ROLLUP: SBF Found Guilty | Solana Dominance | Celestia Airdrop

Bankless Weekly Rollup First Week of November ----- 🏹 Airdrop Hunter is HERE, join your first HUNT today https://bankless.cc/JoinYourFirstHUNT ----- 🔐 Get a Free Trial of Doppel https://bankless.cc/doppel ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE ⁠https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2 https://%E2%81%A0https//k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2 ⁠ 🦊METAMASK PORTFOLIO | MANAGE YOUR WEB3 EVERYTHING ⁠https://bankless.cc/MetaMask ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM ⁠https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum https://%E2%81%A0https//bankless.cc/Arbitrum ⁠ 🗣️TOKU | CRYPTO EMPLOYMENT SOLUTION https://bankless.cc/Toku 🦄UNISWAP | ON-CHAIN MARKETPLACE ⁠https://bankless.cc/uniswap https://%E2%81%A0https//bankless.cc/uniswap 🔗 CELO | CEL2 COMING SOON https://bankless.cc/Celo ------ TIMESTAMPS & RESOURCES 0:00 Breaking: SBF Found Guilty https://twitter.com/RyanSAdams/status/1720260173304893734?s=20 SBF and Eric Debate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ytaa_5liwMA 6:56 MARKETS https://pro.kraken.com/app/trade/btc-usd https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf https://www.tradingview.com/symbols/BTC. D/ 9:59 Gary's HBD Wish To Bitcoin https://x.com/GaryGensler/status/1719393827620876406?s=20 https://twitter.com/DocumentingBTC/status/1719087893061181649 13:10 Celebrating Bitcoin https://twitter.com/RyanSAdams/status/1719362025397117271?s=20 16:38 Solana https://twitter.com/pythianism/status/1719731735049482598?s=46 https://www.coinglass.com/LiquidationData https://x.com/TrustlessState/status/1719775068828668389?s=20 https://x.com/TrustlessState/status/1719731518514323487?s=20 20:24 $COIN https://www.tradingview.com/chart/?symbol=NASDAQ%3ACOIN 21:34 US GDP Growth https://www.cnbc.com/2023/10/26/us-gdp-grew-at-a-4point9percent-annual-pace-in-the-third-quarter-better-than-expected.html https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/01/fed-meeting-november-2023-.html 23:08 Stablecoin Liquidity https://twitter.com/nic__carter/status/1717976711663333846?s=20 https://twitter.com/RaoulGMI/status/1718622637084008929 27:18 SBF Takes The Stand https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/ecc3d1babd84f2082ff315222d7ef8397813ca41/0_227_3024_1815/master/3024.jpg?width=620&dpr=2&s=none https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/ecc3d1babd84f2082ff315222d7ef8397813ca41/0_227_3024_1815/master/3024.jpg?width=620&dpr=2&s=none https://x.com/jillrgunter/status/1719132933141995847?s=20 35:04 Nic Carter vs WSJ https://x.com/nic__carter/status/1717622001014067417?s=20 https://x.com/ArkhamIntel/status/1719363225827922004?s=20 https://x.com/mpier2000/status/1718653964017950802?s=20 https://x.com/SamLyman33/status/1719364757596057813?s=20 https://x.com/SamLyman33/status/1717587105709167097?s=20 https://x.com/nic__carter/status/1719137811541205042?s=20 https://x.com/nic__carter/status/1717997939140722758?s=20 43:29 Bankless Nation vs IRS! https://twitter.com/TheDailyShow/status/1719686561569108447 https://x.com/_jamico/status/1719167848936009866?s=20 https://twitter.com/DavidSacks/status/1719436981086900530 47:42 Celestia Airdrop https://twitter.com/CelestiaOrg/status/1719361585989492800?s=20 https://x.com/nickwh8te/status/1719644381265952841?s=20 https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/celestia/ 49:37 Safemoon https://www.justice.gov/usao-edny/pr/founders-and-executives-digital-asset-company-charged-multi-million-dollar 51:12 Coinbase Wallet Updates https://x.com/brian_armstrong/status/1717265147721666816?s=20 52:08 Kraken zkSync https://x.com/BanklessHQ/status/1719834663689265494?s=20 43:12 Elon Musk on NFTs https://twitter.com/nftnow/status/1719479171120791823?s=46 https://twitter.com/nftnow/status/1719479171120791823?s=46 56:10 Elon gives X 1 year to go Bankless https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/26/23934216/x-twitter-bank-elon-musk-2024 58:16 Paypal Receives Subpoena https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1633917/000163391723000156/pypl-20230930.htm 58:59 Dune AI https://x.com/DuneAnalytics/status/1720035727386292328?s=20 1:01:12 Bankless Ventures https://x.com/ModulusLabs/status/1719749763753730118?s=20 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbyTymGWCak&list=PLmkdAgtxf3ajRnlG3qBgW0RHDET-kmpk7&index=9 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbyTymGWCak&list=PLmkdAgtxf3ajRnlG3qBgW0RHDET-kmpk7&index=9 1:05:26 Questions From The Nation https://discord.com/channels/615592155481767941/1058053004705669211/1168431522076966912 https://twitter.com/RyanSAdams/status/1719430444653990350 https://polynya.mirror.xyz/m-_0l9vcYPIMv6Hmk77q949ZCVDh8MNfaAwi5JeNrPc https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2022/12/05/excited.html 1:12:37 Take of The Week https://imgur.com/aTCkirc 1:17:11 What Are We Bullish On https://x.com/QwQiao/status/1720014402043208053?s=20 https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1719728312702943376?s=20 1:21:11 Meme of The Week https://twitter.com/BanklessHQ/status/1720165186227839388/photo/1 1:23:18 Moment of Zen https://x.com/kylascan/status/1719843914843074938?s=20 ----- Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures

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

• 0:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Hey guys, a note before the episode today. On Thursday evening, that's November 2nd, Sam Bankman-Fried was found guilty of all charges. So that's all seven counts that he was charged for. Now, we've recorded this roll-up episode before the verdict dropped. David's in Europe, he's likely asleep, so we haven't had a chance to talk about this. But I'm pretty sure I speak for him when I say, "It feels so good to end this painful chapter in crypto." One year and five days ago, we hosted SBF on this very podcast on a debate with Eric Voorhees on crypto regulation, and it was an absolutely legendary debate. We arranged it after we heard from some friends that SBF was up to mischief in DC.

• 0:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  Apparently, they said he was greasing the pockets of lawmakers and working with them on a crypto bill that would make DeFi front-ends virtually illegal. Effectively, this would be pulling up the ladder for decentralized finance and accruing more power for his exchange, for FTX, and doing all of this under the auspice of practicality. I remember the debate well, and at times, it felt like SBF was almost giving us a lecture. "We crypto natives didn't understand how to work with governments. Our values weren't practical. They couldn't win. They were too rigid." Here was a billionaire wonderkid who built one of the world's top exchanges in less than four years. And what did we know about building business and getting things done in DC?

• 1:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is the tone of the conversation. Equally, I remember Eric Voorhees with eviscerating arguments and monkish precision. He argued to Sam that crypto is an open, permissionless, financial system for the world. It's like the internet. It's like email. Any society that rejects this technology is a society that rejects fundamental freedom. I felt like Eric's moral clarity pierced through the bullshit like a knife through butter. And David and I watched as SBF absolutely withered under this approach. One thing struck me at the time. It seemed that crypto had made a grave mistake in entrusting so much to people like Sam who didn't share our values. I was so happy to trade them off in some calculated game of maximum expected

• 2:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  value. But what I didn't know at the time was how grave that mistake would be. SBF, during the time of our recording, was actually covering up one of the biggest frauds since Bernie Madoff. By that point, at the end of October in 2022, he had gambled away over $8 billion in customer funds. I don't know what his long-term plan was. Maybe he was hoping for some way to last long enough to win it all back. Maybe he didn't have a plan. Maybe it was all hubris. But 11 days later, it would all start to come crashing down. I still, to this day, have no idea why he showed up to this debate 11 days before the fall of his kingdom. In fact, I think the debate itself may have been the spark that took him down. I mean,

• 2:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  he must regret doing the podcast now, because in hours, days after the debate, the crypto community turned on him. There was this sense of betrayal, of high alert, and it didn't take us long to sniff out the truth of his fraud. Massive credit to CoinDesk for breaking the story of the Alameda balance sheet. Everything followed from there. Now, he's declared guilty in a US court of law after hurting many people, doing incredible damage to this industry that we love. And I'm thankful we have a legal consensus process in the US that afforded a fair trial and due process. I'm thankful that justice has been served. The values of SBF, and many of those like him in 2022, were stage-three cancer

• 3:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  that we had to cut out at some point, because if they persisted much longer, they would have been terminal. I'm thankful for the bear market for giving us the opportunity. I know that criminals and scammers will visit our industry again in the future, and I hope those of us who live through SBF will be wiser the next time. But above all, I think it's important that we remember the true hope of crypto. It's not in another set of bankers like SBF. It's in decentralized finance. It's in holding our own private keys. It's in running our own validator. It's in Ethereum. It's in Bitcoin. This is the real revolution. This is the bankless revolution, and it's just getting started. Protocols, not people. Code, not kings. Let's get back to going bankless.

• 4:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  Hey, Bankless Nation. It's the first Friday of November. David, what time is it?

• 4:32David Hoffman?

  Oh, Ryan, it's the Bankless Friday Weekly Roll-Up, which is always an ambitious endeavor, yet we persevere nonetheless into the frontier with coffee, but I'm not having coffee because it's 8:54 PM for me. This is probably the latest roll-up we've ever recorded.

• 4:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, why, why, why is it so late? Because you're in a different time zone, right?

• 4:48David Hoffman?

  Yeah, different time zone. Also, I took a flight. I was in Amsterdam this morning. I'm now in Lisbon for ETH Lisbon. Flight was delayed, weather in Amsterdam, blah, blah, blah, new podcast setup. Here we are. This is crazy. And we've got like a new setup today. So we've been tinkering around with that. So it's a, it's a lot to get the roll-up to you guys, but we hope you appreciate it. We got a lot of topics to talk about. What's coming up next, David, is Gary Gensler, and he's coming after PayPal now. Okay, PayPal, it's not even a crypto company, but they're doing crypto things. So of course, Gary is the cop on the beat, as usual. So we'll talk about that. What else? The Celestia mainnet is out, along with the Celestia token, TIA, the token. How much was

• 5:29David Hoffman?

  dropped? What is the market cap of Celestia? We're going to get to that. And of course, it's Solana season. I don't know if you've noticed, Ryan, but the, the narrative around crypto Twitter, around with Solana breakpoint going on, which is where I just came from. The Solana people are are very happy right now. Solana season is in.

