ROLLUP: Top 10 Biggest Crypto Events of 2023

Bankless Weekly Rollup Last Week of 2023 ----- 🏹 Airdrop Hunter is HERE, join your first HUNT today https://bankless.cc/JoinYourFirstHUNT —— 💳 AMBIRE | V2 Browser Extension is now Live! https://bankless.cc/ambire-v2 ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE ⁠https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2 ⁠ 🦊METAMASK PORTFOLIO | MANAGE YOUR WEB3 EVERYTHING ⁠https://bankless.cc/MetaMask ⚖️ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM ⁠https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum 🔗CELO | CEL2 COMING SOON https://bankless.cc/Celo 🗣️TOKU | CRYPTO EMPLOYMENT SOLUTION https://bankless.cc/Toku ——— 0:00 Intro 6:00 Markets 1 Year Ago 8:00 Base https://help.coinbase.com/en/coinbase/other-topics/other/base 10:00 SVB https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_of_Silicon_Valley_Bank 12:30 Balaji’s Bitcoin Bet 13:40 Scammers Arrested 15:00 Arbitrum Airdrop 17:00 Bitcoin Ordinals 22:40 Friend.tech 26:20 Pudgy Penguins IP 30:00 SEC Losing in Court 35:20 SEC Suing Exchanges 36:30 Michael Saylor Buying Bitcoin 39:35 CZ Steps Down 43:25 Solana Boom 47:00 Celestia and Jito Airdrop Season 49:45 Where We Are Now 52:30 Looking to 2024 —— Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://bankless.com/disclosures

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

• 0:03David Hoffman?

  Bankless Nation, we got the 10 biggest events in crypto in 2023. Call it the yearly roll up because it is the last week of December of the year. And it has been quite a year, I'll say. In January of this year, the wounds that FTX gave us were wide open. It was not a good 2022 and 2023 did not look like it was going to be any brighter. We had just delivered the anti-crypto regulators of the world, the best possible leverage they could have ever asked to suppress the crypto industry. The incoming onslaught of overly aggressive crypto regulation felt inevitable. Meanwhile, the macro climate was not good. Interest rates were climbing without signs of slowing down. Conversations of the looming recession were growing louder.

• 0:47David Hoffman?

  Consumer credit was rising and consumer sentiment was down bad. We all entered 2023 with PTSD, all waiting with anticipation for the next shoe to drop. And then, after all that, the drop never came. What seemed like one of the worst moments in crypto's history turned out to be the bottom. The bomb of Genesis and DCG turned out to be a dud. Rising interest rates began to decelerate in Q1 and stopped completely in Q2. The SEC took its first L in the courts and sellers literally ran out of coins. Halfway through the year, BlackRock filed its Bitcoin ETF on June 16th in 2023. And at that moment in time, Bitcoin was already up 200% on the year, recovering from 15,000

• 1:32David Hoffman?

  to 30,000. And the dark clouds from the demise of 2022 began to lift and the path forward started to reveal itself. Now, here we are, just 12 months later. Bitcoin is under one month away from a generally assumed spot Bitcoin ETF approval. Solana, after flirting with death from capital fleeing the network, has risen from the ashes in an unprecedented fashion. Gary Gensler has not taken a single W in the courts. And the Fed just pivoted. Funny how all the stars of the markets tend to align. Before we walk into the bull market of 2024, Bankless Nation, on this episode of Bankless, we want to cover the biggest events of 2023, lest we forget the lessons it taught us and

• 2:14David Hoffman?

  the patterns we will see in the future. And before we get into these 10 biggest events of crypto in 2023, first, our friends and sponsors over at Ambier want you to check out their wallet. But calling it a wallet is probably underselling it. You've heard Ryan and I talk about account abstraction and smart contract wallets for a while now. The Ambier team is shipping that into reality with the Ambier V2 Browser Extension Wallet. It's a browser extension, like you already know, but it's also a smart contract wallet, AKA an account abstracted wallet under the hood. So if you want to get your hands on the full power of an account abstracted wallet without any compromises on user experience or security, there is a link in the show notes. It's ambier.com/v2. Ryan, ready to get through the 10 biggest events of crypto?

• 2:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I am. And overall, just, I would say 2023 for me felt like a W, definitely. 2022 is in the L category for sure.

• 3:07David Hoffman?

  Anything else?

• 3:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  2023, we had, we started our redemption arc, I think, and I'm feeling fantastic about the way we ended the year. So David, I'm excited to get into the 10 biggest crypto events of 2023. And actually, there's a rug here because we actually have 13. I don't know if you know this.

• 3:25David Hoffman?

  10 just is better for titles.

• 3:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  We just say 10 because it seems good in a title, but like we couldn't help ourselves. We got three bonus ones for you. Guys, we're going to get right to that. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible, including our preferred exchange for the year of 2023. And going into 2024, that's Kraken. Go create an account.

• 3:44David Hoffman?

  Kraken knows crypto. Kraken's been in the crypto game for over a decade. And as one of the largest and most trusted exchanges in the industry, Kraken is on the journey with all of us to see what crypto can be. Human history is a story of progress. It's part of us, hardwired. We're designed to seek change everywhere, to improve, to strive. And if anything can be improved, why not finance? Crypto is a financial system designed with the modern world in mind. Instant, permissionless, and 24/7. It's not perfect, and nothing ever will be perfect. But crypto is a world-changing technology at a time when the world needs it the most. That's the Kraken mission: to accelerate the global adoption of cryptocurrency, so that you and the rest of the world can achieve financial freedom and inclusion. Head on over to kraken.com/bankless to see what crypto can be.

• 4:29David Hoffman?

  Not investment advice. Crypto trading involves risk of loss. Cryptocurrency services are provided to US and US-territory customers by Payward Ventures EK, PVI doing business as Kraken. Cello is the mobile-first, EVM-compatible, carbon-negative blockchain built for the real world. And now, something big is happening. Introducing the Cello Layer 2. It's a game-changing proposal that's going to bring Cello's rapidly-growing ecosystem home to Ethereum. Vitalik has shared his excitement for the Cello Layer 2 on the Cello forum, so has Ben Jones from Optimism. But why? The Cello Layer 2 will bring huge advantages, like a decentralized sequencer, off-chain data availability, and one-block finality. What does all that mean? Rock-solid security, a trustless bridge to Ethereum, and more real-world use cases for Ethereum without compromise. And real-world adoption is happening. Active addresses on Cello have grown over 500% in the last six months.

• 5:14David Hoffman?

