ROLLUP: 4th Week of April (Venmo Crypto, Canada ETH ETF, Dogecoin & Safemoon, Ampleforth Airdrop)

Download the crypto meta to your brain in this weekly show. 4th Week of April, 2021 ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/ 🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/ 🎖 CLAIM YOUR BADGE: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/-guide-2-using-the-bankless-badge ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 💰 GEMINI | FIAT & CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://bankless.cc/go-gemini 🔀 BALANCER | EXCHANGE & POOL ASSETS https://bankless.cc/balancer 👻 AAVE | LEND & BORROW ASSETS https://bankless.cc/aave 🦄 UNISWAP | DECENTRALIZED FUNDING http://bankless.cc/uniswap ------ 📣 DHARMA | From Dollars to DeFi in a Tap! https://bankless.cc/dharma ------ Topics Covered: 0:00 Intro. Get Your Badge. 1:55 MARKETS 2:06 BTC Price & Dominance 6:14 ETH Price & ETH/BTC https://twitter.com/RaoulGMI/status/1384990262586351617?s=20 https://twitter.com/PeterLBrandt/status/1385023257774985219?s=20 11:05 DeFi Action Liquity Protocol https://twitter.com/koltenb_/status/1384485634929135622?s=21 14:45 Ethereum on-chain metrics https://twitter.com/DocumentEther/status/1384722805434978304?s=20 https://twitter.com/DocumentEther/status/1385278391406891008?s=20 https://twitter.com/DocumentEther/status/1383359905264926723?s=20 https://twitter.com/eliasimos/status/1385182472032370688?s=21 17:01 Ultra Sound Money https://twitter.com/drakefjustin/status/1385193694463135746?s=20 https://twitter.com/drakefjustin/status/1384124998084792324?s=20 21:14 Day 1 of Canadian ETH ETF https://twitter.com/EricBalchunas/status/1384836477675315203 22:24 Largest liquidations Ever https://www.theblockcrypto.com/linked/102007/bitcoin-plunge-7-billion-liquidation 24:29 RELEASES 26:00 Venmo Crypto https://www.theblockcrypto.com/linked/102295/paypal-venmo-crypto 28:27 Etherscan MEV Dark Forest https://twitter.com/etherscan/status/1384118330710056969?s=20 30:14 Alpha Homora V2 Relaunch https://blog.alphafinance.io/upcoming-alpha-homora-v2-relaunch-what-is-included/ 31:57 Ampleforth Gov Token https://www.ampleforth.org/governance/claim/ 33:58 Real World Assets in MakerDAO https://twitter.com/centrifuge/status/1384946100185014280?s=20 https://twitter.com/nomos_paradox/status/1384526932423806981?s=20 37:04 NEWS 37:14 First 13m Gas Block https://etherscan.io/block/12278017 https://twitter.com/sassal0x/status/1384540509293596676?s=20 41:16 Dollars to DeFi Dharma https://twitter.com/Dharma_HQ/status/1384603495198642180?s=20 44:30 PleasrDAO Purchases Snowden NFT - $5.5M https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/1383155552793026560?s=20 47:50 Brazzers NFT Collection https://twitter.com/brazzers/status/1384537381739565060?s=21 49:16 BTC hashrate drop from china blackout https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/bitcoin-mining-hash-rate-drops-as-blackouts-instituted-in-china-2021-04-16 https://twitter.com/nic__carter/status/1384938089748041730/photo/1 53:52 Regulatory Capture https://twitter.com/blockfizac/status/1384496587737640960?s=21 https://www.wsj.com/articles/cryptocurrency-giant-binance-hires-former-top-bank-regulator-11618912800 56:40 TAKES 58:00 Arthur Hayes Bullish on ETH https://cryptohayes.medium.com/yes-i-read-the-whitepaper-59cfa2ea9c2c 1:03:27 Coinbase in 5 Years https://twitter.com/pythianism/status/1383983650480349189?s=20 1:06:00 Binance is a Short-Term Game https://twitter.com/defiprime/status/1384876305129291780?s=20 1:13:58 Teach a Man to Stake https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/mvp9io/give_a_man_a_steak_and_hell_eat_for_a_day_teach_a/ 1:15:30 Three Halvenings Capital https://twitter.com/zhusu/status/1385073821699371016?s=20 1:18:04 What David’s Excited About 1:19:20 What Ryan’s Excited About 1:24:15 MEME of the Week https://twitter.com/RyanSAdams/status/1384930095446511616?s=20 1:29:00 Closing & Disclaimers ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/bankless-disclosures

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

• 0:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  Good morning. It is the fourth week of April. This is your roll up from Bankless. David, how are you doing today?

• 0:12David Hoffman?

  Absolutely fantastic. It's a great day inside of a great week and we are going to go through all of the details about why this week was so great here on the Bankless Weekly Roll Up.

• 0:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Absolutely. So we're going to hit you with the market releases, news, some hot takes, and then end with what we're excited about. Actually, scratch that. We're going to end with the meme of the week as we always do.

• 0:32David Hoffman?

  Meme of the week.

• 0:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  Got to stay to the end to make sure you get the meme of the week. Of course, this comes out every Friday morning. Enjoy it with your morning cup of coffee. The fastest way to download the week that was crypto inside of your brains. We do this as quickly as possible. David, we're going to get in in one second, but we have to mention it's badge week on Bankless. What happens on badge week?

• 0:52David Hoffman?

  Badge week is where we give away a bunch of cool stuff to people that own Bankless badges. So if you are a premium member to the Bankless newsletter, you could have the Bankless badge. Maybe you have one already, and if you don't have one already, you can go get yours. And so go into your email and look for an email from [email protected] talking about how to redeem a Bankless badge and then go do that. If you want to get a Bankless badge, but you are not yet a premium member, become a premium member and then at the first of the month, the first of May, you will get an email to redeem your Bankless badge, which then you can get the Bankless badge because the Bankless badge is something that you want to own. We're giving away BAPs, these t-shirts that you see either me or Ryan, or sometimes both of us, wearing every single weekly roll up, as well as Ether.

• 1:37David Hoffman?

  We are literally giving away ultrasound money.

• 1:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  I can't believe we're about to do that.

• 1:41David Hoffman?

  Yeah, and that's just indicative of how badly we want you to get your Bankless badge.

• 1:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Your badge is an NFT, of course, that is minted and settled on the Ethereum blockchain. So check that out. We want everyone who is eligible to grab the badge. There'll be some links in the show notes to you. Okay, David, you ready to get into the markets?

• 1:58David Hoffman?

  Let's do it. This is going to be the biggest markets section I think we've ever done this week.

• 2:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, let's do it. Markets. Let's start with Bitcoin as we always do. How's Bitcoin doing this week?

• 2:08David Hoffman?

  Dude, Bitcoin is having some trouble. Bitcoin's having some trouble in the last, uh, let's see, in the last 20 hours, there have been two pretty large volatile spikes downwards, down below $52,000 and it just had one right before, uh, we started recording just now. Bitcoin is at $53,300 where it, and it's been down below $52,000 twice in the last day or so. So really just kind of holding on to the bottom of the 50, $50,000 level.

• 2:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  Some performance anxiety for Bitcoin. I've even seen some newsletter headlines or like news headlines coming out like, oh, is Bitcoin going through sort of a mini bear market? But that's, that's part of the story. I think the other part of the story is actually the rest of the market in crypto is doing okay. It's kind of hot. So what we're seeing here, what I'm looking at here is Bitcoin dominance as a percentage of total crypto market cap. Explain this one for us.

• 3:04David Hoffman?

  Yeah. So Bitcoin dominance is if you take all of crypto assets and you get an aggregate market cap of, I think somewhere, where are we? If you scroll up, Ryan, we're at

• 3:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  Trillions, my friend.

• 3:14David Hoffman?

  Trillions, multiple trillions, multiple trillions, two trillion, two trillion in total crypto market cap. And Bitcoin is only right now at 54% of that. It has been previously as high as, uh, almost 70% of all crypto market cap was just Bitcoin. And now we have gone from the recent local high of 70% down to, uh, 54% and falling. And what this means is that people are moving down the market cap stack, right? They're going risk on with crypto assets, uh, and, and the Bitcoin dominance has not been this low since 2018. And so we are back at 2018 levels of Bitcoin dominance.

• 3:54David Hoffman?

  And this is, uh, this is traders like to refer to this as where an alt season indicator. I know we don't like the term alt season. It's not a very nuanced term, but it's kind of just a way to categorize everything is that when, when Bitcoin dominance falls, it because, it's because people are working their way down the market cap stack and speculating on lower cap tokens.

• 4:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  You know what? I think dominance is going to fall further from here. You know what? What I'm often amazed at is over the long term, how many things that actually like people get right. I mean, Chris Berninski basically predicted some of these macro cycles previously, that every single cycle that we have Bitcoin dominance is going to start at a a lower high, and then it's going to fall to a lower low from the previous cycle. And if you look at this Bitcoin dominance, it looks kind of like a version, a fractal version of what happened in 2017, where Bitcoin dominance went all the way down to like 30% ish. I wouldn't be surprised, David, if we see lower lows in this cycle. We'll have to see

• 5:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  how that plays out, but that's my anticipation that we're going to continue to see this trend. 2021 is 2017 all over again.

• 5:10David Hoffman?

  Right. And Bitcoin dominance really, to me, is like the Bitcoin maximalist index. Do you believe that there's going to be one asset to rule them all? Or do you think there's going to be a flourishing of many assets? And part of my personal thesis about this space is that the ERC20 token on Ethereum democratizes access to making an asset, just like the Gutenberg machine democratized access to printing newsletters, the ERC20 token on Ethereum democratizes access to making assets happen. And then we are seeing this with DAOs, we're seeing this with DeFi apps. Everyone is issuing a governance token. Like, I think there's going to be a flourishing of assets, and that's going to really push down the Bitcoin dominance.

• 5:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  David, you know what a Bitcoin maximalist might say to this, though? Is that this is like a scam indicator, basically. Yeah, so when the market gets too hypey, too hot, too scammy, Bitcoin dominance tends to fall.

• 6:03David Hoffman?

  They're not wrong.

• 6:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  There's an element of that, too, as well. There definitely are some projects that are very much vaporware that are pumping these days. We'll get to that in a little bit, but let's talk about ETH, because it is doing something different directionally than Bitcoin in that it's going up.

• 6:22David Hoffman?

  Yeah, whereas Bitcoin is testing local lows. If ether is in its all time high season. And so we just recently, as of today, crossed over the $2,600 mark. We peaked out at roughly $6,000 or $2,650. Took a little tumble in the last few hours down to $2,500 and now we are climbing back up to $2,564 at the time of recording. A nice performance by ether. I expect continuation.