• 5:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, that's because Sol price is going up. So we want to talk about why that might be happening. I want to get your insight today. But before we get in, we got to shout out our friends and sponsors over at Doppel. Doppel wants to whack all the doppelgangers on the head. What do I mean by that, David? Explain Doppel.

• 6:03David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so there is just a litany of phishing scams getting more and more sophisticated going around crypto so far. And I, we, I just ran into one official, a doppelganger of our writer, Jack, who went out to some organization saying, hey, we will totally write articles about you in the Bankless newsletter. Just pay us money.

• 6:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's not the real Jack?

• 6:24David Hoffman?

  It's not the, not the real Jack. Doppel is somebody that goes out and dops all of the doppelgangers. These are not real words, and prevents them from doing the things that would involve your customers, your app depositors, anyone from losing money instead of giving it to you for your product. And so if you plan on having a successful app, or if you do have a successful app, you should go talk to Doppel. That's doppled.com/ sign hyphen up. There's also a link in the show notes.

• 6:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Fight the Fishers. Fight them back. All right. There's a free trial with that, too. If you click the link in the show notes. David, let's talk about the markets this week. Where is Bitcoin looking on the 15th birthday of the Bitcoin White Paper? We just celebrated that on October 31st earlier this week. Tell us about the prices and we'll get to that.

• 7:10David Hoffman?

  Yeah. So up two and a half percent on the week, starting at 34,100. The last time I checked it Bitcoin was 34,990. It's bounced off of 35,000 a handful of times, really trying to get up and above it and trying to hold it. It's flirted with being above 35,000. It's not totally ready yet, but man, it really wants to be there.

• 7:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  Look at this. It's just, you know, that big candle on, I guess that was the 23rd of October, around that time.

• 7:36David Hoffman?

  Do you call that the coin telegraph candles?

• 7:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. I guess that's what it was. The coin telegraph candle, but we've maintained. That's what's impressive about the last week or so is that we've maintained. So we're up 2.5% on the week. And let's talk a little bit, while we're talking about Bitcoin, about this momentous occasion. So 15 years is now 15 years after the first publishing of the Bitcoin White Paper by a guy by the name of Satoshi Nakamoto. He released this white paper. The title of this is Bitcoin, A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System. And it starts like this. The very first sentence, "A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution." And of course-

• 8:22David Hoffman?

  It's called a bank.

• 8:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  The first bankless money system. We got to celebrate that. And of course, within, I think about 60 days, 64 days, on January 3rd, the first block of the Bitcoin blockchain was officially pushed out to mainnet. So a short time later. And you know Bitcoin is doing its own celebration in the charts too. Have you looked at this chart lately, David? This is the Bitcoin dominance chart. Okay. And I think this is really interesting to look at. We are about 53% Bitcoin dominance at this point in time. So

• 8:59David Hoffman?

  Wow, that's really high. There's a market cap of all of crypto is 53% Bitcoin.

• 9:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  Composed to Bitcoin.

• 9:06David Hoffman?

  Crypto is 53% Bitcoin. Wow, that's definitely higher than it's been in a really long time, right?

• 9:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes, but also a lot lower than it used to be. Back in the heady days of 2014, Bitcoin was about 99% dominant. It was about 99% of all of crypto and it's been down since then. But it's popping back up. Okay, it's lows Bitcoin dominance lows. It hit a low in 2017, late 2017, at the last peak of the bull cycle at about 37%. Okay, that was a low on the dominance. And then a few other lows in 2022 of about 40%. Now it's back up to 53%. So Bitcoin on a tear in celebration of its birthday.

• 9:49David Hoffman?

  It's a two and a half year high for Bitcoin. Congrats to Bitcoin.

• 9:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, you know, who else was congratulating Bitcoin, David?

• 9:56David Hoffman?

  I was just the person who was wishing Bitcoin a happy birthday.

• 9:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's our secret person, a big Bitcoin fan. Gary Gensler, he tweets out, if Satoshi, if Satoshi Nakamoto went as Satoshi Nakamoto for Halloween, would we be able to tell? That's his hilarious joke. Happy 15th anniversary, Gensler says to Satoshi's favorite white paper that started crypto. And then he says this, David, then he says this, you're gonna love this. Any crypto companies that are tricking investors should start treating them to compliance with securities laws.

• 10:27David Hoffman?

  Oh, he made it about him.

• 10:30David Hoffman?

  I hate this man so much.

• 10:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, the ultimate troll. I mean, gotta hand it to him, though. That is a pretty good troll of the industry right there.

• 10:38David Hoffman?

  Do you remember his April Fools troll?

• 10:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  No.

• 10:41David Hoffman?

  He put on the, the deal with it glasses on his profile picture. So the current profile picture that you're currently seeing. He put, they just deal with it glasses on. And like to me, I was like, this isn't a troll. This is an admission of guilt. It made me so mad. He's like trolling the crypto community. He's like, God, just deal with it.

• 11:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  Why are bureaucrats, like, why are unelected bureaucrats trolling us?

• 11:06David Hoffman?

  Trolling us? Yeah.

• 11:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's so weird. Where is that in the job description?

• 11:12David Hoffman?

  I mean, this tweet is a troll. This is a troll. He is trolling us with this tweet.

• 11:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Any crypto companies that are tricking investors should start treating them to compliance with the securities law. Okay, but of course Bitcoin's okay. And he's celebrating Satoshi Nakamoto. Unbelievable. This is Stanley Druckenmiller, though, had a good quote about Bitcoin on the celebratory week. Do you want to hear this, David?

• 11:35David Hoffman?

  Yes, please.

• 11:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, let me play it.

• 11:38Speaker 02

  Finally, gold and Bitcoin.

• 11:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm 70 years old. I own gold.

• 11:48Speaker 03

  I was surprised that Bitcoin got going.

• 11:54Speaker 03

  But, you know, it's clear that the young people look at it as a store of value. Because it's a lot easier to do stuff with.

• 12:08Speaker 03

  And 17 years, to me, it's a brand. I like gold because it's a 5,000 year old brand. But the young people have all the money, or certainly the ones on the West Coast do. So I like them both.

• 12:25Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 12:25Speaker 03

  I don't own any Bitcoin, to be frank, but I should.

• 12:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  There you go, David. I don't own any Bitcoin, to be frank, but I should. That is Stanley Druckenmiller, legendary Wall Street investor, hedge fund billionaire worth about $6.2 billion. Too old for Bitcoin himself, he says. He likes gold. He respects the brand.

• 12:47David Hoffman?

  Too old for Bitcoin, but kids love it. It's so funny, because this is what we were saying all of last bull market. It's just like, as boomers hand down their wealth to the kids, it's going into crypto.

• 12:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it's like, it's like, thanks, Mom and Dad. Thanks, Grandma and Grandpa. You know where this money's going.

• 13:04David Hoffman?

  I don't have a house, but I'll have crypto.

• 13:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Of course. Yeah. So, and of course, then in January 3rd is when the Bitcoin blockchain launched with this legendary.

• 13:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Headline from the Times Chancellor on the brink of second bailout for banks. That's what this revolution has always been about from, from day one, David. A revolution to go bankless. Speaking of which-

• 13:28David Hoffman?

  We're gonna just end up repeating some of these bits of news in about six days.

• 13:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  Why not? Speaking of which, David, you want to tell us about the ETH charts for the week?

• 13:37David Hoffman?

  ETH price, yeah, not quite as exciting. Started the week at 1790, up a 1% on the week over to 1810. Got up as high as 1860 this week, but overall, just, it's just quiet in ETH land these days.

• 13:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  How about the ratio, David? That's not quiet, that's down.

• 13:53David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I actually kind of wanted to kill the ratio, but like if I did it in this week, it would just be like, you can't do it this week because it's just getting slaughtered. You can't, you can't-

• 14:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wait, wait, wait, what do you mean kill the ratio? Like never, never-

• 14:04David Hoffman?

  Just from the agenda. Well, I don't, no, I'm just saying like, I don't know if the ratio is relevant to many people. Like it's kind of what you and I think of, but I can't, I can't kill it now because it's down so bad.

• 14:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  No, okay, okay.

• 14:16David Hoffman?

  Then we can kill it.

• 14:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, if you killed it now, it would be capitulation. It would be complete. Yeah, it'd be embarrassing. And by the way, I saw a tweet about this. I think someone tagged you and I. Maybe that's what you're referring to. Vance Spencer goes, only plebs talk about the ratio. Is that why you want to kill it? You don't want to be Vance Spencer's pleb?

• 14:35David Hoffman?

  I did not see that tweet, but I can understand the point of like, yeah, like it's just a narrow focus of what crypto is.

• 14:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  I actually, I-

• 14:43David Hoffman?

  I think we actually either kill the ETH BTC ratio, or we add the ETH Solana ratio, which I also don't want to do this week.

• 14:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  I don't think so. I actually, I think the ETH Bitcoin ratio is much more durable than people want to, are thinking at this point in the market.

• 14:59David Hoffman?

  Chris Bernanke likes it. Yeah.

• 15:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think it's fantastic.

• 15:02David Hoffman?

  According to Vance Spencer, Chris Bernanke is a pleb. Do you hear that?

• 15:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  You know what? Yeah, we could start some beef on the bankless podcast. I don't care. I'm gonna, if you don't talk about the ratio, I'm gonna talk about the ratio. I think it is still a very important metric and we should keep it in the roll up. But let's talk about the cryptocurrency market. Yeah, market cap. What are we at on the week?

• 15:22David Hoffman?

  Happy numbers. I think we were at 1.29 last week. We're at 1.34 this week. So there is some healthy, sustained growth. In the total crypto market cap, I mean, that's what happens when Bitcoin dominance is like at 54%.

• 15:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  David, tell me about some tokens that moved in the last seven days, one of which is the Sol token.

• 15:39David Hoffman?

  Yeah, the other one's not a token.

• 15:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  The other's not a token. Okay. 30% on the week for the Solana token and 62% on the two weeks. So absolutely monster movement for Solana. I think on the month, that's about 72% over the last 30 days. There's pretty, pretty crazy upside here.

• 15:59David Hoffman?