  With the Cello Layer 2, gas fees will stay low, and you can even pay for gas using ERC20 tokens. But Cello is a community-governed protocol. This means that Cello needs you to weigh in and make your voice heard. Join the conversation in the Cello forum. Follow @celloorg on Twitter and visit cello.org to shape the future of Ethereum. Arbitrum is the leading Ethereum scaling solution that is home to hundreds of decentralized applications. Arbitrum's technology allows you to interact with Ethereum at scale with low fees and faster transactions. Arbitrum has the leading DeFi ecosystem, strong infrastructure options, flourishing NFTs, and is quickly becoming the Web3 gaming hub. Explore the ecosystem at portal.arbitrum.io. Are you looking to permissionlessly launch your own Arbitrum Orbit chain?

• 5:57David Hoffman?

  Arbitrum Orbit allows anyone to utilize Arbitrum's secure scaling technology to build your own Orbit chain, giving you access to interoperable, customizable permissions with dedicated throughput. Whether you are a developer, an enterprise, or a user, Arbitrum Orbit lets you take your project to new heights. All of these technologies leverage the security and decentralization of Ethereum. Experience Web3 development the way it was always meant to be: secure, fast, cheap, and friction-free. Visit arbitrum.io and get your journey started in one of the largest Ethereum communities.

• 6:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  We got the biggest event of 2023 for you, Bankless Nation. But before we get to them, let's take a look at how it all started. This is the charts as of January 1st, 2023. So just less than a year ago. And here we are. The total crypto market cap at the time was 840 billion.

• 6:46David Hoffman?

  Measured in billions.

• 6:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  So we were under a trillion and we have Bitcoin here, 16K Bitcoin at that time, David. Ethereum above 1,000, but 1,200 was the ticker price. A number of other coins that you'll recognize, one that we'll get to later in the episode. Solana was sitting at number 17, okay?

• 7:08David Hoffman?

  It was not anywhere close to the top.

• 7:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  3.6 billion or about $10 per Solana. So it was like flirting with that $10 mark. Number of other coins, just in general, man. Do you remember January last year? Like, how did you feel? It felt very much to me like crypto was licking its wounds. But how did you feel personally?

• 7:28David Hoffman?

  I just remember seeing at the top of the CoinGecko charts, all of the stable coins. And I'm like, oh yeah, it's a bear market. When the stable coins are like numbers three through six on the total crypto market cap, you know, people are down bad. If you go look at the charts today, things are not necessarily that case. Things look a lot better, but that will be at the end of the episode because these are going in some loose chronological order.

• 7:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  We had a very somber start, I'll say, to 2023. And then things started happening. We'll go through these 10 to 13 events and most of them are pretty bullish events. Those sprinkled in some bearish events. But let's get to the first, and that is this. Coinbase introduced its Layer 2 network. It's called Base. They did that in February of last year, at least that was when it was announced. Why is this? Why does this make number one on our list?

• 8:17David Hoffman?

  It makes number one because Coinbase is just such a signal of legitimacy because of the way that it has developed the company. It does things slowly. It does things intentionally. It does things that it feels is very safe. And when Coinbase decides to build its own Layer 2 network to finally enter the arena with Binance Smart Chain and Binance, which had dominated the conversation and had made Binance a ton of money. When Coinbase in the West, in America, was spinning up its own native Layer 2 chain using the OP stack, using a Layer 2 on Ethereum.

• 8:55David Hoffman?

  That was just a huge signal of doubling down and building in a bear market. There are a couple of core principles of Base that they launched with. First, a bridge, not an island, whereas Binance Marching, kind of an island, kind of a siloed ecosystem that's beholden to the Binance world. Base was supposed to be a bridge, a bridge for users into the crypto economy. They wrote, "Built for an easy on-chain experience and interoperability with other chains, meant to be the home of Coinbase's on-chain products, and also built in collaboration, like I said, with the OP stack, with Optimism." So Coinbase is the second core dev team working on the OP stack. So it was really Coinbase and the decentralized world of DAO governance

• 9:38David Hoffman?

  and MIT open source licensing coming to build something for Coinbase, but also for the greater crypto world. And it was just a huge signal of building in a bear market, building a layer two, and open innovation for all to contribute to.

• 9:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  It also got some traction pretty quick. It was the fastest L2 to 100,000 users in history. Reached that milestone in 56 days after launch. So even those dark times, we had some traction early on. So that's number one. That happened in February 2023. I think we're going somewhat chronological here as well. Number two is the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. David, I almost forgot that happened, but it was this whole bank crisis in Q1 earlier this year. And it kind of culminated in the collapse of this major bank, Silicon Valley Bank. And there was all of this talk about contagion. Take us down memory lane. So what happened in March of 2023?

• 10:31David Hoffman?

  March 10th. The joke, I think, is that crypto exported its yield contagion to the trad world because we had just watched Terra collapse, then Thuro's capital collapse, and then things were kind of okay for a bit. And then we watched FTX collapse, all because of this contagion yield, this toxic yield. And then it worked its way into TradFi. And we all kind of got a lesson on how banks are constructed and like long-term maturity securities. The significant thing is that a lot of crypto startups were banked at Silicon Valley Bank and of the few other banks that were also adjacent to Silicon Valley. Also, USDC de-pegged because it had $3.3 billion of reserves hosted at Silicon Valley Bank.

• 11:20David Hoffman?

  And that bank went under, a few others went under. And one of the huge bits of collateral damage as a result of this is Signature Bank, which also went under, had Signet, which a lot of crypto market makers would use to transfer money around very, very quickly. And since Signature Bank went down, it was more like, there was a conspiracy that the Fed allowed it to go so that they could capture the Signet infrastructure. And that is the an L that we took as an industry is we lost Signet and we lost a big crypto banking partnership and was one of the beginnings, I would say, of choke point 2.0.

• 11:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, so choke point 2.0 was really the Fed coming after banks that banked crypto companies. And it was also a legitimacy hit. You said that USDC de-pegged. Do you remember? It de-pegged to 87 cents.

• 12:05David Hoffman?

  Yeah, a lot.