• 6:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  Our ether bull podcast that we recorded in like mid-December has been holding up pretty well. And if you recall from that podcast, we had three ether bulls on. That was during more sober time. So I encourage you to go back in time and listen to those price predictions. The low price prediction from Eric Connor was 2,500. Now we've passed Eric's price prediction.

• 7:13David Hoffman?

  Barrett, more like Barrett Connor.

• 7:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  We had some other bulls on there who gave ranges. I'm trying to recall. I know Anthony Sisana said 10K and I think DC said 20K. So we're in that range now.

• 7:28David Hoffman?

  Striking distance.

• 7:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, of what the bulls predicted.

• 7:31David Hoffman?

  Not immediately striking, striking distance. We are now above Eric Connor's price prediction. So one down.

• 7:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  Does this make you worried? I mean, Eric's pretty predictive and he's definitely an ether bull and we're above his price predictions for the high. You worried about this?

• 7:44David Hoffman?

  So this is the theme that I've noticed. So I have three people in my life that are multi-cyclers where I and me, me and Anthony are just like one cycle, one cycle people.

• 7:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  Is that a unicycle?

• 7:56David Hoffman?

  Were you unicyclers? And one thing I've noticed is the longer you've been in the space, the more quickly you are to sell on the way up in this last cycle. And at that, at some point, that makes more sense. You have more life-changing money sooner. And so there's no, you don't really need to wait for the top of the market like how the unicyclers might want to do that. And so like it's interesting, the longer you've been in the space, the more you are selling sooner with lower price targets. And Eric, Eric has been in Ethereum since day one and was in Bitcoin before that. And so that kind of makes sense. That trajectory makes sense.

• 8:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  But you've got some fiat goals. You hit them, you're gonna sell.

• 8:32David Hoffman?

  Yeah, exactly. But $2,500 ether is just complete bearishness in my mind.

• 8:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, we're going up from here is what David says. This is a chart we don't usually talk about on the rollups, but I think it's worth talking about this time is the ETH Bitcoin ratio. And maybe we should take a look at this on

• 8:52David Hoffman?

  Five-year chart, five years.

• 8:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is the, so first of all, the news here is that it's up on the one year, which means ETH as a proportion of Bitcoin from a price perspective is going up. So ETH relative to Bitcoin is up on the like

• 9:07David Hoffman?

  Two and a half X on the, on the one year.

• 9:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. And this is, I don't often look at this ratio, but it's hanging out at 0.04 right now of Bitcoin. On the five-year though, it's pretty low because we hit almost like within flippanting distance of Bitcoin's market cap back in 2017. We're still low from that, but it's, it's, the ratio is on the high, like a two-year or so high. What do you make of this?

• 9:31David Hoffman?

  Right. And so a lot of traders are looking at the ETH BTC ratio because it has made new highs. In the same way that Bitcoin has made new lows in Bitcoin dominance since 2018, Ether versus Bitcoin is up new highs since Bitcoin since 2018. And so that, those are completely correlated. And a lot of traders, I know Raul Paul recently tweeted out a tweet about how

• 9:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  His tweet.

• 9:53David Hoffman?

  Yeah, right. How he just thinks that he is, he stares at the ETH BTC chart and sees an enormous rounded bottom with potentially huge breakout just above. And so what people are saying, what people are looking at is the 2017 ETH BTC ratio is where we might head to, given an Ether rally, right? In all, in, in bull markets, people want tokens and all tokens are on Ethereum and they need Ether to do that. And so the narrative is that people need to buy Ether to play with the tokens. This time's also different. We also have the triple point asset thesis, the ultrasound money thesis, EIP 1559, the merge, proof of stake, all happening in the next like 12 months or so. And so there's

• 10:34David Hoffman?

  definitely a growing amount of energy and momentum behind the ETH BTC ratio. And right now, as we are speaking, the ETH BTC ratio is pushing new highs again ever since 2018. We, we, we have not been this high since then.

• 10:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  So this means Ether may be catching up to Bitcoin's market cap. It could also mean Bitcoin going down as well while Ether goes up.

• 10:56David Hoffman?

  Which is currently is happening right now. Yeah.

• 10:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, which is currently happening right now. And we haven't seen that in a long time. So this does feel like it is a different season of the market. Okay, let's talk about what's locked in DeFi. So total locked value in DeFi, that dipped to around like 55 million, I believe, excuse me, billion. Now it's more recently bounced close to all time highs. Anything here to talk about?

• 11:22David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I think all time high is now $62 billion. We're currently sitting right below that. So all time high in DeFi Pulse. Something that's new this week in the DeFi Pulse Index that's really exploding on the scene is liquidity, excuse me, Liquidity, which is a new stablecoin project that offers 0% interest on your borrowed stablecoins. And the way that they do this is pretty interesting. Instead of paying like how MakerDAO charges a stability fee, which is a normal interest rate that gets charged over time, Liquidity offers 0% interest fees, but they charge you a percentage of your deposits upon deposit, and I believe also retrieval, I think, of your assets. Need to clear up my details.

• 12:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Is this like collateral backed?

• 12:04David Hoffman?

  Collateral backed LUSD is the new stablecoin. So die competitor, LUSD. And there's already 10% of all the ETH that is locked in DeFi is in Liquidity. And this is a brand new project, brand new protocol.

• 12:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  This stuff is awesome. Like, we talked about RIDE before and now Liquidity here. What's cool about this is this is very much fits the thesis that we've had for a while around Ether being economic bandwidth for the rest of the ecosystem. Once you have a store of value that's trustless like Ether on a network, you can build other things on top of them, like stablecoins. And that is exactly what's happening here. So that thesis is playing out. All right, let's talk about DeFi, because it seems like we're moving into ETH season, maybe. What's DeFi Pulse doing right now? The DPI is how we track that. That, once again, is some of the top 12, 13 or so DeFi.

• 12:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  Tokens. This is just tracking them generally. We're down a little bit. So ETH up, but actually on the week we're, yeah, no, on the week we're down too.

• 13:07David Hoffman?

  Yeah. On the week, we're down from a little over $550 per DPI down to $480 per DPI. And I think that's because I think Ether's very strong performance over the last two weeks is really scaring people who are perhaps overexposed to the app layer and perhaps forgot about ultrasound money. How dare you forget about ultrasound money? And that's what Ether is telling a DPI is like, perhaps ultrasound money is a place to be. And you can definitely see this in the ETH DPI ratio as well.

• 13:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay. Well, that's next. It looks like Ether is maybe sucking some of the oxygen out of the room. So this is the ratio that we look at on a weekly basis and that that ratio is down too, right?

• 13:47David Hoffman?

  Yeah, it did have a valiant effort for the last 10 days trying to hold that point two ratio, point two ETH per DPI. But it has fallen down below that at point one nine one Ether per DPI. And perhaps it just continues to fall. There, I'm not, again, not a trader, not financial advice, but there will be a day where DPI versus ETH rockets off of a floor. It's just kind of a game of who wants to try and catch that knife? Who wants to play a little game of chicken with a falling ETH DPI ratio?

• 14:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  You know, it's funny is we're not looking at some of the other assets in these, in these ratios too, right? Like, so if you look at some of the, the B and B pumps, the Binance chain pumps, those are way up. I think even relative to, to DeFi tokens. And that's, that's not taken into account here, but it's definitely seems like Ether is taking some of the, the value oxygen out of the room for other DeFi assets. While we have some of these Binance pumps going on, we'll talk about that in a minute, but let's talk about some fundamentals of Ether, David, because not only are we hitting all time highs from a price perspective. Dude, we're, Ether is crushing it, the Ethereum network. And if Ether as an asset is crushing it from a metrics perspective, I'm going to just zip through four of these.

• 15:03David Hoffman?

  Do this.

• 15:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  So settling more transactions.

• 15:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  In Q1 Ethereum has 1.5 trillion in transactions than all of 2020 combined. So 1.5 trillion transactions Ethereum has settled in the first quarter of this year. And that is like 3X on the quarter, more than all of 2020 combined. A crazy amount of settlement going on.

• 15:31David Hoffman?

  Before you move on to the next metric, Ryan, this eerily reminds me of the Coinbase volumes that they've did, which is a very similar metric where all of Q1 was more than all of 2020. So that's pretty cool correlation between Ethereum, the network and Coinbase, the company.

• 15:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Absolutely. It all tends to rise together. Okay, so Ethereum exchange outflow. This is a metric I'm particularly excited about, but

• 15:54David Hoffman?

  The bankless metric.

• 15:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it's coming out of exchanges. So when it goes out of exchanges, there's only one other place for it to go. And that is on the Ethereum network or on maybe a layer two that's secured by Ethereum. A lot of Ether is going out of exchanges. That means people are using it in DeFi, maybe to back a stablecoin. People are using it as a collateral base for loans. People are just holding it inside of a bankless vault rather than a crypto bank, which I think is pretty awesome as well. This is another all time high. Number of addresses holding at least one coin on Ethereum hit an all time high. Lastly, I'll go to this. Nothing you can see here. So it's the poster, only Ethereum active addresses.

• 16:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  So every Ethereum address is kind of like a bank account and Ethereum active addresses have just about breached all time highs as well. Pretty cool.

• 16:46David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I see you bankless listeners stacking that Ether, being more active on Ethereum. Nice job. Nice job.

• 16:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  Absolutely. It's important that we also use these money systems. We're not just stacking Ether for the hell of it. We're actually using these DeFi money systems. David, speaking of using Ether for economic resources, this is Ether being used to economically secure ETH2. Our friend Justin Drake just reported that there's 10 billion worth of Ether being staked right now. That's 4 million Ether worth in supply, which equates to 10 billion worth of stake. That is the economic security for the future of the Ethereum economy. What do you want to say about that?

• 17:31David Hoffman?

  And that is also how much Ether is receiving ETH rewards from the beacon chain. And so proof of stake alive and well for those who want to stake their Ether.

• 17:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is crazy too. I know we're going to talk about this a little bit, but this is another tweet that Justin put out. And he actually linked a spreadsheet, which I'm going to pull up, where he is looking to estimate, I believe, what returns will be for those who stake in Ethereum post EIP 1559, which is one part of kind of the Ultrasound Money thesis. And then also post the proof of stake merge, where we no longer need proof of work. Did you catch some of these numbers here?

• 18:13David Hoffman?

  Yeah, they are quite impressive. And when you link together the rewards earned by validators, which are both Ether issuance from the protocol, but also tips. And tips could actually be pretty substantial because tips is where minor extractable value gets captured. And so the only people receiving MEV rewards are stakers. And so you're receiving both issued Ether and paid Ether. At the meantime, Ether is also being burned. And so what Justin Drake's best guess is, is staking APR, which is the issuance, plus fee rewards, which is MEV and transaction fees, gets you 25% APY on your Ether. I mean, this has to get arbitrage down over time.

• 18:54David Hoffman?