  No, like Solana, the Sol tokens, the Solana narrative is definitely taking a lot of the oxygen out of the room this week. Over the, I've been at Solana breakpoint for the past like four or five days. And generally as like a rule of thumb, when I open up my phone and I check prices and I'm like, oh, I'm about to refresh and the price is going to be higher and then it is. And if you do that like six times in a row, that's when I start to call froth. And so I did that between the prices of like 40 and $44 of like, I'm just going to refresh it. It's going to be higher. That's froth. And so, I mean, like it can like mellow out for a little bit and then go up later. But like, man, when you just know that you just refresh and it's higher and it is for five times in a row, that's froth.

• 16:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's when you know, that's when you know things are getting frothy. Is there an explanation for this? So this is from Vance Spencer. We're just talking about him. He says this, always surprised there are people who actually short crypto. I think he's talking about people shorting Solana. Look at the Sol chart. Clearly someone just got carded out. In my opinion, most crypto shorts are people trying to run a TradFi-esque long short book. They think we are playing in the NBA. Sir, we are playing slam ball in a bounce castle.

• 17:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  Slam ball in a bounce castle. What's going on here, David? Is Vance implying that people are actually trying to short the Sol token?

• 17:17David Hoffman?

  Yeah, well, this is what he's saying. So $16 million of Solana short is just like a lot of momentary buy pressure all at once, which is what he is saying is like, one of the reasons why Sol price is going up. At least, at least going up so quickly and so violently, like it's going up. It went up in just like so much in like four to five days, but it's also been going up for like two weeks straight. And so like this, this one person who just like got liquidated on the short side of things definitely is helping with the sole price. But, but also I would just say like Solana narrative is just like really, really strong right now, which is because of the price, which like actually feeds back into the price. It's just full season.

• 17:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. Tell me about the Solana conference. So you're there, feet on the ground. So yeah, what was it like? What's, what's, what's the vibe?

• 18:02David Hoffman?

  Yeah. So I went to the Solana conference, the Solana breakpoint. This is the third breakpoint. The first was in Lisbon, Fun Factors is where I am now, at 2020, 2021, when Solana price was like $250. And apparently it was just like absolute just fest of money just flying everywhere. Somebody had the, some party had the cops roll up to the house and they're like, you guys can't have a party like this. And they were like, well, buy the house. And the cops was like, that wasn't a solution.

• 18:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  Was that last, are you talking about last year?

• 18:32David Hoffman?

  That was 2021. That was like in December 2021. It's like peak of the market. Anyways, so this one, it was in Amsterdam, kind of outside of the city. Maybe like 1,500, 2,000 people that were there, maybe like 50, 50 community builders and investors, maybe, maybe more on the builder side. Definitely kind of felt like an inner circle of communities, a community that had banded together that all felt like, yo, we are sitting on something really, really like powerful here and really, really cool. Kind of felt like 2018 to 2019 Ethereum, when like you, me and all of the other Ethereum people were like, yo, like there's something here and everyone

• 19:15David Hoffman?

  else doesn't see it. And that's crazy. Except the Solana people know that that's happened once before. So like they, I feel like they have a little bit more conviction. It's kind of my, my hot take. The archetype of people at the Solana conference is just like these low level engineers that understand the relationship between hardware and software, like the, at the point where hardware becomes software, like that intersection, like really low level engineers, like ex SpaceX, ex Tesla, ex Google types.

• 19:46David Hoffman?

  Uh, yeah, I think that these are kind of all my hot takes. Uh, not even all that hot. Uh, just my like my sit rep, like the reason why I wanted to go to the salon conference, like what, what the hell is David doing at a salon? Um, it, it just turns out like if you want to get a, like a vibe check for what Solana is like, you don't do it through crypto Twitter, because the Solana people on crypto Twitter are super toxic. Which is perhaps like, uh, good people like my fault in something I'm working on.

• 20:14David Hoffman?

  Uh, so I just had, wanted to go like drink from the faucet myself. Uh, and so I recorded an episode with Austin from the Solana Foundation in Anatoly. Uh, that'll be out on Tuesday, I believe, out on Tuesday. Yeah.

• 20:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, very cool. Uh, there's also another big move around the week is not a token, though it is a coin, the stock. So what's coin up to? And I believe as of our recording, because we're recording so late, uh, on a Thursday. Um, the Q3 update, the quarterly earnings report for Coinbase has just been updated. I don't know if that's reflected in the price of coin. Looks like we're up in the post-market trading. Um, but yeah, what's, what's coin been doing lately?

• 20:53David Hoffman?

  I don't know if it is up. Uh, it was up almost nine percent today, pre-market, and then as soon as

• 20:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, it's down post-market.

• 21:01David Hoffman?

  A bunch. It dumped a bunch. So yeah. Uh, so it's down post-market, but, uh, okay, up 8.75% pre-market, down four and a half percent post-market. So still up like four percent on the day. Um, I guess it didn't totally like the, the earnings, um, earnings report, but overall I would say just not, not all that bad. I mean, it's up four percent in the day. So it was a good day.

• 21:25David Hoffman?

  The, the coin price has been up, uh, just, uh, five, five percent on the week. So I guess pretty modest. But, uh, I think just, I've seen more and more people just pay attention to coin lately.

• 21:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, let's turn to some, uh, bigger markets beyond crypto. Let's, let's talk about US GDP because some numbers came in last week as well. So US GDP grew at 4.9% annual pace in the third quarter. That's a pretty big quarter. Look at this.

• 21:47David Hoffman?

  That's large.

• 21:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Kind of chunky. So last quarter, Q2 is 2.1% the quarter before, 2.2%. This is a monster 4.9% quarter. Compare that to, should I compare that to 2022 in the third quarter was 2.7%. 2021 was 3.3%. So, pretty big quarter for GDP as far as quarters go, David.

• 22:10David Hoffman?

  Big plus one to, there's no recession happening. This is a big plus one to Fed is going to keep rates higher for longer because apparently the economy can take it.

• 22:22David Hoffman?

  I like the idea of not having recession. That's good.

• 22:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, you're right about the Fed because they did hold rates steady. So that was a decision that came in this week. They are holding the Fed funds rate between 5.25% and 5.5%. This is the second meeting in a row that they have held rates steady. Proceeding that though, the last 11 times before the last two times, they increased rates. So, Holden study and Powell said that the Fed is not considering or even discussing rate reductions at this time, I guess, especially back on a GDP for a quarter like that. So that's what the Fed is doing, David. And switching back to crypto though, let's talk a little bit about liquidity.

• 23:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  In particular, stablecoin liquidity. This is a tweet from Nic Carter. What's he saying here, David?

• 23:14David Hoffman?

  Nic Carter is calling the bottom of stablecoin supply. And if you've been paying attention to Bankless for a while, we kind of think that stablecoin supply in crypto is basically synonymous with liquidity. The number of dollars that we have in our industry is going to be a very strong indicator to how much liquidity that we actually have. And so Nic Carter has the chart from the block, just of all the stablecoins out there. Tether, USDC, DAI, BUSD and all the other ones. And I mean, it's been down ever since Terra Luna and it went down really, really fast with Terra Luna and then it's just kind of been slowly tapering out ever since then. It's been down.

• 23:53David Hoffman?

  It's been down for like two plus years now and it's looking like it's starting to go back up. And this is what Nic Carter is saying is he is calling the bottom of stablecoin supply. And if you believe that this is the bottom of stablecoin supply, hence ergo. That liquidity in crypto is up only. What happens when you have more liquidity in your assets? They go up in price is what they do. More liquidity, higher prices. And so this has been something that we've said along with our Jim Bianco, a podcast. It's just like when you see stablecoin supply trending upwards, you can be bullish. You will have permission to be bullish. And so this is a bullish indicator.

• 24:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, so we are one step before we're starting to see it increase, but maybe it's bottom. David, I wouldn't be surprised right at about 120 billion or so in total stablecoin supply. I would not be surprised if this market cycle, we hit a trillion. What do you think about that?

• 24:48David Hoffman?

  Yes, I agree. I agree. Right. Because I mean, what's the one thing that has product market fit in crypto? It's stablecoins.

• 24:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  Stablecoins and treasuries, particularly if you include treasuries in that as well. David, what do we have coming up next?

• 24:59David Hoffman?

  Coming up next, SBF takes the stand. I'll give you the recap. Did he land the hail Mary? Place your bets. I know where I'm placing my bets. Nic Carter versus the Wall Street Journal, part two. He is, he's, he's got a bone to pick and he has definitely picked it. And there's just going to be so much more. A $2.7 billion main net drops. We're going to get to all of these details and more. But first, a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible, especially Kraken, our preferred crypto exchange for 2023. If you're getting bullish, you know where to express that. That's on Kraken. There is a link to get started with Kraken today. 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,

• 25:44David Hoffman?

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• 26:29David Hoffman?

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• 27:14David Hoffman?

  Visit Toku at toku.com slash bankless or click the link in the description below. Ryan, what are you showing me on my screen?

• 27:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  I'm showing you a glorious picture of our friend, actually not our friend, but previous podcast guest. Let me just say that Sam Bankman Freed, he's on the stand.

• 27:31David Hoffman?

  That is a.

• 27:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  The cartoon drawing is I don't think they quite captured his essence. I would say in this drawing.

• 27:38David Hoffman?

  He's got so much blush on.

• 27:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  The hair is a little shorter. I don't know. The facial structure is not quite the same. Yeah, the ears are a little engorged, but here he is on the stand. What, what was he doing on the stand? All right, this is a follow up from last week where apparently Sam's like thrown the hail Mary pass, probably against all the advice of his, his lawyers, but maybe not. Maybe they're like, wow, what does this guy have to lose? Put him on the stand. And so he gets up on the stand. What did he say, David? What on earth could this man say to us?

• 28:10David Hoffman?

  Yeah, but first I really set the stage here. If you go on the stand, you get to spout your truth because your lawyer, your own lawyer will underhand you all of the right questions. It'll be perfect. You can just knock them out of the park. And then the prosecution gets a turn. So it's a bargain that you gotta make.

• 28:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  Didn't he have to do this, David? Didn't he have to do a pre-show with the judge? It was just like him and the judge, they sent all the jurors out. I think that happened like last Thursday.

• 28:37David Hoffman?

  That did happen. That was like an anomaly. They needed to like be able to determine which is valid to present the jury with.

• 28:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  What was admissible in court? So the judge is like, eh, okay, I'll let this go.

• 28:48David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 28:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  And okay. And so then he went in front of the jury, which is what we're talking about now.

• 28:52David Hoffman?