• 12:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  So $1 USDC and then you see it de-pegging to 87 cents. That was very concerning at the time for all stablecoin holders. I think a good outcome of this is Circle and the issuers of USDC got into some of the top 10, the too big to fail types of banks. So now it's no longer, assets are no longer backed by some of these smaller regional type players like Silicon Valley Bank. So maybe that was an upgrade. But at the time, there was talk of contagion. And it wouldn't stop at Silicon Valley Bank. That many of the other regional banks in the US would get the virus and they would start to collapse. In fact, Bology, if you remember at the time, David, this was March of last year, he made his famous

• 12:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  $1 million Bitcoin bet. He said, "You buy one Bitcoin, I will send $1 million USDC." This is 41 odds, as Bitcoin is now worth 26K. The term is 90 days. He was essentially betting that Bitcoin would hit $1 million in the next 90 days this year. Of course, he fell short on that bet. But I remember doing an episode with him where we talked about the reasons. There was also an episode with Arthur Hayes where we talked about, you know, the contagion and how the Fed was going to have to bail out the banking system. The FDIC essentially guaranteed all of the assets at these companies and stopped the contagion in its tracks. But it was a dicey Q1 of this year, for sure.

• 13:29David Hoffman?

  Yeah, it definitely didn't bode well for the looming recession macro crisis that we all kind of still thought was definitely going to come in Q1, Q2 of 2023. Moving in to the third subject of this year, this one spans the whole entire year, but it really first started in March. Before I really introduce this subject, I want to pull out this tweet from Nick Carter, where he says, "If you want to pick a bottom, it's when all of Doquan, Bankman, Alex Mashinsky, and Suzu have reached their reckoning. Only then can we recover." And I heard Nick Carter gave this take on this podcast as well. He was saying, "We cannot proceed as an industry. We cannot come out of this bear market until these scammers and fraudsters of 2022 were jailed."

• 14:13David Hoffman?

  Well, Doquan was arrested in Montenegro in March of 2023. Fun fact, Bankless actually broke that news. Alex Mashinsky was arrested in July 13th. Suzu was arrested on September 29th, and SBF was found guilty of seven counts of fraud on November 3rd. So, over the year, one by one, all of the fraudulent scammers of 2023 were one by one arrested all over the world, which restored a little bit of my faith in humanity, Ryan, to discover that we still have due process and rule of law. And no matter what you do inside of crypto or outside of crypto, if you scam people, you will go to jail.

• 14:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  That was number three. So, scammers arrested. And it took many months for that to play out. But some people at the beginning of the year were saying things like, "SBF would never be held to account. You had too many friends in Washington," that sort of thing. And it turned out, none of that was correct. Justice did prevail in crypto. So, hopefully, we've learned some lessons going into this bull cycle, going into 2024. Something as well happened in March that is significant, David. This is the Arbitrum airdrop. That happened on March 16th. $1.5 billion was dropped to individual Arbitrum addresses and making it the largest, one of the largest, airdrops in history.

• 15:30David Hoffman?

  It might be the largest.

• 15:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, this is the promo video for that absolutely massive amount of money. Of course, Arbitrum was the first Layer 2 rollup, kind of out of the gates, early on. Optimism closed on its heels, but Arbitrum was first. And like this was a very significant event, kind of kicking off the growth of layer twos.

• 15:52David Hoffman?

  The Arbitrum token, of course, spawned the Arbitrum DAO and the very vibrant DeFi ecosystem on Arbitrum made it pretty easy, I would say, to distribute Arbitrum tokens into on-chain users of Arbitrum. We also didn't necessarily have to use Arbitrum to get the Arbitrum Nova was also on the table, as well as a few other criteria. And this also marked the launch of Arbitrum Orbits, which was Arbitrum's chain development kit. So you could launch layer threes on top of Arbitrum, and then also with Arbitrum DAO approval, you could launch Arbitrum chains on top of Ethereum as well. So it was also Arbitrum entering the race of the chain development kit, the horizontal scaling of layer twos on Ethereum. I think to this day, I think Arbitrum

• 16:35David Hoffman?

  has one of the largest treasuries in crypto, and that is all governed by the DAO, all by the ARP token. And that is not including the very positive economics that Arbitrum has from sequencer fees. So Arbitrum just, you know, makes ETH from reselling Ethereum layer one block space, and they are very, very cash positive as an organization, which I would say was just a big plus one to the overall layer two economic thesis.

• 17:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, a big moment that was certainly coming in at number five. And I'm not sure what the exact date is for this, David. Maybe you could give us some insight, but it's definitely been an evolving trend through the course of 2023, and that is Bitcoin ordinals revived Bitcoin building culture. Give us the recap on what ordinals actually is. And I'm looking at the Dune Analytics charts here of daily inscription data, and it looks like a straight line up, starting really in May. That's when it like the charts show it really taking off. But but what is this? And what did it do for Bitcoin culture and the community of Bitcoin?

• 17:35David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so Bitcoin ordinals was launched in February, and it made a pretty big splash between February and March. And then the absolute vertical line of further inscriptions, which are ordinals, coming after the first wave just was massively significant. And to this day, inscriptions is a very vibrant ecosystem on Bitcoin.

• 17:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  When you say inscriptions, what do you mean? Because it's coming, somebody coming from like the Ethereum space might not fully understand. What's an inscription, Dave? And what does it empower?

• 18:05David Hoffman?

  An inscription is kind of like a packet of data, I would say. An ordinal is a single Satoshi, which is a very, very small division, the smallest division of Bitcoin. And it like splits from the UTXO set. So you send one Satoshi and all of a sudden you have a unique trail of one single Satoshi running around Bitcoin. That's how Bitcoin works. And with inscriptions, you can append data to that one Satoshi. So you're kind of making an NFT. And so an inscription is like a little packet of data, could be a JPEG, could be anything. Someone, Ryan, put Doom, the video game, into an inscription that you could legitimately play on Bitcoin through ordinals, through this inscription technology.

• 18:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Not just NFTs too, tokens, right? I'm seeing a chart here, BRC20s, which is Bitcoin version of an ordinal based token. Is that right?

• 18:56David Hoffman?

  That's exactly right. And so Bitcoin, through ordinals, through these inscriptions, has become extremely expressive in a way to produce surface area for Bitcoin builders. And this is kind of spawning, spawned a civil war in Bitcoin between the Bitcoin fundamentalists, the people who are like, no, it's BTC and BTC alone. And then the Bitcoin progressives who are saying, hey, it's inside of the protocol rules, it's allowed. And as a result, we are seeing a renaissance of Bitcoin building culture. There are venture capital deals, there are startup deals, building on Bitcoins in ways that we have never seen before. Taproot Wizards, I would say, is the spearhead of this, the vanguard of this, who raised

• 19:37David Hoffman?

  $7.5 million this year, led by Eric Wall and Udi Wertheimer, and who showed up to the Bitcoin conference in Miami in their Wizards uniform, doing the floss onstage, kind of trolling all of the Bitcoin fundamentalists out there, saying like, yo, we're like, we're a part of Bitcoin and this is part of the rules and this is what we're doing.