  But at Genesis, this is what Justin Drake thinks is going to be the staking rewards, which is pretty phenomenal.

• 19:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, so that means if you stake, rather than receive the, what, 6, 7, 8% that you're receiving today, you're actually receiving 25% in Ether as a reward, right? Effectively.

• 19:12David Hoffman?

  When we also include what is being burned, yes.

• 19:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  And that's going to encourage more people to stake, which is going to in turn lock up more Ether. And this doesn't even take into account the supply issuance reduction that is coming with the merge. So you get two things happen simultaneously. You get these massive staking returns and then you get issuance slashed down from like four and a half percent all the way to 1% or maybe below, maybe into the ultrasound territory where Ether supply is being burnt. Like it's just this convergence, almost like a perfect storm of all of these things happening at once. I, I, I don't think people like, so how many tweets? How many, how many, uh, this got about 640, like I, I don't know how many people understand this, David.

• 19:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like even our ultrasound money on YouTube, I was looking at this early in the week. 16,000 people have viewed it and that's great, right? It's a two and a half hour episode. I know it's like movie length, right? But at the same time, only 16,000 people have viewed it, right? How many people do you think understand what is about to happen to Ether?

• 20:18David Hoffman?

  I think of, of people that pay attention to this space and know Ethereum, one in 100 people really truly understand the ultrasound money thesis. And think about how many people out there in the world who is like, oh yeah, let's, let's, let's, let's start thinking about crypto. All right, there's Bitcoin, there's this thing called Ethereum, there's Litecoin. These are all the same. Let's, let's, let's, so let's allocate all Dogecoin, let's allocate all these things. So many people do not even know what this ultrasound money thesis is who are inside of Ethereum and infinitely more don't know what it is outside of Ethereum. That the ultrasound money thesis and what's being articulated by Justin Drake on his Twitter and in that podcast is in my opinion, the world's biggest alpha I can think of.

• 21:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's so.

• 21:04David Hoffman?

  It's massive. It is massive.

• 21:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  Available to you if you're listening right now.

• 21:08David Hoffman?

  If you're paying attention.

• 21:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yep, absolutely. Uh, so early on this, let's, let's talk about another thing that's early for Ether. Day one of Ether ETFs, at least in Canada, there are Ether ETFs in Canada.

• 21:20David Hoffman?

  Three of them. That's crazy. Nice job, Canada.

• 21:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  And three of them, go Canada, three of them released on the same day. I think one of these is from our friends at Ether Capital, whom we had on the show in December. But it's a pretty good volume on these Ether ETFs, about one fifth of the volume of what Bitcoin did. But now that there's an instrument. I think more institutional investors, at least Canadians, will pile in. And of course, if Canada is doing it, the US has got to follow along.

• 21:48David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 21:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  Look, David, I don't think that the US. So let me ask you, if the US approves a Bitcoin ETF, why the hell wouldn't they approve an Ether ETF at the exact same time?

• 21:58David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 21:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like, they're both commodities now.

• 22:00David Hoffman?

  We've already got statements that they're both commodities. We've already got plenty of conversation about Ethereum-related topics in Congress and other regulatory bodies. If the Bitcoin ETF gets approved, the Ether ETF comes within six months after it. Like, and that's slow, in my opinion.

• 22:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Maybe at the same time?

• 22:18David Hoffman?

  Oh.

• 22:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's fast.

• 22:21David Hoffman?

  That's fast.

• 22:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's a Hester Pearce question. All right, last note here, David, before we leave markets, is actually, this Bitcoin price plunge caused a lot of chaos in the markets, at least short-term, a lot of liquidations on some positions as well. 7.6 billion in long positions were liquidated in one hour when it plunged down to 52K. What's going on here?

• 22:43David Hoffman?

  Yeah, this is also true for Ether as well, where Ether topped out at $25,000, a little bit above, and then it fell to like, almost below $2,000 in a very short amount of time. Bitcoin did something very similar. And people were just leveraged, probably perhaps people who are really bullish on the Coinbase news, really thought that there was going to be a flood of capital into this base afterwards, so they took on a bunch of leverage. Funding rates were through the roof. It costs you like 40% to 50% APY to borrow USDC from Avian Compound, and that's because DGENs were going leveraged long. And then there was, there's a bunch of just like drama and debate and perhaps like a fake news tweet that really

• 23:25David Hoffman?

  triggered a bunch of fear. And as a result, there was a cascading set of liquidations that really brought the crypto prices down very, very quickly and liquidated the most amount of capital that has ever been liquidated ever in the crypto markets, all in one hour. And the cool thing is, is that we bounced back from it pretty fast, which means that there is capital that is being deployed to catch bids, and those bids were caught. And then we resumed the being bullish. And so that's pretty cool.

• 23:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  If you want to sleep at night, of course, don't take on excessive margin. You could be among those liquidations. Crypto is incredibly volatile, of course.

• 24:02David Hoffman?

  Crypto can always go faster and lower than you ever thought it could. And so you need to account for that if you ever take on leverage.

• 24:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's right. Been through one of those cycles, haven't we, David?

• 24:13David Hoffman?

  Yes, we have. We've done this before.

• 24:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, guys, there's more to cover in releases. We didn't get a chance to mention what Doge and Safe Moon is doing, but stay tuned for the meme of the week at the end of this episode. And we will. For now, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible.

• 24:30David Hoffman?

  Balancer is DeFi's most powerful automated market maker. Typical AMMs just have two tokens inside of one liquidity pool, which can lead to fractured liquidity across the many pairs of DeFi. With Balancer, you can access the full power of multiple tokens inside of one single AMM, which unlocks an entirely new playing field of possibility. This makes Balancer an awesome building block for so many different use cases. Balancer pools can make asset indexes, but instead of paying fees to portfolio managers, Balancer lets you collect fees from traders who use your portfolio for liquidity. Additionally, Balancer's smart pools can be programmed to have properties that change according to predetermined rules, such as changing the swap fee based on market conditions, or even liquidity bootstrapping pools, which can help you launch and distribute your token with day one liquidity. At Bankless, we used a liquidity bootstrapping pool

• 25:15David Hoffman?

  to sell our BAP t-shirts to much success. Balancer V2 brings powerful new features that makes your money work even harder for you. In V2, idle tokens are capable of generating yield in DeFi without sacrificing liquidity in the pool. To top things off, Balancer is reimbursing all gas costs with BAV rewards, meaning that all your gas costs are returned to your wallet with the Balancer Governance token. Balancer's mission is to become the primary source of liquidity in DeFi, providing the most flexible and powerful platform for asset management and decentralized exchange. Dive into the Balancer pools at pools-balancer exchange.

• 25:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  MetaMask is your go-to wallet for the bankless journey. If you're going bankless, you need MetaMask, period. Browser and mobile, get them both. This is your tool to unlock the world of DeFi. Here's my favorite part. Now you can swap tokens directly in MetaMask with a single swipe. This has got to be the easiest way to trade Ethereum tokens. Choose a token you own, a token to exchange it with, and get your quotes. If you like what you see, you hit swap. That's it. What makes swaps so useful is what happens behind the scenes. It compares DEXs, aggregators, and market makers to find you the best price with the lowest network fees and the least slippage.

• 26:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  This means you can swap a wider range of tokens, and swaps can even automatically split up your trade to give you access to better liquidity. You don't even have to think about it. Try it out. Download MetaMask for desktop or mobile now at metamask.io and start swapping.

• 26:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, guys, we are back with some releases. The first one is pretty massive. Venmo, PayPal's Venmo, of course, which is an app, a banking app, payment app, that many people in the US, all over the world, have on their phones, now allows users to buy and sell crypto. I think Bitcoin, Ether, Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash are all supported assets. 70 million customers, David.

• 27:13David Hoffman?

  Yeah, that's huge. So much surface area with so many people. And I even already got a message with one of my friends, who I told to buy Ether back at $200, and he didn't listen to me, and then now he's like-

• 27:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  Because it was hard, probably.

• 27:26David Hoffman?

  Probably because it was hard. He didn't have an account, like, didn't believe in it, like, who, and this was before Ether's pump, so who the hell am I to give financial advice to this guy? Turns out, turns out, it was right. But, but now he messaged me, and he was like, "Well, should I just buy Ether through Venmo?" And I was like, "Well, yeah, you could. I think you perhaps are going to make your way into the world of DeFi at one point in time, so that means you need a real exchange like PayPal or Gemini. But if you want, sure, why not? That's a great place to do it." And so Venmo now is competing with the likes of Robinhood, which is kind of cool.

• 27:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, pretty cool. I don't think they allow transfers off of Venmo, or am I incorrect about that? So you don't really get your private keys. They custody it all.

• 28:03David Hoffman?

  Right. And you can't, I don't think you can transfer it from account to account, but I'm sure that that is something that they are going to do, because why wouldn't they? They're a payment app.

• 28:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  What's crazy about this, though, is I don't know anyone around me who doesn't have Venmo. Like, everybody has Venmo, completely normalized. So now crypto is like, this kind of a headline in 2017, once again, David, would have been absolutely insane. Now here we are, living in it, crypto is being adopted. David, let's talk about this. This is a new feature from Block Explorer EtherScan. EtherScan is just so valuable, man.

• 28:34David Hoffman?

  It's crazy how awesome it is.

• 28:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's like a daily user of EtherScan. It's just an amazing tool for seeing everything that happens on Ethereum. Now, they are showing what's happening in the dark forest, the MEV dark forest. What do I mean by dark forest, David? And what are they showing here?

• 28:52David Hoffman?

  Right. So MEV is a very hot topic, and we are in the works of making a MEV panel happen, kind of like an AMA. So stay tuned for that. We're trying to get Phil Dian on, as well as Georgios, and also perhaps Charlie Nois, currently in the works, but maybe there's a panel, an MEV panel, coming your way in the bankless future. And what's going on is that miners who want to compete to mine a block and also order those transactions in a block, instead of having an on-chain gas war, it's actually beneficial for them to actually just, you know, tuck some ETH under the table and send it straight to the mining pool, so the mining pool doesn't have to broadcast their transaction. And while that off-chain bidding war can be obfuscated, that tip that is paid directly to the mining

• 29:34David Hoffman?

  pool to compensate the pool for mining the transaction without broadcasting it, that actually, that part can be broadcasted, and that is what Ether is showing us. They're showing you what happened. If there was a transaction that paid a spark pool or another Ethereum block miner, mining pool, if there is a tip being paid to them, they will report that. So you can know what is a MEV transaction versus what's not.

• 30:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think there are a lot of challenges with MEV. It's also not all bad, but the best thing we can do with MEV is make it visible, is actually show it. And this is what EtherScan is attempting to do with at least a portion of it. Really cool stuff. Alpha Homora, that is a really interesting DeFi protocol we've talked about in the past. They just did a V2 relaunch. They've had some issues a couple of months ago with kind of a security breach related to like something with the Iron Bank. I think we were, we covered it then. But this new V2 launch, what's that going to include, David?

