ROLLUP: 4 Year Cycles | $JUP Airdrop | ETH ETF Rumors

Bankless Weekly Rollup 1st Week of February, 2024 ------ 🏹 dYdX | STAKING https://bankless.cc/dYdX-staking-podcast ------ 🎧 Listen On Your Favorite Podcast Player: https://bankless.cc/Podcast ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2 🔗CELO | CEL2 COMING SOON https://bankless.cc/Celo https://bankless.com/Celo 🗣️TOKU | CRYPTO EMPLOYMENT SOLUTION https://bankless.cc/toku 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle 💸 CRYPTO TAX CALCULATOR | USE CODE BANK30 https://bankless.cc/CTC ------ TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 1:30 dYdX https://blockworks.co/news/dydx-chain-liquid-staking 3:00 stTIA https://x.com/stride_zone/status/1753057572708315569 3:50 MARKETS 5:30 Interest Rates https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/feds-faith-immaculate-disinflation-narrative-put-test-2024-01-31/ 7:20 4 Year Cycles https://x.com/MikeIppolito_/status/1751260864949186776 https://x.com/mrink0/status/1751262550249861500 https://www.ft.com/content/4d3790e0-cf12-47f9-a129-b44f4ed70e67 16:30 Jupiter Airdrop https://x.com/weremeow/status/1752355081499132228?s=20 https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/jupiter https://www.reddit.com/r/solana/comments/18r31pb/meow_here_i_am_the_founder_of_jupiter_ama/ https://twitter.com/weremeow/status/1735544950417436806 20:30 Farcaster Frames https://metaversal.banklesshq.com/p/farcaster-frames https://twitter.com/dwr/status/1752183814737322379?s=20 https://blog.spindl.xyz/p/why-farcaster-frames-are-important https://twitter.com/dwr/status/1751636894989897990 https://x.com/dwr/status/1752333651734675918?s=20 https://x.com/dwr/status/1752709131977490702?s=20 https://twitter.com/dwr/status/1751675485984055440?s=46 28:15 New Onchain Users https://drive.google.com/file/d/1auz3m9oiDeYnFxFN-tLveyQFanC_BJLo/view https://flipsidecrypto.xyz/flipcomm/crypto-users-crypto-users-yv2zCa 33:30 FTX Repaying Funds https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2024/01/31/ftx-expects-to-fully-repay-customers-but-wont-restart-defunct-crypto-exchange/ 37:15 Blobs Testnet https://twitter.com/parithosh_j/status/1752468658868126030 38:05 Protocol Guild Pledge https://twitter.com/TimBeiko/status/1752458526407139680 https://x.com/ether_fi/status/1752376059394408458?s=20 https://x.com/ether_fi/status/1752754098984878536?s=20 41:20 Friend.tech Points https://twitter.com/friendtech/status/1751038251056738459?s=20 42:45 Puffer Finance Points https://x.com/puffer_finance/status/1751954283052810298?s=20 43:50 ETH Spot ETF https://twitter.com/RyanSAdams/status/1752075849044549966?s=20 https://www.theblock.co/post/275174/sec-ethereum-etf-approval-may-standard-chartered-bank 47:20 Ripple Chairman Hacked https://twitter.com/chrislarsensf/status/1752702297971532258?s=20 https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/USA-v-Powell-Order-on-Motion-for-Miscellaneous-Relief-1-25-2024.pdf https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-398483A1.pdf 49:50 Bankless 2024 Badge https://x.com/BanklessHQ/status/1752715915706175541?s=20 50:30 Meme of the Week https://twitter.com/sherlock_hodles/status/1752731162676441378?s=20 ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠

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

• 0:00David Hoffman?

  What really causes the four-year boom-bust cycles in crypto? Is it the Bitcoin halving, like everyone says it is? Or is it something else?

• 0:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bankless Station is the first week of February, and it is time for the weekly roll-up. David, you know, we've never done a roll-up on a leap month? February has 29 days this month. Do you know that?

• 0:20David Hoffman?

  Oh, it's our first Bankless Leap Month. Is that something to celebrate?

• 0:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  I don't know. I don't know what it means.

• 0:27David Hoffman?

  I don't think it is.

• 0:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  No? People celebrate the 29th of February?

• 0:31David Hoffman?

  It's below my line.

• 0:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  Unless it's their birthday? All right, well, let's talk about what is above your line this week. Farcaster Frames, they are the hot new thing on the app called Farcaster. All right? But the question is, is this the killer app that crypto social media actually needs to take off? We haven't had our iPhone moment yet, but could this be it?

• 0:51David Hoffman?

  I'm surprised people with money in FTX are being paid back pretty damn soon here, but how much is the question? And also, where is that money coming from? Speaking of money, Jupiter on Solana has launched its Jupe token at an earth-shattering $7 billion valuation. I think one of the largest airdrops, maybe top three airdrops of all time. How did the Solana network hold up? Was it able to keep itself upright? We'll talk about that.

• 1:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  And speaking of valuations, we got to talk about the Fed. It's getting a little hawkish. All right, that might impact our crypto valuations.

• 1:23David Hoffman?

  All of that and more. But first, we're going to talk about DYDX, because DYDX is the number one DEX volume in the world. DYDX Chain, the new Cosmos chain, has recently launched with a six-month incentive program that they want you to know about. They are distributing $20 million in DYDX rewards to traders and market makers on the DYDX chain. So you can earn DYDX as you trade on the DYDX chain. Trading on DYDX is basically free right now. If you are a trader on DYDX, you can check your rewards at dydx trade. But there is also ongoing rewards for stakers and traders that are permanently a part of the DYDX system. Traders on the DYDX chain get 90% of their trading fees back in the DYDX token.

• 2:05David Hoffman?

  But you can also stake DYDX to validators of the DYDX chain, just like you Stake your ETH to Ethereum, you stake your DYDX to the DYDX chain. Currently getting about 15% APR on DYDX chain. The reward mechanism is actually non-inflationary because they are paying DYDX stakers in USDC, Ryan. Isn't that interesting? You stake DYDX, you get paid in USDC. It's a cash flowing asset, my friend. Cash flowing asset. That ain't no point. That ain't no point. That's a token, David. Those are points called US dollars. And 4.2 million USDC has been distributed, over 11,002 DYDX stakers. So, thank you to DYDX for sponsoring this message, but also in the news this week,

• 2:48David Hoffman?

  staked DYDX is now a thing. Inside of the Cosmos ecosystem, I learned this week, Ryan, there's this thing called Stride, which is like the staking as a service for Cosmos. And so, staked DYDX is now a thing, liquid staked DYDX, just like liquid staked ETH. But also, staked TIA from the Celestia ecosystem is also now a thing. I think there's a growing conversation in the Celestia world about Celestia TIA as modular money. And I would call this evolution, staked TIA, liquid staked TIA, as like an evolution of a progress on that goal, if that is indeed their goal. So, like Stride, making some big moves in the Cosmos ecosystem.

