact check us. Don't fact check us, Pinkless Nation. Okay, Maple Finance, they just originated $1 billion worth of loans. This is a protocol for DeFi services for institutions, which is kind of cool.

• 22:06David Hoffman?

  Fixed money markets, yeah, aggregation of loans, yeah.

• 22:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  And that's a theme of today's episode, which is like, hey, the institutions, like, they're not coming. They're already here. And this is them here in DeFi. So what is Maple Finance again? Can you refresh us?

• 22:21David Hoffman?

  Yeah, it's fixed money market, like it aggregates a bunch of loans and simplifies it and just makes life easier for institutions who are trying to get yield in DeFi. Maple Finance has been grinding for years. I remember talking to them back in my realty days, 2019 to 2020.

• 22:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  Australia.

• 22:38David Hoffman?

  Australia-based, Australia-based, yeah. So definitely like true to the good ethos, true builders of good DeFi products. So just tip of the hat to Maple Finance. Congratulations for breaking $1 billion.

• 22:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  Look at this. Congratulations on this tie, Sid Powell from Maple Finance.

• 22:54David Hoffman?

  Hey, that's what happens when you have to deal with institutions. You wear ties.

• 22:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's just for the headshot, right? Alright guys, we will be back with the releases of the week and of course, the hot news of the week. We're gonna get to Vitalik on the cover of Time and some other things, but before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible.

• 23:14David Hoffman?

  Living a bankless life requires taking control over your own private keys. And that's why so many in the bankless nation already have their Ledger hardware wallet. And brand new to the Ledger lineup of hardware wallets is the Ledger Nano S Plus, a huge upgrade to the world's most popular hardware wallet. With more memory and a larger screen, the Nano S Plus makes it easy to navigate and verify your transactions. And the paired Ledger Live desktop app gives you increased transparency as to what is about to happen with your NFT. What you see is what you sign. The Nano S Plus gives you the smoothest possible user experience while you're doing all of your crypto things. So, go to the Ledger website to check out the features of the new Ledger Nano S Plus and join the waitlist to get yours. And don't forget about the Crypto Life Card, also powered by Ledger. The CL Card is a crypto debit card that hooks right into the Ledger Live app,

• 23:58David Hoffman?

  right next to all the DeFi apps and services that you're already used to doing, like swapping tokens and staking. So if you don't have a Ledger hardware wallet, go to ledger.com, grab a Ledger and take control over your crypto. If you're going bankless, you need Metamask. This is your tool to unlock the world of DeFi without giving up custody over your private keys. Metamask is both a secure in-browser wallet and also a secure bridge for your hardware wallet. You can now trade tokens on any Decks or Aggregator. Metamask Swap gathers real-time pricing information across all the DeFi exchanges, allowing you to select your best price while getting all the Metamask benefits of self-custody, lower gas costs, and increased transaction success rates. Metamask also has a fantastic mobile wallet that I use when I'm out and about, which I use to collect PoApps, NFTs, and do all my DeFi things while I'm away from home.

• 24:43David Hoffman?

  If you haven't downloaded Metamask, you gotta try it out. Web3 wouldn't be the same without it. Download Metamask for desktop and mobile at metamask.io and load up your Trezor, Ledger, Lattice, or Keystone hardware wallets so that they too can get into the world of Web3. Polygon is Ethereum's largest and most vibrant scaling solution to date. With millions of monthly users and all of the biggest DeFi apps, the Polygon ecosystem has turned into a blossoming metropolis of DeFi activity. Transactions on Polygon are quick and cheap, allowing users the freedom to achieve their DeFi goals, all while being economically anchored to Ethereum. But Polygon isn't just the proof-of-stake sidechain. The Polygon team is building a suite of scaling solutions, including Polygon Hermes, Midan, Nightfall, and Zero, all with different design choices

• 25:27David Hoffman?

  in order to be optimized for all possible crypto use cases. If you're a developer who wants to build on the Polygon ecosystem, go to the link in the show notes to check out their fantastic documentation. And if you're a user who just wants to experience fast and cheap DeFi, you can bridge over your ETH or other tokens and start playing around with any of the thousands of applications that are available on Polygon.

• 25:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, guys, we are back with the releases of the week. Got to start with this release. This made some waves. LoopRings LRC, their LRC token is up. And that's because there was a beta release of GameStop's NFT marketplaces built on LoopRing that was just released. This is a little bit what it looks like. You can connect your wallet. You can add funds to LoopRing's Layer 2 here. GameStop plus Ethereum Layer 2. That seems like a good marriage. Now, we also, I think, heard about Immutable doing this with GameStop as well. So I'm a little bit confused because it feels like...

• 26:27David Hoffman?

  We're getting some mixed messages here.

• 26:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, GameStop's definitely on Layer 2, but they're dating two different Layer 2s right now, it seems like.

• 26:34David Hoffman?

  Yeah, and well, actually, when you do the whole login with your wallet, there is actually no LoopRing, or actually, for that matter, Immutable branding or anything. So what Layer 2 is this? There's a formal relationship between GameStop and Immutable X, and they have that $100 million fund. But then, okay, so the backstory here is that there is a former LoopRing business developer. We had him on the show, Matt Finestone. Great, great guy.

• 27:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Matt's fantastic.

• 27:05David Hoffman?

  But got poached by GameStop to start building out their... NFT ecosystem. So Loopring, business developer, went to GameStop. I'm sure Matt, with knowing Loopring in and out, connected GameStop to Loopring, and that's the connection there. But then GameStop, I think, elected to go with Immutable, which, I mean, makes sense, because Loopring, Immutable X is a Validium, which is off-chain data but on-chain transactions, on-chain assets. So it's super fast, super cheap. Loopring is more

• 27:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  Costs you nothing to mint things.

• 27:37David Hoffman?

  Costs you nothing. Well, it costs the network something, but it costs you, the user, nothing.

• 27:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  Immutable just pays for it.

• 27:42David Hoffman?

  Yeah, Immutable just pays for it, which makes sense, because with Loopring, you still have like 30 cent transaction fees and everything's on-chain. So it's actually better for very, very high-value transactions. Like, I would feel more comfortable having my CryptoPunk on Loopring than I would on Immutable. But for gaming, makes less sense. And so there's no reason why they have to pick one NFT marketplace, one NFT platform. But the mixed messaging here is a little bit confusing. So what are they actually doing with Loopring? I don't know. It's also interesting that Loopring is tweeting about this and not necessarily GameStop.

• 28:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I was just gonna say that. But of course, anytime you tweet something about GameStop, it does quite well. It gets a lot of attention. Like, look at this. And LRC price is up a little bit on this news, but maybe not a ton. I think that the bigger spike with the price of the Loopring token actually happens. Like, look at this, back in November.

• 28:40David Hoffman?

  When the first rumors about the Matt Finestone Bridge Loopring relationship with GameStop happened. But then GameStop announced their relationship with Immutable, and then it kind of tanked back to the pre-price. But now it's up just a little bit, so.

• 28:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  Got a little blip.

• 28:54David Hoffman?

  Yeah, market confused.

• 28:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Market confused, but not super excited about this, which does maybe tell you something. Also, let's talk about this. A protocol called TimeSwap just launched on the Polygon network. This is a fixed-income lending and borrowing protocol for ERC20s. It's built on Polygon. I guess, you know, we've seen a lot of these lending and borrowing Protocols, the the special sauce here is no, no oracle somehow. So that makes it, you know, permissionless. There's no like governance apparatus. They're saying non liquidatable. They're also saying it's got fixed maturity lending and borrowing. So you can kind of lock in the date at which these, these, these assets will mature. And of course, this is in DeFi,

• 29:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  built on Polygon first. I guess like my observation about this stuff and like, I think we cover as many as we can and as many as we see, but so many launched that we're just like not able to fit into the roll up every week. But once observation I've had is like, we're starting to see more innovation on the edges. And what I mean by that is like, the new protocols are being developed and launched, like the new weird stuff on layer twos and on sidechains first, not on Ethereum. And once they prove themselves in kind of these like more local jurisdictions, then maybe they make their way back to Ethereum and they kind of launch on mainnet. But the

• 30:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  innovation is starting to happen at the edges. So I guess one message is like be on the lookout for cool new projects on sidechains and layer twos. That's where the action is going to be. That's where the innovation is going to be in the future.

• 30:40David Hoffman?

  The alpha is always on the frontier. That's why we have the going west metaphor. It's the new frontier.

• 30:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, my God. Yeah. I mean, we were in Colorado, I guess. Now we're just headed, we're headed west towards Oregon.

• 30:52David Hoffman?

  California, going to the gold rush.

• 30:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  California, baby. Yeah.

• 30:54David Hoffman?

  Come visit me.

• 30:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  Just more and more space.

• 30:58David Hoffman?

  And this makes sense, right? Because innovation needs to have cheap fees. If you're going to take risks, you need to have cheap fees, because why would you take risks when you have to pay the fees of the Ethereum L1? So I think the process for this is that developers and the cost of innovation goes to zero on the layer twos. Developers are free to experiment, are free to innovate, and then they are free to experiment and get their product market fit. And then if they do get it, it justifies returning back to Manhattan, back to the L1. And you can have your ceremony of just like, yo, we made it, guys, by deploying your contracts on the L1 because you have proven that there is sufficient demand to justify it on the layer two.

• 31:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  The new frontier, L22.

• 31:39David Hoffman?

  You like that one, Ron?

• 31:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  I like it a lot, David. I don't know where you come up with this stuff, sir. It's just genius. Robinhood, they're coming up with some stuff too. A new debit card that offers crypto rewards. Well, where have I seen that? Some of the quotes are interesting here. Of course, everyone's trying to get Gen Z now. Sorry millennials, you're no longer hot. It's all about Gen Z.