  Yep, exactly. Okay. So last week, again, going back on Friday, Friday, Thursday and Friday was when the defense, SBF's lawyer was able to ask SBF questions. And so that was last Friday. We weren't able to cover that because we do a weekly rolls on Thursdays. So that ended in a cliffhanger because SBF took the stand and was questioned by the defense. And the vibe that I got from just a handful of people doing reporting on that day was that Sam was extremely prepared, obviously, actually did a good job of stringing coherent sentences together and probably because he had his Adderall and was overall able to produce a nugget of convincing compassion for his side of the story. So like, this is the one moment where people were like, maybe he did just F.

• 29:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Maybe there's a chance.

• 29:38David Hoffman?

  Maybe there's a chance, right. And this all ended on Friday. So after Sam was able to kind of give a more glowing perception of himself, the jury went away for the weekend. They were able to sleep on that for like multiple days.

• 29:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  What kind of things was he saying? It's like, oh, it's just, you know, growing pains. I heard someone say, or like, oh, I delegated too much to the wrong people. I kind of lost sight of, you know, what I was, how I was managing this.

• 30:05David Hoffman?

  It was my subordinates. Yeah, it was really unfortunate. It was an accident. Whoopsies. I've learned a lot, a lot of lessons. Yeah, right. So at the very end of Friday, the judge ends by saying, okay, we're going to resume with Sam on the stand on Monday, with the prosecution doing a cross-examination, to which, like, to which the prosecution said something to the effect of, Yes, we certainly will. It will be long and we are very interested in it.

• 30:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, my God.

• 30:31David Hoffman?

  Basically, the prosecution is like, let's fucking go. Let's do this.

• 30:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  Rolling up their sleeves. All right, we're doing this.

• 30:39David Hoffman?

  Okay, and that was this week. And so, so next week comes and the prosecution just gets to go after Sam Bankman-Fried. And the prosecution apparently just had like layup after layup to herself.

• 30:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  Do you know what? I, I, as a prosecutor, I would be overwhelmed at like, like, there would be too many options. Where do I even start?

• 31:03David Hoffman?

  Apparently, there was a number of times where like, the prosecution asked Sam Bankman-Fried about like, did you ever say this thing in this way? And like, it was such a specific way of asking the question where like, the entire courtroom and all the audience was like, oh, she's got something. There's no, there's no way that Sam can answer anything without falling right into her trap. Yeah. Okay, so some of, just some of the themes here. SBF increasingly relied on not remembering, especially as the day went on. He said, I do not recall, in his answers, 104 times and also answered, yep, 282 times.

• 31:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wait, wait. 104? There was 104 I do not recalls on, on one day?

• 31:46David Hoffman?

  Yes, on one day, on just on one day. And like, you know, you know, the Sam Bankman-Fried, the, yep, yep.

• 31:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, yeah.

• 31:53David Hoffman?

  282. Imagine, imagine listening to 282 SBF yeps just on Monday.

• 31:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  No, I can't imagine.

• 32:00David Hoffman?

  Shoot me in the face. Okay, so Sam denied that he and Caroline ever discussed the seven alternative balance sheets, like Caroline claimed. SBF's version of the story was that Caroline just sent him one balance sheet and it was referred to as all seven, which they both found reasonable.

• 32:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  The other six, huh?

• 32:18David Hoffman?

  No, she just didn't show him one through six, of course. He said that he did not know about Alameda's problems. He said Sam was surprised and concerned when he learned about Alameda's potential bankruptcy in June of 2022 due to a bug and it had an $8 billion fiat liability to FTX. He was surprised to learn these things in June of 2022. He said that there were risk management mistakes, said that mistakes were made at Alameda, not hedging against an investment in some Bitcoin miner thing. That lack of hedging alleged, allegedly led to a loss of over $10 billion.

• 32:55David Hoffman?

  He denied the existence of a risk department at FTX and Alameda and he claimed that he just trusted the wrong people, blamed challenges like working at a startup. It was like building a plane while flying it, he said. He was asked about how Alameda Research was able to spend $8 billion of FTX customer deposits and to which he responded, "I deeply regret not taking a closer look into it."

• 33:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  I bet he regrets it.

• 33:21David Hoffman?

  Yeah. And when the lawyer pressed him about the specifics of the $8 billion, SBF said, "Money is fungible anyways. I wasn't particularly interested in trying to dole out blame over how and why the money was used at all." If there's one thing I know about Sam Bankman-Fried is that he definitely thinks money is fungible. It's like, "Oh, just like spend this money here and that money there." It's fungible.

• 33:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  To be fair, I also think money is fungible, as you do. It's pretty hard to argue with that line of defense.

• 33:50David Hoffman?

  But if I had an exchange, I would still consolidate accounts and separate them differently.

• 33:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's not a good answer to the question of where's our $8 billion, Sam. Money is fungible.

• 34:02David Hoffman?

  Well, money's fungible. You know, the $8 billion is somewhere. It's fungible.

• 34:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, man. I kind of wish I was there for actually that day of court in particular. I don't know. Maybe some catharsis.

• 34:13David Hoffman?

  Of all the days in the court, this one obviously was the most well-attended. I think they had like three or four spillover rooms.

• 34:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, my God. I bet it was a circus. What the heck is this, though? We're just looking at one drawing of Sam Bankman-Fried. This is a much more flattering version. Is this also a re-

• 34:30David Hoffman?

  Chad Bankman-Fried with an absolute chiseled jaw and like kind of scruffy hair, looking buff. Who drew this? Are they looking at the same Sam?

• 34:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it's much different than this version.

• 34:44David Hoffman?

  That is a real court drawing of Sam Bankman-Fried.

• 34:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wow.

• 34:47David Hoffman?

  That's a very different Sam. These are different images.

• 34:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  People are taking some liberties in the drawings here. All right.

• 34:54David Hoffman?

  I want whoever drew this one to draw a picture of me.

• 34:59David Hoffman?

  Not in court, though.

• 35:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, you have to go on the stand for that, David.

• 35:03David Hoffman?

  No, no.

• 35:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, fill us in. Nic Carter versus Wall Street Journal. Did they apologize yet? I haven't looked at this at all, so you're gonna have to fill me in, okay? But last we left things, the Wall Street Journal completely lied about crypto being tied up with Hamas and completely exaggerated. They said something like $90 million worth of crypto was transmitted to Hamas. And it turns out it's something like...

• 35:28David Hoffman?

  130.

• 35:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, 130, 90 to 130. It turns out it was something like 450K, 450,000 when you go look at the blockchain data. Have they apologized for this yet?

• 35:39David Hoffman?

  So they did do this super flaccid retraction, I'll call it. It was, it was a confusing retraction. It wasn't, it was like, it was a correction and they just were like really vague about it. And so it was like technically they retracted, but they really didn't. Like all of the harm is still on the table.

• 36:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  What did they do then? I'm not even sure they...

• 36:06David Hoffman?

  Yeah, if you read what they say, it's just like confusing and doesn't actually provide any clarity about anything. It's just like they succumb to the pressure and they get to say like, "Look, we retracted." But then if you read it, it's like you didn't, you just were confusing.

• 36:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is very confusing. This is a very long...

• 36:22David Hoffman?

  Nic Carter is not satisfied. And so what did Nic Carter do? He announced that he's going to have $500 in Bitcoin bounties, open-ended bounty. So anyone can apply for this. It's definitely like, there's more than one. For the 20, for 21 best open source analysis of the facts surrounding the Wall Street Journal Warren letter. He's actually given out 28 bounties so far. So he increased to 21 because Arkham Intelligence also joined the effort to fund this. And so this has turned into a mutual pot to finance the investigation of truth around the details of Hamas's reception of crypto assets using the blockchain, because we have this amazing tool called a blockchain that allows you to audit this.

• 37:07David Hoffman?

  And so there's just been some incredible data that has come out. From people just open source investigation of of the the exact flow of funds that went to Hamas. So this is just one of many people of the people that have put an investigation together. It was very, very detailed. If Ryan, if you scroll down, you can you can kind of just.

• 37:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  What am I looking at?

• 37:30David Hoffman?

  Yeah, just like I don't. This is just like a map of transactions, very thorough. It takes some takes some skills to really put some of this together. So this this one particular tweet that we're showing is one of 28, and I'll just read two lines here. That that this one particular person came to the conclusion of where they said, according to the Wall Street Journal, wallets connected to Hamas received about $41 million over a similar time period, an arbitrary time period that the Wall Street Journal said, which was proven false. In reality, that account connected to Hamas has only received about $250,000 in total during that same time period. So just like really good grassroots investigation, because Nic Carter and a few other people are putting up a pot

• 38:10David Hoffman?

  of money to actually do real research, not like Elizabeth Warren cares because she's like doubling down.

• 38:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wait, wait. So she's not apologizing then? She's not retracting anything? This is a we have got a clip of Elizabeth Warren. I actually haven't looked at this. Should we play this?

• 38:25Speaker 04

  Last year, you wrote that, quote, "In their attempt to avoid being traced, illegal actors have adopted ever more sophisticated cryptocurrency technologies such as non-custodial wallets."

• 38:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  Non-custodial wallets.

• 38:40Speaker 04

  You wrote that Hamas uses non-custodial wallets to evade detection. Do those wallets pose a particularly high risk of attracting terrorists and other very dangerous people?

• 38:54Speaker 05

  Thank you for the question. It is important, perhaps if I may, just to refer to your earlier comments about the funding of Hamas. The major funding of Hamas, unfortunately, the current sanctuary regime is far from being sufficient, and most of its budget and funds are still going through the traditional channels. And I want to put that clear because crypto is a problem, but this is not the major problem. And we have to look, you know, on other traditional channels like banking and exchanges and money exchanges and cash and so forth. So let's not.

• 39:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, here's the expert actually telling her that the problem isn't crypto. The problem is like the traditional banking system. Interesting.

• 39:30David Hoffman?

  And we have a second better clip. So let's listen to the next clip of the same person.

• 39:35Speaker 05

  Let's don't lose sight and focus from the big picture. Crypto is currently a very small part of the puzzle. The major funding channels are where and remain. State funding, Iran and others, those are the major players. Most of the funds are still being transferred by the traditional channels that we all know from the past. Banks, money transmitter, payment system, howala, money exchange, trade-based terrorism, financing, charity, cash, shell companies and crypto. The effort should be global and focus on imposing global sanctions on Hamas and their sponsors, as was the case with ISIS.

• 40:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, there you go.

• 40:18David Hoffman?

  Liz Warren just got told to calm down inside of Congress by the person that she was asking to basically like help her say that it's crypto.

• 40:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 40:28David Hoffman?