• 3:28David Hoffman?

  I'm sure it's TIA's goal. I'm sure it's Celestia's goal to have that monetary premium attached to their asset. So, but can they do it? That'll be a question, I guess, for another day. If you're interested in learning how to stake your DYDX, if you have DYDX on Ethereum, that is no longer the home of DYDX, there is a link in the show notes for how to stake DYDX on the DYDX chain, if you want to learn more. All right, let's get to the markets this week, David. What is Bitcoin showing us on the week? We got some pretty round number price movements this week. 40,000 is where we started the week, 43,000 is where we are ending the week, up about 7.5%. Pretty good, 7.5%. We like that. I mean, it was a pretty red week last week, so now we're kind of like starting to fill in that gap.

• 4:09David Hoffman?

  ETH price, also some round number movements, starting the week at 2,200, ending the week at 2,300, up 5% on the week. How about the ratio, David? Ratio down slightly on the week. We are below 0.054, but not news. Thanks to Kraken for these charts. I like to see them going up, and that's what happened this week. Make them go up.

• 4:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  David, how about total crypto market cap? What are we looking at?

• 4:36David Hoffman?

  1.71 trillion, call it flat, flat on the week, flat. It's been flatty.

• 4:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  And Layer 2 beat?

• 4:42David Hoffman?

  Layer 2 beat, also flat. So slightly up in TVL, we're at 21 billion locked in TVL on Layer 2s with a 5.5x scaling factor. Arbitrum coming in at $10.5 billion in TVL, followed by Optimism at 5, followed by Manta Network, a brand new ZK Layer 2, which I think is the subject of a big old airdrop farm at $1.6 billion.

• 5:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Manta, Base, number 4, Metis, number 5. 6 is ZK Sync Era and number 7 Mantle, and then DYDX. Interesting.

• 5:12David Hoffman?

  Oh, who's that?

• 5:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  Immutable. DYDX. And ZK Fair. So this is...

• 5:15David Hoffman?

  Never heard of ZK Fair.

• 5:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is the horse race to watch, though. And yeah, it's one of the most interesting that's going on right now. David, let's flip, though, to the Fed. What is going on in the broader macro markets this week? I think Jerome Powell had something to say. What did he say?

• 5:30David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I heard it was a hawkish FOMC meeting this week. The TLDR that I've gotten the vibe of is the last FOMC meeting, everyone was like, "We just got the pivot." And then this FOMC meeting, everyone's like, "Oh, maybe we didn't, maybe we didn't get the pivot." That's kind of my TLDR. Do you have any more color, Adam?

• 5:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I mean, so Jerome Powell said inflation is still too high. And recall, the rates right now are 5.25% to 5.5% in kind of that range. And he said inflation's too high, there's ongoing progress to bring it down, it's not assured. He wants to get inflation back down towards 2%, which is, you know, the central bank target. And he said rate cuts would not be appropriate. Yeah, and I think you're right, David. Some investors were surprised by this because there was talk of this, maybe the pivot, that is the decreasing of rates, happening as early as March of this year. And it looks like that's not going to happen. Powell is not giving us a full pivot yet, though. That could happen later in the year, David.

• 6:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think that's still on the table, and the FOMC indicated as much, expecting rate cuts later in the year. We just have to wait on those, I guess.

• 6:41David Hoffman?

  My understanding is that the pivot is inevitable because high interest rates means that the United States government has to pay a ton of money on its debts, which are massive. And so, just as a matter of incentive, we have to have the pivot. But that's like, if I keep on saying that, it'll be the bajillionth time that I said that in the last like 18 months. So I'm kind of like starting to feel like I'm beating a dead horse or I'm broken record or something. That's still true, right?

• 7:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it's still true. All I gotta do is wait. Just wait.

• 7:08David Hoffman?

  All right.

• 7:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  Just be patient.

• 7:09David Hoffman?

  How long?

• 7:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  A few months. I don't know. It's gonna happen this year. I'm still... And look, something crazy could happen. You never know, but it looks like we're still on track, just a little bit delayed. David, you know, we talk about crypto and the boom-bust cycle happening every four years. And of course, this is sort of our base prediction. Yeah, a four-year cycle. And so, we are like, we're getting into the bull territory of this four-year cycle. The reason that many in crypto have always pointed to for this four-year cycle that I have not fully bought into is the halving. Because it turns out that the Bitcoin halves its supply about every four years. And of course, the magnitude of that as a percentage of Bitcoin's supply is decreasing over time.

• 7:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is the tiniest halving yet in terms of total Bitcoin supply. But still, that's one of the reasons given for four-year cycles in crypto. Mike Ippolito has a different take on that. Maybe the four-year cycle is not caused by the Bitcoin halving. Maybe it's something else. What are we looking at here?

• 8:15David Hoffman?

  We are looking at a graph that basically looks like a sinusoid. It is a wave going up and down, up and down in the background. It's just like a model for a sinusoid. And then there's a chart in front of that sinusoid that is the Global Liquidity Index, as in how much liquidity is there in the global markets around the world. And that line is a little bit more choppy, but it generally follows that four-year sinusoid in a very rough fashion, but like the pattern is pretty clear. And then if you just look at this in the crypto context, right? We had the 2013 fork and fair launch bull market, which was at the peak of the rise and the peak of the 2013 to 2014 sinusoid. Then we had the 2017 bull market, which also same thing.

• 8:59David Hoffman?

  And then also we had the 2021 peak as well. And so, it all just lines up with liquidity. And I think this is the big... Conclusion that people got to after Bitcoin went from like 69,000 down to 20,000 as inflation set in, where everyone was like, prior to that, everyone was like Bitcoin is an inflation hedge and then inflation happened and Bitcoin went down because interest rates went up and turns out we are now remodeling our idea about what Bitcoin is. It's an index for liquidity, which is exactly what this theory would would say.

• 9:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I think that's right. And I think this sort of explains crypto four-year cycles even more than Bitcoin. I will point out, it could be both, though, right? It doesn't just have to be one thing. But I do think that worldwide global liquidity is kind of the big explainer here. And just to give a sense of what this global liquidity index is based off of, it's basically the central banks of the world. So all of the, you know, the central banks, so that's the Fed, central banks of China, Japan, EU, all of them, and also commercial banks. They are kind of the levers or control mechanisms for how much liquidity is in the actual market. So at the end of 2023, we had a global liquidity

• 10:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  of about $170 trillion. And that is on pace to rise in this cycle. So we're at kind of the trough of global liquidity and now making our way up as more liquidity is injected by the banks into the into the market. That is what this trend line kind of predicts. And those are the ways that you were just saying.