• 32:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  And the idea is to turn non-crypto natives onto Bitcoin. So basically, it's a debit card because according to this article, Gen Z doesn't like credit cards. They just want debit cards? I don't know. The article says, David, I don't know.

• 32:18David Hoffman?

  Is Decrypt the alpha for this? I'm not sure.

• 32:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  I don't know if that's true, but we do know they do like crypto. And so when you use your debit card, you can like, like basically if you're paying something and it's, you know, 90 cents, you can just round up to the dollar and that 10% gets allocated to whatever you want, including crypto. You buy some ETH with that, you buy some Bitcoin with that little excess on your debit card. So I think the story here is like Robinhood becoming more crypto friendly and actually taking a page out of the crypto bank's book, right? Gemini does this already with their card, as does BlockFi, as does Coinbase. Like they're all going to do this and now fintech is coming to crypto for like the the new features, which is sort of interesting to me.

• 33:05David Hoffman?

  I will have to say that a crypto themed like credit or debit card is like, okay, cool. Like you get the thumbs up, but like there is no innovation points on that one.

• 33:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's just something, it's probably table stakes. It's probably something you have to have to keep going. All right, man. You want to get to some raises?

• 33:22David Hoffman?

  Yeah. Okay. Let's go with this one. This one's awesome.

• 33:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  The mega raise?

• 33:26David Hoffman?

  The mega raise. Yeah. So Bored Ape Yacht Club creators Yuga Labs raises $450 million. That is a large number to build the first version of the metaverse. These are my words, first version of the metaverse. But we talk about the metaverse a lot, like, oh, NFTs, they're part of the metaverse. Digital land, they're part of the metaverse. Yuga Labs is on a race to build out. The full, the first fully fledged version of the metaverse. So complete with land, complete with NFTs being the Bored Apes and all the other IP that Yuga Labs owns. You know, complete with, you know, people running around in their avatars doing Bored Ape things. They have the Apecoin for the currency of that metaverse. So they are not doing just one part of the metaverse. They're doing the full entire metaverse.

• 34:10David Hoffman?

  This funding round evaluates Yuga Labs at $4 billion. And like using that kind of like frame of reference for what Yuga Labs is building. No, as a team that has been known to execute and execute very, very well. You know, remember when Ryan, when Bored Apes used to be considered like the poor man's punk? And now they're almost like 2X the floor price of punks.

• 34:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  And how they just like bought like punks last week?

• 34:33David Hoffman?

  And they bought the punks, yeah.

• 34:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I remember that.

• 34:35David Hoffman?

  And so like people are looking at the Apecoin drop at the current valuation of $13 billion and being like, that is ridiculous. That's way too high. Usually airdrops happen, they have a spike of interest, but then they just basically bleed to zero. People in my mind are valuing this Apecoin based on the value of like a completely fully fledged, first, first functional metaverse ever coming out of Yuga Labs. And so that is, that is the, the value, $13 billion is absolutely insane. $13 billion airdrop. That makes, that makes the minting of a Bored Ape, perhaps one of the greatest investments of all time. I think it was 0.08 ETH to mint an ape. So that's now like 100 ETH.

• 35:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Don't remind me, okay? That's painful.

• 35:19David Hoffman?

  But then you also got the Apecoin airdrop, Ryan. You also got probably, I think, I think they got mutant apes airdropped as well. Maybe they had to mint those too. But yeah, minting an ape, one of the best investments of all time.

• 35:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  Dude, I would, you know what? Maybe William Peaster can do a metiversal post on that. You know, I'd love to see the best NFT investments of all time. Like compare like the original CryptoPunks, you know, like mints to this. But this is their slide deck, okay?

• 35:44David Hoffman?

  It's bullish. It's a pretty Chad, Chad, uh, deck. It's a Chad deck.

• 35:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  When you've got a slide that just lists like, you know, 12 different celebrities and their names are Shaq, Post Malone, Snoop Dogg, Timbaland, Future, The Biebs, Serena Williams.

• 36:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  And they're all like apes, right? You've done something really well to kind of penetrate. And this is all about, I mean, there's so much in this slide deck. We'll include a link in the show notes, but, and we think like our conspiracy theory, right? It's like, I think you said this, that this was probably leaked to hype up what they're doing. So people like Bank Tens would go talk about it.

• 36:24David Hoffman?

  The intentional leak.

• 36:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. So this is basically like, they're saying everyone's done crappy versions of the metaverse. No one else gets it. We have the brands and the, the ability to actually pull off a metaverse. The thing that Zuckerberg is talking about, like, that's the thing that we can build and we are going to build. And Apecoin is the currency of this. You know, the NFT early community and all of our brands will be sort of the, the NFT layer and come hang with us. And, you know, this is going to be really awesome. And now all we have to do is build it.

• 37:00David Hoffman?

  So if you want to hear more content about this, this, this news actually dropped while we were live streaming on the State of the Nation on Tuesday about this exact topic. So you can go watch that, that State of the Nation. It's about Yuga Labs buying the punks, but we also talked about what they're building. We had a number of builders on that show who were saying like, okay, yeah, Yuga Labs executed on, on the branding behind Bored Apes, but like building a metaverse, building Digital Land and all the other things that they're talking about, like, that's hard and that's something new. So sure, they have the ability to execute in one domain. Does that mean that they have, that it carries over to the ability to execute in like three other domains simultaneously? TBD.

• 37:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  I kind of agree. I kind of agree with that take, which is like, you have one category of execution that you've absolutely crushed. And that is like narrative building, story building, branding, marketing, total points there. You total crushed it. But the metaverse? That is a different type of execution ability, right? And the question is, can you now pull that off as well? And I guess we'll have to see, but they're definitely funded to do that. A16Z was involved in that funding round. They did their profile pic of a, you know, whatever Bored Ape that they hold.

• 38:20David Hoffman?

  3D glasses, Bored Ape with astronaut suit. The astronaut suit's a nice touch.

• 38:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  You like this one?

• 38:26David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 38:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  They put it as their profile pic.

• 38:29David Hoffman?

  For a very short amount of time.

• 38:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Just one day. You know, the announcement day.

• 38:33David Hoffman?

  The announcement day, just to hype it up.

• 38:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's all you get, just one day. Okay, let's keep moving. FTX is backing a $500 million crypto gaming platform on Terra. What's super interesting is these alt-layer-one ecosystems are also accruing their own funding, funding rounds too. And $500 million for a crypto gaming platform? Like, that just blows my, blows my mind, the money that is flowing into this space right now. Do you have any thoughts on this?

• 39:03David Hoffman?

  Yeah, no, no thoughts, other than just that you, there's absolutely, you would have no idea what the price action would be if it, being down for the last four months, based on the, the valuations that are being pulled in the private rounds, so.

• 39:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  Absolutely. These private rounds are not bearish. Yeah, it's like, do you remember how the private rounds like dried up in 2018, 2019? Like, no one, like, people couldn't raise money.

• 39:23David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 39:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like, I remember talking to founders and they're like, "It's, it's really hard. Like, we don't know if we're gonna be able to survive." And this is not that type of bear market at all.

• 39:33David Hoffman?

  Thank you for printing all the money, Federal Reserve. Appreciate it.

• 39:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, FTX, they just invested $100 million in an app, banking app, called Dave.

• 39:43David Hoffman?

  Yeah, Ryan, I have a banking app that I sold for $100 million.

• 39:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Is that yours, Dave?

• 39:49David Hoffman?

  Banking app called Dave.

• 39:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  They have dave.com. I'm surprised that wasn't yours, Dave. Have you used this before?

• 39:58David Hoffman?

  I have not used this. This is the first time I've heard about this.

• 40:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, this is the first time David has heard about Dave. Anyway, this is an example, I think, of FTX, like, I don't know what you'd call this, but like, going toward the, the TradFi side of things, right? So FTX is obviously like a crypto exchange, a crypto bank, and now they are investing in, in TradFi fintech companies, $100 million worth. So, you know, smart move, but this is all, like, we've had this thesis for a long time, that crypto banks would just become, basically, neo-banks. And this is, looks like what they're evolving into. Kind of see, cool to see crypto get involved a bit more in, in fintech. I don't know very much about Dave, but you should invite these guys to Dave Dow, David.

• 40:43David Hoffman?

  Oh, they're, they're in Dave Dow.

• 40:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  Just like, just because of the name. Um, WorldCoin.

• 40:49David Hoffman?

  Oh, boy. Oh, boy.

• 40:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, they just raised a hundred million dollars. I feel like they just raised.

• 40:54David Hoffman?

  The last time we heard about WorldCoin was because of their raise and their announcement.

• 40:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, so I wasn't making that up. Um, they raised a hundred million dollars, this time at a three billion dollar token valuation. What, what is WorldCoin for people who forgot about this thing? They talk about a lot of raises.

• 41:10David Hoffman?

  There is a particular like niche in crypto that has been tried a number of times, and that is the Sybil resistant token distribution as, as in, can we distribute the same amount of tokens to everyone in the world? And so the attempt here is to make your token value valuable by fairness, right? So if everyone has the equal, an equal amount, then that's super, super fair. And humans value fairness. Humans value legitimacy. Did a great podcast on this with Vitalik Bitter entitled Legitimacy. You should definitely listen to that if you haven't. Uh, and so this is an attempt for that. When they released the first time around, they got absolutely slaughtered on Twitter and in the, in the public sphere because of how they actually went about trying to solve Sybil resistance.

• 41:55David Hoffman?

  And they did it with these like super dystopian silver ball looking things that scans your iris. And it uses your iris and your fingerprints as like an anti-Sybil mechanism. So it's the classic web two model of like, give us your data and we'll give you money. And so they got absolutely slaughtered on crypto Twitter and every, and they were funded by like a very big names like, uh, three hours capital, uh, A16Z. And Coinbase is now in this one.

