📺 ROLLUP: Ukraine Crypto Donations | Russia SWIFT Sanctions | EBay Accepting ETH | Pixelmon NFTs

4th Week of February 2022 ------ 📣 OPOLIS | Sign Up to Get 1000 $WORK and 1000 $BANK https://bankless.cc/Opolis ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/ 🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/ ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum 🍵 MATCHA | SMART ORDER ROUTING https://bankless.cc/Matcha 🚀 SLINGSHOT | LAYER 2 SOCIAL TRADING https://bankless.cc/Slingshot 🏦 GEMINI | TURN FIAT INTO CRYPTO https://bankless.cc/Gemini 🦁 BRAVE | THE BROWSER NATIVE WALLET https://bankless.cc/Brave 🦄 UNISWAP | DECENTRALIZED FUNDING https://bankless.cc/UniGrants ------ Topics Covered: 0:00 Intro 3:30 MARKETS 3:47 BTC Price 5:01 ETH Price 7:23: Coinbase Numbers https://decrypt.co/93763/coinbase-posts-record-revenue-user-numbers-in-q4-earnings-surprise 8:26 10 Million ETH Staked https://launchpad.ethereum.org/en/ 13:20 Crypto Jobs https://pallet.xyz/list/bankless/jobs 16:30 NEWS 17:10 Clash with the Real World https://twitter.com/ercwl/status/1498380832058265607?s=20&t=WJaaPqhN4PdjaLv00Id1fw https://twitter.com/ercwl/status/1498380832058265607?s=20&t=WJaaPqhN4PdjaLv00Id1fw 19:20 Sanctions https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/weaponized-banks-lite?s=w 24:26 Fall of the Ruble https://twitter.com/b_judah/status/1498137793003929601?s=20&t=KZJTbDLT7r8G8-plF_Oe6Q https://twitter.com/b_judah/status/1498137793003929601?s=20&t=KZJTbDLT7r8G8-plF_Oe6Q 25:50 Buying Bitcoin https://decrypt.co/94164/ukrainians-use-binance-to-buy-record-sums-of-bitcoin-after-russian-invasion 30:10 Crypto Sanctions https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2022/02/28/us-treasury-department-formally-adds-crypto-rules-to-russian-sanctions-guidance 34:40 DeFi, Not Crypto Banks https://twitter.com/jchervinsky/status/1499424494758285318?s=20&t=_0_pE_F4xQZLuNYFbGp9qA https://twitter.com/jchervinsky/status/1499424494758285318?s=20&t=_0_pE_F4xQZLuNYFbGp9qA 37:10 UkraineDAO https://www.ukrainedao.love/ Overpriced JPEGs https://youtu.be/eJgeAQYJlBo 39:00 Ukraine Crypto Donations https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/02/26/ukrainian-government-is-seeking-crypto-donations 39:54 Matching UN Donations https://twitter.com/kylascan/status/1498672249443917833?s=20&t=IHhKN50aSnSzMonHgpi7XA https://twitter.com/kylascan/status/1498672249443917833?s=20&t=IHhKN50aSnSzMonHgpi7XA 41:45 Ukraine Airdrop https://twitter.com/Ukraine/status/1498911922791583746?s=20&t=aGxXK0E-I_-6MK-HZcJQ4A https://twitter.com/Ukraine/status/1498911922791583746?s=20&t=aGxXK0E-I_-6MK-HZcJQ4A 44:10 Financing Weapons https://twitter.com/TrustlessState/status/1499167417678786560?s=20&t=yxH_Vk4fkCLdBL1mrymEYA https://twitter.com/TrustlessState/status/1499167417678786560?s=20&t=yxH_Vk4fkCLdBL1mrymEYA 45:41 OpenSea Censoring https://twitter.com/bornosor/status/1499371157790863369?s=21 47:27 Korean Exchanges https://twitter.com/ki_young_ju/status/1496995862010265600?s=21 49:11 Ebay Accepting Crypto https://www.thestreet.com/investing/ebay-considers-crypto-payments-already-accepts-nfts-ceo-says 49:54 MATIC Lido Staking https://twitter.com/LidoFinance/status/1498949232836988929 50:16 Consensys Drama https://twitter.com/evan_van_ness/status/1499024475970486279?s=21 52:10 Pixelmon Fail https://metaversal.banklesshq.com/p/the-pixelmon-nft-debacle 57:52 