• 30:33David Hoffman?

  Yeah, a bunch of cool, cool upgrades. And so there are now LP tokens as collateral, Uniswap V2 LP tokens, perhaps also Sushi LP tokens as well. You know, yeah, so Uniswap, the Curve LP tokens, SushiSwap LP tokens, Balancer LP tokens are now collateral inside of Alpha. And so that's fantastic. There's more interest-bearing tokens as well. And so there are other assets that are created, their interest-bearing derivative of them. That's what the Alpha protocol does. There's also protocol fees being paid to Alpha stakers, which I'm always a big fan of. If we can get on-chain value flowing towards people that govern the protocols, I always like to see that real verifiable flow of value

• 31:18David Hoffman?

  to people that govern. And then also, there's even more assets to borrow inside of the Ave, or not Ave, Alpha system. So, congrats to Alpha for getting this out the door.

• 31:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I wonder, have you looked at the iBeth yields from Alpha lately? I mean,

• 31:32David Hoffman?

  Not lately, but I remember them being very, very high, above and beyond what people were getting on the Beacon Chain.

• 31:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, and they had a large portion of ETH locked up as well. So it's another sort of hungry ETH money Lego that is just like consuming economic bandwidth from Ethereum.

• 31:49David Hoffman?

  Yeah, join the club. I'm also an ETH hungry. I'm not a money Lego, but I'm pretty ETH hungry.

• 31:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  No, you're a human Lego? That's also ETH hungry?

• 31:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, let's talk about this one, David. So this is the fourth protocol from Ample4th. And so Ample4th, sort of a, an elastic, a price elastic, not quite a stablecoin, but I guess it's been trying to be a monetary asset of some sorts.

• 32:13David Hoffman?

  Inventor of rebasing is where rebasing came from Ample4th.

• 32:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Exactly, rebasing. It's a little complex. We don't have to get into all those details. But if you've ever used Ample4th in the past, Ample4th is releasing a fourth token. So this is a governance token on top of Ample4th. You can connect your wallet, if you've used Ample4th in the past, you've ever held it, and receive some fourth token. It's a governance token. It has value in Uniswap and secondary markets. Not to emphasize this, look, there's like airdrops almost every week.

• 32:49David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 32:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  And there's protocols spinning up governance protocols, governance tokens, almost like it's 2017 again. So like, I think what's interesting here is like, I've used Ample4th in the past. I know you have, David, right? And so like, what did you do with your Ample4th claim? Like, what do you do when you receive an airdrop from a token of some sort? And you have some governance token to claim? What's your process?

• 33:15David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so the only airdrop that I've kept is Uniswap, because I'm interested in being a governor of Uniswap. And every other airdrop, I sold it for Ether, basically, immediately.

• 33:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  So this was no exception?

• 33:29David Hoffman?

  No, it was, the amount of fourth tokens was more than the gas that it would require to redeem and trade them. And so I did that.

• 33:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  So there you go, right? So I think this is gonna be, it's an interesting price catalyst for Ether, too. It's like, when these governance tokens are sold, what will they be sold for? Will they be sold for dollars? I think in some cases. In other cases, they might just be sold for ETH. I did the same with a portion of my fourth airdrop. Thank you, Ample4th. Let's talk about this. Real-world assets in Maker DAO. We talked about this a little bit.

• 34:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  On the last roll up where they were being proposed, now they are actually here. What is this and what does it mean?

• 34:14David Hoffman?

  Yeah, there so there is actually outstanding DAI in the Ethereum ecosystem backed by real world collateral. And so that is just a groundbreaking achievement by the Ethereum protocol at large, but and also specifically MakerDAO. And also with our partner Centrifuge. And so the collateral itself is a real estate loan. And there's there's some clever engineering going into this, but basically there's two ways to get collateral on chain. One is you mint a token that is redeemable for that collateral. And another way is you make a trust in the nation state meat space and that trust does one thing and one thing only, which is manage its own assets and then reports back to the protocol that it integrates with.

• 34:57David Hoffman?

  And that's the way that MakerDAO has decided to go. And so Nick Kunkel, who works at Oracles at MakerDAO, wrote this tweet yesterday. Yesterday was a tectonic shift in finance. MakerDAO is on the bleeding edge of standardizing how DAOs in the legal system will interact to connect DeFi to TradFi. That's traditional finance. Real world assets are here and a sign of the growing maturity of DeFi. And so if you don't want the Oracle problem or the real world assets or real world to to digital world. And integration is a very hard problem. Ethereum doesn't know what the outside world is. The outside world does know what Ethereum is, but Ethereum doesn't know what the state of things is outside of Ethereum.

• 35:40David Hoffman?

  And so getting real world assets onto Ethereum requires trust. And this is a very hard problem that many teams just have just decided to not bother with and say, you know, F it. We're only doing on chain assets because doing off chain assets is really, really hard. MakerDAO from day one has been going after hard problems. They were the first one problem team to really tackle Oracles, which is also off chain data. And now they are tackling real world assets. And so the fact there is real world assets backing DAI and DAI is outstanding in the Ethereum ecosystem. Based off of real world assets is absolutely fantastic, absolutely phenomenal. And also it just unlocks trillions and trillions of dollars of potential value that can be added to Ethereum.

• 36:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  You used the term "real-world assets" a number of times. What are we talking about, "real-world assets"? What assets?

• 36:31David Hoffman?

  Real estate, loans, bonds, corporate debt, like your car. Who knows? Like, anything that has a real substantial value and a market for in the real world could, in theory, become collateral inside of Ethereum.

• 36:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  You know, what's interesting is the most successful real-world asset right now is Tether or USDC. Are these like stablecoins? That's the first asset that's kind of leaked into the crypto space and blockchain. And now, we're starting to see other things leak into it. So, I mean, the real estate market alone is something like $200 trillion out there and like property value. Seeing that migrate to crypto would be super interesting. All right, David, let's get to the news. I think those were all of our releases. Let's talk about some Ethereum stuff first. So, this was a major event. We saw the first gas block on the Ethereum network that exceeded 13 million gas used.

• 37:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  And for people who don't actually know what that means, David, could you give us a quick primer on what this means and why this was the first?

• 37:39David Hoffman?

  Yeah, the size of a block denominated in gas is basically the size of a block denominated in data, right? And so Bitcoin has the 1 megabyte hard cap, and that's the size of a Bitcoin block. Ethereum has 13 million gas, and that is the size of an Ethereum block. And so, the reason why we call it gas instead of data is outside of the scope of a weekly rollup. But basically, if you want more computation, you need more gas. And so, the size of a block in Ethereum is really denoted by the gas used. One of the really elegant things about Ethereum is that miners can choose to vote up or down the block size, the gas limit. And rather than having a rigid and fixed block size like Bitcoin,

• 38:25David Hoffman?

  Ethereum has elected to have a consensus by validators or consensus by miners mechanism, where if miners think that we should increase block size, then they will all collectively vote for that. And there is a game theory as to why you don't want two big blocks or two low blocks. If you have two big blocks, there is an increased chance that multiple miners will make multiple blocks, and one of them turns into Ethereum and one of them turns into an uncle with a reduced reward. And so there's an equilibrium behind how much or how high block size can go. But what the takeaway is, is that Ethereum block size is allowed to increase up to a certain threshold so long that the network can handle

• 39:09David Hoffman?

  that increased block size. And so what happened is we went from 12.5 million gas to 13 million gas, which means Ethereum got that much bigger in scale, half a million more gas in scale. And so we just increased the throughput of Ethereum by a decent amount. And the cool thing is, is that it can always increase as a function of the underlying computational and bandwidth efficiency of the Ethereum network at large. And so when we see a new higher gas limit, what we are seeing is we are seeing Ethereum organically increase how much scale it has as a result of consensus by validators.

• 39:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  There you go, guys. On rollups, not only do you get the news, you get some tutorials sprinkled in there. That was a gas tutorial from our own David Hoffman as well. And of course, the gas that David is talking about, like, if you've ever done a transaction on Ethereum, you've consumed some gas. So a transaction that takes a little gas, example of that is if I send ETH to someone else, ETH from one address to another address.

• 40:08David Hoffman?

  That's the lowest amount of gas you could ever consume, which is 21,000.

• 40:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  Lowest amount. So lowest amount of gas, lowest amount of compute, lowest amount of data, as David said, a little bit more is sending a token, a little bit more is doing a uniswap transaction. And you can get increasingly complex and sophisticated compute transactions that consume more and more gas. So, gas went up, that means the amount of trustless compute of the Ethereum network Went up. So people are wondering, I bet at this point. So, okay, are gas prices going to fall then? We have more supply, right, guys? Gas price go down? Well, that's not necessarily the case.

• 40:47David Hoffman?

  Probably not.

• 40:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  Why is that not the case?

• 40:49David Hoffman?

  Because people are just going to consume more of it, right? It's like, oh, well, price went down, I'll just execute my transaction and then boom, price goes back up. My takeaway here, though, is that we are consuming more gas per unit time, which under EIP 1559 means more ether burned per unit time. So bullish.

• 41:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Ooh, bullish burn rate. Interesting. I didn't think about that. That's very fascinating.

• 41:13David Hoffman?

  Increasing the burn rate.

• 41:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, um, let's talk about another really cool news item slash release. This is from Dharma. Big fans of Dharma these days. You know, the problem they've solved, David, is the problem of connecting your traditional bank, your Wells Fargo, your Bank of America, whatever, if you live in the US, you've got this bank account. And you're multiple steps from getting it into the DeFi ecosystem. So say I want to take advantage of YFI today and get like 14% yield, right? Which is what, what wiren offers on USDC today. Well, I'm multiple hops away. First, I have to ACH transfer to an exchange like Gemini.

• 41:55David Hoffman?

  Three days.

• 41:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  From Gemini, three days. Then from Gemini, I have to transfer that to MetaMask. And then once it's on MetaMask, I have to do a series of transactions to get myself into, to get myself into YFI. And by the way, I have to have ETH in my wallet in order to pay for those transactions. So it can't just be USDC or, you know, another stablecoin asset. Anyway, multiple steps, just a complete pain. What, um, what Dharma solved is like this last mile problem. So one click of the app and you can do as much as 25K a week from your traditional bank account directly into a wiren or an Aave and start earning yield. So not only is it cool for, I think, like more advanced folks, because there's a, you know, a ton of shortcuts here.

• 42:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is like a go-to tool for, for newbies. For those in retail who haven't had a first taste of DeFi, but like they know that their savings account sucks because they're getting basically no interest on it. So it's really cool. Now they're in 50 states. Just a big fan of what Dharma is doing over there.

• 43:01David Hoffman?