• 42:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  Coastal Ventures.

• 42:25David Hoffman?

  Right. Uh, and, and so they, they were in the news cycle. So we, we reached out to them to host them on State of the Nation because it was, it was hot in the news cycle. That's what we do. Uh, and they were afraid to come on. They, we, we told them like, you guys need to come on because you guys are getting slaughtered in the narrative. And if you ever want to justify or explain your project, you guys need to, you guys are welcome to use our platform to explain what you guys are up to. And they were too scared.

• 42:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  Do you think they were, I, they backed out at the last minute, which surprised us.

• 42:54David Hoffman?

  Oh, fun, fun talks about that. You know what episode we did in, in lieu of that episode, Ryan? You remember?

• 42:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  No.

• 42:59David Hoffman?

  It was ultra scalable Ethereum.

• 43:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, really?

• 43:02David Hoffman?

  One of the most popular episodes of all time.

• 43:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, the one that we were just like, oh shit.

• 43:06David Hoffman?

  Cause we got rugged. We got rugged, yeah. They were like, yo, like, we don't want to come on anymore. We're not ready for the PR. And then I went back to the CEO and DM'd him on Twitter. He's like, you're making a huge mistake. Like, Bankless is one of the most fair platforms you'll ever get, ever, and you're not going to get this opportunity again. And then he just didn't respond. And so instead, we grounded out and produced the agenda for ultra scalable Ethereum. And it's one of the best episodes of all time.

• 43:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  I remember being very stressed with the cancellation there. Like, we don't usually get cancellations. I don't think, like, um, look, I, I am actually optimistic. Like, I was cautiously optimistic about this. I think they may have gotten a fair, like, an unfair rap on Twitter. And, and in, in the crypto community, I wanted them to kind of explain themselves. Cause they have made some really cool engineering decisions. For example, they've built this thing on a really interesting layer two set of technologies. So it's all like ultimately settled on Ethereum. And I do think fair distribution this way is a monetary experiment that we've never been able to successfully try. So can we mitigate the privacy concerns that people have?

• 44:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like, I, I do think that they should spend some time with the crypto community and, and explain this. So I guess despite what we've just said, and despite the previous invitation, I would still welcome these guys on. At least somebody from their project to like talk a little bit about WorldCoin. But what they're in the news for is more funding, not necessarily like actual traction and progress.

• 44:37David Hoffman?

  Right. So like, we would know that there would be traction if people saw little silver balls in their neighborhood. And we saw cues of people lining up to get their irises scanned. So Bankless listeners, if you've seen that, tweet at us and let us know if you've seen that, because I certainly haven't.

• 44:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes, and I will not be first in line for that one. Let's skip that. That's a good experiment. Yeah. I'll just, I'll just wait for it. At least come on the podcast first and then we'll talk about it. This is kind of neat. This is under the, I guess, the title of why work at a crypto fund when you can go start your own? Katie Haun, she was at A16Z, she was a partner. She started her own fund recently. She just raised 1.5 billion dollars for a Web3 fund. Again, more money in the space, more people breaking off from the funds that they were in and starting their own. Here's another, this is a former Polychain Capital founder who just launched a 125 million dollar fund.

• 45:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  Now, the, I guess the twist here is this fund is actually destined to become a DAO at some point in the future. Let me describe how that works. It says, "After the full 125 million is invested," that's the initial fund amount, "the fund will be dissolved." And the DAO, and DAO5 will return the limited partnership capital to investors and convert the fund into a DAO, which of course is an online community that uses smart contracts, cryptocurrency, et cetera, et cetera. So that is the plan for this, kind of a unique twist on things.

• 46:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  Why, why join a fund when you could start your own, David? Win Bankless DAO, win Bankless Fund? Are we going to do a fund at some point?

• 46:13David Hoffman?

  I mean, we've talked about this. The answer is yes. If people are interested.

• 46:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  I have, I have too much, I have too much to do. We're not, not anytime soon, guys. But yeah, why start a fund when you can build your own? That is the question. And I think it's a question for, for everyone, right? Like, these crypto economic tools make it easier than ever to like coordinate capital. So why not try some capital coordination experiments? If you're listening to Bankless, if you're plugged into DeFi, you're probably on the frontier and you're probably able to make some pretty good investment decisions. At least if you've been in the space for a little bit and have seen some cycles play out. Let's see what Qualcomm does in this space.

• 46:54David Hoffman?

  Oh, this one's mine, Ryan, because Qualcomm is based right around the corner from me.

• 46:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  They're in San Diego, right?

• 46:59David Hoffman?

  They're in San Diego, yeah. They drive by their office every now and then. $100 million Metaverse Investment Fund, and this is actually pretty interesting. And when I was reading this article, I was reminded of Kathy Wood's whole, "The future is nearer than we actually think." And there are like five mega trends in technology. One of them being blockchain, another one being basically like, kind of like AI chip. What Qualcomm's up to. So Qualcomm is putting $100 million into a Metaverse fund to build out things like VR headsets and things that demand chips. So because, so they are investing in the Metaverse because they think the Metaverse will create net new demand for microchips, for silicon semiconductors.

• 47:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's like the hardware side of the Metaverse.

• 47:42David Hoffman?

  The hardware side of the Metaverse, right. And so this is the intersection of industries coming together to build out the future. And so reminder, the Metaverse is not just crypto. It is so many more other things. It is data centers and servers that can host persistent state of many, many different people from across the world, like significantly more massive MMORPGs. We need chips for that. It's headsets and immersive experiences. So these technologies are coming together and Qualcomm is putting $100 million into that investment.

• 48:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  I do think crypto, people forget about the hardware side of things. I mean, we are focused on the content. We're focused on the property to populate the Metaverse and the people. But there's a lot of like hardware in, you know, data center tech underneath all of this. This is another one. The teams behind the Mina Protocol, I think that's how you say it, Mina Protocol, they just raised 92... Mina? Okay, I'll go with Mina.

• 48:38David Hoffman?

  I don't know.

• 48:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  The Mina Protocol, they just raised $92 million from Theros Capital, FTX and others. This is a Layer 1 chain, okay? And it is a privacy-focused chain. I don't know very much about this, to be honest, David. I haven't, you know, gone down the rabbit hole on this one. I imagine it's probably proof of stake. I imagine it's using some advanced cryptography. I imagine it's also a smart contract platform. Beyond that, I gotta ask the question, like, do we have any more room for more Layer 1 chains?

• 49:11David Hoffman?

  Well, we have room for more Layer 1 investments, Ryan.

• 49:16David Hoffman?

  We've got lots of that, lots of room for that.

• 49:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  At some point, it's got to become a bad investment, though, right? It's like, at some point, when does the window fully close on layer ones?

• 49:25David Hoffman?

  Well, okay, so privacy is hot right now because of the whole conversations of sanctions and nation states and crypto. And so, privacy tools and privacy tooling is in vogue at the moment. So I think that kind of explains that a little bit.

• 49:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  I just always ask the question is, you'd have to have a really good reason to build a layer one when you could also just build a layer two from an economics perspective. And sometimes I wonder if the reason to build a layer one is just investors will fund your project for a lot of money and you can sell tokens.

• 49:57David Hoffman?

  That's been the status quo for like, almost five years now.

• 50:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Let's talk about this. Paradigm just invested $8.75 million in Ribbon Finance. What's this about?

• 50:08David Hoffman?

  So in the TradFi world, we have these things called structured products, which is basically like, I think an analogy is like, kind of like a yearn's custom strategies, like you can load up yield strategies. So it's like, it's like a yield strategy DeFi product. We have these things in TradFi, but basically, anything you can do in TradFi, you can do even better in DeFi. So that's what Ribbon is. Their project's declared mission is to create sustainable alpha for everyone. Financial products are bundled per specific investment strategies. So they just raised $8.75 million from Paradigm.

• 50:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think this is a cool DeFi protocol, and if people want to check it out, of course, Bankless wrote a tactic about this.

• 50:47David Hoffman?

  Classic.

• 50:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  In this article, "How to Make Money with Ribbon Finance." And William Peace describes it as a prepackaged and cross-protocol DeFi investment strategy. So if you want to learn how to use this thing, yeah, at the time, we wrote it, APIs, APYs ranged from 10 to 54% on this thing. So pretty good APYs. Go check out this article, we'll include a link in the show notes. Dalio, Bridgewater, investing in a crypto fund.

• 51:15David Hoffman?

  Finally.

• 51:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  Dalio's warming up a little bit to crypto.

• 51:18David Hoffman?

  Finally, yeah.

• 51:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  What do you think about this?

• 51:21David Hoffman?

  It's, it's so frustrating. I know you and I are both reading his book. I don't know if you've finished his book or not, Ryan. But like, it's impossible to read his book, which is titled like,

• 51:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Changing World Order.

• 51:32David Hoffman?

  Principles for Living in a Changing World Order. And the Changing World Order is something we talk on Bankless about all the time.

• 51:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  He just nails it.

• 51:38David Hoffman?

  The decline of the dollar, the decline of institutions. Here's what you, here's, this is why we're, we talk about how it's risky to not go into crypto, while crypto is also risky itself. Things are risky and things are volatile and things are chaotic when we have changing world orders. And Ray Dalio is so tapped into this, what he's missing. And he talks about how the phoenix that rises from the ashes of like one broken world order, moves into a new world order, and then the phoenix rises from the ashes and we do it all over again. He talks about like these new, these new nations always work well when they have their own internal financial markets, their own internal equities markets, their own like places of trade.

• 52:21David Hoffman?