• 10:32David Hoffman?

  I want to double down on that punchline. We are past the trough of the recent sinusoid and we are on our way up. That's kind of the, that's where we are in this trend. And so if it was as violent of an uptrend as it was last cycle, we have a long way to go in terms of more liquidity coming into the markets, which always impacts risk assets the most, which is crypto. That's us.

• 10:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, you could see this on other charts, too. This is a comment from Mike's tweet. If you know this, but Satoshi was actually a macroeconomist. It's so interesting how the Bitcoin four-year happening cycle is also timed with these four-year like cycles of liquidity in and out of the market. And it goes to show, David, like one thing that's always true. Of markets is it's all about inflows and outflows, isn't it? Right. And so fundamentals make their way into prices over time. But in the, in the business cycle time range, like the two to five year time range, it's all about liquidity. And so, I mean, this looks very bullish for crypto assets and then probably risk on assets in general.

• 11:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  And, you know, the punchline here is it's actually less about interest rate. So people look at the interest rate and they're like, it's 5%, it's 5%. That's high. It's higher than it's been in the last like 10 years, right? It's not just about interest rate, guys. It's also about the liquidity that is sloshing around in these markets. And it looks like all of the banks are ready for another cycle of money printing.

• 12:01David Hoffman?

  Speaking of inflows and outflows, the GBTC outflows have slowed this week, especially in the last two days. So the 29th, 30th and 31st have been some pretty notable changes in tune in the Bitcoin ETF world. So on, on net, there was negative $17 million outflows on the 29th, between all of the grayscale outflows versus the other ETF inflows. On the 30th, which was Tuesday, there was $378 million inflows into all of the Bitcoin ETFs. And then yesterday, at the time of recording, the 31st, $240 million inflows. So over the last two days, we've had over like $600 million of inflows into the Bitcoin ETFs, which have surpassed all the grayscale outflows.

• 12:45David Hoffman?

  The grayscale outflows on the 29th, 30th and 31st, 289, 192, 170 million. So that number of grayscale flowing out, GBTC flowing out of grayscale to Coinbase, being sold, turning all these candles red, is slowing. That is a lower number.

• 13:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  We needed to get rid of all of those outflows in order to resume the ascent upwards, didn't we? And it's, it might be no accident that this week we saw 7% gain on Bitcoin. And these outflows have started to, to halt and stultify. So that's good. That's healthy market activity. That's what we need in order to go back up. David, what do we have coming up next?

• 13:23David Hoffman?

  Coming up next on the second half of the show, we're going to talk about Jupiter's $7 billion token launch. Did you get that airdrop, Bankless Nation? We're also going to talk about Farcaster Frames, and if crypto found its social killer app, as well as record amounts of on-chain user growth in 2023, which chains grew the most? Was it Ethereum Layer 2s? Or was it newer Layer 1s? We're going to talk about all that and more. But first, I want to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible, like Kraken, our preferred exchange for crypto in 2024. If you do not have an account with Kraken, click the link in the show notes to get started with Kraken today. Kraken knows crypto. Kraken's been in the crypto game for over a decade, and as one of the largest and most trusted exchanges in the industry, Kraken is on the journey with all of us to see what crypto can be. Human history is a story of progress.

• 14:08David Hoffman?

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• 15:35David Hoffman?

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• 16:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  Big airdrop this week. Solana's biggest DEX, Jupiter, just launched its Jupe token. What do people need to know?

• 16:40David Hoffman?

  10 billion Jupe tokens. This airdrop was actually announced. There's going to be four phases. This is phase one. The future criteria of phases 2 through 4 are undecided. But this was actually announced all the way back at Solana Breakpoint in 2023, November 15, 2023. 10 billion Jupe tokens going to 955,000 Solana wallets? Almost a million wallets? Definitely not a million users in Solana pre-November of 2023. Of that 955,000 eligible airdrops, airdrop addresses, 485,000 addresses have claimed those tokens. 646 million Jupe tokens. That's about 2/3 of the airdrop, which I believe is 10%. I need to double-check these numbers,

• 17:25David Hoffman?

  but I believe 10% was airdropped. Of the $7 billion, which means $700 million was airdropped to Jupiter users.

• 17:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  Where are you getting $7 billion? Is that the market cap of Jupiter?

• 17:37David Hoffman?

  That was the market cap at the drop. It is now at $6 billion, which, I mean, still plenty respectable. Yeah, still $6 billion.

• 17:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  So almost $1 billion in token value was dropped to

• 17:48David Hoffman?

  600 million. At the current price is 600 million.

• 17:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wow, wow.

• 17:53David Hoffman?

  Which might be number two behind Arbitrum, which dropped like 2 billion to users.

• 17:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, because Jupiter is like the primary DEX on Solana. It's kind of winning so far.

• 18:02David Hoffman?

  It's like a super DEX. It's not just an AMM. It's also a DEX aggregator with like a bunch of just other bells and whistles. It's got, it's like a, like it's got all the, all the DEX bells and whistles like hooked into one app.

• 18:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, so how did Solana, the actual network? I'm sure this was a flood of activity of people claiming their, their JUP tokens, getting very excited. How did the network handle that load?

• 18:26David Hoffman?

  Network stayed up and running, but a bunch of failed transactions happened. I think something like 50 or 60% failed transactions. So people were pretty frustrated about that. But it was, you know, significant improvement from what Solana would have done like a year ago, which was topple over. And so it stayed on, stayed online, didn't, didn't break a sweat in terms of block production. But now Solana as an ecosystem is like just paying attention towards its fee markets and its congestion. And so this is like the new era of development in Solana. So I would call that, I would call that a success. I mean, they have work to do, but it's a success.

• 18:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  Those are the big boy problems, right? When you, when you get so many users, your network can't handle it, right? You gotta keep up with it and you gotta figure out front running and MEV and all of these things. And I think it's a sign of increasing maturity that, that Solana is working on these problems. And of course, if you're a Bankless citizen, then you probably knew about the JUP airdrop because we covered it in the airdrop hunter. And you can claim that. If you, if you don't know whether you're eligible or not, you can also claim that on the Bankless website, bankless.com/claimables. Type your Solana address in and see if you qualified. And David, you've scheduled a live stream with one of the founders of Jupiter, I believe, to, to talk about this and talk about future plans?

• 19:37David Hoffman?