  All these legacy platforms like SoFi, which help you just like, you know, get a high interest savings account of one to 2%. That's all gone comparison to Dharma, right? Like the one drawback about Dharma is that they can't solve the gas fee issue. And so if you are, it costs like, I think $200 because it's Dharma's smart contract wallet to make a trade on Uniswap. But if you can convince your friends to get beyond that, you can show them like, yo, these yields, these like 20% USDC yields on Ethereum? Just download the Dharma app, just like you download the SoFi app, like go, go liquidate all of your SoFi assets. Go send them into Dharma and get, get a much better yield and do it via Dharma, which is a place that they are familiar with, an app on their phone.

• 43:45David Hoffman?

  Legacy, traditional finance people like apps on phones. DeFi power users probably use MetaMask on desktop. Dharma is now building out DeFi and getting it into people's hands where they're comfortable with it. So I expect a lot of cool things out of the Dharma ecosystem in the future.

• 44:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Look, man, you know, the only thing stopping like more adoption of this at this point, David, in my opinion?

• 44:04David Hoffman?

  News?

• 44:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, I think that it's just gas fees.

• 44:09David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 44:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like, like you said, right? So imagine a Dharma, imagine an Argent Wallet on layer two.

• 44:15David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 44:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right? Like we've solved these fiat connectivity, bank connectivity problems, then the next thing we have to solve is, is layer two and gas fees. And then this is just going to go absolutely crazy. So I'm excited to see what they have in store there. All right, let's talk NFT stuff. Pleaser Dow. Did you get into Pleaser Dow?

• 44:33David Hoffman?

  I am a member of Pleaser Dow. I'm so pleased.

• 44:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  Pleaser Dow? Yeah, I know you are.

• 44:37David Hoffman?

  Pleaser Dow is the Dow that came together who wanted to buy people pleasers, the artist people pleasers. X times Y equals K Uniswap V3 announcement gif. It is, or movie, it was about 45, 50 seconds long. And it ended up going for half a million. And I was invited to get into Pleaser Dow before before bidding even started and then I just didn't take the invite and then I hard FOMOed about that. I wrote I wrote an article about it, put it on Bank List, did some interviews, put all that stuff up there and just yelling at the Pleaser Dow, "Let me in, I want in." And then Pleaser Dow let me in because they needed a little, uh, some more capital to purchase the Edward Snowden NFT.

• 45:21David Hoffman?

  Uh, and they, once again, Pleaser Dow got into a bidding war and spooked the hell out of the person that they were in a bidding war with. Because as they ran out of money, more people sent money into the Pleaser Dow, like me, who needed, because they needed the capital. And so, uh, Pleaser Dow literally ran out of money and then people came and sent more money into the Dow.

• 45:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  Was it like a capital call? They were like, "Hey, we want to do this thing, but we need X more ETH?"

• 45:45David Hoffman?

  Yeah, and so people reached out to friends and and, uh, one very generous individual came in with a bunch of ETH. Uh, and and sent it into the Dow and then, uh, they won the bidding war against, uh, against whoever they were competing with. Uh, and so now Edward Snowden has said the words, "Congratulations, Pleaser Dow." So they know about the Dow. We've been trying to get him on Bank List because now I'm a member of Pleaser Dow. Uh, I am a fractional owner of the, uh, Edward Snowden NFT. So that's pretty cool. Uh, and I'm, I hope that he kind of becomes, uh, wakes up to the world of, uh, permissionless censorship resistant money in addition to just censorship resistant press, which I know Edward Snowden is a big fan of.

• 46:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, that that's, that's what's cool about the story too, is the proceeds from this NFT don't go to Edward Snowden, they go to this Freedom of the Press organization, which is a nonprofit that defends transparency in journalism and defends freedom of speech, right? So we've got like two sides of the same fight for freedom, right? Like we've got this fight for speech. You know, the ability to to say what you want without censorship and also this fight for, uh, financial sovereignty. And, um, the ability to not be locked out of the economic system, um, to have self sovereignty over that. And like, it feels like- Like it's two sides of the same coin and that coin is freedom.

• 47:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  So it does feel like there's a lot of common cause with with folks that are fighting for speech, of which Edward Snowden is one. I hope he goes deeper down the rabbit hole. I've seen him talk about crypto before, but not necessarily DeFi in a knowledgeable way. Like, I don't know that he's used a DeFi protocol. This might be his first experience with DeFi.

• 47:28David Hoffman?

  Right. Yeah. And I think if he read the tweets, he should be clear that what a DAO is at this point, if he doesn't even have the deepest understanding, he should know that a collection of people bought his NFT rather than one individual people. And Edward Snowden, I believe, could be labeled a populist because he's like a buy the people for the people type individual. So perhaps that resonates with him.

• 47:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  It was bound to happen sometime, David, but while we're on NFTs, of course, the adult industry has gotten into NFTs as well. Looks like Brazzers is selling NFTs at, you know, at this point. Only a matter of time, dude.

• 48:04David Hoffman?

  Yeah. So NFTs are very democratizing technology. And I actually do hope that Brazzers is not the entity that capitalizes on the intersection.

• 48:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  Cause they're an aggregator.

• 48:15David Hoffman?

  They're a middleman between adult entertainment and now perhaps NFTs, right? And so if there's any adult listeners or adult entertaining listeners or adult performers or sex workers, just know that you can use this technology yourself. You don't need Brazzers to NFT you. You can just NFT you. But as we all know, the porn industry really likes new technology and they tend to adopt it first basically out of necessity. And so now, I mean, everyone's getting into NFTs these days, so maybe Brazzers is even late. But I do expect the world of adult entertainment and sex work to become a very big, have a very large surface area integration with NFTs.

• 48:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  Do you think NFT season is over, David? Are some of these like the top markers, in your opinion?

• 49:01David Hoffman?

  I mean, NFT, the recent NFT season is over, but the next NFT season is like really close, so.

• 49:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  Just season one.

• 49:08David Hoffman?

  Just season one. Onto season two, yeah.

• 49:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  Onto season two.

• 49:11David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 49:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, let's talk Bitcoin.

• 49:13David Hoffman?

  We're in the break between seasons, yeah.

• 49:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, interim. Let's talk Bitcoin. Bitcoin mining hash rate dropped.

• 49:20David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 49:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is something also, and some people were linking this to the Bitcoin price drop as well. Like, you know, I don't know, maybe you can make those links, maybe not. But for sure, Bitcoin's mining hash rate dropped as blackouts were instituted in China. I haven't followed this super closely, but what, like, where did the blackouts come from? Are these actions by the government? Or is this kind of like, you know, natural causes? Or what, where did the blackouts come from? And what happened to Bitcoin hash rate here?

• 49:48David Hoffman?

  Yeah, this was a top-down choice by the Chinese government to implement a blackout. Well, I don't know if we have concrete details as to why. There's speculation about a coal mining accident. So there's just reduced ability to produce power. But either way, there was a elimination of electricity to a part of China. And as a result of this, 25% of Bitcoin hash power dropped off the network. And what this means is that 25% of Bitcoin hash power is located under one single energy grid, perhaps supplied by one single energy source. If that, that to me spells fragility, right?

• 50:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's not awesome.

• 50:28David Hoffman?

  The Bitcoin blockchain is still going. There's nothing wrong with it. It still produces blocks. It has the difficulty adjustment. It's just readjusted and now it keeps on going, blah, blah, blah, blah. Doesn't matter. 25% of Bitcoin's computational capacity lives under one energy grid. That to me is centralized fragility. And that's not something that we want in our long-term blockchain.

• 50:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  Now, did it bounce back after that outage, David?

• 50:51David Hoffman?

  No, it's not back yet. It had some, I'm sure there are other ASICs that have turned on to help compensate. But there's, imagine just how much supply of ASICs are in that one zone that are still under the blackout.

• 51:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is Nick Carter, who is very data-driven, also a big proponent of proof of work. Some people, he said, said it was more like a 40 to 50% drop. This is false. Based on five days of data, it looks like 25%. But oh my God, 25%.

• 51:17David Hoffman?

  25, a quarter of your blockchain?

• 51:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's a lot. Like, if it was 50%, I would be freaking out.

• 51:23David Hoffman?

  Right, yeah.

• 51:25David Hoffman?

  If it was 50%, that would mean 50% of the Bitcoin hash power is located under one energy grid. Holy shit.

• 51:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  This goes back to you, part of the conversation from our ultrasound money podcast with Justin Drake. There's so many, so many hidden things there, but one of them was the stealthiness of proof of stake compared to proof of work. And it comes out kind of here, right? Like, you can see the, the power footprint, the energy consumption footprint on any electrical grid that Bitcoin exists on. So it's not very stealthy. If there was a third party who wanted to take out some of that, the Bitcoin hash rate, there are some key electrical grids that person could attack and probably accomplish that. Whereas proof of stake provides the ability to hide essentially. There's not any profile that that's sitting out there

• 52:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  on electricity grid. And so could be a bit harder to shut down, much harder, it seems than something like this. If you have decentralized validators all across the world that just look like regular, everyday consumer laptop-grade computers that are connecting to the internet.

• 52:31David Hoffman?

  Right. And we just have to remember what this whole industry is. This is a digital finance revolution, right? And it to me, like, there's no concrete connection here, but to me, something with a physical footprint in the world is not digital by definition. What is digital is proof of stake, where if your computer with, that's running your node explodes, your ether still exists and you can go get it and move it to a different computer. Your ether doesn't exist anywhere in the world. Therefore Ethereum security doesn't actually exist anywhere in the physical world. It only exists in the digital world. And so there's, there's no place of Ethereum security. There's no geographic place where Ethereum finds its security, unlike proof of work.

• 53:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  David, I still want to have that bankless debate podcast. That's like proof of work on this side from somebody who can articulate the position and proof of stake on this side. We've got to have that. I feel like that, that conversation needs to be had.

• 53:24David Hoffman?

  I don't know of any other Bitcoiner who could do that other than Nick Carter.

• 53:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  Nick Carter, if you're listening, I'd love to hear more from you on that subject. Okay, let's talk about regulation. There are two things maybe to talk about here and they're related. The first is Giancarlo, so the former Christian Giancarlo, you used to call him Crypto Dad, actually, because he worked at the CFTC and was very pro crypto.

• 53:48David Hoffman?

  Advocate for us, yeah.

• 53:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  An advocate against like what the SEC was doing. He has now joined the board of BlockFi, which of course is a crypto bank that I've used in the past, you know, based in the US. You can lend your crypto and they will offer interest rate. Also, we have this news that Brian Brooks, so he was...

• 54:12David Hoffman?

  Self-driving banks guy.