  And like you mentioned this during the first clip, Ryan, like she's going after the self-hosted wallets. She's good. She's trying to blame this on self-hosted wallets, which also ironically, a lot of the funds, the actual funds, the $450,000 funds that went to Hamas, went through centralized exchange.

• 40:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  Not even self-hosted wallets.

• 40:45David Hoffman?

  That got frozen. That got frozen.

• 40:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  She just wants an opportunity to slam self-hosted wallets, bankless, bankless wallets, right?

• 40:53David Hoffman?

  But this isn't the opportunity, is the thing. There's no opportunity for her here.

• 40:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  I know.

• 40:58David Hoffman?

  All of the cards are on our side.

• 41:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  I'm just worried that when there does come a time when a self-hosted wallet is culpable in some sort of transaction, she's going to go right after it. Like, you know, like she's, she's primed to do that. This was, by the way, that expert was Dr. Shalomit Wagman, who set the record straight on terrorism and its non-relationship with, with crypto. So excellent job there. So what's Nic Carter saying here, David, in this tweet?

• 41:25David Hoffman?

  Yeah. Yeah. So this is another article about this, about the same issue. So the article says, "Since the Hamas attacks of October 7th, the most prominent public crypto fundraising campaign has been operated by Gaza Now, a pro-Hamas news organization. However, only $21,000 in cryptocurrency has been donated, donated since October 7th. And thanks to the effort of crypto businesses and researchers, much of this has been frozen, preventing Gaza Now from being able to use these funds. On October 9th, Gaza Now sent around $2,000 of the donated crypto to an exchange, presumably to cash out, where it was promptly frozen. In addition, around $9,000 in stablecoin donations were frozen by Tether, the stablecoins issuer."

• 42:07David Hoffman?

  Crypto is the most, is the worst platform to do terrorism stuff. It will just get frozen because it's stablecoins, which are going to get frozen, or centralized exchanges, which are going to get frozen. Like, again, all of the arguments are on our side here.

• 42:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  No, no, I get it. I get it. The facts and circumstances this time around. I think in a future time, it could be just straight Bitcoin. It could be straight Ether, it could be no, um,

• 42:32David Hoffman?

  Actually, not the stablecoins, like, die.

• 42:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, yeah. And I just think that this, uh, you know, apparatus, this, this kind of like push in DC from the anti-crypto army is going to attack it. They're just, they're just waiting for it. They're primed to attack crypto.

• 42:49David Hoffman?

  Well, that's why I think that I'm so thankful that Nic Carter is like digging in the knife on this one, because it shows the cards of how dishonest and how much of an agenda that Elizabeth Warren has. So when, in the future, when there's like rampant privacy everywhere on crypto, which is the version of crypto that I see, we will be able to go and say, like, you just hate crypto.

• 43:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  I just don't understand, like, yeah, look, Hamas is using the internet too. I mean, they're using TCP IP, right? Like, come on. They're using all sorts of technology. Technology is neutral. I don't know. That, that, that's an uphill battle with, with this group. But David, we are making some progress on one particular issue. And that particular issue is something that we brought up last week. Do you remember there was a regulatory fight with the IRS, again, coming from the Elizabeth Warren camp, anti-crypto army? IRS had a massively anti-DeFi interpretation of some regulations. And our role as the Bankless Community, as a crypto community, was to comment on their comments page.

• 43:54David Hoffman?

  Well, we needed 10,000 comments to extend the deadline by one year.

• 43:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  And you know what we got, David? We got 25,000 comments.

• 44:03David Hoffman?

  That's, that's more than 10,000.

• 44:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is a tweet. Over 25,000 comments have been received by the IRS regarding their broker rulemaking proposal. Over 12,000 posted to the docket on regulations.gov, clearly a sign that something is wrong with the proposal. This is the most popular the IRS has probably ever been on its comment page. And we did that. We played a role in that. So hopefully they are hearing the crypto community. They're hearing US citizens loud and clear. Unfortunately, the last opportunity to comment about that was October 31st. But fortunately, many of you did because we got 25,000. And that is how we have our voices heard on this, on this particular issue. So what they choose to do with it is up to them. But we will keep you guys informed of the next steps.

• 44:51David Hoffman?

  Ryan, you remember from the episode that we did where we did this big call to action? They have to read every comment.

• 44:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes.

• 44:58David Hoffman?

  The comment I submitted was like six paragraphs.

• 45:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it was, it was an AI submission, which I love too, by the way. So like,

• 45:05David Hoffman?

  Whatever.

• 45:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  I set mine just like a hair below spicy, by the way, in my.

• 45:09David Hoffman?

  Mine was very spicy.

• 45:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, you spiced it up?

• 45:12David Hoffman?

  Oh, I spiced it up, dude.

• 45:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  David, what else we covering today?

• 45:15David Hoffman?

  $2.7 billion mainnet just dropped. That doesn't happen every day. We'll talk about which one. What does Elon Musk have to say about NFTs? And also, why does Elon Musk want everyone to go bankless in under one year? He charges his employees with helping everyone go bankless in just one year. What is going on? I kind of like the sound of this. And also, remember Safe Moon, Ryan?

• 45:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes. No.

• 45:39David Hoffman?

  Well, it turns out it was not safe, nor did it moon. The execs got arrested by the Department of Justice for misappropriing users' funds and manipulating the market. I am just shocked. We're going to get to all of these details and more. But first a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible, especially MetaMask portfolio. If you've not opened up your MetaMask portfolio, what are you waiting for? Go try it out while you listen to these sponsors. MetaMask portfolio is your one stop shop to navigate the world of DeFi. And now bridging seamlessly across networks doesn't have to be so daunting anymore. With competitive rates and Convenient routes, MetaMask Portfolio's bridge feature lets you easily move your tokens from chain to chain using popular Layer 1 and Layer 2 networks. And all you have to do is select the network you want to bridge from and where you want your tokens to go.

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  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. 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.

• 47:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, David, tell me about that $2 billion mainnet. What are we looking at here?

• 47:46David Hoffman?

  Celestia. Congrats on the mainnet launch. What is Celestia? It is a data availability network. It is a chain that is meant to do one thing, and one thing extremely well, which is provide data availability, or data publishing as we are calling it now. And so, this Celestia, the Celestia thesis is highly synonymous with the rollup thesis. Celestia thinks that there is going to be thousands and thousands and millions of rollups, and it wants to sell them data availability. We've already seen a roll up platform like Eclipse use Celestia for data availability. And the idea is like, the more rollups that get data availability from Celestia, the more fees that it generates. It's also got this whole like light node optimization emphasis.

• 48:31David Hoffman?

  We'll have to go down the Celestia rabbit hole. There's an episode I did with Nick White, the CEO, founder of Celestia forever ago. Anyways, the token TIA. Why TIA for Celestia instead of CEL? I don't know. CEL is also Celsius is token. So maybe that's

• 48:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's probably why.

• 48:48David Hoffman?

  That's probably why. 580,000 people received the airdrop. The current price of TIA is around $2.58, which is coming in at a fully diluted valuation. The last I checked at $2.7 billion. So it's not every day that $2.7 billion just gets minted out of thin air. So congratulations to anyone that invested or has worked on or received the airdrop of Celestia.

• 49:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. And congratulations to anyone who lives in the US and who was protected by this airdrop from our friend.

• 49:17David Hoffman?

  Yeah, this dangerous, dangerous airdrop.

• 49:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Could not access it. Couldn't VPN in? Nothing. Could not get it. Have to cross the border to Canada, I guess. So to get your

• 49:27David Hoffman?

  I legitimately thought about this like, yo, I could just Uber to Canada. Less than the cost.

• 49:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  Get my airdrop and get out real quick. All right, David, Safe Moon. Tell me about that. I barely remember Safe Moon. This was some meme coin in 2021, 2022. Is that, is that it?

• 49:44David Hoffman?

  Yeah. Yeah. This is how we knew the Marcus were frothy. I mean, kind of in hindsight. It's literally called Safe Moon because it safely, it's a safe bet that it goes to the moon. It's in the title. Yeah, it's in the title.

• 49:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  Who is feeling this? Like some big likes? Is Dave Portnoy showing this?

• 50:00David Hoffman?

  It was TikTok accounts.

• 50:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  TikToks. Okay.

• 50:02David Hoffman?

  Yeah. It has a mechanism that like, when you make, when you transfer it, it burns a part of it. So it's like pumponomics. Anyways, the Department of Justice arrested and charged the exec team with perpetrating a massive fraud on its investors. The SEC also targeted them for offering unregistered securities. You know, I'm not going to get in the front of the SEC on this one. It's like, you guys, you guys

• 50:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  No problem.

• 50:22David Hoffman?

  These people, get them out of here.

• 50:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  Thanks, SEC, SEC on that. Take the bad with the good. It's mostly bad, but I guess there's a little bit of good here. What, what did the execs do here? I'm reading a line here. Apparently they withdrew more than $200 million from the project. That's the Safe Moon execs.

• 50:38David Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. Charged with conspiracy to commit securities fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud and money laundering. Yeah, you, anyone who does this also is totally money laundering. They're not paying their taxes. And then they misappropriated investors' funds for personal use, a sports, a Porsche, other luxury vehicles, real estate, some other bullshit, I'm sure.

• 51:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Anyways, there you go. Well, it would be nice if the SEC spent more time doing stuff like that, but there are.

• 51:09David Hoffman?

  Tip of the hat, tip of the hat. More of this, more of this.

• 51:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  A tweet from Brian Armstrong says he's working hard on the Coinbase wallet. Our ambitious goal is to get the average transaction under one second, one second, end to end, instant, cheap and global. I think he's using the magic, the power of layer twos to do that. He's actually showing a demo here in this tweet. Don't blink, it says, as a Coinbase wallet transacting. Looks like sending maybe some ETH somewhere? Yeah, sending some ETH somewhere in a second.

• 51:39David Hoffman?

  Yeah, ETH between Arbitrum and Base, the two layer two chains. And then there's, there's probably like five or seven different routes to do that. And then the Coinbase wallet is just obfuscating it because you have cryptographic assurances for layer twos. You have inclusion assurances. And so what can a wallet do? They can just make it snappy. There's like so much juice to squeeze left in the interoperability layer between layer twos and stuff like this, just like the front end UX is, is one of them.

• 52:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  I love to see exchanges cozying up with layer twos. This is a Kraken with its own ETH deposits and withdrawals now supporting ZK Sync. This is, I believe, the first major exchange to support the ZK EVM and maybe the first to support a ZK rollup, David. So pretty big Kraken moving into that. And it's fantastic.