  And like, it's so frustrating when I'm hearing this and I'm like, oh, okay. So Ethereum, it's got its own Uniswap. It's got its own like D Y D X. It's got its own money markets with Compound and Aave. It's got all of the financial institutions that Ray Dalio is, says is critical for the arising of a new, of the new neo-nation, the next step in the world. And I'm like, Ray, it's right in front of you. It's right in front of you. It's Ethereum. It's DeFi. It's crypto.

• 52:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  He literally goes, he's like, here, here's the history of, you know, Denmark and like Amsterdam is the first exchange. And then we got London, right? And that, that was another financial.

• 52:54David Hoffman?

  We invented the LLC. It's like, Ray, we have DAOs now.

• 52:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  Exactly. And then, and then he's like, and then it's New York. And then he's like, well, what's going to be next? The question is, what's the next nation state on the rise? Is it going to be China? Maybe it's like Beijing is the next. I'm like,

• 53:08David Hoffman?

  It's Ethereum.

• 53:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's Ethereum.

• 53:11David Hoffman?

  It perfectly fits into the trajectory.

• 53:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  It it really does, and I don't think he's, I just don't think that's on his radar, the raise, the like, the rise of what we would call like the, you know, this new institution, the digital nation, these new protocols. I think even if you are, if you believe that nation states will get a whole another big cycle, like financial cycle and be kind of the empire, then even in the most like, I guess, bearish case for, you know, the bankless concept of a digital nation, crypto is still

• 53:45David Hoffman?

  The new thing.

• 53:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  The perfect bridge

• 53:46David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 53:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Between the old paradigm and the new paradigm. So you at least want to be in crypto, because you don't know what the the future big nation, you know, new world order is going to be. And like, so you want to be in crypto in order to get across that bridge, because crypto is going to be essential for getting across the the bridge and establishing a new world order. So we tend to think that, hey, the new world order will probably be based on crypto, because it's the only credibly neutral institution to actually do the job in the digital era, right? It's going to just slurp in all of the value, just like the internet has slurped in all of our, you know, communication content. But even if you don't believe that that's true, you know,

• 54:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  crypto is going to play a massive role as the bridge between old paradigm and new paradigm. Anyway, all that to say, Ray's getting it, though. He's investing in crypto funds. So it's it's starting to happen.

• 54:40David Hoffman?

  There's a reason why we call it the bankless nation, and it's not just because it's a good name, like, it is a direct reference to exactly what Ray Dalio is talking about. We're building new nations in the sky, and they shall be bankless.

• 54:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  There you go, guys. If you want to get into the new nation, you got to get a job in crypto. That's what it takes. We got some fantastic jobs. We tell you every week to get a job in crypto. I think we just got a massive dump of new job postings on the bankless job boards.

• 55:09David Hoffman?

  I'm ready to dance.

• 55:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  You ready to dance?

• 55:10David Hoffman?

  I'm ready to dance.

• 55:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  You ready to dance?

• 55:11David Hoffman?

  I'm ready to dance.

• 55:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  Because I'm ready to read. All right, let's go.

• 55:13David Hoffman?

  You got the easier one.

• 55:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  Uh, yeah, well, blockchain engineer, DAOs.

• 55:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  Missouri is hiring that. What a fantastic role. Software engineer for market data also at Missouri. Go check those roles out. Operations manager Syndica, senior product designer Smart DeFi, a senior GoRust engineer at Syndica, a senior full stack engineer at Syndica, a senior software engineer at Airdrop Labs, a product manager for crypto at Nori, a Bankless web developer at Bankless, an editor at Bankless as well, senior project engineer at the Bankless Academy, a senior product engineer at SuperRare. Got a bunch more positions open for Missouri. You should take a look at Gauntlet as well. David's done dancing and I gotta take a sip of water because I've been reading a little bit.

• 55:55David Hoffman?

  I would like to emphasize the Bankless web developer would be in charge of building out one of the coolest websites of all time. I shouldn't even call it a website. We need a better name for it. But if you want some alpha, you gotta apply to be the Bankless web dev. If you are a talented web dev who wants to lead Bankless into the world of Web 3 and into the frontier, pay attention to that one.

• 56:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, why would you not? Get a job in crypto. Companies are still hiring like crazy. This is not like the last bear market. This is a ton of hiring going on. All right, man. Well, let's get to news, okay?

• 56:28David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 56:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  And let's get to Vitalik on the cover of Time Magazine. Look at this picture.

• 56:32David Hoffman?

  Looking like an absolute king.

• 56:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, he's not a king. He's the prince of crypto.

• 56:37David Hoffman?

  Excuse me, excuse me. It's on the cover of Time Magazine. It says, "The prince of crypto has concerns", on Vitalik's shirt. And then it says, "Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin fights to fix the world he created." And this isn't anything new. Vitalik in 2017 made similar sentiments on Twitter saying like, "Yo, if this whole industry just turns into like pump and dump ICO Ponzi schemes, like I'm out of here."

• 56:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  I'm out.

• 56:59David Hoffman?

  And then the bear market happened, so he stayed.

• 57:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Thank God.

• 57:03David Hoffman?

  But like now, now, once again, like it's always the hotline. Like Vitalik's a very like pragmatic, modest person. When he sees like all the scams in crypto, he's like, yes, those are bad. Like, I don't want Ethereum necessarily to be used for these things, but I understand the value of open permissionless systems. But like, it's a really, really hot line for something like Time Magazine to be like, "Yo, the guy that invented crypto says it's bad."

• 57:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  But you know what? That's a catchy. Look, we do it to you. It's called, it's called, we call it legit bait, okay? Which is like, you say something, but like, it has, has to have some legitimacy. And in the article, which was absolutely fantastic, I think everyone, if you got like, you know, 15 minutes, go read this article. Vitalik does, you know, put in place some of his, his criticisms about the current state of crypto. And many of these criticisms are always well reasoned, but they're, they're also very valid. But yeah, they, they like, they put him on the, but not everyone liked this image of Vitalik, David. So when this got out, of course, everyone in crypto was very excited to see Vitalik. And like, if you've met Vitalik, I mean, this is pretty much what he dresses like and what he looks like.

• 58:10David Hoffman?

  This is tame Vitalik.

• 58:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like, there's, but there's no pretense in the guy. Like, you're never gonna catch him in, you know, a suit and tie and, you know, fully buttoned up.

• 58:19David Hoffman?

  Usually it's in a unicorn t-shirt.

• 58:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  But, I mean, some of the responses, some of the quote tweets on this were absolutely like, mean.

• 58:31David Hoffman?

  Yeah, pretty terrible, because crypto has a bad rap, right? So here's a quote tweet from the Time article. "This guy looks like the clone of, of Tom Brady." Can you go back to the other one? "This guy looks like the clone of Tom Brady keeps locked in his basement to periodically feed on to stay youthful."

• 58:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  My god.

• 58:50David Hoffman?

  There's, there's a few others. This is if Tom Brady was a, was on dog food. "How is it possible to be this rich and still be ugly? Oh my god, get a hair transplant or a botox or a new wardrobe, something." Okay, this one, I want to dwell on this one. This is why I love Vitalik, because he doesn't care about his image. He is a person. He is him. And like, he shows up in ruffled hair that he didn't comb, and it's in a unicorn t-shirt, because he has no ego. And who do you want most to be the founder of your, of your crypto project, to have someone with zero ego? We are missing L1 founders with zero ego in this world, in my opinion.

• 59:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  There's not, there's not very many. There was Satoshi, I think. There's Vitalik, and I don't know.

• 59:35David Hoffman?

  I don't know who else.

• 59:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  If there's another I can think of, maybe Zuko. It's a pretty cool guy.

• 59:40David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 59:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  A fantastic person as well. My, uh, my wife actually sent me this one. It was like, oh my God, everyone's being mean to Vitalik on the internet. Like, like I could do something. But I did, I treated how I was like, most of the comments here suck. And this is so true. Vitalik is one of the best human beings I know. He'll be remembered as a historical figure of monumental importance. Petty people can't get past how he looks in this image. We don't deserve him. I a hundred percent stand by that.

• 1:00:08David Hoffman?

  That's the right take.

• 1:00:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  One of the best humans I know. Not only that, I think the Vitalik is going to be remembered across history. Like he is going to be one of the most important people, I think, of this century. For his work in Ethereum, but the other things he's, he's going to do in life as well. And, um, it's super petty that people just, you know, take the, take this picture and use it to insult him.

• 1:00:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Pretty annoying actually to me, but there, we got a funny exchange out of it, David.

• 1:00:40David Hoffman?

  I'm reminded of the layer zero I did with, um, uh, Santi Siri from, from Argentina. And he called Vitalik, while he walked around Argentina in his like sandals. He called Vitalik like this monk figure. And I think that's a very, very apt description of Vitalik, right? Like has, has no like, is not interested in material things. Is mostly interested in making good things happen for the world. Very polite, very respectful, um, very grounded, even, even, yeah, yeah. Very grounded individual.

• 1:01:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I just, I know both of us have, you know, had the opportunity to interact with him on a number of occasions. And, uh, he's just a fantastic human being and represents the, the best of us. And I think the best of this industry as well. But at least we got some fun out of this as well, because there were some back and forth on the, on the Tom Brady. Why don't you tell us what happened here between Vitalik?

• 1:01:29David Hoffman?

  Vitalik, Vitalik can take a joke. He can take a joke very, very well. He's, he's been used to getting just berated in all different capacities for ever since he's been in crypto. So he, he retweets the, all of these like terrible, terrible comments on him on Twitter. And he goes, the quote, quote tweets on the new time article about me are truly amazing. These are barely even cherry picked. It's pretty much one piece of awesome after another. Highly recommend scrolling. And then he follows up his own tweet saying, I don't even know who Tom Brady is. Had to ask people around me. My best guess is that he is the actor from Mission Impossible.