• 54:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  Self-driving banks guy. We've referenced that article in a number of podcasts. Office of the Comptroller of Currency under Trump, he left that position several months ago. He's now going to become the CEO of Binance US. Okay, former regulator becoming on the board of a crypto bank. Another former regulator on the board of Binance US, both US-based companies. David, it sounds like crypto banks are playing the regulatory capture game. They're getting their lobbyists, they're getting their former regulators. They're playing the same game that traditional banks play as well and other industries play as well. This is regulatory capture. I'm not necessarily saying it's like a bad thing that they shouldn't be doing this.

• 54:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  We definitely need some of that firepower, but what does this say to you?

• 55:03David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I mean, centralized crypto banks have, are flushed with cash and they are ready to make moves like this. I'm kind of bummed that Brian Brooks, who coined the term self-driving banks, ended up at not a self-driving bank, ended up at a crypto bank. But again, this is good for the industry because we have advocates for us now in the industry. Like, we want these people, we want to integrate with these people who have influence with regulating bodies. It also makes a ton of sense that Binance as an entity... And like, we can talk about the difference between Binance US or non-Binance US, like global Binance, but at the end of the day, it's one Binance, right? It's one company. And they really need regulatory protection because of all the nefarious things that

• 55:46David Hoffman?

  they're doing that are extremely regulatorily gray. And so it's probably a very good defensive move for them to bring on Brian Brooks onto their board because they need that sort of like extra defense.

• 55:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Absolutely. We're definitely seeing crypto sneak into the, you know, the areas of US regulatory. I think that's a good thing for the industry. I just hope, David, that this is not where we end up with a bunch of crypto banks who have kind of, they have the regulatory support and they're basically just like the old banks that we used to have. Hopefully, we get to this self-driving bank concept with DeFi and are less reliant on these centralized intermediaries, although they are a great bridge, as we said before, into the DeFi landscape. David, we're going to be back with some takes. I know we've got some hot ones this week, but first, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible.

• 56:42David Hoffman?

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

• 57:26David Hoffman?

  Just look at the size of the Uniswap Treasury. It's almost $3 billion. This mountain of capital is looking for labor. Do you have something of value to contribute to the Uniswap DAO? No matter how big or small your idea is, you can apply for a UniGrant at unigrants.org and help steer Uniswap in the direction that you think it should go. That's exactly what we did to get Uniswap to be a sponsor for Bankless and you can do the same for your project. Thank you, Uniswap, for sponsoring Bankless. Gemini is the world's most trusted cryptocurrency exchange. I've been a customer of Gemini since I first got into crypto in 2017, and it's been my main exchange of choice to make my crypto buys and sells. Gemini is available in all 50 states and in over 50 countries worldwide.

• 58:10David Hoffman?

  And on Gemini, there are markets for over 30 various different crypto assets, including many of the hot DeFi tokens. And it's one of the few exchanges that has liquid DAI markets. Gemini just launched their Earn program, where you can earn up to 7.4% interest on 26 various crypto assets. If you're tired of paying fees in DeFi, or you don't want to worry about DeFi exploits, but you still want to earn interest on your crypto assets, Gemini Earn is the product for you. Another product I'm stoked to get my hands on is the Gemini Crypto Back Credit Card, which gives you 3% cash back on all of your purchases, but paid to you in your preferred crypto asset. When I get my Gemini credit card, I'm going to make sure that I get my cash back in ETH. So whenever I buy something,

• 58:53David Hoffman?

  I get a little bit of ETH bonus back to me at the same time. You can open up a free account in under three minutes at Gemini.com/goBanklist. And if you trade more than $100 within the first 30 days after signup, you'll be gifted a free $15 Bitcoin bonus. Check them out at Gemini.com/goBanklist.

• 59:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, guys, we are back with the hottest takes in crypto on the week. The first is from Arthur Hayes. Is Arthur Hayes bullish on ETH, David?

• 59:19David Hoffman?

  Yeah, super, super bullish, which is crazy, because if you know Arthur Hayes, Arthur Hayes is the CEO of Bitmex, who has been recently on the run for a while. Not quite on the run, but just like not yet arrested by the authorities. I think he did surrender to the authorities, and now he is awaiting trial or something. I don't know. Meanwhile, while he's awaiting trial, he wrote this extremely bullish piece on Ether and why he's so bullish on it, which is in stark contrast to what he was talking about Ether in 2017, where he called Ether "the mother of all shitcoins." A lot of people didn't believe in...

• 59:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  Double-digit shitcoin? Do you remember when we were dropping into the 90s and 80s? He just like...

• 59:59David Hoffman?

  He kept, yeah.

• 1:00:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Kept at it, man.

• 1:00:01David Hoffman?

  Yeah, Arthur Hayes has been called one of the most savage people in crypto. And perhaps that's why he's under arrest or wherever awaiting trial. And, and, but he wrote this extremely bullish piece on Ether. And I think there's some, perhaps some fun numbers in here. But really, the takeaway is not necessarily the accuracy of the data, but the complete 180 by a very influential, influential individual from being an Ether bear to an Ether bull.

• 1:00:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, what's, what's interesting about Arthur is his persona is very much, I'm a profit maximalist. Like, he will make money no matter what market condition you're in. And he'll support anything that maximizes profit, right?

• 1:00:43David Hoffman?

  Liquidating his own customers, blah, blah, blah, blah, yeah.

• 1:00:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I mean, at the time, trashing Ether, like, that was a profitable move. Like, short Ether, and by the way, short Ether on BitMEX, because then I'll make money while you make money. It sounds great, so I'm going to push that narrative. Well, now he's flipping on that, which is super interesting, but he's always been what he's always been, which is kind of a trader, profit maximalist at, at heart. I actually read everything he writes, because he's actually a fantastic writer, too. And it's a really interesting perspective, but I want to just show off like this in the article. Dude, so he was doing, he, he was trying to model the price, the, the fair market value of Ether as an asset,

• 1:01:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  based on it being a capital asset, based on its ability to continue to create, like, to produce transaction fees, right? And we've talked about in the triple point asset thesis, how Ether is a store of value, how Ether is a commodity, you know, for gas, how it's a capital asset. Throw those first two out, he's not even talking about Ether as a store of value. He doesn't necessarily believe that. He's not talking about it as a commodity, who cares? He's talking about its raw ability to be a capital asset, to produce, you know, transaction fees and revenue on the platform. And he's getting to a market cap, and this is based on the percent of, the percent of, of, of traditional finance that DeFi actually captures, right? So it's a very rough proxy here.

• 1:02:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  But he gets to an ETH price, David, of not 20,000. That's only if it captures half a percent of the world's traditional finance. But all the way at the top, if it captures all of traditional finance, a $4 million price of ETH.

• 1:02:28David Hoffman?

  Right. So this is under the conditions where Ethereum is the economy. So when we, when we say like, oh, the economy, people are just talking about Ethereum. There's literally zero economic activity that is not on Ethereum, which we are not at all close to. Maybe one day when I'm at a boomer age, that is when that happens. But Arthur Hayes decided to model this out. And he said, what happens if Ethereum is economy? Then Ether should be worth $4 million, which is just absolutely insane.

• 1:02:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  And he goes down. So if it's, if it's 1% of the economy, then Ether should be worth $40,000.

• 1:03:02David Hoffman?

  Now that starts to be a little bit more reasonable. I can get behind that.

• 1:03:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's just like, I don't understand. I would have never thought that going into 2020, we would have seen an article on Ether that would be more bullish than anything we've ever published on Bankless. Like, this is, this is crazy to me, but it's interesting flippanting nonetheless.

• 1:03:18David Hoffman?

  Yeah, Ryan, we gotta, we gotta get more bullish. We're getting outdone by Arthur Hayes.

• 1:03:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  I can't do that, man. $4 million price of Ether. What does that even mean? That means like fiat has gone down the toilet. That means something else. Let's talk about this. This is Vance Spencer. Okay. So why don't you take this? This is Coinbase in five years. What does Coinbase in five years look like hypothetically?

• 1:03:37David Hoffman?

  Yeah. So Vance Spencer, before I get into his take, he is a DeFi bull. He did one of our best performing podcasts ever, which is the bull case for DeFi. And so Vance is coming at what Coinbase could look like from a DeFi first perspective, perhaps not from a crypto bank perspective. And so here's his take. Here's what Coinbase is in five years. Probably no order book. Trades are routed to open source liquidity where they LP, where they provide liquidity. And then they focus, Coinbase focuses on front end slash regulatory slash staking slash custody. And then they earn most of their income from LPing and staking the native tokens of DEXs. And then Coinbase just primarily serves as a wallet for users. And then Vance characterizes this as a.

• 1:04:20David Hoffman?

  Asset light version of Coinbase, a light on assets, heavy on just interactions with customers. Kind of just like a DeFi mullet phenomenon where Coinbase just provides the custody and the interface. And then everyone else, just you, and it, all it does is a one massive Dex aggregator for all of Ethereum. I don't think, we, we asked our, our state of the nation guest, Jeff Dorman, if he thinks that this is the direction of Coinbase, and he gave a very different one. But I think it's a good, a good thought experiment, a good mental model for what could be.

• 1:04:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is almost a DeFi maximalist take on what Coinbase will evolve to in the future. And I think, David, the truth might be somewhat in the middle here. But I do think that what Vance is talking about, a lot of this absolutely could come true. Especially if DeFi itself at the protocol layer, if the protocol sync thesis pans out and DeFi protocols like Uniswap and Aave and Compound and all of these like trustless primitives at the base layer, if they attract the most liquidity, then you know, crypto banks will have to essentially tap into these liquidity sources in order to maintain, you know, in order to be competitive. And in that world, they just serve as sort of a fiat bridge. I don't know that we'll get there. I do think that there's a lot of juice to squeeze in just the custody side.

• 1:05:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  And if you've seen like, you know, Coinbase's assets under management, it continues to increase. And I think a lot of people still

• 1:05:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  want the easy button and will trust the, the custody of Coinbase. And like Coinbase will create a lot of other offerings that are independent and more competitive with, with DeFi. So maybe somewhat the truth in the middle, but I think that vision is super interesting.

• 1:06:01David Hoffman?

  Yep, agreed.

• 1:06:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Binance is a short-term game. Let's talk about why Binance, at least Binance Chain itself, not the exchange necessarily, is a short-term game. Here's some numbers to back it up. David, what are we looking at?

• 1:06:15David Hoffman?

  Right. So this is actually really convenient that we are talking about this right after we gave our little lesson on gas earlier. And so what we are looking at is BSC Scan, which is already a fork of EtherScan, just like how Binance Smart Chain is a fork of the EVM and Geth. Which is Ethereum's first client. Binance Scan is a fork of EtherScan, so really nothing original going on here. But we are looking at the gas limit for Binance Smart Chain. And we saw the gas limit for Ethereum at 13 million gas, which is its all-time high. Took forever to get there. Binance Smart Chain just went from 30 million gas, where it's been already insanely high, all the way up to 45 million gas.