• 52:29David Hoffman?

  Other stuff in Krakenland, their, their Formula F1 NFT car finally got revealed. And so they had this like promo video of these race car drivers like talking about the NFTs that are it's all like on the spoiler on the end. So when they these F1 cars are driving really fast, the spoiler pushes the air up.

• 52:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is the thing we were talking about where you could get your NFT on the back of this car, right?

• 52:50David Hoffman?

  Yeah, sadly, my dick butt did not.

• 52:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  I don't know how sad that is. Some of these race car drivers are pretty happy. They don't have a dick butt.

• 52:59David Hoffman?

  We don't need, we don't need to listen to the race cars, but like one in the video, one race car is talking to the other one is like, yeah, I put this NFT on it because it's super distracting for the driver.

• 53:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  Probably true. Speaking of NFTs, Elon Musk said something about NFTs earlier.

• 53:15David Hoffman?

  Oh, super positive, right?

• 53:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, let's hear.

• 53:18Speaker 06

  But I mean, NFTs, the funny thing is that the NFT is not even on the blockchain. It's just a URL to the, to the JPEG. So it's not even like, it's like, you should at least encode the JPEG in the blockchain. Cause like if the URL, if the company housing the image goes out of business, you don't have the image anymore.

• 53:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, David, trivia on that. Is Elon Musk right about that? Is an NFT just a pointer? The NFT, the JPEG itself is not on the blockchain? Is that, is that true?

• 53:51David Hoffman?

  That, that is yes and no. First, before I answer that question, I just love Joe Rogan's just like, it's like those NFT scammers.

• 54:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, not even on the chain this whole time. We thought it was on the chain. It's not. Did you think it was on the chain this whole time, David?

• 54:10David Hoffman?

  No, of course not. This is why NFTs like autoglyphs are so cool. Not only are they on chain, but they're generated natively on chain. There are a good, strong selection of on-chain NFTs. Smaller NFTs, like pixelated ones, for example, CryptoPunks, for example, are on-chain.

• 54:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  Fully on-chain.

• 54:30David Hoffman?

  Fully on-chain, like the JPEGs on-chain, the JPEG is on the chain. So you.

• 54:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's usually, it's not a JPEG. It's like, sometimes it's a vector file, right? It's like an SVG.

• 54:38David Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah, because they're, because they're lower data. So there's 20 of them. Shout out Treasure, the Treasure Small Brains, those are on-chain. There's just like a good handful of NFTs that are on-chain.

• 54:53David Hoffman?

  There's also like NFTs, like I have a couple, I have like 12 NFTs made by my buddy Nate Muller, who the NFTs themselves are like 1.2 gigabytes a pop.

• 55:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 55:04David Hoffman?

  And those are not on-chain. Those are actually stored on R-Weave. And so then using the modular blockchain thesis, data on R-Weave, NFT on Ethereum, NFT points to R-Weave, and then I can get my data from R-Weave.

• 55:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  And R-Weave is decentralized storage layer. Okay, so it's not quite as kind of decentralized and secure as something maybe like Ethereum. Doesn't quite give you those guarantees, but it is much cheaper. It's optimized to store large files and it's certainly much better than a cloud provider, an AWS or something like that, or what Elon was talking about, a company that could go out of business, right? So that's kind of an interim type step with a lot of NFTs are stored on R-Weave or IPFS.

• 55:49David Hoffman?

  Right. And it's also just important to remember, what is an NFT? An NFT is a file format. You can put a URL there. You can put an actual image there. You can put a pointer to another token or something else. So yes, Elon, you're actually mostly wrong. You're kind of right, but you're mostly wrong.

• 56:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, kind of right. But like the spirit of that, I feel like is mostly wrong.

• 56:10David Hoffman?

  The spirit is wrong.

• 56:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  You know, David, Elon, always the ambitious individual. He gave his employees at X, that is formerly Twitter, one year to create a system on X that replaces the banks. You know, he got, he got his start over at PayPal, right? That's, I think shortly after that, he bought the-

• 56:26David Hoffman?

  He wanted to call X, by the way.

• 56:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  He wanted to call X. He got the X.com domain after that and now wants to, it seems like, turn Twitter into a financial platform. So the quote is, "When I say payments, I actually mean someone's entire financial life. If it involves money, it'll be on our platform, money or securities or whatever." So it's not like, "Send $20 to my friend." I'm talking about, "You won't even need a bank account." Anything that's possible, David, is no bank account.

• 56:56David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I don't know how he does this without crypto.

• 57:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, neither do I. And I actually think when he says no bank account, he actually means there's going to be a bank account somewhere, unless he's using crypto. I mean PayPal definitely has a bank accounts, right? I mean, it's all kind of connected. You have to have a bank account and I think he is getting a broker dealer money transmission licenses across the US right now. So me like no bank account in air quotes here.

• 57:26David Hoffman?

  This is kind of the version of crypto that I don't want, which is that we use the power of crypto to just make a new banker. I don't want Elon Musk to be my banker.

• 57:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  I don't think he should.

• 57:35David Hoffman?

  You should just focus on cars and Mars.

• 57:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  I Carson Mars. I don't think he's using crypto here. Right? Like I don't think I don't know what this means, but I think.

• 57:45David Hoffman?

  Just Stripe only?

• 57:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think it's just a fintech play. If he starts using crypto, if he starts using like your stable coins or something like that, then I think this gets a bit more interesting and a bit more bankless.

• 57:59David Hoffman?

  If he, if he makes this fintech dominant X platform, it becomes very ripe to hook crypto into it in the backend.

• 58:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  I agree. I agree. But I don't know if he's there yet.

• 58:10David Hoffman?

  Still prefer crypto spoiler.

• 58:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. Speaking PayPal, by the way, so PayPal just received a subpoena from the SEC. Apparently they don't like what PayPal is doing with their PYUSD. This is a stablecoin product. Remember Nic Carter came on the show, we did an entire episode on stablecoins. He told us a little bit about PYUSD. And according to Nic Carter, PYUSD is actually offers even better settlement and security guarantees than the PayPal dollars.

• 58:41David Hoffman?

  And PayPal.

• 58:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, and actual deposits in PayPal. But something about this, the SEC doesn't like, maybe because it's tokenized. Gary Gensler thinks he gets to control it, but they're in the process of subpoenaing PayPal right now over this. So that's the same thing, David.

• 58:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  David, one of our favorite sites for a while has been Dune Analytics. This is anybody, anybody can create a like open source metrics board to gather any on-chain data. And now they are releasing Dune AI. What is this, David?

• 59:15David Hoffman?

  So this is using large language models like ChatGPT to be able to query and parse Dune's data. And so this is, I think, just making Dune's data much more accessible. We, as plebs, Ryan, are beholden to people like Hill Dobby and Data Always to put Dune boards together for us.

• 59:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  And I say no sequel, and we don't. We are non-sequel plebs.

• 59:38David Hoffman?

  Exactly. But now we are large language model users, which makes us Dune gods, I guess. It's kind of the idea. And so you can just go to Dune and type in your query, hopefully, and then all of the Dune data that's parsed will be able to spit back out whatever you are looking for.

• 59:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like, here's the example. What are weekly ZK sync transaction volumes this year? You can plug that in, in, you know, just language, just normal human, like, English language, and then it'll spit back a chart for that. It's pretty magical.

• 1:00:08David Hoffman?

  So this is actually something that we learned during our travels at Bankless Ventures. I want to parse something out here. There is the data that Dune has parsed and purified and made ready for people to query. And then there is all of the data on the blockchain.

• 1:00:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:26David Hoffman?

  Dune does not have all of the data on the blockchain. Data on the blockchain is like this unrefined, extremely crude, like, oil that needs to go and be refined. So people like Hill Dobby or Data Always, and, you know, these Dune wizards can actually

• 1:00:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's true.

• 1:00:42David Hoffman?

  And so we are not actually scaling out. There's no new data. Dune doesn't have any new data. The current data that Dune does have parsed is now much more easily

• 1:00:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  Which is still incredibly powerful, but you can't do things like, how much money did Hamas receive in crypto assets? Like, you couldn't ask a question, like, you wouldn't be able to answer a question like that.

• 1:01:04David Hoffman?

  Right. So Dune still has to manually kind of parse and purify data on the blockchain to be able to present it through its LLM. This is how I understand this.

• 1:01:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes. Speaking of Bankless Ventures, by the way, David, one of our portfolio companies, Modulus, just announced their raise. And the reason we're including this is, of course, is it presents a future possible conflict of interest, and also because we're pretty excited about the Modulus project. So what is Modulus, David?

• 1:01:28David Hoffman?

  So Modulus is in the ZKML space, that is zero knowledge machine learning. And so this is a bet that there will be a ton of machine learning models out there. And what can you do with ZK, like machine model, learning models, very big sets of data? Like imagine how big the data is behind ChatGPT. It's like 100 gigabytes. You can ZK that LLM or that that machine learning model. And then you produce a proof of that and then you put that proof on chain. In the world in which there are extremely valuable models out there to use across all different circumstances. It would be really useful to have a proof that you are actually using the correct model and actually being served the correct output of that model.

• 1:02:11David Hoffman?

  And so this just is, it's like an authenticity, authentication layer for models and making sure that you're not getting man in the middle attacked if you are a consumer of a model. And so it puts all models into a ZK proof and puts on chain for verification. And then so you can attest that the output of the model that you are paying for or subscribing to or just need for whatever reason is actually using the correct model. And so it's using, it's kind of like using Ethereum as like an Ethereum meditation service type of use case. And so there is like the external needs for authenticity. But what's really cool about this, what really got my imagination going

• 1:02:48David Hoffman?

  is when the outputs of one ZKML model can also engage with the outputs of another ZKML model natively on chain. So you can start to think of this as like on-chain ZKML Legos that can be composed together, which gets really interesting when we talk about the world of fully on-chain universes, fully on-chain games. And they need to go out and like query a model as a part of their universe, like, oh my God, imagine that. And so that's why, that's why I'm super stoked about Modulus. Congratulations on Modulus for the race.

• 1:03:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  David, what do we have coming up next?

• 1:03:20David Hoffman?

  Coming up next, where are all the apps? That is a question from one of the members in the Bankless Nation. Ryan and I are going to tell you exactly where all the apps are.

• 1:03:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Where are they hiding? Yeah, we're also going to talk about what we're bullish on. So stay tuned for all of that. But first, I'm going to talk about these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible.