• 1:02:06David Hoffman?

  And so there's like, he quotes like-

• 1:02:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's Tom Cruise, Vitalik. Sorry.

• 1:02:09David Hoffman?

  So he quote tweets like four tweets like calling him Tom Brady. He's like, "Anyone else looks like Vitalik looks like Tom Brady on meth. Bro looks like a dystopian Tom Brady. Tom Brady was a reverse Captain America super soldier serum. The prince of crypto kinda looks like Tom Brady after two years of retirement and no weightlifting."

• 1:02:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  No. Okay. And then what happens?

• 1:02:30David Hoffman?

  Tom Brady retweets Vitalik. Vitalik's tweet saying, "I don't know who Tom Brady is." And Tom Brady says, "What's up, Vitalik? You may not know me, but just wanted to say I'm a big fan of yours. Thank you for everything you've built in the world of crypto. Otherwise Autograph wouldn't have been possible, his NFT platform. Hope I get to meet you someday. You're the GOAT." Which is a tip of the hat to how everyone calls Tom Brady the GOAT. He's like one of the most Super Bowls by all time for ever. So the GOAT of Super Bowl, of football, is calling Vitalik Buterin the GOAT.

• 1:03:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Hey, real recognize real.

• 1:03:04David Hoffman?

  Also a slight chill of his Autograph platform.

• 1:03:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, but also real recognize real, you know, like one GOAT seeing another, it's really cool to see. And I love that the story came together that way. Anything else on this, David?

• 1:03:20David Hoffman?

  No, it was a good story. It was a good story. The last time we saw Vitalik engage with celebrities, it turned into a really funny video of Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher and Vitalik in the living room. So I'm hopeful something like this happens with Tom Brady.

• 1:03:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, absolutely. All right, man. Let's move on to some other Ethereum stuff while we're talking about Ethereum. And, you know, we gotta just mention EIP 4844. Okay, I'm gonna say that again because this is the first time we've talked about this Ethereum improvement proposal. That's what an EIP is on Bankless. EIP 4844.

• 1:03:56David Hoffman?

  Remember the name.

• 1:03:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Remember, remember that number, okay? Because it is like 1559 in that it is going to be of-

• 1:04:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  That level of significance, I think, in the future. We don't talk about EIPs very often, but this thing is worth talking about. Now, we're not going to go in detail. It's probably a bunch of future bankless articles and probably some shows that we'll put together for you in the future. And there's kind of no rush because it's still in the early stages of development. So we've got a long time on this one. But David, could you sum up what EIP 4844 is going to do for us?

• 1:04:33David Hoffman?

  Yeah, it's a new type of data sharding structure, which takes a leaf out of distributed systems like BitTorrent. It kind of copies a BitTorrent model. So on the website, it'll read, "EIP 4844 introduces a new kind of transaction type to Ethereum, which accepts blobs of data to be persisted in the beacon node for a short period of time. These changes are forward compatible, not required for EVM execution, and small enough to keep disk use manageable." So it's basically allowing Ethereum's data layer to be a little bit more expressive and using distributed systems, again, like BitTorrent. We will get better and better at explaining these things as we come to understand them more.

• 1:05:15David Hoffman?

  But the TLDR is that, this is from Proto Lambda out of the Optimism team, "Data blobs are the first milestone towards full Ethereum sharding, enabling rollups like Optimism to grow 100x in capacity." That's already after rollups like Optimism have 10x in capacity coming from their own innovations. And so this is, we were just previewing this very, very significant subject for something that's going to have a huge scalability increase, both to the Ethereum L1 and, of course, orders of magnitude more scalability to the Ethereum Layer 2s.

• 1:05:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  And in particular, this is going to scale out. Remember, we've talked about on our Modular Blockchain show, the three kind of layers of the stack here. The consensus layer, the data layer, and the execution layer, and the Ethereum scalability roadmap. The execution layer is all rollups, basically. And the consensus layer is the beacon chain, of course. This is bringing massive scalability to the data layer, which rollups, of course, need in order to scale. So what we get When this thing is deployed and it's a much more simplified version than the full data sharding spec. So the hope is it can be deployed a little bit faster than the full data sharding.

• 1:06:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  You know, spec is roll up fees, as David said, up to 100 times faster, like 100 times more space on rollups. So look at your, what you pay on Arbitrum or Optimism or any of the ZK rollups you use, right? And it's going to be 99% less in terms of costs. So if you're paying like, you know, one cent now or 10 cents now, you're going to be paying like fractions of a cent in the future for a transaction. So lots of cool stuff to unpack there and we will unpack it in the future, just not on this particular episode. While we're talking about that though, David, should we talk a little bit about the merge? Because some people brought to our attention

• 1:07:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  that like

• 1:07:12David Hoffman?

  We should emphasize something. Yes.

• 1:07:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay. What should we emphasize?

• 1:07:16David Hoffman?

  Last week, we were, we went through like the the super physics analysis on like five different points that indicate that the merge is coming in June. And then we talked about how bullish the merge is and emphasize June, emphasize June, emphasize June. June is possible, but it is not, it's not fact, it's not, it's not canon. So the merge is coming perhaps sometime in Q3, sometime between June and August, but it could also come in 2024. It could come in 2025. It could come in 2020, 2030. It'll be ready when it's ready. Bankless is not the oracle for when the merge comes. That's what the developers' job is for. So apologies if any of the Ethereum developers felt any pressure by the narratives that Bankless likes to beat the drum for. The

• 1:08:00David Hoffman?

  merge is, is, would, the merge, if it came in June, that would be fantastic. People are hypo, hypothesizing that it'll be sometime between June and August, but June is not actually scheduled. That's just a estimation. So I just wanted to say that.

• 1:08:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  And I do think that people got a little bit skittish after there was a bug in the Kilo testnet, right? And they were just like, ah, wow, given that bug. You know, the June date might not happen, right? And so that's in the feedback. Anyway, there's still a chance it happens in June.

• 1:08:33David Hoffman?

  Still a chance.

• 1:08:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  Of course, but it could also be July, it could also be August, it could also be later. It's ready when it's ready, as David said.

• 1:08:41David Hoffman?

  The best time for the merge is when it's time for the merge.

• 1:08:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Which is this summer.

• 1:08:47David Hoffman?

  I don't even know if that makes sense.

• 1:08:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  I don't know either, but.

• 1:08:50David Hoffman?

  Moving on.

• 1:08:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  This summer.

• 1:08:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  Let's talk about NFT stuff and first we gotta talk about a pretty massive phishing scam. Not because it's the biggest in dollar amounts, because, but because it seemed like it was targeted and very sophisticated. We've had Arthur0x on the show before. He is the founder of Defiance Capital, which is a DeFi firm. He just got 1.7 million dollars worth of NFTs yoinked. From his Ethereum wallet. David, like, what happened here and how did it happen?

• 1:09:21David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so I think somebody spun up like a shared Google Doc and sent it to his email. And it kind of looks like somebody was sharing a Google Doc, but when he opened it, that did things. And I'm noticing that that Doc is a docx file, .docx. And that is the same file type that Hugh Karp had his Nexus Mutual Tokens stolen from. And so be wary about people sending you files, basically. And which makes it really, really hard because maybe we could talk to somebody technical about this. I don't know if this like functionality is possible inside of a PDF. But a docx file can have embedded data in it that can swap out your MetaMask

• 1:10:06David Hoffman?

  to a clone of a MetaMask that looks like MetaMask that does things that it shouldn't do. And so, you know, even people as sophisticated as Arthur0x got phished. And so it can happen to you too. If you want to have maximum security about how to not have this happen to you, the best way to do this is to work on one computer and sign transactions on a different computer and not to open up files on that second computer and keep that other computer relatively clean. And that's how you can protect yourself from this.

• 1:10:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think that is especially true. The other thing you should do is go read this article that William Peaster put together on Metaverse about this hack and how it happened and how you can protect yourself. Because I think you were talking about the Hugh Karp hack, who's a DeFi founder. The crazy thing about this is with Arthur as well, is he's likely stalked, likely targeted, right? So if you have kind of a public reputation in DeFi, I think you should be especially cautious of this type of hack. Because not only was he targeted, he was likely targeted by a known group in crypto, the Blue Norov group,

• 1:11:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  it's called. And there's some speculation that this might be a group out of North Korea that's actually assembled to go attack some of these individuals in crypto and kind of like hunt them down, learn their patterns, and actually see where their vulnerabilities were. Because this email that got sent to Arthur was actually somebody from one of his portfolio accounts whom he trusted. So like, they had inside knowledge of who Arthur might trust, and the type of link he might click. Anyway, William concludes this article with a few other resources for you on self custody, operational security tips, on how to guard yourself, how to store Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. So go refresh yourself

• 1:12:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  on that, especially if you're one of these like, public, high profile people who might be susceptible to a group like this.

• 1:12:15David Hoffman?

  Yeah, the same strategy was used with Hugh Karp, where he clicked a document that just made sense for him to receive. It came out of like, the Nexus community call. And so somebody was like, "Okay, Hugh Karp, here's this document. It's part of the Nexus community call information that we were talking about." So somebody was using relevant information to Hugh Karp, so that when he received this file, he's like, "Oh, this totally makes sense that I'm receiving this file. I will totally click on this."

• 1:12:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes. This is why we also talk about cold storage so often, and like, you know, the ledger keys.

• 1:12:46David Hoffman?

  That didn't protect Hugh Karp. Hugh Karp got rugged from his ledger.

• 1:12:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  You're right. It can help with some things, but it doesn't help with this kind of phishing phishing attack. The best thing you can do is just make sure you know exactly what you're signing. And sometimes that's tricky too, but be vigilant, plus up your OPSEC if you can. Let's keep moving. Hollywood in our Hollywood section. So Disney just released something called Pixar pals. What are these?