  Yeah, that founder's name is Meow. He is a cat and we are having a live stream tomorrow, 8 a.m. Eastern time, because I believe he's in Singapore hours, to talk about Jupiter and the Jupiter airdrop. And so this will actually conclude my Solana app layer series that I've done. Over a while, I did Tensor, I did Gito, and now Jupiter. And these are like the three big apps on Solana. And it's going to be round out that series.

• 20:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  Are you expecting a cat to actually show up? Like, is this person going to be pseudonymous?

• 20:07David Hoffman?

  No, no, he is a man who I'm sure if you investigated, you'd be able to find out his name. And he will show up as a dude. He will also call himself Meow. I am Meow, Meow is what I'm expecting to hear.

• 20:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, it sounds like it's worth $7 billion. This is crypto.

• 20:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  Sorry, Chad Fy, I gotta get you this weirdness. Speaking of weirdness, and this came out last Friday, David, but it really made waves. Farcaster Frames. So, talking about Farcaster, we're talking about the crypto social network. It's kind of a Twitter type of competitor called Farcaster. And they've rolled out a new feature called Farcaster Frames. William Peaster of Bankless, William Peaster, one of the analysts at Bankless, described it like this. "The crypto social scene just got a huge level up. That's because Farcaster just introduced Frames, which can turn any cast, which is Farcaster's equivalent of a tweet, a cast is a tweet, into an interactive app. This new feature offers awesome new possibilities for the Farcaster ecosystem, ranging from in-cast airdrop checkers

• 21:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  to one-tap, gasless NFT mints." So the idea here, David, is that rather than have just a tweet, which, you know, on Twitter, it's a piece of content, right? It's an image, it's a video, it's some text. You can actually tweet, or as Farcaster calls it, cast, an interactive application inside of the cast itself. If that makes sense. So like, some examples of this, literally, one of the first apps, I don't know if you ever saw, like, you ever played Doom on a TI-83 calculator? You ever see that?

• 21:43David Hoffman?

  No, I never, not on a calculator. I would be like four or five years old, sitting on my dad's lap, and he would move and I would press the spacebar, and I would kill the monsters. And my mom did not like that.

• 21:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, like, on a PC, right?

• 21:53David Hoffman?

  On a computer, yeah.

• 21:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, yeah. Well, one of the kind of the things that is done, like, have you ever seen Doom on like a pregnancy test? Like, people love putting Doom...

• 22:02David Hoffman?

  What? I know the meme of we can put Doom places, but I've not seen it on a pregnancy test.

• 22:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  I've seen Doom on a pregnancy test, like not in person, alright?

• 22:09David Hoffman?

  On the internet.

• 22:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  I've just seen this on the internet. And anyway, so Doom, as an early application in a frame, just why? Because you can, but there's some really other cool apps that people have developed. And once again, this functionality just dropped on Friday, alright? And there's already something like 500 different frames that have been developed. Tell us about some of the frames that are possible here, David.

• 22:32David Hoffman?

  Well, I mean, the first one that everyone should go play is the Doom one, of course. But in addition to that, there's a chess trainer, so you can just play chess inside of a tweet, a Farcaster cast. There's a song drop, which is a music NFT minting frame from Sound XYZ. There's NFT mint, so gasless NFT drops on Farcaster. One of the more creative ones, Netheria, a text-based game where users attempt to conquer a monster. The way that I would explain this is like, if Twitter is Bitcoin, as in all you can do is write text, and that's how Bitcoin is expressed, then Farcaster frames are like smart contracts on Ethereum, where you can put smart logic in, you can put logic into your tweets, aka your casts. That's how I would explain that very, very simply.

• 23:17David Hoffman?

  And so it's just opening up the world of just like innovation to the Farcaster community. And people are doing cool stuff with it. And this is, I'm just here for this because, you know, let's put, place a complexity on the margins, allow for coders and developers to have clay to work with and see what they come up with. Why didn't Twitter ever do this? I don't know.

• 23:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, they didn't because their model's kind of against it. They've, Twitter and most of the other, all the other social media platforms are now these walled gardens, right? Even your, Facebook used to be much more innovative with kind of the Facebook API and used to get like games like Farmville. Now none of that exists, right? So what's really cool about this is all of the permissionless innovation that's been unleashed. And, you know, I've been excited about Farcaster for a while, right?

• 24:07David Hoffman?

  Yeah, you've been on there for a whole month, right?

• 24:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  I, like, I mean, I've been there for a while, but I started to get really active about six weeks ago when. And it just felt to me like Twitter was just too toxic. Twitter sucks. It was just getting like too toxic, right? And so just, you know, algorithm, it's, we've talked about this ad nauseam, right? It very much incentivizes clout chasing, dunking, like, you know, and Farcaster seemed to me, maybe it's because it's small, a much healthier crypto community. I just loved it. But the thing about Farcaster up to this point, David, and all crypto social that I've used, is it didn't feel significantly differentiated from traditional social media. So you go into Farcaster, it just looks like Twitter. And you're like, all right, so it's a healthier Twitter. Cool. It's not the 10x better thing.

• 24:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  David, this is the first time I've actually seen crypto social present potentially a 10x better use case, right? So.

• 25:00David Hoffman?

  And there's actually not, we call it crypto social, it is crypto social, but this is just a social innovation on a crypto adjacent application.

• 25:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, crypto adjacent and, you know, also, I mean, they've designed this thing with kind of open borders. So it's completely permissionless. Shri Ram, who we've had on the podcast of A16Z, says the Farcaster and Frames Energy is how 2005 Web 2.0 web energy felt like. And I very, I kind of remember that in the Internet.

• 25:31David Hoffman?

  He's talking about like the open source era of Web 2.0.

• 25:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, he's talking about, or the Chris Dixon podcast, when we went from Web 1 to Web 2, and it was no longer just read, it was about write. Like, this kind of feels like that. And for the first time, I saw a glimpse of what could be the way we onboard the masses. Like, oh, cool. Now we have a social primitive that allows us to expose the own verb, right? To use Chris Dixon's framing of it. We can do all sorts of crypto things on top of this. So I'm pretty excited about it, even though it's like early days. It's still just the crypto native community. But I think this has some real potential and we'll see what's unleashed, what's built on top of Farcaster Frames.

• 26:13David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I called Farcaster a crypto-adjacent application because it just has this very small on-chain footprint, like one user transaction on Farcaster on Optimism per account. But also, these frames can be bridges into crypto use cases. Like, we've already seen like NFT drops and sound mints and NFT mints and all this kind of stuff inside of frames. And so it's is a portal to allow for crypto expressivity to come into a web two social app. And so it's a little bit just about the culture of Farcaster is about enabling crypto use cases that you would never see from any of the web two gargantuan. As a result of frames, daily active users spiked immediately to 10,000, breaking 10,000. And then that was, I think, on Saturday of last week.