• 20:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  I enjoy it from a number of different dimensions, but certainly there's this cultural rift that we've seen in the community and kind of the zero of Bitcoin between those. You call them fundamentalists who basically think Bitcoin block space should really be reserved for this pristine asset of Bitcoin and like transactions related to Bitcoin, the asset and others who are basically saying, no, it's block space, Bitcoin block space. We can put tokens in it. We can put JPEGs in it. We can like do whatever we want. And by the way, that's totally in protocol. One byproduct has been transaction fees have gone up a lot, actually, which of course gets into the economic sustainability of Bitcoin discussion that the community's been having for, you know, the past half a decade or so and will into the future.

• 20:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  So I think going into 2024, it's going to be interesting to see like whether the two separate camps in the community fracture more, like could it? Some people are speculating that there could be some sort of a fork. Others say, no, it's not quite that significant. I mean, it's like not a big deal. And at the end of the day, all Bitcoiners are kind of united as long as number goes up, it's fine, but we'll have to see. There's these two opposed, opposing camps, I think, in the Bitcoin community, which has certainly made things interesting.

• 21:12David Hoffman?

  I think the last interesting thing about the Bitcoin ordinal story that I want to draw out is that this is actually something that Bitcoin exported to Ethereum. Usually we had seen things kind of go the other way as of late, but BRC 20 tokens and inscriptions ended up hopping from chain to chain to chain. And, you know, at the time of recording, Ryan, at the end of the year 2023, inscription started on Bitcoin in February of this year, but in December of this year, inscriptions took down Arbitrum because this call data, the amount of data that was using and like it has been, it has been like a rite of passage for layer two chains to stress test, not just layer twos, there are now inscriptions on Celestia.

• 21:54David Hoffman?

  So this is kind of this primitive that has been exported from Bitcoin to the rest of the crypto world and all of these other chains are being stress test with how much, how much data they can be, can be consumed by inscriptions because the inscriptions are by definition a data intensive primitive. And so all of these non Bitcoin chains are getting tested.

• 22:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's kind of weird too, because all of these chains are like EVM chains that already have ERC 20, they already have NFTs. So it remains to be seen whether this is a fad or not. But one thing that will persist, I think, going to next year is with introduction of EIP 4844 and proto dank sharding, we're going to have like even more call data available to us, like almost a new primitive. And I wonder what all like, what sorts of weird things that developers in the community might try to store in there as well. So I think that's going to be something to watch. Dave, we've got number six here, and this hit crypto in a big way. That was the launch of FriendTech. And most significantly, FriendTech reaching 1 million users. And they did this in

• 22:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  two months. This happened in August, I think, or maybe peaked in August earlier this year. Tell us the story of FriendTech.

• 23:04David Hoffman?

  FriendTech was a combination of a handful of different technologies to really show the crypto world that yeah, you can build a consumer app. And we do have the infrastructure ready to support a growth of 1 million users inside of two months. I think this was just the combination of progressive web applications, Ethereum layer twos, improved wallet backend infrastructure from Privy, and a fun kind of social element, a social gamification element to really incentivize a bunch of adoption. We all remember FriendTech. You can buy your friends' shares. You can speculate on your friends. It's probably the most degenerates crypto native app that you can probably think of. And it went viral. It went viral very, very quickly, mainly because you can make money on

• 23:49David Hoffman?

  FriendTech. And there were like hundreds of millions of dollars of paper gains, at least at any given moment in time during the the big hype cycle of FriendTech. This, the user retention and user growth was just massively up only for like, I think, two months in a row. And then it retained, even as like, kind of the this shiny new toy era came and went, it did retain a bunch of new users. And it even escaped crypto. We saw OnlyFans users coming on to FriendTech. We had saw NBA stars coming on to FriendTech. We saw DJs coming on to FriendTech. So it really, I think, showed the crypto industry, Ryan, exactly where we are in our capabilities for building apps that we can convince mainstream users to use.

• 24:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  At one point in time, they passed Bitcoin in terms of their daily fees. This is one app on the base layer two, and that is significant, too. Friendtec was deployed on basis layer two, which, of course, that was, what, number one in our list here, and like, base came out earlier in the year. So this looked like a killer app. And of course, any killer app in crypto spawns a whole bunch of forks. So we saw this long tail of a Friendtec on Arbitrum, Frenzy on Solana, Fantec on Mantle, Alpha on Bitcoin, Layer Three, on and on. I'm not sure. I haven't looked at the traction of Friendtec recently, but I have to assume it's died down from the heady, you know, like, days of earlier this

• 25:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  summer. There was also, David, in the background, I think some outrage about Friendtec as well, like this comment of, oh, great crypto, your innovation is just another pyramid scheme. Like, get out of here. Like, stop talking about it. Influencers shilling more of their bags, like, dump on retail. And so we had some conversations around that as well, which I think was a good conversation to have, certainly on the back of all of the scammers of 2022. And I'm not sure if the industry knows how it feels about Friendtec, but we've certainly moved on to other pyramid schemes and Ponzi's, I would say, here lately. So maybe the moral outrage isn't as peaked at this point in time.

• 25:57David Hoffman?

  The one thing that Friendtec did leave us with, Ryan, is points. I think Friendtec made points, and if they did make points, then they definitely popularized it. And now it's kind of gotten to the point where everyone's doing points, because no one wants to strike the ire of Gary Gensler in the SEC.

• 26:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  They're not tokens, Gary!

• 26:12David Hoffman?

  They're not tokens. They're just points. They're just points.

• 26:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  We know you've heard, we've heard you say tokens are securities, but have you said points are securities?

• 26:23David Hoffman?

  All right, moving on to number seven, pudgy penguins waddles their way into 2,000 Walmart locations. This happened in September, but earlier of the same year in May, pudgy toys and pudgy world were announced. So pudgy toys were already a thing by the time that they got their way into Walmart. It was really the Walmart launch, getting it into 2,000 Walmart locations around the world that really elevated pudgy penguins and showed that you can actually build IP using NFTs. I think this was probably one of the most, the largest branding and distribution announcements that we ever saw out of the NFT world. And that was just two

• 27:05David Hoffman?

  of the three pudgy penguin announcements that were big this year. The first, the first one being the announcement of pudgy toys and pudgy world. The second being, oh, pudgy toys are inside of Walmart. And also, by the way, when you buy a pudgy toy, there's a QR code to link you to somewhere. Where does that somewhere go? Oh, well, that's the third announcement. I'm so glad you asked. The, the release of pudgy world, a multiplayer digital social experiment, experience built on a ZK sync chain where you can actually register the, the in real life stuffed animal pudgy penguin and claim some properties on inside of the pudgy world. So fulfilling, I would say, Ryan, some of the metaverse promises that NFTs made in

• 27:48David Hoffman?