• 1:06:57David Hoffman?

  And if you're wondering why the Binance Smart Chain is free, almost free and cheap and instant, it's because they have so much more, so massive block sizes. And there's a reason why we can't just increase block sizes. Because if our block sizes get too big, then we have a more centralized network. We already have a super centralized network in Binance Smart Chain with only 21 nodes. But the thing is, is that if you increase the gas, how much data that is going through the chain per time, you increase the total size of Binance Smart Chain really, really quickly. And so right now, Binance is putting on like terabytes every month or so, which is too big. Too big to be centralized. We already know that they are willing to give up centralization.

• 1:07:40David Hoffman?

  But at some point, the blockchain actually collapses because there's no block propagation, because no one can keep up with the chain. And so if you are thinking that Binance Smart Chain is a blockchain, it's not. At some point, this blockchain is going to get too big. And if they want it to continue, they're going to have to checkpoint it, which is basically like a save game, delete all of the history, and then move forward from that point if they want their blockchain to continue. And at that point, again, the whole inevitable question about Binance Smart Chain is, why don't, why just do it on the website? Just do it on your database. Just have one node. It's easier if you just have one node.

• 1:08:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  Very, very well said, David. So much of this is like decentralized theater in Binance land. I've had people tweet at me when we talk about this sort of thing, just saying things like, "Well, yes, Binance Chain is centralized now, but it's going to become more decentralized in the future." No, it's not, guys. I mean, this is like a pipe dream. We are going the opposite direction. There's no physical way it can become more decentralized because the hardware required to actually run the chain and be a validator in the node is just increasing at an exponential rate. And to your point where this, maybe at some point, this whole thing collapses in on itself, I'd say two things.

• 1:08:55David Hoffman?

  Oh shit, it's already at 58 million. That chart was old. We said it topped out at 45 million? No, it's at 58 million. Wow.

• 1:09:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, this is the chart from two days ago.

• 1:09:04David Hoffman?

  And that chart's only two days old! Oh, wait, does it keep on going? Is there another one below it?

• 1:09:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, I don't know. Of course, it's gonna keep on going. You know, as people know, people demand, this is average gas limit chain. Yeah, so, so, so two things. One, we've seen this play out already. It played out in 2017, 2018 with a chain called EOS. And pretty soon, no one could run it, aside from the largest validators, multiple terabytes in size. Chain analytics companies like CoinMetrix could barely run the thing in order to extract the data, like massive centralization.

• 1:09:36David Hoffman?

  And that's their job.

• 1:09:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, that's their job. Okay, so that's, that's one. The second is, here's the developer, David, of Geth, the thing that Binance Chain like forked and took. Here's the guy that actually engineered it, Peter. He said, "I don't want to wish ill on anyone, but Binance Chain is pushing their chain harder than what he thinks Geth, the client that he helped build, can handle. It's nice when the chain is empty, but once you pile enough data, Geth is gonna reach its limits. The thing's gonna collapse, the thing's gonna explode," right? So, look, we don't say this type of thing, David, because we hate Binance Chain, or because we're like maximalists for any chain. Like, if I'm a maximalist, David, if you're a maximalist, we are bankless maximalists. We're about decentralization and truly self-sovereign

• 1:10:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  money systems. And what's happening on Binance Chain, I'm just gonna be honest with everyone, like, it's not sustainable. It's not gonna work. This is a classic, it's already running out. This is a classic short-term game. And the, the only beneficiary of this short-term game are people in the short run, probably a small percent, that own BNB token, right? So, this is why I'm not a fan of Binance Chain, you're not a fan of Binance Chain. Fan of Binance Chain, it's about long-term gains. We're building something for the future, future generations. We're not building something that can only last like months and years and pumps and then dumps and like retail is left picking up all the scraps. There, rant over.

• 1:11:01David Hoffman?

  We, we get a lot of flack sometimes because we talk a lot about Ethereum, uh, because we both think Ethereum is really, really cool. And people are like, well, why don't you talk about Cardano? Why don't you talk about Binance Smart Chain? Uh, Ethereum's got high fees. It's, it's, it's killing me on the fees, but Binance Smart Chain is serving our needs. The reason why we don't talk about those things that much is because we've seen this before. We've already seen this play out with EOS, right? And Cardano is seven years old or something and doesn't have an app layer yet. And so like, some of these things like we have already seen come and go. And sometimes you just need to be in crypto for a full cycle to really comprehend and understand it. And I, I feel like that's a big difference between listeners who have bank lists who are confused as to why we don't appreciate

• 1:11:42David Hoffman?

  Binance Smart Chain and those who have been in Ethereum for more than one cycle. People who have been in crypto for more than one cycle don't have, aren't confused about these things. It's complicated to learn. It takes a while. It took me a while. I was convinced by the EOS narrative back in 2017. I literally bought EOS as a hedge in case EOS was the, the thing that happened. And then in hindsight, I was like, oh, well, that was dumb. Um, but it just took me a while to learn that. And I think that people are going, it's going to take perhaps not actually that long for people to learn that about Binance Smart Chain because they are just growing their state way too large. Um, but we'll see what clever engineering CZ cooks up to, to route around this. At the end of the day, uh, it's, it's, it's an open secret that CZ made Binance Smart Chain because he knew DeFi was going to come

• 1:12:24David Hoffman?

  eat his lunch, which from a business profit match perspective is probably a good move.

• 1:12:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, absolutely. David, uh, brace yourself, man. You're going to get a lot of reaction on Twitter for some of those takes.

• 1:12:34David Hoffman?

  Well, did you see the, the reaction I got on Twitter when I, when I said, uh, perhaps Cardano was a blatant scam on the Wolf of Wall Street podcast? Cause that's already happened.

• 1:12:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I did. Look, I did. Right? So, um, scam is an interesting word choice. First of all, I'll say that, but I agree with. Oh, okay. Well, then I'm fine with it. I mean, possibly. So, but here's the thing. Where I saw a lot of that reaction, and like, I know both you and I are keen observers of crypto communities to see what's really there. And there's like, there's so many bots in these community armies, right? There's bots, and then there are like, I'll just call it like retail moonboys, like people who are just about the price and will not like debate you on the merits of anything. They don't know why they bought. They just know they bought, and then price went up. So they've doubled down on their conviction. A lot of these

• 1:13:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  communities are fairly hollow. And Cardano proved me otherwise. But I'm not sure, like, from a community perspective, if there's a lot there. But definitely, I think we both keep an open mind on some of this. Oh, you're pulling up a tweet. This is a tweet I tweeted about the compilation of communities. When there's 20% moon kids, 79% bots, and 1% puppeteers getting rich, your community has a problem. And I think there's some communities like that out there. That's why, you know, we just try to call it like it is on Bagless. Let's talk about this one. This is a good thread on r/ethereum. "Give a man a steak, and he'll eat for a day. Teach a man to steak, and he eats forever." What's the lesson here?

• 1:14:08David Hoffman?

  Right. And so, we all know the metaphor, "Teach a man to fish versus give a man a fish." And basically, what my takeaway here is that if you give someone some ETH, they'll spend it over time. But if you give some man an ETH and teach them how to stake it, they'll have steak for the rest of their life. And that's the whole promise of proof of steak. You put your ETH principal up, and then you can just live off the dividends. And this has been my game plan since getting into crypto, day one. I was like, oh, man, geez, proof of steak. If I buy enough Ether, I can just live off of the dividends. That has been my plan since day one, still my plan, eyes on the prize. I am trying to teach the world through Bankless, that's what we're trying to do, to teach people how to stake

• 1:14:49David Hoffman?

  so they can live off of their ETH dividends, and experience financial freedom, and do the things that they enjoy and improve their lives and the lives of those around them, if they teach people how to stake. And I love this, I love this takeaway. So, thanks to George Eve on r/ethereum.

• 1:15:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  Are you never sell gang? Are you part of the never never sell club?

• 1:15:10David Hoffman?

  I'm definitely gonna try and sell the top, but not with my whole stack, absolutely not with my whole stack. And so I'll try and sell the top a little bit, but there's definitely a very healthy proportion of my stack, like two thirds of it that will be in the never sell category for sure.

• 1:15:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  If you don't need the money, why not stake? That's what a productive asset gives you. I think it's a fantastic point that, again, if you realize, um, let's talk about this. Three Havings Capital. This is from SuZu. Yeah, SuZu. So what is, what is Three Havings Capital? What's this a play on?

• 1:15:43David Hoffman?

  Yeah, it's a play on Three Arrows Capital, which is the, the very famous market moving capital firm between SuZu and Kyle Davies, kind of known as Three Chads Capital as well. And so he's retweeting a tweet from that, that everyone in the Ethereum ecosystem really, really liked. And I think we should go through this tweet as well. So let's start at the top. This is from Squish Chaos, interesting name. And he says, he or she says, net annual buying pressure in quotes, doesn't make the point. In a halving event, BTC miner sell pressure drops 50%. It causes all hell to break loose amongst the Bitcoiners. And then he asked the question, what does that look like for ETH? And so what this is saying is that Bitcoiners rally around the halving. It's like a four year ceremony of a halving.

• 1:16:27David Hoffman?

  And the reason why Bitcoiners rally around the halving is because that means that miners are receiving half as much Ether, therefore, or Bitcoin. Therefore, they can only sell half as much Bitcoin, which makes Bitcoin more scarce. And the same phenomenon is happening under proof of stake, where instead of issuing 4.5% of Ether supply per year, it drops down to perhaps just 1%. And so this is where this triple halving comes in, this three halving, because we are speedrunning Bitcoin halvings by proof of stake, where we, we are going from, we are cutting issuance down to roughly 12 and a half percent of previous issuance.

• 1:17:07David Hoffman?

  And so continuing the Squish Chaos thread, he says, or she says, post-merge ETH sell pressure will drop by 90%. For BTC sell- Pressure to reduce by that much, it takes three halvings. I'll repeat, Ether will undergo the equivalent of three halving events in the next 12 months. And so if Bitcoiners just get over the moon about every halving that comes, this is why Etherians are so incredibly stoked about proof of stake and the merge. And that's not even including about Ether burn because of how much supply reduction is going to happen as a result of staking. Awesome.

• 1:17:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is all riffs on the same thing that we've been talking about ETH as ultrasound money. These are all different ways to view it, all different ways to say it. And as we made the comment earlier, I feel like the market does not appreciate this. Very few people understand this at this point. All right, David, let's get to excitement time. What are you excited about this week?

• 1:18:07David Hoffman?

  Continuing on that same line of reasoning, I'm excited about the triple point asset finally being priced in. I think that's perhaps what we are seeing right now in this ETH outperforming basically most other assets, except for Dogecoin.

• 1:18:22David Hoffman?