• 26:58David Hoffman?

  And then Monday of this week, we're up above 14,500. I think it's over 15,000 daily active users on Farcaster, which makes Farcaster by far the most popular crypto application that we have. Like, daily active users, absolutely.

• 27:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  And David, they did it without points. They did it without big token incentives.

• 27:18David Hoffman?

  They have warps.

• 27:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  They do.

• 27:20David Hoffman?

  They do have warps.

• 27:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  But they're not gamifying it.

• 27:23David Hoffman?

  But I don't know if anyone's speculating on them, like, people are speculating on, like, Eigenlayer points.

• 27:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  No, I think it would be somewhat foolish to do so, actually. Like, you can buy warps inside of the app, but it's not sort of...

• 27:32David Hoffman?

  Oh, with money?

• 27:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, with money.

• 27:34David Hoffman?

  With a credit card?

• 27:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, with credit card or with your ETH, if that's what you want to do. But it doesn't have kind of the speculative, you know, token mania side of things. They're not using that growth hack yet, which is pretty interesting.

• 27:47David Hoffman?

  Yeah, if warps turned into actual, like, ERC 20 tokens, that would be, that would be very large. That would be a big move.

• 27:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 27:55David Hoffman?

  That's not happening, not happening for a while, not happening, maybe ever, not happening at least for a while.

• 28:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think Dan and the co-founders of, they're taking the slow, steady route and like, they're getting it right. And I respect that.

• 28:07David Hoffman?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 28:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  David, I also respect the numbers that crypto is putting out with the number of users on-chain. So here's a report from Flipside Crypto this week that shows the total number of acquired users across all of the years that crypto... Has existed, starting from 2012 to 2023. And the headline here is that on-chain crypto users grew by a record 62 million in 2023. Now, what do we mean by an on-chain user? This is this analytics platform particular is their particular definition. But basically, they kind of mean an active address. Okay, so that doesn't map one to one necessarily to a human being.

• 28:51David Hoffman?

  There were not 955,000 users of Jupiter.

• 28:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes, there were not. So but each of these kind of map to, let's call it like a crypto bank account, right? It's an active address and it does mean that it's active. So they had to use the chain at least once past year and then use it actively in like twice or more in the years preceding that. So it is good. It's a good proxy for not all the humans on chain, but it is a good proxy for, I guess, some of the users. I mean, bots are users too, right? Bank accounts are users too. Anyway, 65 million and that's the highest it's ever been. In fact, most of these years have been up from the previous, except 2019. That was an outlier year where we had, you know, fewer on-chain active users in the last.

• 29:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, exactly. But take a look at this compilation here. What does what does this look like to you when we compare the different chains?

• 29:44David Hoffman?

  All right, we got 15 million active wallets on Ethereum, 7 million active wallets on Arbitrum, 5 million active wallets on Solana, 15 million active wallets on Polygon. Polygon a really standout bar here. It's actually it's it's as big as Ethereum's. And 2 million on base, 3 and a half million on Polygon, 10 million on Bitcoin. All right.

• 30:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's the compilation.

• 30:07David Hoffman?

  Yeah, they could have organized that a little bit better, but okay.

• 30:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, it's cool to see all of this on-chain usage and this is going to hit 100 million in no time, definitely this year. David, what do we got coming up next?

• 30:20David Hoffman?

  FTX users are getting their money back, how much of it? And will we see FTX 2.0? And are we going to have to wait until 2025 for the ETH ETF? God, I hope not, but someone says so. Also, a new LRT protocol brings in $100 million in TVL in just under one day. And also, most importantly, bankless citizens are getting something new. So stay tuned after the sponsors to find out what that is. But first, I want to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible, especially Mantle, the Layer 2 with staking built in. You can stake your ETH with Mantle, you can use the Mantle Layer 2. What you want to do, I don't know, try it out. There's a link in the show notes. We're going to go here for Mantle right now. Mantle, formerly known as BitDow, is the first DAO-led Web3 ecosystem, all built on

• 31:04David Hoffman?

  top of Mantle's first core product, the Mantle Network. A brand-new, high-performance Ethereum Layer 2 built using the OP stack, but uses Eigenlayer's data availability solution instead of the expensive Ethereum Layer 1. Not only does this reduce Mantle Network's gas fees by 80%, but it also reduces gas fee volatility, providing a more stable foundation for Mantle's applications. The Mantle Treasury is one of the biggest DAO-owned treasuries, which is seeding an ecosystem of projects from all around the Web3 space for Mantle. Mantle already has sub-communities from around Web3 on-boarded, like Game7 for Web3 Gaming and Bybit for TVL and liquidity and on-ramps. So if you want to build on the Mantle Network, Mantle is offering a grants program that provides milestone-based funding to promising projects to help expand, secure, and decentralize Mantle.

• 31:48David Hoffman?

  If you want to get started working with the first DAO-led Layer 2 ecosystem, check out Mantle at mantel.xyz and follow them on Twitter at @zeroxmantle. It's everyone's favorite season in crypto: tax season. And crypto tax is always an absolute headache, especially for all you degens out there. But it doesn't have to be a nightmare. That's where Crypto Tax Calculator comes in, the software built for degens by degens. As Coinbase's official global tax partner, Crypto Tax Calculator focuses on making complex transactions into easy ones, supporting over 300,000 currencies across Ethereum, Arbitrum, Optimism, as well as 1,000 other integrations as well. It's as simple as connecting your wallet, pulling in all your transactions, and following the automated suggestions to quickly and accurately calculate your tax obligations.

• 32:31David Hoffman?

  Plus, for all the airdrop farmers out there, Crypto Tax Calculator has your back, as they are consistently adding support for new and upcoming Layer 1s, Layer 2s, and all the airdrops that you're currently farming. 2024 is the year where the degens do their crypto taxes with Speed and confidence. Make taxes this year easy and affordable with Crypto Tax Calculator. Sign up at cryptotaxcalculator.io and get a 30% discount with code BANK30. Click the link in the show notes for more information. You know Uniswap, it's the world's largest decentralized exchange with over 1.4 trillion dollars in trading volume. You know this because we talk about it endlessly on Bakeless. It's Uniswap, but Uniswap is becoming so much more. Uniswap Labs just released the Uniswap Mobile Wallet for iOS. The newest, easiest way to trade tokens on the go.

• 33:14David Hoffman?