  2021, pudgy penguins turned out to be the one to actually be able to cash that check. So congrats on pudgy. Congrats to Luca, who bought, by the way, he didn't start pudgy penguins. He bought the IP towards pudgy penguins and really turned that ship around in the middle of 2022. So huge success story out of NFTs in the world of pudgy penguins.

• 28:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, big, big turnaround story here. And I think was a couple of weeks ago in the roll up, we, we looked at the price of pudgy NFTs and they have absolutely 12 ETH, all the way from the bottoms of like one ETH or something like this. Might have even been less than one ETH. So big turnaround story here. In addition to, of course, powered by ZK sync. So this is part of the, the layer two story. As well in a pretty large app on on ZK sync. So fantastic turnaround showing the world that PFPs are not dead, at least when they when they have a physical man like representation in the real world, then maybe they're worth a little bit more than the JPEG. David, we got a lot more to cover. I think we've got eight all the way through 13. But before we do, we want

• 28:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible, including our friends over at MetaMask. They have the MetaMask portfolio. Go take a look at your MetaMask wallet, click the link, and you can access the portfolio now.

• 29:04David Hoffman?

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• 29:41David Hoffman?

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• 30:23David Hoffman?

  can help you streamline your token management and get started for free. Visit toku at toku.com/bankless or click the link in the description below.

• 30:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Coming in hot with the biggest events of 2023, we're halfway through the year, Ryan. Starting in July, the SEC starts to collect a series of Ls in the courts. The two biggest ones, the two biggest Ls that it collected, SEC versus Ripple in July of 2023. Ripple Labs notched a landmark win in a case versus the SEC over the XRP cryptocurrency. This was mainly

• 30:55David Hoffman?

  Viewed as a canary in the coal mine by the crypto industry for all further SEC versus crypto cases because Ripple, XRP, extremely centralized, extremely like bold in its sales of XRP. And yet, the SEC could not get the win in the courts claiming that XRP currency was a security, setting in some very large landmark precedents about what exactly is a security and is not a security, and really just took the wind out of Gary Gensler's sails going into the second half of this year.

• 31:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  Basically, the ruling, if I remember it, David, is that the investment contract itself, the promise to give XRP tokens, like that part of it was a security. That's the investment contract itself. But the court ruled that the XRP token itself was not a security when it's outside of that investment contract wrapper. And this is something that crypto people and crypto lawyers have been arguing for a very long time. And completely, if this precedent holds, in other court cases, completely debunks the Gary Gensler standard SEC take that all tokens, aside from Bitcoin, are securities, right? So absolutely major win. Now, I want to ask you a question. Where were you at the time of this win? Okay?

• 32:11David Hoffman?

  I was busy.

• 32:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, you were busy. You were on top of a mountain? Okay, that was July 2023, on top of a mountain. And then that wasn't the only L that we've got in number eight here. What was the second L from the SEC this year?

• 32:24David Hoffman?

  There was a court case back in August over which was about the Grayscale turning its trust into an ETF. And a quote from this article, "The mandate puts into effect the court's ruling when it overturned the SEC's rejection of a Grayscale proposal to convert its trust into an ETF. Judge Naomi Rao called the SEC's decision arbitrary and capricious because the regulator failed to explain why it approved similar products." And so this was more or less calling out Gary Gensler and the SEC, saying like, yo, Bitcoin can have an ETF, and you need to find a better reason as to why you're denying it. Otherwise, we're going to approve it.

• 33:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, and that phrase, that turn of phrase from the judge, arbitrary and capricious, that totally describes how the crypto industry has felt with respect to the SEC's treatment of it. These completely arbitrary rules and just actually negativity. It was just like they dislike crypto for some reason. They can't exactly explain why. They just hate it. And that's what the judge was reflecting. I feel like this was part of the opening of the door for what we stand on the gateway of going to 2024, which is the Bitcoin ETF, right? If the courts hadn't slapped back the SEC and slapped back Gary Gensler in this way, if they hadn't done their job to push back in these cases, I don't know

• 33:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  that we'd be on the precipice of getting ETFs approved, Bitcoins bot ETFs approved, which we are now. So these were two major rulings in 2023 and major losses for the SEC with respect to their position on crypto.

• 33:58David Hoffman?

  Well, think about the two major precedents that this placed and gave us in the crypto world. It said, just because a token is transferred on a blockchain doesn't make it a security, which is what Gary Gensler and the SEC was trying to say, which makes Uniswap not inherently a securities exchange, just because one of these tokens might be a security on Ethereum. And also, just being a token on Ethereum doesn't make you a security. And also, it sets in stone, it sets the precedent that Bitcoin deserves to have an ETF just like gold and just like all the other commodities out there. And so these were two very large doors that were open to the crypto world, which, Ryan, starting in the year, we did not think might be open to us. And so it was two of the biggest clearing

• 34:43David Hoffman?

  of the skies in terms of actually being regulatory approved, given regulatory green lights that we could have ever asked for this year.

• 34:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  One of my favorite clips from the year was the number of times that Congress had Gary Gensler testify in front of them. And I believe it was Representative Richie Torres, Ask Gary Gensler whether Ether was a security or not. He couldn't answer the question and then proceeded to ask him whether a Pokemon card, if tokenized, would be a security. And Gary Gensler kind of like fumbled in that answer. It's like one of my favorite clips of this year, but this did not stop the SEC from continuing to go on the offensive against crypto. This is number nine. The SEC sued Coinbase, Binance, and Kraken. And Kraken, not once, but twice last year. So all of that happened. Give us the recap of these three major crypto exchanges

• 35:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  who are sued by the SEC and some of those stories.

• 35:36David Hoffman?

  Yeah, the SEC sued all three major crypto exchanges for failing to come in and register. And I think those words, come in and register, are burned into our brains by the end of this year. Kraken was also sued by the SEC for offering its ETH staking service. So deposit your ETH with Kraken, they'll stake it and pass along the yields. So the three major crypto exchanges were sued for being exchanges. And then Kraken was sued again for just providing a very basic, normal financial service to its users. Hester Purcey, of course, crypto mom, I believe, wrote a dissent for every single one of these, which is why we enjoyed having her at Permissionless this year. Especially the Kraken one, I think, was one of the most articulate speeches that I think I'd ever watched her give.