• 1:13:14David Hoffman?

  These are both the most simple types of NFTs you'll ever see. They are NFTs of Pixar characters like Woody from Toy Story, Buzz from Toy Story. They are pictures of characters. You can buy the NFTs coming out of TV.

• 1:13:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  And it's Disney. Disney's getting in on NFT. So is DC, the DC Universe, right? The creators of Batman, of course Marvel's rival. So what are they doing in the NFT space?

• 1:13:38David Hoffman?

  Digital trading cards of their characters from the Marvel Universe. You can buy them as NFTs. Pretty simple, open and shut.

• 1:13:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  They're at the very simple stages of NFTs, right? Yeah. I got to imagine these are just like tests and prototypes and it's going to get more complicated from here. Let's talk about the institutions a little bit, David. So check this out, man. This is Goldman Sachs homepage.

• 1:14:00David Hoffman?

  Goldman Sachs. Shall I read it?

• 1:14:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  What's this say? Yeah, read it.

• 1:14:03David Hoffman?

  Big word, digitalization, front and center with the subtitle, "From cryptocurrencies to the metaverse, explore the meta trends, mega trends that are reshaping economies." That's it. Just the word digitalization, cryptocurrencies and metaverse now on the front page of Goldman Sachs.

• 1:14:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  So crypto making the front page of Goldman Sachs as if it's like a pillar of their strategy moving forward. But are they going to get it right? This is Ben's take. He's actually from the Bankless team. Why don't you talk about this?

• 1:14:33David Hoffman?

  Yeah, Ben, Bankless analyst, head of the GMI index, one of the methodologists, says, "Per F, per command F, where you know, you find something. This Goldman Sachs report on the metaverse and Web 3 does not include a single mention of either blockchain or Ethereum. This is a perfect example of why DeFi natives are going to eat their damn lunch." Well said, Ben. That's what we love to hear. That's the right take. Chad Ben's the best Ben. Yeah, like if you don't know what's up. We're just gonna learn how to eat you. Like, this is the rise of the individual against the institution. Like, if you don't know what DeFi is and you're not reporting on it, we're just gonna eat your lunch.

• 1:15:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I think we got like at least five years of knowledge on these guys, and they're just kind of getting into the space, and I bet they're gonna not understand it for a while. But they could if they start, like, consuming the right content, actually using these protocols and getting in the space. But I think that's a... it's kind of few. It's not the many who are gonna go on that path. They just also, as well, announced the first OTC crypto trade. Of course, we talked about their partnership with Galaxy Digital last week. Apparently, that partnership went forward, and they're actually spending money on crypto right now.

• 1:15:42David Hoffman?

  Yep, that's that.

• 1:15:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  Let's talk about our friend Elizabeth Warren. What's she up to these days?

• 1:15:47David Hoffman?

  Being cringe. She introduced a new compliance bill for crypto on the wake of the whole sanctions conversation with Russia. And so, it's using the Russian narrative of we need to regulate crypto because you can use crypto to get around sanctions, even though there's absolutely no evidence that that's actually happening. But in addition to that, the bill goes beyond Russian sanctions. An additional provision in the bill would authorize FinCEN, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, to force users to report transactions larger than $10,000 if they send them outside of the United States. So, if you're a crypto person, you send $10,000 to somebody else that is outside of the United States, you have to report it.

• 1:16:31David Hoffman?

  But that also begs the question, in what jurisdiction is a smart contract? If it exists on Ethereum? Like, does that smart contract, is that outside of the United States? Like, it's on the internet, is the internet outside of the United States? Not only that, but the bill also tries to attempt to regulate publishing code, which is a legal battle that we have already fought before. There's this line that code is speech that came out of the Cypherpunks. So, basically, you are not allowed to put strings of characters together in a way that creates code and then publish that to Ethereum if this bill goes through without it being regulated. So, Elizabeth? Rain it in, rain it in.

• 1:17:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, we're disappointed.

• 1:17:13David Hoffman?

  Disappointed.

• 1:17:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  Dave and I are disappointed and continually disappointed. There's absolutely no reason for this, like number one, there's, there's no evidence of Russians actually, like Russian oligarchs actually using crypto to like, you know, launder money or evade sanctions or anything like that. But, um, you know, even if that was the case, what they actually want to do is basically put you in a database. They want all of your crypto wallets in a database so they have an ID and they, they can match your ETH address, your crypto wallet address to your identity, right? And that, that's what would happen if it was any, any 10K transaction that I sent from like one place to another, I would have, have to actually, uh, make sure the government IDs my wallet.

• 1:17:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Uh, it's absolutely crazy, absolutely insane. This is, um, I guess, you know, the surveillance state trying to reach its tentacles into crypto. What I was super disappointed with is actually one of my senators in Virginia, Mark Warner, uh, co-signed this as well. So I sent some, uh, you know, tweets his way as, you know, that said, basically this kind of financial surveillance is, is garbage and is what's going to make the next generation leave the US, that I was sad to see him to support this. So it's another reminder, tweet at your Congress representatives, tweet at your senators, tweet at the people, uh, who are behind this bill and, um, and get your opinion out there because this sort of thing can't be pushed forward.

• 1:18:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's, it's unlikely that this will go through, is what I would say, but the fact that...

• 1:18:45David Hoffman?

  They're even trying?

• 1:18:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes, the fact that they're trying and they're, they're couching this in language as if this is being tough on Russia, when really it's just being tough on...

• 1:18:55David Hoffman?

  Annoying for me.

• 1:18:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  ...American citizens. No, it's like, it's like, it's an authoritarian anti-speech provision that they're trying to push down our throat, using Russia as a, um, justification for that and as a reason for doing that.

• 1:19:08David Hoffman?

  And if you want to get a taste on the, um, what's the right descriptor, the dishonest intentions of Elizabeth Warren, there's a, a clip of her asking, um, somebody who's an expert in crypto... About how somebody can use cross-chain bridges to like to launder billions in dollars of Russian oligarch money. And the guy attempts to answer the questions like, well, Elizabeth, Senator Warren, you can't really, there's not enough liquidity in. She actually referenced the wormhole bridge between Solana and Ethereum. There's not enough liquidity to support $10 billion going from one chain to another. Like, and she's like, and she goes, I don't care about the liquidity. Can you obfuscate funds by going from one chain to another?

• 1:19:52David Hoffman?

  Can you obfuscate funds by breaking it up into small little wallets and using tumblers and mixers to obfuscate, to obfuscate transactions? And the man attempts to answer is like, Senator Warren, like, it's too much money. The liquidity isn't there. And she goes, I don't care, but stop asking about the liquidity. Can you do this? And she just refused to listen to the answer.

• 1:20:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  David, they just, okay, so what I feel like is, is nation states and people like politicians like Elizabeth Warren. They feel like because everything's digital, that they should have a license to see it all. This is like, imagine if she put forward a bill that said, basically, if you keep any valuables, I need to know the physical locations of all your vaults. You have gold bars in your home, you have jewelry, like you have any gold.

• 1:20:34David Hoffman?

  Which room, which room is it in?

• 1:20:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  Which room in your house, the actual location? We need an identification system for your physical vaults, right? If she proposed something like that, that's essentially what she's proposing here. But because it's digital, they think they have a right to like inspect all of this and to have everything registered with, with the state. And it's absolutely ludicrous to me. And if this kind of thing goes forward in the US, crypto will be fine over the long run. But the US will get left behind.

• 1:21:06David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 1:21:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  And that's my big concern here.

• 1:21:08David Hoffman?

  It's like, there's, it's like that gif of like this sword coming down and like hitting the thing and the sword just shatters. That's what's gonna happen if you keep on trying to swing the sword at crypto.

• 1:21:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Absolutely. Well, let's keep moving. So FIFA World Cup, crypto.com being a, is a sponsor of this. It's like crypto is, is taking all the, the sports it can. Yeah, what's, what's going on?

• 1:21:33David Hoffman?

  No, that's about it. Yeah, crypto.com, in addition to crypto.com arena, is now a FIFA World Cup sponsor for an undisclosed sum.

• 1:21:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wow, crypto is getting everywhere. Guys, we will be right back with the takes of the week, but before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible.

• 1:21:50David Hoffman?

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

• 1:22:33David Hoffman?

  The Layer 2 era is upon us. Ethereum's Layer 2 ecosystem is growing every day, and we need L2 bridges to be fast and efficient in order to live a Layer 2 life. A cross is the fastest and cheapest and most secure cross-chain bridge. With a cross, you don't have to worry about the long wait times or high fees to get your assets back to the Layer 1. Assets are bridged and available for use almost instantaneously. A cross's bridges are powered by UMA's Optimistic Oracle to securely transfer tokens from Layer 2 back to Ethereum. A cross is critical ecosystem infrastructure, and ownership is being handed over to the community. You can be a part of this story of a cross by joining the Discord and becoming a co-founder and helping to design the fair, fair launch of a cross.

• 1:23:14David Hoffman?

  If you want to bridge your assets quickly and securely, go to a cross.to to bridge your assets between ETH, Optimism, Arbitrum, or Bova Networks.

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• 1:24:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, guys, we are back with two David Hoffman takes in a row, back to back.

• 1:24:28David Hoffman?

  Favorite type.

• 1:24:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is a great one. All right, I'll read this out. "This cultural difference between Vitalik and the other co-founders is such a crucial part of this industry." And you were talking about a cultural difference. This is a quote from Laura Shin's book, Cryptopians. Should I read this last paragraph? Is this where the good part is?

• 1:24:45David Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah, it's that last paragraph, for sure.