  With the Uniswap Wallet, you can easily create or import a new wallet, buy crypto on any available exchange with your debit card with extremely low fiat on-ramp fees, and you can seamlessly swap on mainnet, Polygon, Arbitrum, and Optimism. On the Uniswap Mobile Wallet, you can store and display your beautiful NFTs, and you can also explore Web3 with the in-app search features, market leaderboards, and price charts, or use Wallet Connect to connect to any Web3 application. So you can now go directly to DeFi with the Uniswap Mobile Wallet. Safe, simple custody from the most trusted team in DeFi. Download the Uniswap Wallet today on iOS. There is a link in the show notes.

• 33:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  David, you remember that FTX thing that happened last year, right?

• 33:50David Hoffman?

  I remember.

• 33:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. Actually, that wasn't last year. That was two years ago.

• 33:54David Hoffman?

  That was two years ago.

• 33:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, it was 2023.

• 33:56David Hoffman?

  13 months ago.

• 33:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, so 15 million people lost a combined $30 billion or more. Some estimates are $35 billion. The question in all of the bankruptcy proceedings is how much would they get paid back? Would they get paid back anything? And the answer, it seems, has come this week. What are we looking at for the FTX creditors?

• 34:20David Hoffman?

  So the headline reads, "FTX Expect To Fully Repay Customers." And we are not going to see FTX 2.0, which I kind of think is sad because I think that would have been hilarious.

• 34:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like them rebooting the exchange?

• 34:32David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 34:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  You think that would be hilarious?

• 34:37David Hoffman?

  That'd be hilarious. That would be peak drama. I mean, what's the Elon Musk line? Like, whatever's the most comical is the thing that's going to happen.

• 34:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 34:44David Hoffman?

  Anyways, FTX users fully repaid. So everyone's getting all of their money back with a big ol' asterisk of what your money is. Is US dollar value at the time that the FTX exchange went defunct?

• 34:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  The bottom.

• 35:00David Hoffman?

  The bottom. You are getting your money back at the worst, almost the worst prices that we had all of, all of last bear market. Which makes many users very upset. Cause I mean, why, how did, where did all this money come from? There's been some clawbacks. There has been some VC investments out of FTX that have actually done well. There has been some money actually discovered under the couch cushions. And all of that money, especially like the sole tokens and the GBTC tokens have significantly increased in the market value. Like Bitcoin did over 100% in increase. Like it was $20,000 when FTX went under. It's now $40,000. But then also GBTC appreciated even more than that.

• 35:43David Hoffman?

  And all of, so like the reason why so many people are getting all of their quote unquote money back is because, oh yeah, crypto markets bounced back. And so they're not really getting what they feel like is their money back, but they get to say like, hey, we paid back everyone's money.

• 35:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, but still not bad.

• 35:59David Hoffman?

  And it could be worse.

• 35:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  I gotta say, not bad. I mean, 30 to 35 billion. When does this ever happen in a bankruptcy? If you told, it was as if, I guess the, the market affected this was as if you, if you were an FTX depositor. Sam just hit market sell on all the assets at the worst possible time, right?

• 36:17David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 36:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  But like, at least you're getting something back. That doesn't happen in bankruptcy cases usually if you're a creditor. I mean, if you, if you told someone outside crypto that, um, yeah, FTX depositors, they lost $30 billion. And then they got 30 billion back 18 months later. Like, that sounds good. Now, when you denominate to your point in crypto assets, it's a lot worse, but.

• 36:39David Hoffman?

  You underperformed the crypto markets.

• 36:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I just gotta say, this never happens in, in, um, outside of crypto, but it does tend to happen in crypto. Like from time to time, although Celsius, I don't think it's gonna happen. BlockFi is not gonna happen, so. Yeah, maybe not all the time.

• 36:54David Hoffman?

  I would like to see how much of this money being recouped was actually made from VC investments. Cause they, they had that anthropic investment and others too. And that's, they're not over, right? So like the VC investments could keep on paying off in theory. Are creditors gonna get all those too?

• 37:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  I don't know. Yeah, I don't know. I think they're trying to just dispose of everything at this point in time and just kind of end the chapter of this FTX cycle. Hey, speaking of new chapters, Ethereum's got a new chapter coming, which is the next Ethereum upgrade. What is the latest on that?

• 37:25David Hoffman?

  We just had the second of three Ethereum testnets upgrade to Dankun. Blobs are now on a Sepolia testnet. I bet 99.9% of listeners have never used a Sepolia testnet, but the point is, is that as soon as we get to three of three successful testnet upgrades to Dankun, we get to take that all the way to the main chain, to the Ethereum Layer 1. We are at two of three now. I think the next one will happen in two or three weeks. And then maybe two or three weeks after that, we will have a full Dankun upgrade on the Ethereum mainnet. End of March. End of March. Looking good. On track for end of March. These are my words. This is not in the Ethereum developers' words. These are just my estimations of time. End of March. Looking good.

• 38:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's going to feel good when that ships, David. So in addition to the upcoming hard fork, some good news, I think, for open source development and client development, the core dev development specifically on Ethereum. Tim Bako is introducing the Protocol Guild pledge. So any project that has a token can take the Protocol Guild pledge and donate 1% of their native token to the Protocol Guild. David, what is the Protocol Guild? And what's the significance of this pledge?

• 38:35David Hoffman?

  Yeah, the Protocol Guild is a collection of open source Ethereum engineers, contributors to the Ethereum project, who just work either for the EF or work towards Ethereum and are just, they just work out of the goodness of their heart, right? They're working on open source technology, which means they're not compensated for that. So that means the Ethereum ecosystem needs to come up with funds somehow, somewhere in order to pay these people.

• 38:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like people like Peter from Geth, who we were talking about last week.

• 39:01David Hoffman?

  Peter from Geth, exactly.

• 39:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  They're like, our fate is entirely in Peter's hands, right?

• 39:03David Hoffman?

  Peter from Geth is in there. Mike Norder is in there. Alex Stokes is in there. Tim Bako, Trent Van Eppes, who are part of the stewards of the Protocol Guild. Dom, we've had him on the podcast. Just a ton of people. There's like, I think, 300 people plus. Anyone who contributes to Ethereum, open source, anyone who like builds a client and the Protocol Guild, it's DAO, is a DAO. Protocol Guild is a DAO and it also governs over who's in there. And people donate to the Protocol Guild, send money to the Protocol Guild, just say, hey, it's a solution to Ethereum funding. And so the Protocol Guild pledge is to say, hey, if you are on Ethereum, if you're using Ethereum, consider donating 1% of your tokens, of your token generation event to the Protocol Guild. And that token has slowly trickled out over many, many years

• 39:48David Hoffman?

  towards members of the Protocol Guild who have been vetted by other Ethereum EF members and others as deemed worthy of being, receiving some of these funds. So this pledge, this idea, this pledge was announced by Simbaco and then immediately, EtherFi, one of the largest liquid staking token projects that are new and upcoming in the Eigenlayer ecosystem, announces that they are taking the pledge. So EtherFi has committed 1% of their upcoming token will go to the Protocol Guild in order to support the continued development of Ethereum. So just big hats off to EtherFi. This, I mean Ethereum alignment is kind of a meme, but like, hey, there are people contributing, building Ethereum and we are all standing on those people's shoulders and those people are in the Protocol Guild.