• 1:03:37David Hoffman?

  You know Uniswap, it's the world's largest decentralized exchange with over 1.4 trillion dollars in trading volume. You know this because we talk about it endlessly on Bankless. It's Uniswap, but Uniswap is becoming so much more. Uniswap Labs just released the Uniswap Mobile Wallet for iOS, the newest, easiest way to trade tokens on the go. With a Uniswap Wallet, you can easily create or import a new wallet, buy crypto on any available exchange with your debit card with extremely low fiat on-ramp fees, and you can seamlessly swap on mainnet, Polygon, Arbitrum, and Optimism. On the Uniswap Mobile Wallet, you can store and display your beautiful NFTs, and you can also explore Web3 with the in-app search features, market leaderboards, and price charts, or use Wallet Connect to connect to any Web3 application. So you can now go directly to DeFi with the Uniswap Mobile Wallet.

• 1:04:22David Hoffman?

  Safe, simple custody from the most trusted team in DeFi. Download the Uniswap Wallet today on iOS. There is a link in the show notes. Arbitrum is accelerating the Web3 landscape with a suite of secure Ethereum scaling solutions. Hundreds of projects have already deployed on Arbitrum One with flourishing DeFi and NFT ecosystems. Arbitrum Nova is quickly becoming a Web3 gaming hub, and social datums like Reddit are also calling Arbitrum home. And now Arbitrum Orbit allows you to use Arbitrum's secure scaling technology to build your own Layer 3, giving you access to interoperable, customizable permissions with dedicated throughput. Whether you are a developer, 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

• 1:05:05David Hoffman?

  and provide a builder experience that's intuitive, familiar, and fully EVM compatible. Faster transaction speeds and significantly lower gas fees. So visit arbitrum.io where you can join the community, dive into the developer docs, bridge your assets, and start building your first app with Arbitrum. Experience Web3 development the way it was always meant to be: secure, fast, cheap, and friction-free.

• 1:05:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Question from Galena this week from the Bankless Nation. Most of the projects highlighted are infrastructure-focused, but where are user-focused apps that have a true practical application and solve a pain point? Where are they even being built right now? Where are the apps, I think, is the question from Galena. Do you have an answer for that?

• 1:05:44David Hoffman?

  Yeah, crypto has been in this like infrastructure phase for like ever. And the application phase is something that I would love to get to. Where are all the apps is kind of like a really good question. We had friend dot tech. We had one good one. We need like a lot more. Kind of the big use cases that are definitely successful in crypto are stablecoins and non sovereign store values. And after that, I don't know if there's really a good like friend tech is like sixth and there's nothing that's three through five. Where are all the apps? We have, I would say in the year 2023, block space supply, supply of block space is no longer an issue. We need the apps.

• 1:06:29David Hoffman?

  We like, we are in this kind of, we should be having an existential crisis as an industry of just like, you know, we have all the infrastructure, but no one's building anything on the app layer WTF. That's kind of what I would say is the state of the industry. That's also what I would say is the state of the Solana conference I went to, like the Solana, what they are delivering as their infrastructure layer is like, apparently really crazy. What they're saying they can do is like, oh, that's, that's insane. Like the whole like token 2022 package, really cool. No apps, no ecosystems got apps.

• 1:07:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes, the, the way I tee this up and talk about this is first of all, lay out the, the concern, right? Cause I'm also, it's also been on my mind. I tweeted this earlier this week. I'm no longer worried about the scalability problem for crypto. Now it's the opposite. We have too much block space chasing too few apps. What apps will consume all this cheap block space? I feel like we go in this feast or famine type of a phase with, with crypto where actually if you remember last cycle, we had so much activity that our transactions cost like $30 to do something on Ethereum, right? That's like, Maybe too many apps, not enough block space. Now we have all of this block space. You were just talking about all the cheap Solana block spaces coming down the pike. We have all of this cheap layer two block space, too. And it's just getting cheaper.

• 1:07:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's getting cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. And it's going, it's becoming more and more plentiful. So now we're in the feast portion of things. And the big question is like, what are the apps? And the way I think about this, David, is there's like really two schools of thought. There's like the many app thesis and the few app thesis. I would say the few app thesis, one of the best analysts on this is Palenya. And I would also maybe extend this to Vitalik a little bit, but Palenya basically says, you know what, most of the apps, and this was, I would say, part of the bankless thesis from 2019, 2020. Everyone, if you remember the 2017 crypto cycle, we thought we were going to disrupt Uber with a decentralized Uber.

• 1:08:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  As people are saying, like the world computer, we're going to like take over AWS as well. Okay. And I remember part of the refresh for me in 2018, 2019 was being like, uh, what is this crypto thing actually useful for? And the thing I came away with was money, finance, going bankless. And these are still the king apps. It's non-sovereign store of value. So it's like a gold type of object, Bitcoin, let's say, or Ether as a, you know, kind of an internet bond and non-sovereign store of values. We got that, check the box. You mentioned stable coins, that's another. DeFi is another, so decentralized finance. I mean, Uniswap overtaking the volume of some of our major exchanges has been a clear success.

• 1:09:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  DeFi, Ave, Compound, these things did fine when all of the centralized collateralized loan providers in 2022 faltered. So we do have some wins and we do have some apps, but they're mostly in the finance category. And then NFTs, right? That is like property, it's still an asset. So the apps primarily have come from the finance category of things. And Palenya says that's pretty much the sweet spot for crypto. It's high value. Money, finance-y types of applications, there's not going to be a lot else. So what you should do crypto is focus the UX on this niche and get it really good and then onboard the world that way.

• 1:09:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  That I would say is the few apps type thesis. And then there's others that are maybe the many app type thesis. I would say, you know, Chris Dixon from A16Z is probably this, like the folks at Variant Fund, WeGen, who we had on the podcast earlier is probably like many app thesis. And they believe a bit more in kind of a on-chain, social, web three type of world where we're going to have a lot of consumption of this block space that we just can't imagine right now. So that would be more along the lines of friends.tech types of things, or even, you know, we were looking at that song.tech, like just things that are new, things that we can't imagine right now.

• 1:10:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  I would say for myself personally, I still think we're in that, you know, we're in the famine phase for apps right now, but we're in the feast phase for block space. And so this is where we get to actually test to see how many use cases there are for crypto beyond these kind of simple money cases. I think there'll be more than we expect, but maybe not as much as the Uber bulls who think we're going to put like Uber on chain 2017 think there are. So that's how I'd answer that.

• 1:11:11David Hoffman?

  Is it too much to ask for feast feast, feast in block space? And feast in apps?

• 1:11:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  No, we never get that. Nothing's ever perfect, David. Not in crypto. Yeah, you know, one thing I'll add to this is Vitalik wrote a post about this in 2022 that you can go read. He names a few apps. Money, he says that's the first and still the most important app. And then, yep, and then he talks about DeFi, which we named there, Identity, which we really haven't talked about, and that's an up and comer. So ENS, proof of humanity, PoApps, soulbound tokens, that kind of thing. DAOs, maybe they're nascent as well. Again, this is a capital formation structure.

• 1:11:50David Hoffman?

  Don't hurt me again.

• 1:11:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  And that's, that's, that's what he mentions. And by the way, all of those use cases, guess what, David? They were in the Ethereum white paper. So that veers more towards Plenya's line of thinking. It's like, it's a few use cases that blockchain and crypto is, it's highly tuned for. Very valuable for the world, but it's just not everything.

• 1:12:11David Hoffman?

  I'm firmly in the many apps camp.

• 1:12:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right.

• 1:12:14David Hoffman?

  I think if you can have a fully on train game, fully on train universe, a fully on train like state machine inside of a state machine, that is, that's like infinity. If you can re-simulate a world, that's infinity apps. That's my take.

• 1:12:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  In the fullness of time, though.

• 1:12:29David Hoffman?

  In the fullness of time.

• 1:12:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right. How long does that take to actually play out? It may take a lot longer.

• 1:12:33David Hoffman?

  Oh, yeah. They're like, yeah, like, like 10 plus 20 years. Yeah.

• 1:12:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Take of the week, David. This is your take. It's the only take we got. So, so give it to us.

• 1:12:42David Hoffman?

  This is the only take. This is, this is also, okay, I'll, this is also what I'm bullish on, but it comes in two parts. Okay.

• 1:12:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Looking at a money ball here. Yeah. What are we looking at?

• 1:12:49David Hoffman?

  Money ball. Yeah. So we're looking at a graphic that I put together. This is coming out of a slide for a talk that I'm giving at Fabric Ventures event in Lisbon here on Monday. One of the reasons why I'm here in Lisbon. So like my hot take here is like we're, we're like circle spectrum with every single color of the universe in it, right? Like yellow, red, blue. It's like a spectrum, a sphere of color spectrums. And around it, I have like disciplines of knowledge, economics, physics, finance, anthropology, political science, sociology, physics, psychology. And like my, my hot take here is that like money is actually like the space between these disciplines. Like money, like money doesn't just emerge until many other things also emerge.

• 1:13:32David Hoffman?

  Like other things, like other things have to be, are the prerequisites to get to money. Right? And so.

• 1:13:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  You're saying like money, money as a protocol, money as like a, a social coordination tool, right? Cause.

• 1:13:45David Hoffman?

  Yes.

• 1:13:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. You're not saying money is the center of finance and economics and physics and history and anthropology. You're saying it.

• 1:13:53David Hoffman?

  Right. Yeah. So like, it, it, so like money is like kind of gestaltian as in like you need a few of these things in order to allow for money to emerge. Right? And so, uh, for example, like economics. Inside the economics, you have the subjects of like the role of money, the medium exchange, unit of accounts or a value. You have concept of like supply and demand and inflation and deflation. In physics world, you have the production of money, like hard versus soft money is a function of physics. Like, why did gold win the Darwinian fight of commodity monies? Well, that answer lies in physics. You have finance, and finance can produce money. Credit is a financial concept. Debits and credits are two kinds of entries into a ledger that comes from the world of

• 1:14:37David Hoffman?

  finance. You have anthropology, right? So, different cultures have produced different commodity monies and different ledger monies throughout history. And then these cultures collided, and so did their monies. And one money ultimately displaces each other. Political science. When humans invented armies and organized states, the technology of money gained a new property, the central bank. And so that's now money has governance. Then there's sociology, like statehood, money and society all relate to each other. Now societies vote for governments that makes fiscal and monetary decisions. And these choices are made in mass for all of society. And then there's psychology. Because like, economic and societal choices are all determined at the margins. Every

• 1:15:20David Hoffman?

  single choice that you make as an individual is an economic one. Do you buy that coffee in the morning? Do you take the train, an Uber, a personal vehicle? Do you store your savings in Argentine peso or Bitcoin? These choices reverberate through the rest of the system. And so my take is that money is a technology that is at the center of so many other disciplines. And when we're just like cavemen with like stone tools, you don't get any money because you don't have any of the other disciplines that allowed for money to emerge. But money as a technology gets more sophisticated, the more knowledge we have.