• 1:24:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, this is from the book Cryptopians. "As Ethereum's promise became apparent, people jockeyed for positions. Charles," this is Charles Hoskinson, right, from now Cardano, who had lobbied to be CEO. Do people know that? He lobbied to be CEO in early Ethereum. Anyway, he casually asked Gavin, over a game of chess, to be his chief technology officer, CTO. Gavin, who on Wednesday sent the first Ether transaction from his laptop to Charles, asked Vitalik if that was cool. Vitalik, being less interested in a title or in ordering people around than in conducting research or learning Chinese, said, "Sure," and gave himself the title "C3PO." We got a CTO, we got a CEO, and he wants to be C3PO.

• 1:25:31David Hoffman?

  So this is going back to the whole monk perception of Vitalik. The guy does not care about status. The guy does not care about material things. When everyone else is jockeying for position, Vitalik is just letting it go. In the same way Satoshi let Bitcoin go and go off into the world, Vitalik is like, "Oh, you're gonna be CEO? Fine, I'll be C3PO." And like, this is the culture. of that's been baked into Ethereum, not not completely, but more than any other smart contract chain. That is really what makes me feel good about being part of Ethereum. This is the culture that I align with because if we're going to make a new financial world order, if we're going to make a new money for the whole entire globe, we can't have people

• 1:26:14David Hoffman?

  like Charles Hoskinson, who's jockeying to be a CEO of the new monetary world order.

• 1:26:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, yeah. You know what? So people say Vitalik has too much power in Ethereum. And so first of all, I disagree, but I do agree that that Vitalik does have some power in Ethereum. But there's a difference because the type of power Vitalik has isn't hard power. It's not top down authority power. It is soft power. And the fantastic thing about soft power is soft power is earned, right? It's like it's a decentralized form of power because it's only power if people actually like follow him and actually believe what he's saying. It's not something that he can enforce on others. They have to consent. Yeah, they have to opt in to that sort of like, yeah,

• 1:27:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  it's the kind of power a monk would would have, or like a religious leader, or like the Dalai Lama, or something like that. And I'm not trying to exalt him into like a religious leader, but there's an element of that type of leadership of soft power that I think Vitalik wields very well. And that's the sort of of leadership you need in a decentralized system, I've come to realize.

• 1:27:22David Hoffman?

  And it's just this charm in the, oh, you'll be CEO, LBC, three PO. It's the charm of that is just what gets people to believe in this man. And not only that, but like even after Vitalik was a billionaire, based on on the his ETH holdings, he was still staying in hostels, trying to spend the minimum amount of money just because that's what is downhill for him. That's what's natural to him.

• 1:27:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, just a good person, all around. The second David Hoffman take.

• 1:27:52David Hoffman?

  Second David Hoffman take, yeah. This is about music NFTs and I was going, I was just kind of like thinking about like, why do JPG NFTs, why are they so much more viral than music NFTs? And what is a music NFT anyways? So basically, the difference in my mind between JPG NFTs and MP3 NFTs is that you can fully experience a JPG basically instantaneously, like because it's an image, you can receive it all at once. And music NFTs take time to experience. Like if we're talking about a song, that's like three plus minutes. So like JPGs can be instantly viral, right? MP3s take too much time. And I follow that up with the next tweet, Ryan, where you can apply the same thought to like profile picture NFTs. Some NFT art is more viral than others, like CryptoPunks, extremely obvious aesthetic. Same thing with Bored Apes.

• 1:28:36David Hoffman?

  Also, why I'm bullish on MFers, right? Like, it's just so obvious what their vibe is. It's easy for these NFTs to live rent-free in your brain, kind of like a meme, right? These are memes. It's harder, like songs definitely go viral, but like pictures go viral on average way more than songs do, just because like of how laborious it is to consume a whole entire song versus how laborious it is to just view an image.

• 1:29:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Do you also think that like, there's an element of, there was an existing hole for PFPs to fill in a way there's not for MP3s? And here's, here's what I mean, like, there's, there's like, in all of my social media profiles, there's no place where I can like, set my profile song, right? Like, that was like, maybe in the MySpace days, people did that.

• 1:29:24David Hoffman?

  And people would put it on Mew anyways.

• 1:29:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right, and people hate that, right? But for PFPs, profile pics, I have so many places where I can just like, display my image. There's so much surface area in Web 2, and I wonder if that's an insight too. It's like, in order to do really well, at least in this phase of the NFT game. The thing that will make the NFT category popular is, does it have surface area in Web 2? Does it have like a ready-made hole it could just like plop in and fill?

• 1:29:55David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 1:29:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think that might be part of it, too.

• 1:29:56David Hoffman?

  And this is not to say that music NFTs aren't a thing. Like, they are absolutely a thing.

• 1:30:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  They just will be a different thing.

• 1:30:01David Hoffman?

  It'll be a different thing. It'll fill a different niche than like the profile picture NFT. It's not gonna go, like, music NFTs aren't gonna like go viral in the same way that JPEG NFTs will.

• 1:30:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, but we got it all figured out, guys. That's, that's how it's gonna happen.

• 1:30:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is a good take. I, I hear a lot of people saying this, that, um, hey, you guys talk about ETH as ultrasound money and deflationary. Like, isn't deflationary bad? Here's a hot take from, uh, Kevin, uh, Fitch, Fitcher. "I think deflationary systems are kinda whack, and it's frustrating that deflation is becoming core Ethereum meme." Thanks, Bankless guys. You can say that, but...

• 1:30:38David Hoffman?

  He's on the optimism team, by the way.

• 1:30:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, "Deflation mainly really benefits the people who already have stacks to sit on." I thought this was a fantastic, and that's not the take, this is the take. This is the response from Polynia. Do you wanna read this, David?

• 1:30:52David Hoffman?

  Yeah, Polynia says, "Ethereum is inflationary. Deflation is not a given, it is earned through surplus demand. The current gas price is 14 Gua. At this level, there is no deflation. If deflation is earned, it means that the network is undervalued. It's a self-correcting system that minimizes deflation." Okay, so like, kinda how like EIP 1559 throttles up or down based on demand? Polynia is saying a similar dynamic is happening. Uh, there's a governor to the system, as in, if Ethereum has a ton of utility, if it's very, very useful, then the block space becomes very, very useful, and block space becomes a very high-end demand, and a lot of Ether gets burned. If Ethereum stops becoming useful, then there's less block space demand, therefore, less Ether is burned,

• 1:31:36David Hoffman?

  and Ethereum starts to become inflationary, decreasing the value of Ether, making it easier to transact on Ethereum. But as Ethereum becomes more useful, more Ether is burned, making it deflationary. The whole, uh, uh, "it's earned" concept, I think, is beautiful, and that's a fantastic take. Ethereum is only deflationary if it is earned by being useful to the world around it.

• 1:31:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  So the answer, if someone asks you, like, isn't a deflationary system like Ethereum bad? The answer is Ethereum is inflationary. If it's not selling any blocks, it's inflationary. But because it's in demand and selling so many blocks, it actually turns out that's deflationary. At some point in time, it's going to hit this nice equilibrium where those things kind of line up. And then the whole network and block space and everything is kind of fairly valued.

• 1:32:24David Hoffman?

  Yeah. The supply of Ether is not going to zero.

• 1:32:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's not going to zero, right? It's just going down a lot. Well, Justin Drake, so we're talking ultrasound money case, like 100 million or so, right? Like, under 100 million, right? Like, that's probably the long-term projection.

• 1:32:40David Hoffman?

  Yeah. I bet the equilibrium of Ether's supply is like somewhere between like 85 and 100 million over the very long term, like 50-plus years.

• 1:32:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  I bet, too. I bet. Let's talk about this. This is an Arthur Hayes piece, probably my favorite written piece of the week. Do you want to pull out some takes from this? The title of this is "Energy Cancelled."

• 1:33:00David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  "Energy Cancelled." What's Arthur Hayes' thesis here? What's he saying?

• 1:33:04David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so this is part of the whole macro conversation that's happening with oil and energy in Russia, but not just that, and all over the world. And also, the energy that is basically imbued into currencies and how currencies are basically a store of energy, basically. And when you expend that energy by inflating your currency, well, then you're deleting the last bits of energy that your currency has. Anyways, Arthur Hayes says, "The current petrodollar slash euro-dollar monetary system ended last week," which is a huge statement, "with the confiscation of the Russian central bank's fiat currency reserves by the US and the EU, and the removal of certain Russian banks from the SWIFT network. In a generation hence, when this hopefully sad episode of human history concludes, historians

• 1:33:48David Hoffman?

  will point to 26 February 2022 as the date upon which the system ended and a new, currently unknown to us, system sprouted." Also, shout out to Ray Dalio and the changing world order. This is the same energy, same vibe. Great take. What do you think about that, Ryan?

• 1:34:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I mean, he goes on, I mean, we've been saying that basically, too, is like, this kind of could mark the end of US US dollar monetary supremacy, right, as being the reserve currency. But, you know, he says what's going to happen is energy will cost more, food will cost more as a result of sanctions. And everyone's going to increase their military spending, will further crowd up the civilian economy. And I said because of the sanctions, I mean, it's why were the sanctions put in place? Because Putin decided to go invade Ukraine, right? Like, ultimately, that's that's like the root cause, that's like the reason why in this case. But I do think it's going to cost it's going to cost the US, this is going to accelerate

• 1:34:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  the paradigm shift that we're talking about earlier and that Ray Dalio, you know, talks about in his book, To a New World Order. Arthur's thesis in this article is basically, we'll have to go back to commodity money. Like Bretton Woods V3, basically. So we had Bretton Woods original, V2, 1946, US dollar would be the global reserve currency based, backed by gold. And then we had Bretton Woods V2, which is like when Nixon got us off the gold standard in the early 1970s, and that's been the regime right now. Bretton Woods V3 is something new, something different. Nation-states will have to kind of go back

• 1:35:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  to commodity-backed money. And Arthur's thesis is actually the nation-state money, just because of its history, will probably be gold. So he actually ends this article being like, I'm bullish on gold. But I'm also super bullish and even more bullish on crypto. And for him, it's specifically Bitcoin, but I would also like lump Ether in that category and say like, more bullish on Ether than Bitcoin, but those are words in Arthur's mouth. Anyway, commodity money, like, death of the US dollar as the reserve currency system, that future, I think, is accelerating. It still could take many years to play out. It's like, not a transformation that's going to happen instantly, but this is another step in that direction.