• 36:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  So this is one story that persists into 2024, which is all of these exchanges are still fighting the SEC in the court system. Now, we've got a number of losses for Gensler and the SEC in 2023. We'll see if those continue into 2024, but the fight certainly continues. Meanwhile, David, coming in at number 10, this is something that isn't a specific date for last year, but just happened like every two weeks or so. We were talking about it. Michael Saylor, MicroStrategy, was dollar-cost averaging into Bitcoin, purchased over $1.3 billion worth of Bitcoin in 2023. That's 47,000 Bitcoin.

• 37:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  There was actually eight different purchase events, so not as many as I remember, and locked in an average buy price of $30,142, which is lower than the price of Bitcoin now, which means he is up on those dollar-cost average purchases. So Bitcoin continuing to demonstrate extreme bullishness in 2023, as he had the previous couple of years.

• 37:26David Hoffman?

  I think by the time 2023 started, we were all used to Michael Saylor's average buy price being higher than the Bitcoin price because Bitcoin price went down all of 2022. And then 2023 was, it started to, you know, be, be flat. And then towards the end of this year, for the first time ever, we're starting to see the average buy price of Bitcoin being lower than the current price of Bitcoin. And I think the lowest, the most down bad Michael Saylor every ever was, was down like 30%, maybe 30 or 40% from

• 37:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  Not at all.

• 37:59David Hoffman?

  No.

• 37:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  My portfolio's been down a lot worse.

• 38:02David Hoffman?

  In the grand scheme of things, he made out just fine. And now we are watching, I think, the total, I think Michael Saylor and MicroStrategy, MicroStrategy are up, I think, over $1 billion in profits on their Bitcoin purchases. And we are just getting started, my friend. Like, he is going to print some billions and billions of dollars. I think he's the number one owner of Bitcoin after maybe Block 1, but we don't know how many, how many Bitcoins Block 1 still has. Number one Bitcoin treasury, that's for sure. And it's a pretty insane concentration of Bitcoin inside of MicroStrategy.

• 38:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  It is. It's a lot.

• 38:37David Hoffman?

  It's definitely contributed to some of Bitcoin's very strong price performances. Like when you buy 1.3 billions of dollars or something, it goes up in price. My question is, is like, well, I know he says he's never going to sell, but that is a key man risk with the price of Bitcoin. Like, what happens if, if Michael Saylor turns from bull to bear? Like that, I'm, that is something

• 39:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, that's a great thing about, about Saylor's strategy here. He doesn't actually have to sell Bitcoin. He could just sell MicroStrategy stock and, you know, exit that way as well because MicroStrategy's stock is certainly correlated to the price of Bitcoin now with, with all of this Bitcoin on the balance sheet. I, I just think as the price of Bitcoin goes up, he is going to be like, be very much in the green on this trade and he's probably going to be, become absolutely insufferable, David, of just

• 39:25David Hoffman?

  You're

• 39:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  I was right. I told you, you should have like, mortgage your house, buy more Bitcoin.

• 39:31David Hoffman?

  Do you think his Twitter account is annoying now? Well, wait until $100,000 Bitcoin.

• 39:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right. Number 11. This was absolutely massive. One of the biggest events of the year and it happened towards the tail end. That is the Binance founder and CEO CZ pled guilty to federal charges. In a $4 billion resolution that happened in November of this year was absolutely huge news. So this is one of the largest financial settlement cases in history. It's larger than almost all of the big cases against the big banks. $4 billion that CZ and Binance have to pay. Refresh us on the details here, David. Why was Binance charged in the first place? And what was the settlement? And what happened to CZ as a result of this?

• 40:18David Hoffman?

  This was a settlement with the Department of Justice, which is like the highest, most severe, critical office in the land. And this investigation of Binance by the DOJ started, Ryan, back in 2018. So this had been a long time coming. The Department of Justice has been looking into Binance for as long as we've been in crypto and finally has come to a head with a settlement with a massive, massive price tag of $4.3 billion, which amazingly, Binance has enough cash on hand to pay that outright without selling any of our crypto assets. So he's not going to tank the market. CZ was in a courtroom in Seattle where he pled guilty and he has been released on $175 million bond.

• 41:01David Hoffman?

  But he remains, I believe, inside of the United States because the court, the judge said, "Well, you're kind of the flight risk, so you're going to stay here." He will be sentenced in February. I think the expected length of sentence is 18 months. So CZ will spend 18 months in jail and he has been ordered to not be able to lead Binance for three years. Meanwhile, Richard Tang has replaced CZ as CEO. So we have a new Binance CEO in charge, taking over the CEO seat for Binance, the largest crypto exchange, crypto empire, if you will, of the East. So massive, massive churn in Binance.

• 41:43David Hoffman?

  But also, one of the largest looming clouds of uncertainty and unclarity about the crypto space as it relates to the United States, now decently clear. I would call that a solved problem, if you will.

• 41:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I think so. It certainly provides more clarity. And one thing that's notable, you know, we had a, we were talking about the bad boys of crypto earlier, the SBS and Alex Misonskis and that sort of thing. This was a different type of charge. This was not like insolvency. This is not fraud. This is not like you're taking customer deposits and like, you know, gambling them away or using them for other purposes. This is AML KYC type stuff, money laundering. Basically, you didn't do the identity checks and therefore like you could have let Russian oligarchs and, you know, terrorists use the Binance platform. And that's a no-no. And right, that's why it was a DOJ type of charge. I do think that

• 42:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  that CZ retains some of his reputation crypto, though. Like, I think he built the largest crypto exchange in the world. He didn't rug people. He didn't steal their money. Certainly, he did not abide by nation state laws and regulations. He played it fast and loose in many ways. He blitz scaled. He maybe he cut some corners in various ways. But I don't think he has gone from the public sphere at all. And, you know, all in all, I mean, the guy's probably worth, what, $100 billion, something like this, like plus or minus 50 billion, right? And so $4 billion fine is kind of a slap on the risk. So I expect to see him in the in the future as well. And I'm not sure what he'll be up to.

• 43:20David Hoffman?

  The day CZ comes back will be a glorious day. No matter how you feel about him, it will be a big deal. Coming up on the home stretch here, we're getting into November and December. In November, Solana rose from the ashes. We had Anatoly on, Ryan, I think in February of 2023 for an episode titled, Is Solana Going to Make It? And I think by the end of this year, we definitively have the answer. So price back in December of 2022, right after FTX collapsed, was $12. And I tweeted this out, good luck to the Solana community out there. I hope this is your $80 ETH moment. And that's just something that I learned when I went through the $80 ETH moment in 2018 of Ethereum and the Ethereum

• 44:07David Hoffman?