• 40:32David Hoffman?

  And so very, very, very well done by EtherFi. Also in EtherFi news, they have announced their Mega Week. So this is in the LRT ecosystem. Mega Week is just like juiced incentives for the EtherFi system. They are distributing 3 million Eigenlayer points from the EtherFi treasury to new and existing EETH holders. That is the restaked, liquid restaked token from EtherFi over the next 10 days. That started January 31st, ending February 10th. And so if you are interested in getting some, catching up on your Eigenlayer points, EtherFi is giving you away, giving away 3 million points over the next 10 days.

• 41:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  We still have to do that.

• 41:11David Hoffman?

  We're giving away points.

• 41:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, we still have to do that liquid restaking tokens episode, David.

• 41:16David Hoffman?

  Yeah, and we're doing this tomorrow.

• 41:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, cool. Okay, cool. And I mean, speaking of points, a lot, lot more points giving going on. So this is friend.tech. Tonight, we're doing our final weekly distribution. I guess this is the final.

• 41:28David Hoffman?

  Yeah, they are ceasing the points.

• 41:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  Beta period.

• 41:30David Hoffman?

  Points are being ceased.

• 41:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, how do we know that? I mean, we just did an episode on points.

• 41:35David Hoffman?

  It's what they are saying. We are trusting them.

• 41:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  You know, six, six, six months later, they can be like, oh, it's back on again.

• 41:40David Hoffman?

  No, I don't think so. I don't think so. They are ceasing their distribution and I think that they actually launched a token. I think FriendTech token is coming soon, TM.

• 41:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  Ah, so you think this is a pretty binding, strong, social commitment?

• 41:51David Hoffman?

  It's what they are saying.

• 41:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  That will just transfer into a, a token?

• 41:54David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I could not imagine them saying this without that turning into a token. I mean, V2 launch of FriendTech, remaining 10 million beta points being distributed up to that. And then V2 launches. So V2 of FriendTech is coming. Points are going to have a point, quote unquote, is what they said. So the FriendTech token is probably coming.

• 42:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, okay. All right. Well, some, some hard hints then.

• 42:14David Hoffman?

  What do you think, what do you think the market cap is going to open up at? Fully divergent.

• 42:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  FriendTech?

• 42:18David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 42:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  You know, here's the thing about FriendTech.

• 42:20David Hoffman?

  Billion, over billion?

• 42:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes. Yeah.

• 42:24David Hoffman?

  It's unicorn season, baby.

• 42:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  Crypto going in, into bull cycle. It's over a billion. I, I will say for myself, I haven't used FriendTech recently.

• 42:32David Hoffman?

  I haven't. Yeah, I used it pretty hard for the first three weeks and then that was it.

• 42:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  It kind of, it just didn't have enough to kind of keep me sticky, right? Aside from the, the initial novelty of it. So, I mean, maybe, maybe others are different or maybe they're, they're adding some features. We'll see how that develops. Also, Puffer Finance given us some points. What's this about?

• 42:51David Hoffman?

  Puffer Finance, that is the LRT project that I mentioned that has sourced over $100 billion in 20 and under 20 hours. They have just launched their vampire tack on Lido. There's a meme apparently out there of a puffer fish eating a carrot. And so Puffer Finance has like leaned into that meme. And so.

• 43:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  What's the carrot?

• 43:10David Hoffman?

  I don't know. I don't know. It's a, it's a YouTube video. I just learned about this. Anyways, so like, yeah, so, so if you take Lido steak to eat and put it into Puffer's vaults. You're taking carrots and putting it into the buffer. I don't know. Anyways, Puffer just launched and just like over a hundred million dollars has flowed into their vaults. Congrats to Puffer.

• 43:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  I gotta say, I'm looking at this tweet. This does not look like organic traffic here. 91,000 likes, 167,000 retweets.

• 43:39David Hoffman?

  Puffer announced their investment from Binance Labs and then all traction I've ever gotten of any Puffer tweet I've ever done has just like completely blown up. I think there's just like a Binance swarm of Twitter accounts that come in just like, yeah, I don't know.

• 43:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  David, a disturbing headline I read this week was basically the spot ETH ETF approval is unlikely until 2025 or 2026.

• 44:06David Hoffman?

  I don't believe it. I don't want to believe that.

• 44:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, investment bank TD Cowen anticipates that the SEC won't approve a spot Ether ETF before late 2025 or early 2026. This is the reasoning, David. They say this is a political call. We believe there is no upside for SEC Chair Gary Gensler to approve a spot Ethereum ETF, given how upset progressive Democrats were over the agency's approval of the spot Bitcoin ETF earlier this month. That's what their analysts say.

• 44:36David Hoffman?

  No upside. What about not getting sued? If you approve the ETH ETF, you don't get sued.

• 44:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, he's getting a lot of suits. So this is some sound logic, although these analysts, I don't know that like they're saying this a bit like pretty emphatically, right? When really there's sort of a probability distribution cloud. So I called in James Safer to actually, who is kind of the go-to Bloomberg analyst. He and Eric Balchunas are the people I think have the best takes on the probability of the Ethereum ETF. And this is what James Safer says, "There's more work to be done on this," he says, "but we're probably in the 60% range for 2024 right now." So over 50%.

• 45:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it's lower than what he said probably three to six months ago, you'll know. So it's over 50%, he says, but not meaningfully so. I wouldn't be stunned either way. Gensler really wants to. He can kick the can down the road. There was no more can kicking for Bitcoin. I think that is the most valid point here.

• 45:37David Hoffman?

  I think Gensler will kick the can down the road as long as he can until he gets sued, which he will if he kicks it too many times.

• 45:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, that was kind of James Safer's take as well. I said, you know, Gensler really does hate crypto, so unless a court forces him, why would he? And James says, yeah, that's the bearish take. But on the flip side, it's not exactly a good look to go back to the same court and be told the exact same thing.

• 46:05David Hoffman?

  Okay, so that's also, that's also bad upside is maybe he's actually, he does care about his optics. And so maybe Jimmy James is saying if he cares about his optics enough, he will approve the ETH ETF even before getting sued.

• 46:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it kind of could go.

• 46:19David Hoffman?

  Which only accelerates it by like six to eight months.