• 1:36:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  And I think has accelerated things, sanctions, the war like conflict in Ukraine and the globes global world response to that. I think one other piece that I maybe want to mention is he he puts you in the shoes of China. And he says China is probably thinking deep and hard about the value of inside money claims in its FX reserves now that the G7 just seized Russia's right. So he's saying like, are nation states going to store up their reserve currencies in the dollar with this kind of global distrust?

• 1:36:47David Hoffman?

  Yeah, after after watching the US just rugging in the entire country of Russia, China's like, I don't want to get rugged.

• 1:36:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  For sure. So it's going to be, it's going to be an interesting decade for sure. And like, I think this is just accelerating the regime change.

• 1:37:03David Hoffman?

  Yeah, Ryan, we have our closing statements at the end of the podcast. Crypto is risky, DeFi is risky. Staying in the same spot, also risky, also risky.

• 1:37:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  You don't want to be caught in the same spot during a paradigm shift.

• 1:37:14David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Donald Glover, he's not getting caught in the same spot. What's his take here?

• 1:37:19David Hoffman?

  No, Donald Glover gets it. So he says, this is a quote about NFTs. NFTs are gonna be a thing, but not in the way that people think they're gonna be a thing. Like, it'll be way easier to not fake things online. And it's going to affect a lot of other stuff in a way that people won't understand for like another five years. Oh, yeah. Remember when we had all that corruption in the section? And now it's gone because you basically can't lie about this. That's probably what's going to happen. This is a live quote out of Donald Glover from South by Southwest. Very rare to see a hot and accurate take from a celebrity. Nice job, Donald. Nice job, Donald. We love it. We love it. Yes.

• 1:37:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think this this man's brilliant. I think he's a genius. Yeah. So I'm not super surprised that he gets NFTs, but well articulated. Last last take of the week. Another NFT take. David, what's this one from Jimmy dot E?

• 1:38:08David Hoffman?

  Yeah, Jimmy J one MMY Jimmy dot E. He was recently on the overpriced JPEGs podcast when talking about a very similar subject. He goes, in the future, most entities will be all data and no media. And I think we will look back on the current state of NFTs with embedded photos that aren't actually embedded as like analog NFTs.

• 1:38:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  Skumorphic?

• 1:38:29David Hoffman?

  Skumorphic NFTs. And so this is a little bit like the loot NFT vibe, where instead of having like this point to a picture, instead, all of the value of the NFT will be embedded inside of it. And we're actually starting to see this. I, while listening to this podcast, I learned that the Cypherbrokers NFT project, they have a bunch of SVG files, like all the properties of a profile picture NFT, like the, the blue shirt, 3D sunglasses, beanie caps, you know, like cypherpunk hair or whatever. All of these properties for the Cypherpunks NFTs are SVG files that are embedded into Ethereum, into Ethereum on chain. And then what the, what the project does is that it just takes all the different permutations and it layers on all the SVG files.

• 1:39:12David Hoffman?

  And so every single thing about the NFT is on chain. And so completely trustless, completely decentralized, completely cypherpunk, super bullish on that whole entire concept. And so the idea that like we are going to point outwards for the data that our NFTs represents is short term, short term.

• 1:39:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, that's a really good take. And for people who aren't following what an SVG file is, right? So that's basically like, it's a different type of image format, but it can be all distilled to a bunch of numbers, a bunch of data, basically. And that's different from like bitmap style images of which, you know, a GIF is one and a JPEG is one, which can't really be distilled into like, into like data and can't be embedded on a chain. So with like JPEG NFTs, which have been this current era, this current generation of NFTs, all you can really do on a, on chain, except in cases like, like CryptoPunks, where the image is like really small enough and able to be fully embedded on chain,

• 1:40:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  is like you're generally putting a pointer out to an external bitmap image somewhere, right? With SVGs, you can just put all of the data on chain and then, wow, the metaverse could fully manifest this particular object or image in any way it chooses to do so, because all of the data behind that image is on chain. So that's part of it. I don't think Jimmy's saying like, there's going to be no graphics on chain and it's all going to be like data, but it'll be more like vector style images, rather than maybe like bitmap style JPEGs and GIFs.

• 1:40:47David Hoffman?

  When we did our defining the metaverse episode, Ryan, the line, "The metaverse is rendered at the periphery," perfectly aligns with this.

• 1:40:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's cool.

• 1:40:55David Hoffman?

  Like, data at the center, compressed, highly dense data at the center, and then it's rendered locally on your computers because they're just giving instructions on how to render it. So when Jimmy says, "The future of entities will be all data," the data is instructions on how to render the metaverse and your local computer, wherever you are in the world.

• 1:41:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wait, who said that? "The metaverse is rendered at the periphery." Did we say that?

• 1:41:19David Hoffman?

  That's my line, yeah.

• 1:41:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's a great line.

• 1:41:21David Hoffman?

  That's a David Hoffman original, brother.

• 1:41:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wow.

• 1:41:23David Hoffman?

  Yeah, you like that one?

• 1:41:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's great. No, I love that one. That's, man, we should start a podcast here.

• 1:41:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  What are you excited about this week, man?

• 1:41:33David Hoffman?

  Oh, my God, Ryan. Okay, so I made this meme earlier this morning about like, all right, what narrative am I trying to promote on Twitter? Do I want L222 or do I want the merge? And so it's the meme is the guy sweating his face, doesn't know which button to press. What do I shill? L222 or do I shill the merge? Because the thing is, I think they're both happening around the same time. I think L222 and the merge is gonna happen towards end of Q2, start of Q3, mutual climax time. I think that's what's about to happen, Ryan.

• 1:42:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wow, very exciting year.

• 1:42:07David Hoffman?

  Of course, somebody would be excited about that.

• 1:42:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  A new article by David Hoffman, the mutual climax.

• 1:42:13David Hoffman?

  The mutual climax thesis?

• 1:42:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wow, this is the type of content people subscribe to bank this for.

• 1:42:20David Hoffman?

  That's exactly right. Ryan, what are you excited about?

• 1:42:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  I don't think I can top that. Mine was gonna be, "The institutions are here." They're not just coming, but they're here. And that's also an unfortunate turn of phrase. But anyways, "The institutions are here" is the bottom line. So there was this phrase repeated over and over again in 2018. "Institutions are coming, institutions are coming." Like, "There won't be a bear market" was kind of the implication because like-

• 1:42:50David Hoffman?

  Big copium.

• 1:42:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  "Institutions would buy our bags."

• 1:42:52David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  And that really never happened.

• 1:42:54David Hoffman?

  Nope.

• 1:42:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  The institutions were nowhere in 2018. 2018, 2019 Goldman Sachs is not talking about digitization on their homepage. They were not buying DeFi. No one believed in it. Ethereum was dead. Bitcoin was just hanging by a thread, but now they're here. Okay. Like this week, digitization on the Goldman Sachs homepage. They just announced their first trade. We talked about that earlier. Bridgewater, Ray Dalio, massive fund, not only like in terms of assets under management, but in terms of like institutional respect, right? This guy is like a global leader. They're doing crypto now. Qualcomm even, if they're metaverse fund, right? The institutions are here. They're not coming anywhere. They're here.

• 1:43:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  And that is like, I, you know, that is a shift. I don't know when it happened. It feels like I kind of thought in the days of, you know, 2019, 2019, when I somewhat thought that that meme could be true, that there would be like a big announcement and somebody would be like, yep, we're here now, guys. Well, it's actually just happened without people knowing about it. It's like happening on a week by week basis, but they are quite obviously here. And what I think that means, David, is like, we kind of won. You know, crypto is not going anywhere at this point in time. The world's biggest institutions are behind it. That means nation states will eventually fall in line.

• 1:44:22David Hoffman?

  Because of lobbying.

• 1:44:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yep. And it's, it'll be a slow trickle at times. Sometimes it'll feel like a stampede, but the institutions are already here. And I feel like I've just realized that maybe in the last, last week or two. It's not as cool as yours. Okay. But it's, it's what I had.

• 1:44:40David Hoffman?

  Hey, the institutions are here for the, for the mutual climax.

• 1:44:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's right.

• 1:44:45David Hoffman?

  We are ever gonna get.

• 1:44:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right. Meme of the week, guys. What are we looking at here, David?

• 1:44:53David Hoffman?

  Yeah, this is a, sorry for the podcast listeners. This one's not going to translate very well, but we're going to watch a short video of two high schoolers in a lunchroom having a breakdance competition. So you have a guy who's decently good at breakdancing. Now, I'll give him a soft five out of 10. Going up against like a kind of a white, skinny nerdy kid who doesn't, you wouldn't expect to be good at breakdancing, but he absolutely kills it. And then the caption is three months later, he created Ethereum.

• 1:45:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's amazing. Yeah, look, I just feel the vibes of this video. I don't know exactly why I like it, but there's something about it, right? Vitalik buterin, surprising everyone. That's what that means about too. Alright guys, I think that's it. None of this has been financial advice. It never is. Eth is risky, so is DeFi, so is Bitcoin. You could definitely lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the Bankless journey. Thanks a lot.

• 1:45:48David 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

• 1:46:31David 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.