  He grit his teeth, chewed glass and built his way out of the bear market. And that seems to be the exact same pattern that Solana has gone through over the last year. Happened really fast, to be honest, I would say like 11 months. Solana price is now, at the time of recording, over $80. Solana volumes are up bigly, reaching new heights that it never saw in the bull market of last year. NFT volumes are pretty high. Stablecoin volumes are high. TVL still suffering, but that's because Solana is less of a DeFi chain, more of a consumer app chain. And so definitely a renaissance currently going on inside of the Solana ecosystem at the moment.

• 44:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I think some other metrics that are pretty impressive is total active users since the beginning of the year. And they have spiked way up over 400,000 total active users. There's also some pretty strong development going on, so it's not just narrative, right? In this case, we got Tensor, which is kind of like the open sea of Solana and NFT platform. We've got Jupiter, which is kind of like a super exchange, sort of like a Uniswap. We've got Gito, by the way, they just did an airdrop. I think we'll talk about that in a minute. There's a staking plus MEV. We've got like the deep in narratives. We've got a lot of narratives going on. And that is, I would say, a key win for Solana as well, is they have really changed the narrative on crypto Twitter in various places, right? And some would say it's like they've overextended on the narrative a little bit.

• 45:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  But I think going into 2023 of last year, if you spin back to January, they were basically the chain and the token that SBF was holding. You know, and like, where would they be without SBF and FTX? And the answer that a lot of people in the crypto industry gave is like nowhere. But you're right, the community stuck on, they held through, and they've really done this jujitsu on the narrative. So rather than the monolithic chain versus modular, it's like, you know,

• 46:00David Hoffman?

  Integrated chain.

• 46:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Integrated chain, right? Which is what?

• 46:02David Hoffman?

  No more bridging.

• 46:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's great because it's an answer to the fragmentation of Ethereum's layer two. Low transaction fees on the layer one, like we are the chain that's ready for the bull run, right? Ethereum is not ready for the bull run. It has really expensive transaction fees. It's difficult to bridge is the narrative that's going on. Minimum necessary decentralization. How much decentralization do you really need? That's the question. I think this narrative is like posing back to Ethereum. Maybe Ethereum is kind of over engineered. And so this is sort of the narrative landscape going into 2023. And I think they have excelled on that front in a way that probably is reminiscent of Ethereum in like 2020, 2021, right? With

• 46:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  kind of like fighting back, pushing back, we're like fighting Bitcoiners. They have done that effectively and really made some, you know, I'll say propaganda, but I'll say narrative strides in 2023 that have been a sight to behold.

• 46:59David Hoffman?

  Coming up in the rear, we got number 13, a bonus one. TIA, Celestia restarts airdrop season and GTO follows suit. And this is October through December. So Celestia drops their TIA, TIA token as the network goes live and starts the era of modular chains. Pretty massive airdrop, $120 million to over half a million addresses, 580,000 addresses. And I think the cool thing about this, the unique thing about this airdrop, Ryan, is that it never went down in price, including when you are showing this chart to me today in this moment, it is even higher than the last time I looked at it, zooming all the way out. It only goes up. TIA was dropped at $2 at roughly a $2 billion market cap and it

• 47:42David Hoffman?

  has now been arriving at $13, right? And doesn't go down. It only goes up. And when things only go up, people start to get bullish. And so all of a sudden, a $14 billion network just gets airdropped onto the scene. And not too long after that, GTO. A very beloved project inside of the Solana ecosystem airdrops over 10,000 addresses, a collective $200 million of GTO tokens. And so actually, let's compare those things really quick. I said two numbers. It was 120 million or 200 million. The prices at the beginning of the TIA token were volatile. I kind of like the $200 million. So 200 million

• 48:21David Hoffman?

  sent to 580,000 addresses for Celestia, whereas GTO sent roughly the same $200 million to 10,000 addresses in Solana. And that's because Solana just like didn't really have any users in the bear market. And so the very few users that were left all touched the very few apps that were being built. One of them was GTO. And so if you merely just held on to a bunch of GTO soul tokens, the stake to GTO, kind of like the stake to ETH version for Solana, you received the minimum, which was a $10,000 airdrop at the time of the airdrop. And similarly, that GTO price has been up only ever since. And so we are releasing hundreds of millions of

• 48:59David Hoffman?

  dollars, Ryan, to users. And that is just in Q4 of 2023. We have already gotten the tease for Starknet and for Layer Zero have both confirmed that, yo, the tokens come in pretty damn soon. And so as a result of these two airdrops in late 2023, I think we are definitely going to see a pretty big airdrop mania going into 2024. I will make a prediction, Ryan, that at least $2 billion is going to be airdropped into users' hands in the year 2024.

• 49:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, I think that's a that's a great prediction and probably even a conservative prediction, David. I mean, earlier in 2023, the Arbitrum airdrop was 1.5 billion, right?

• 49:39David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 49:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  And then the these, these two, GTO and Celestia, just added to all of that. And so I think we have restarted airdrop season in a big way, which leaves us, David, we've gone through the 13 biggest events, not 10, but three bonus events. It's a reverse rug.

• 49:54David Hoffman?

  Last bankless rug of the year.

• 49:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  We actually give you more than than you thought you were getting. But let's kind of recap. So we brought up the price chart at the very beginning. And if you recall, in January 1, 2023, so about 12 months ago, we were 800

• 50:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  Uh, $800 billion, $840 billion in total crypto market cap. Bitcoin was hanging out at 16K. Ether was 1,200. Solana was under $10 at that time. Market cap of 3.6 billion. Let's, let's flash forward to where are we now? This is the 20th of December when we are, when we are recording this. So tell us about the charts now. My have they, they have changed. Total crypto market cap is what? 1.6 trillion dollars? So just about double. How about Bitcoin? How about Ether? How about some of these other tokens?

• 50:50David Hoffman?

  Yeah, Bitcoin coming in at $42,000 where it started the year at $15,000. 150% increase year over year. Ether $2.1,000 at the time of recording. A very meager 75% increase year over year.

• 51:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's actually sad.

• 51:08David Hoffman?