• 46:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, well, the interesting thing is Gary is kind of the decider, right? Because there's, there's five votes for the SEC on whether to approve this or not. And Gary was the decider, three to two.

• 46:31David Hoffman?

  He was the decider.

• 46:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  For the Bitcoin ETF. So he's still the decider. He's still got all the power, David. This same week, another analyst said the SEC is very likely to approve the spot Ethereum ETF. This was an analyst from Standard Chartered Bank and called in a price prediction. Basically ETH is going to hit 4K in the next two months because we are on the, the brink of the Ethereum ETF getting approved. So don't know. There's takes on either side of this and it could probably go either way, though I still lean more bullish for sure.

• 47:01David Hoffman?

  Yeah, this bank's take just happens to coincide with that ETH price bump in the middle of the week up to $2,400. But I mean, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not one to listen to banks frequently. I'm going to just say that that's just, that's just noise.

• 47:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  You do have a bank account though, don't you?

• 47:15David Hoffman?

  Yeah, but I'm not listening to them. Don't listen to my Wells Fargo.

• 47:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  So this was crazy. The co-founder and chairman of Ripple, that's the XRP coin, of course, Chris Larson, announced yesterday. Actually, Zach XPT caught this before this was publicly announced. Because Zach XPT is apparently everywhere on chain. And Zach XPT said, "It appears Ripple was hacked for about $112 million worth of Ripple." And then, XRP, rather, and then Chris Larson confirmed it. He said, "There was unauthorized access to my personal XRP accounts, and the exchanges were notified to freeze the affected addresses." And I mean, that's a lot of money, though, for Chris and for the XRP community to lose in a hack. Do you have any other takes on this?

• 48:04David Hoffman?

  Yeah, why is he, he has like a handful of wallets and one of them, and one of them has $112 million of Ripple.

• 48:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, just a personal, personal wallet.

• 48:15David Hoffman?

  God, Ripple's such a goddamn scam.

• 48:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's your take?

• 48:19David Hoffman?

  That's my take. That's all I have to say.

• 48:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, wow. Well, I don't know if the hackers are going to get away with that.

• 48:25David Hoffman?

  No, because there's no DeFi on Ripple. They, all of the major exchanges that have Ripple liquidity are just tracking those wallets. They're not going to get anything out of it.

• 48:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  They'll probably get it back. Now, we don't know how he lost $100 million of Ripple, but a common vector for attack for anybody in crypto is the classic SIM swap, where an attacker actually swaps your mobile phone number for theirs in some sort of social engineering attack, where they call a phone company, basically, and they switch your number to their number, and then get two-factor authentication type of access and sort of compromise your account. I don't know if that's what happened with Chris Larson, but like, this is an important PSA for everybody in crypto to realize it could happen to them. And what you need to do is make sure you are using not your mobile phone number as your second factor auth in

• 49:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  your, in all of your logins, but use something like Google Authenticator. That was like the primary prevention. But David, there was a SIM swapping ring that stole $400 million, just like one guy in Chicago. In a ring and that was brought to court this week. So

• 49:32David Hoffman?

  We got him?

• 49:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, yes, this, this one, there's, there's more. And when you're talking about a bounty of like hundreds of millions of dollars, lots of scammers are looking at that with mouths watering and I'm sure are entering the space. So we always have to keep on our guard for sure.

• 49:48David Hoffman?

  In much cooler and more exciting news, Bankless, that's us, has released a 2024 badge. So if you are a Bankless citizen, we do this every single year. The Po app for being a Bankless citizen, January of every single year or now February, you get one of these, it's done, it's shipped, it's now claimable for all the Bankless citizens out there. In code, we trust it's in there, it's in every single Po app. This is the year of the dragon. There's an animated little Po app breathing fire into the Bankless be. I think it's just absolutely gorgeous. If you have one of these, that means you probably should be also going to the Bankless meetup at ETH Denver. You should also go, there's a link in the show notes. If you're a Bankless citizen, you can go claim it now and then tweet it and I will retweet it.

• 50:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  There you go. Wow. Retweet the dragon, David. What do we got for meme of the week?

• 50:36David Hoffman?

  Meme of the week, hard times create airdrops. Airdrops create good times. That's where we are now. Good times create Ponzi's. That's coming up next. Be careful. And then Ponzi's create hard times. Make sure you are prepared for the next two phases of crypto because those are the phases in which you get wrecked. Now is the time in that you get rich. So I hope everyone's having a fantastic time collecting their airdrops. One, another, in addition to the Jupiter airdrop, the Mode Network airdrop went live today. I have claimed a few of mine, you should as well. I think there'll be a link in the show notes for that. Have fun harvesting, be wary that lucrative harvesting creates Ponzi's in crypto. We're not there yet. I haven't seen one yet, but we are, they are inevitable.

• 51:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  How do we, how do we know when we are in the, the good times create Ponzi's phase, David? Do the airdrops just get dumber and dumber?

• 51:30David Hoffman?

  They get dumber, they get quicker. Yeah, people come in who have never been in crypto before and they start launching billion dollar airdrops. And no one knows who the hell they are, what the projects are, what they're doing. And yeah.

• 51:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Look for talk show hosts, look for celebrities painting their nails and posting on Instagram. Like, these are like top signals. Is that what we should be looking at?

• 51:50David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 51:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, this is so far.

• 51:51David Hoffman?

  The top signals change every single year. Last, last cycle was so confusing because it was a year's worth of top signals. And after one year straight, by the time we got to like November of 2021, December of 2021, I'm like, what's the point of listening to a top signal? They're all top signals and crypto still goes up. And if you had sold at any time during 2021, you would have been doing just fine.

• 52:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I, I, I think that we are still comfortably in the airdrops create good times because this really, this phenomenon really hasn't escaped beyond kind of like crypto natives yet. Nothing.

• 52:23David Hoffman?

  We're still below all time high prices in Ether and Bitcoin.

• 52:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, exactly. Nothing about this cycle has brought in mainstream yet. So look for that. Look for the, the signals specifically, not among the crypto native crowd, but when it starts to leak outside of that, that's when you should worry about the good times creating Ponzi and then the, the subsequent hard times that will happen as a result of this.

• 52:45David Hoffman?

  But the hard times, they do come.

• 52:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Some disclosures as we end this episode, both David and I are advisors in Eigenlayer. Also, Bankless Ventures is an investor in some of the liquid staking, liquid restaking token projects that we mentioned in today. Both David and I hold ETH. We are investors. We're not journalists. We don't do paid content. There's always a link to all disclosures at bankless.com/disclosures. And you know, crypto is risky. You could lose what you put in, but we're headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the Bankless journey. Thanks a lot.