• 1:15:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  And another way to maybe interpret this is, in order to understand money, and the reason so few, I think, understand it, you have to understand a little bit about economics, physics, history, anthropology, political science, sociology, psychology, and finance. Like, no wonder.

• 1:16:07David Hoffman?

  That's literally the line in my talk. It's like a money one-on-one talk.

• 1:16:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  But you know what? On the flip side, the best way to learn about these disciplines, and the reason why I personally find crypto endlessly fascinating, I mean, like, I know a lot of people are here for kind of like the Uh, you know, just the, the dopamine hits of watching the price go up. And I'm not going to lie, that's, that's great, you know, like investing is, is fantastic and seeing number go up and that's, that's all great. But, uh, the reason I've stayed here is because it's just so intellectually, it's so freaking interesting and it's the best way to learn all of these disciplines as well because money and a study of crypto will teach you all of these things. The one thing I would add, if, if you were to say crypto money on top of this, you'd also

• 1:16:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  have to like put cryptography and like technology to surround the circle and, and round this out along with all of those other disciplines, which is why we have endless content to cover on bankless, my friend.

• 1:17:06David Hoffman?

  Looking at a, a spectrum of bankless content right here.

• 1:17:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's right. All right. What are you bullish on, David?

• 1:17:14David Hoffman?

  I'm bullish on money, Ryan.

• 1:17:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  With the context that you just gave.

• 1:17:19David Hoffman?

  Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think like the, I think people often forget, I think especially in the year 2023 in this industry, like how important money is as one of the functions of crypto, especially as we are going there where like Janet Yellen just said, oh yeah, we can totally afford two wars.

• 1:17:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:39David Hoffman?

  And sure Janet, Janet Yellen, we can totally afford two wars if we take it out of the money, out of the US dollar. The value comes out of the dollar, which is where people make their, their savings, which is where it comes to the future. It comes from people and then people's individual psychologies are like, well, my dollars are bad now, and so I need to ask for more dollars from my employer so I can live. And so it reverberates throughout the system, right? And then all of a sudden, if you have a defective money, you have a defective society. And so I'm, I'm just having a, a reminder, it's like, yo. Money, if there's one thing that crypto produces that we needed to produce,

• 1:18:21David Hoffman?

  it's money. And so it's a reminder to be bullish about money. Money is why we're here. If we can fix money, you can fix the world. Tip of the hat to, can't believe I'm saying this, but Safedine Amuse.

• 1:18:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  I can't believe you're saying that either. Wow.

• 1:18:35David Hoffman?

  Yeah, right.

• 1:18:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  Hold on, I'm finding, David, while you're saying this, you know, I wanted to pull up this like absurdist tweet. And this is actually, this is real. So it's only struck me as absurd. This, this is this, this is a headline I saw. Japan to approve $110 billion stimulus package to fight inflation.

• 1:18:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  How does that work?

• 1:18:56David Hoffman?

  You don't, you don't spend money to fight inflation.

• 1:18:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, that's exact, that's exactly what you're talking about, though. An understanding of money will make this pretty obvious. Oh, our friend Preston Pish is there because we need more made up money to have less money.

• 1:19:10David Hoffman?

  See Bitcoiners understand money. They don't understand Bitcoin, but they understand money.

• 1:19:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wow. You've got a lot of people mad right there. All right. Ask me, David. Ask me.

• 1:19:20David Hoffman?

  I will, Ryan. What are you bullish on?

• 1:19:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  You know what's on that theme? I'm bullish on Ether, Ether as money. Okay. And in particular, I just want to say, you were talking about, obviously, a lot of tokens have had big pumps here lately. I am not surprised Lana had such a monumental pump. I think it was kind of like it's off massive lows, you know, 97% down. But I think-

• 1:19:43David Hoffman?

  Context, it's back up to its pre-FTX, right before FTX.

• 1:19:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes. What I think people are doing now, though, is they're forgetting about Ether, okay? They're starting to fade Ether.

• 1:19:54David Hoffman?

  Ether isn't cool anymore.

• 1:19:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's not cool anymore because it hasn't pumped the way Sol has over the last 30 days. So I'm hearing even like some seasoned ETH people starting to like worry, maybe?

• 1:20:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  Starting to like, wonder, did I miss something? I'm not saying anyone that listens to bankless is like this, but my message is this.

• 1:20:12David Hoffman?

  Oh, good day.

• 1:20:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  You guys are too bearish on ETH right now. Okay, if you are one of those people, because look at the landscape. There's a bunch of execution layers out there. There's layer twos. I consider Solana an execution layer. Take your pick. There's only one settlement layer, and that's Ethereum. Do you know how I know this? Because Ethereum is the only chain that has other chains that settle on top of it.

• 1:20:34David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 1:20:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  Ethereum is the only chain that from 2019, okay, to this year, 2023, went from about 19 million annually in blockchain sales to like 1.2 billion in annualized blockchain sales. It is the only chain that is producing profitable block space. Okay, that makes it a settlement layer. And I think that is, the market is not appreciating that right now. The market is doing some narrative type trading, and that's fine. You know, that's going to happen. But I feel like too many people are fading ETH. And you know who agrees with me? His previous bankless guest, Chow Wang. He says this, hilarious that ETH is now the most hated asset in crypto,

• 1:21:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  and yet ETH has objectively the largest dev community, arguably better long-term security than Bitcoin. For most retail, if they could only own one crypto asset as part of the concentrated portfolio, it would be ETH. That's still my take, man. Whenever someone asks me, I'm like, ETH.

• 1:21:32David Hoffman?

  I saw the Bitcoin plus Solana barbell case. And I'm like, where have I heard this before?

• 1:21:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, tell people, some people missed it. Where have we heard that before?

• 1:21:43David Hoffman?

  It was like DeFi summer. It was DeFi, it was after like nine months of DeFi tokens of absolutely mooning in price. Bitcoin was mooning in price and Ether wasn't doing anything. And they're like Bitcoin and, and DeFi tokens. These are the barbells. You're like, why do you need Ether? It's all you need. Now people are doing like, it's Bitcoin for the money because they know they, in the back of their head, they're like, yeah, Bitcoin for the money, Solana for the tech.

• 1:22:06David Hoffman?

  And to me, like, so a lot of people mostly know their shit. If you're going to say that Bitcoin is the money, to me, it just reveals your bias because we know Bitcoin is broken money. And they know it too. And there's, and they're just saying like, no, no, just no Ethereum, just Bitcoin and Sol, it's all you need. Like, to me, it just reveals the cards.

• 1:22:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  I'm just, I'm just-

• 1:22:26David Hoffman?

  Pull up one more tweet while we-

• 1:22:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, you can, you can. Yeah, we're ranting, it's our show, we can do what we want. What's your tweet?

• 1:22:31David Hoffman?

  Okay, you want to read this one first?

• 1:22:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, uh, this is someone by the name of Matty. Describe rollups, but leave out the typical jargon. No Ethereum, you can't say layer two, you can't say scaling, or you can't say multi-sig.

• 1:22:40David Hoffman?

  So the answer that I gave for this is, what is a rollup? It is a ledger contained inside of a single line of a larger ledger. What, Ryan, is a settlement layer?

• 1:22:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:53David Hoffman?

  It's the, it's the one that isn't contained by any other larger ledger.

• 1:22:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's the king ledger, it's the, uh, substrate.

• 1:23:01David Hoffman?

  The final settlement layer, right.

• 1:23:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:03David Hoffman?

  Which is ETH.

• 1:23:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, until, until there are other chains that are settling other ledgers.

• 1:23:08David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 1:23:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Uh, I think Ether has an incredibly strong value proposition. I'm not worried at all about these recent moves. I'm feeling quite comfy. David, let's get to the meme of the week.

• 1:23:18David Hoffman?

  This is, uh, this is an old meme, kind of, kind of checks out. It is, uh, two people, it's a guy and a girl, and the guy is doing the hand heart thing where he, like, the other, the girl matches the heart. And the girl's just got like a thumbs up.

• 1:23:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  This man has clearly been friends with it.

• 1:23:32David Hoffman?

  You know, thumbs up is Sam Bankman-Fried, and the guy trying to do the heart is FTX, the part of theirs. They're not, they're not getting it.

• 1:23:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  Can, can this be our last Sam Bankman-Fried meme ever? As soon as, as soon as-

• 1:23:45David Hoffman?

  He's so meme-able, he's so meme-able.

• 1:23:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  You're right, here, I can't, we can't commit to that. Well, there you go, Bankless Nation, thanks for staying tuned. This has been the Rollup, and with some disclosures and then risks in a minute. Bankless Ventures, of course, invested in Modulus, we told you about that earlier. I'm an angel investor in Dune Analytics as well. Both David and I are long-term ETH holders. We also hold Bitcoin, other assets. You can always view our disclosures at bankless.com/disclosures. Let me end with this, as I do. You gotta know that crypto is risky. 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.

• 1:24:22David Hoffman?

  And please enjoy this moment of Zen from Kyla Scanlon, who, in this Zoomer fashion way, explains the Federal Reserve.

• 1:24:29Speaker 07

  Hey there Fed Chair Jerome Powell, I have no surprises for you today except for my tie is silver and I'm not wearing glasses. So we have pause and rates are unchanged. This is because the economy is an economy, it is doing what it does. Inflation is somewhat cooling, the labor market somewhat cooling, the bond market freaking out. So that did our job for us a little bit, tighter financial and credit conditions, basically a couple rate hikes. We have maintained optionality by taking a break, by saying, "Hey, maybe we'll date again soon." We don't think that the rise in long-term bond yields is because of policy rates. Hey, nobody really knows, just like nobody knows if you're doing well. Recession not in the forecast, rates steady, economy zooming, thanks to you. Can you keep doing it? Can you keep spending lots of money on things?

• 1:25:13Speaker 07

  So we will keep that door open and maintain optionality and call you back a couple times a week to say, "Hey, is there a lot of things going on?" Have to ask, is inflation cooling? Ask, is the market happy and can that rock keep rolling up that hill?