  It's actually pretty sad. Solana up from $3 billion to a $31 billion network. Something like almost 700% year over year. So definitely Solana coming in as a last minute finisher. I'll say since all of that activity started in November and December. Coming up as the last minute winner, last minute finisher in the, the 2023 race of the crypto assets. But also not to be discounted. I say layer twos had a fantastic year of adoption. In terms of AUM, layer twos went from a $4 billion to $16 billion in value deposited on Ethereum layer twos.

• 51:47David Hoffman?

  And also we are up to 8X hitting new all time highs in terms of Ethereum transactions per second. So 8X Ethereum's built on the Ethereum layer twos. And so that is some of the numbers. Any other numbers you want to bring up, Ryan?

• 52:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  No, I think that's great. I mean, you were shown in the report cards. You know, we said 2023 was a, was a win and that's where we see it in kind of the numbers. I think adoption is, is going up. I think we have a fantastic setup going to 2024. I do feel like some things are discounted. I know we've made no secret that we think layer twos are probably discounted in terms of. Their narrative value in the market and also Ether. Wow, it had a not a great year considering it was a bull market. So we'll have to see if that changes in 2024. But I want to ask you, how are you feeling going into the next year? Like, what are you looking for? Are you feeling like hopeful? What's your take going into next year?

• 52:45David Hoffman?

  I remember I've given this take a few times and I'll just keep on hammering this on. But at the beginning of 2023, I think it was a couple of weekly rollups. I said this is that 2023 is going to feel like a year of pain. It's going to feel like a year of flat. And then we're going to look back on the year and you're going to realize that it was up only. And I think I said that's in like January or February of this year. And if you look back, that's exactly what happened. Bitcoin Ether, like pick your asset, they are all up only over the year, even though it felt like a year of turmoil and trouble. Ultimately, we were just coming out of recovery mode from being oversold going into 2022.

• 53:27David Hoffman?

  And so now I think prices have reverted to some sort of mean. And they are about to enter froth. If we're not, we might be a little bit frothy already. Going into 2024, man, I remember going into the bull market of 2020, 2021 thinking like, oh, my God, I want to bull market. Please give me the bull market. I'm so excited for the bull market. And then the bull market came, I'm like, what is this? I don't know what is happening. Not like this. Yeah. Bull markets are hard. There's a reason why veterans prefer bear markets. And we all like our when our numbers go up. But when number goes up, mental health tends to go down. These things are inversely correlated with each other.

• 54:10David Hoffman?

  Yet nonetheless, I think there is a massive white space, green space, fertile fertile land to build new stuff on. There are tons of things that I'm excited for going into 2024. Eigenlayer and restaking networks. I mean, it kind of, it actually, this happened today, Ryan. Here's a bonus number 14. Eigenlayer hits $1 billion in total deposits in its restaking network before it even hits mainnet. It's just because, you know, starting conservative, growing at the pie, slowly bootstrapping the Eigenlayer system. I think Eigenlayer is going to be a massive thing to watch in 2024.

• 54:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Just restaking in general.

• 54:48David Hoffman?

  Restaking in general, yeah. Liquid restaking tokens. Here's another prediction. Liquid restaking tokens is going to eat significantly out of the market share of liquid staking tokens. And that'll be definitely a narrative behind Ether, the monetary asset. And so I think even though Ether is undersold, oversold at this moment, or at least just underappreciated by the crypto markets, I think really we are primed for an evolution in Ether, the monetary unit going into 2024. Gary Gensler is going to continue to take Ls, like that's just going to happen. We all know this. We're going to continue to fight the DOJ and the Treasury because privacy is offensive to them. Yet, we're still going to be investing in privacy.

• 55:33David Hoffman?

  I'm not going to stop that. And so it's going to be a mixed year, but it'll probably be very bullish.

• 55:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I'm, I agree with you there. I'm counting on a bullish year. I'm also very excited about the restaking types of activities. I'll add crypto gaming to the list here. I think that that might be a way we onboard the masses. I'm looking at things like in the mutable ecosystem, how you can basically connect to get a crypto asset. You don't even know what chain you're on. You don't even like, it's not the clunky experience that you crypto natives are used to. It just feels like a gaming experience. I think that could really birth something exciting. And the backdrop, of course, we still have some people predicting recession, right? We still have 2024 as a, an election year in the US and all of the

• 56:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  uncertainty that comes with that. I mean, Colorado just nixed Donald Trump from their ballot, at least the Supreme Court. Like, there's a lot of uncertainty in the US politically. As well. So that's always the backdrop that we face going to 2024. There's always something going on in macro and the rest of the world that could disrupt the the bull market. But I think if things take the course, 2024 to me, it looks a lot like 2021 of the last cycle for all of the good.

• 56:50David Hoffman?

  All the good and all the bad.

• 56:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  All of the bad, hopefully with a few less scammers, but we'll have to see and keep our guard up. So I'm going to take a much needed break, I think, over the holidays, get off the charts, not podcast too too often. Spend some time with with family and I hope you, Bankless Nation, get an opportunity to do the same because you've got to recharge. We've got a big year ahead of us in 2024 and it's been a pleasure to be with you. David, how do you want to end it?

• 57:21David Hoffman?

  How do I want to end it? Well, Bankless Nation, I actually want to see all of you, not now, but later, at Permissionless in October in Salt Lake City in 2024. That is in October. We're going west. That's where Salt Lake City is. For all you European listeners who don't know where that is, that is literally the west. So if you do not have your ticket prices, they are extremely cheap now. They are $200 if you are just a, you know, a normie. But if you're a bankless citizen, it's $140 because bankless citizens get 30% off. So if you want to hang out at the one time that me and Ryan hang out in 2024, it'll be at Permissionless. There's a link in the show notes if you want that. And also, if you believe my prediction that at least $2 billion is going to be airdropped to users in 2024,

• 58:04David Hoffman?

  sign up for the airdrop hunter because we have a bunch of analysts.

• 58:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Do the work. Don't just sign up.

• 58:09David Hoffman?

  We are doing the work for you, so the work is easier for you. And if you need guidance as to how you get your share of that $2 billion plus billion dollars, sign up for the airdrop hunter as well. You need Bankless Premium, like if you don't want to listen to the ads, get Bankless Premium, like it's your tool to navigate a bull market. Just do it for one of these many reasons.

• 58:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like I asked David how he wants to end it. He ends on a shill.

• 58:32David Hoffman?

  With a shill.

• 58:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  But this is this is healthy medicine for you guys. I do think that these are tools you're going to want and save you tons of time. We'll end with this, though. Risks and disclaimers, of course, crypto is risky. You 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 in the Bankless journey. Thanks a lot.