  The triple point asset, I think, is becoming priced in. That's what people are understanding when they say a three halvings all at once. That's what people talk about when they say the Ether burn rate makes Ether deflationary from EIP 1559. And we already touched on this, we touched on those two things. And we also touched on how staking rewards can be 25% APY denominated in ETH turns at Genesis of the merge, which is the Ether capital asset. People are finally understanding the Ether, the triple point asset thesis. It took them a year and a half, it's been a year and a half since I did that presentation in Tel Aviv and then put out the article in Bankless. And so those who have been paying attention to Bankless for the last year and a half,

• 1:19:06David Hoffman?

  you've known this is coming. Congratulations. Hopefully you're among the early few. But finally, I think we are seeing the early days of the rotation into Ether, the asset, because the Ether, the triple point asset is finally being understood and integrated by the rest of the market.

• 1:19:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Absolutely, man. Yeah, it, you know, my, the thing I'm excited about kind of does a riff off of yours. So let me just say that to kind of round out your thought there.

• 1:19:31David Hoffman?

  Nice.

• 1:19:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Is, it just, it feels really great when a plan comes together, right? Like, I feel like when you put ideas out there and like, we don't get everything right. Let's, let's just be completely clear. There are things that we missed. There are things that we get wrong. We don't get everything right, but some of the big ideas that we've put out there as part of the bankless platform are starting to work out. Like, it feels like they are more certain now, much more certain now than when we first published them and we didn't really know if, if they were going to happen or not. So triple point asset is one of those. So is the entire bankless thesis, this idea that we are on the brink of creating this new parallel self-servant money stack.

• 1:20:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like, DeFi has worked out, David. Three years ago, it wasn't obvious that any of these things were going to work. And now here we are in the very start of product market fit for DeFi. And now it just has to hit the accelerator and scale. Another thing we talked about, idea we talked about so much is the protocol sync thesis, right? With, with crypto banks and like traditional banks having to use the most trustless and permissionless protocols available to them, whether that's a settlement stack like Ethereum or whether that's a DeFi protocol like Uniswap and Aave, that's starting to happen as well.

• 1:20:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  Protocol sync thesis, like the fact that Uniswap has exceeded the volume of Coinbase sometime, multiple times in the last 12 months. That is protocol sync thesis playing out. DeFi mullet is another idea that, that we've talked about. Ultrasound money now is a more recent narrative that we've just used to describe what is happening with the three havenings that you were just talking about with, with Ether coming up. All of this is-

• 1:21:13David Hoffman?

  And we've also talked about almost every single one of these inside of this weekly rollup. If we wanted to, we could go back to the, the Vance Spencer Coinbase take and say, that's the DeFi mullet. Dharma, that's the DeFi mullet.

• 1:21:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, and I don't want to like, look, I don't think, I don't want to pat ourselves on the back because not just bankless, David does, but like a lot of, like, to be- Fair. There are, there are many other people who've, who've gotten this right, but it's just cool to see a, a plan working out. It's cool to see that, that directionally, this thing that we weren't too sure of, like, we think this is how it's going to play out, is actually playing out. Like, for all of the things that we've gotten wrong, we have gotten some things wrong. The big things, I feel like we've gotten right. Uh, and this 2020 run so far, and everything that's happened, whether it's price, or whether it's news and other things, have been evidence of that. So I'm just excited. And more than that, look, not just excited, I'm like, I'm like grateful. I'm like grateful to be in crypto.

• 1:22:06David Hoffman?

  Sense of relief.

• 1:22:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  At this time. Well, yeah, yeah. Could have been real wrong on this. Could have let a lot of people like down the wrong path.

• 1:22:16David Hoffman?

  Could be four years into Bankless and be like, you guys, the triple point asset, I swear it's coming.

• 1:22:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's coming.

• 1:22:21David Hoffman?

  Coming one day.

• 1:22:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  This ETH thing is going to be real big, trust me. Anyway, um, I'm just grateful to be here. And that's the thing is, uh, the last thing I'll say on this is, there's a tendency during bull runs to look around at the crypto portfolios around you and like compare to other people, right? Like, there's always somebody who has gotten in earlier than you have, right? But comparison is the thief of joy. That's absolutely true in crypto.

• 1:22:47David Hoffman?

  Yep.

• 1:22:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  You're here, you're early, you're among the first, like 1% who knows this. You're among the first, like, I don't know, fraction of 1%, some tiny fraction of 1% in the world who know about Ether uh, as an asset. Like, be grateful for that. I'm grateful for that. It's awesome to be here. This community's great. Um, just really excited about the future and, uh, and grateful.

• 1:23:08David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  So don't, yeah, go ahead.

• 1:23:10David Hoffman?

  And perhaps a tie and bow on that, that's a, a good reminder that don't mess up a good thing. Uh, and on the Bankless newsletter on Monday, we talked about, uh, traps that people fall into. And a lot of it had to do with people FOMOing because, uh, perhaps, perhaps you, the listener, just got into the Bankless podcast or crypto at large in the last few months. And you're like, oh my God, I am so behind on everything. Everyone knows more than me. And by definition, if you're just getting into crypto, you don't know anything. You have to come, come in with a, a blank slate and an open And you feel like you're behind and I felt this in 2017. I'm like, oh my God, there's so much technology I don't know about like, oh, I'm not going to make it, blah, blah, blah.

• 1:23:50David Hoffman?

  If you understand ether as ultrasound money, you are in the 0.1% of the people that know about Ethereum, well, maybe not know about crypto that understand ether as ultrasound money. You don't have to play with leverage. You don't have to get out over your bootstraps. You don't have to risk your rent money. You just need to be responsible and the ether will do the rest.

• 1:24:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  Responsible and then be patient, guys.

• 1:24:13David Hoffman?

  And patient.

• 1:24:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  Absolutely. Well said, David. All right, let's get to it, man. Moment, the moment we've been waiting for.

• 1:24:18David Hoffman?

  Meme of the week.

• 1:24:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  The meme of the week.

• 1:24:19David Hoffman?

  Meme of the week.

• 1:24:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  You want to explain this one?

• 1:24:21David Hoffman?

  Let's do it. Well, so this is your, this is your, your meme, but if you want me to explain it, I will happily do that. This is a, a favorite movie of mine. I think this is the first Spider-Man, Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst. And so it's three panels. Here we go. And Kirsten Dunst is turning to Tobey Maguire and goes, tell me the truth. I'm ready to hear it. And oh no, this is the third Spider-Man where Tobey Maguire tells Kirsten Dunst that he's Spider-Man, I think. Anyways, Kirsten Dunst says to Tobey Maguire, tell me the truth. I'm ready to hear it. And Tobey Maguire says back to Kirsten Dunst and says, it takes more than 15 seconds of a TikTok video to understand the crypto asset you just bought. And then the panel goes back to Kirsten Dunst and she's just crying in tears of sadness.

• 1:25:06David Hoffman?

  You made this meme, Ryan, and it's a fantastic meme. Nice job. But what does it mean?

• 1:25:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  I just, I just feel like some people needed to hear that this week, especially with like, um, all of these assets on TikTok pumping. And you know, I almost feel like, um, I almost feel like, like an elite baby boomer has never heard of crypto because I don't even, what are some of these assets like?

• 1:25:27David Hoffman?

  Safe moon.

• 1:25:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  Safe moon. What is safe moon?

• 1:25:29David Hoffman?

  It's clearly something that's going to moon safely. Of course, Ryan, it's in the title.

• 1:25:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  I get texts and people asking questions about like Safe Moon and I have no idea what's happening. Like here's the lesson here, and this is a lesson for everybody who, before they invest. Like you can't possibly learn about an asset class and have conviction in what you're buying in like a 15 second TikTok video, right? So just because some influencer is showing it, just because you like the memes, do you know actually what you're buying? If you're new to crypto, my encouragement is you just, you buy Bitcoin, you buy Ether and nothing else until you understand what you just bought and why. Start there, be patient.

• 1:26:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like we can't, we can't be a TikTok investing generation. I'm not saying like I love, I love Twitter, I love TikTok for meme propagation, these sorts of things. But don't think you can possibly understand a trans, like something you just bought with, you know, somebody sharing like a 15 second video. And there's a lot of that going on right now. And look, I know that's nobody listening to Bankless does that. Message is not for the people listening, but it's, it's happening and people need to stop doing it.

• 1:26:48David Hoffman?

  If anyone knows a TikToker that can explain a crypto asset in 15 seconds, let us know because we want them on our team. But I'm highly skeptical that anyone can actually do that. Again, TikTok is fun and it, but it's really just, just like you said, and there's a reason why like people are explaining when I, my opinions, less quality assets, all the way down to complete outright scams like Safe Moon. Because they don't want you to explain the truth, they just want you to buy the token. And so of course they go to TikTok where memes are literally, it's the breeding grounds of memes. That there's a complete product market fit between pumpamental tokens and TikTok.

• 1:27:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  But do you know what throws people, David? Is unless you spend the time, like you and I meme all the time too. Ether is money, Ether is ultrasound money is a meme, right? People who have no idea, they hear that and then, then they hear Doge is money. Doge is ultrasound money. Binance is Ethereum, Binance is the future of finance, all of these things. And if you're only spending 15 seconds on it, those things sound exactly alike. The thing that, that we just say with conviction, because we know why, because we have.

• 1:27:52David Hoffman?

  Hours of like years. Yeah. Yep. And we have hours of podcasts and we have like all of this information and data backing it at a 15 second like tweet sized, um, TikTok sized format. It sounds exactly the same. So look, don't do anything in this space until you know what you're doing, until you know what you're buying. That's the, that's the meme. That's the lesson here. Uh, I remember, uh, earlier this week, my, uh, my cousin was texting me about, uh, crypto assets that, that, uh, he should get into. And he, he was like, well, do you know chain link? And I'm like, yeah, I know chain link. He's like, well, what about Doge? Should I get into Doge? I'm like, no, just Bitcoin and Ether. Start there. Just those two. And they're like, So boring though. And then they're like, uh, what about Cardano? And I'm like, just Bitcoin and Ether. And I'm

• 1:28:37David Hoffman?

  like, well, what about this BNB token? I'm like, just Bitcoin and Ether. And then they just kept on going. Like, what about all these tokens? At some point, people just like tokens. Like, tokens are product market fit. People like to play with tokens and they don't want to hear this boomer advice of just like, just the top two assets and nothing else because they don't understand. They don't understand. And because short term, you're probably wrong, David. That's true. That's also, that's true. I'm ready to, I'm ready to take that one. Absolutely. All right, guys. Well, I hope you've enjoyed the roll up. Hope this got you up to speed. Dave and I always have a fantastic time doing it. Of course, none of this is financial advice. Make your own decisions with respect to crypto, but this is the journey west. It's not for everyone. We're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.

• 1:29:19David Hoffman?

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

• 1:30:03David Hoffman?

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