Treasure Exploit on Arbitrum https://www.theblockcrypto.com/linked/136143/treasure-marketplace-tells-users-to-delist-nfts-after-exploit 58:34 Kuiper Finance https://twitter.com/scott_lew_is/status/1498742697192050704?s=20&t=nw8jkP646_zFJr0g7jvtHw https://twitter.com/scott_lew_is/status/1498742697192050704?s=20&t=nw8jkP646_zFJr0g7jvtHw 59:34 Blitwear https://twitter.com/dhof/status/1498692101579714570 1:00:59 KPMG Buys World of Women https://twitter.com/KPMG_Canada/status/1498335705965203463?s=20&t=pakE_2RxF6JsktDbf-0yGQ https://twitter.com/KPMG_Canada/status/1498335705965203463?s=20&t=pakE_2RxF6JsktDbf-0yGQ 1:01:44 Japanese Rakuten NFT Marketplace https://news.bitcoin.com/japanese-online-retail-giant-rakuten-launches-nft-marketplace 1:02:47 Puma Cool Cat https://twitter.com/PUMA/status/1498825210757365763 1:03:25 Mfers Derivatives https://twitter.com/TrustlessState/status/1499424828268290051?s=20&t=gDF5kchQexMwETwVGbk6Qw https://twitter.com/TrustlessState/status/1499424828268290051?s=20&t=gDF5kchQexMwETwVGbk6Qw 1:06:36 Discord Grinding https://decrypt.co/94143/the-newest-crypto-side-hustle-discord-grinding 1:09:14 Arthur Hayes Pleads Guilty https://www.theblockcrypto.com/linked/135406/bitmex-co-founders-hayes-delo-plead-doj 1:11:12 Fractional NFT Security https://www.ledgerinsights.com/sec-probes-fractional-nfts-for-securities-infringements/ 1:13:42 Citadel Crypto https://www.theblockcrypto.com/linked/135864/griffin-says-fair-to-assume-that-citadel-will-be-market-making-in-crypto-in-months-to-come 1:16:00 TAKES 1:17:30 Web3 Won’t Rug You https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-startup-founder-littlethings-joe-speiser-2018-algorithm-change-2022-2 1:19:48 Annihilation https://twitter.com/CryptoHayes/status/1498811869926100992?s=20&t=kGdO4VQHrTP5vBSmELS7jg https://twitter.com/CryptoHayes/status/1498811869926100992?s=20&t=kGdO4VQHrTP5vBSmELS7jg 1:22:00 The Individual Has Power https://twitter.com/TrustlessState/status/1499167417678786560?s=20&t=yxH_Vk4fkCLdBL1mrymEYA https://twitter.com/TrustlessState/status/1499167417678786560?s=20&t=yxH_Vk4fkCLdBL1mrymEYA 1:24:54 NFTs and Identity https://twitter.com/Cooopahtroopa/status/1499090669654069248?s=20&t=OtUJn574SDQINCcVwpqOYA https://twitter.com/Cooopahtroopa/status/1499090669654069248?s=20&t=OtUJn574SDQINCcVwpqOYA 1:27:33 What David’s Excited About 1:29:50 What Ryan’s Excited About 1:31:58 MEME of the Week Moment of Zen https://twitter.com/randizuckerberg/status/1498425277734690816?s=20&t=QNIFJfc61RsTyYQJVKIZ9Q https://twitter.com/randizuckerberg/status/1498425277734690816?s=20&t=QNIFJfc61RsTyYQJVKIZ9Q ​ ----- Not financial or tax advice. Do your own research. See our investment disclosures here: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/bankless-disclosures

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

• 0:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Crypto just got real.

• 0:01David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 0:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like it got real on the geopolitical stage.

• 0:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  Hey, Bankless Nation. It is the first week of March. David, what time is it?

• 0:11David Hoffman?

  Oh, it's the Friday Bankless Weekly Roll-Up Time, Ryan, where we cover what just happened in the last week of crypto, which I say it every single week, was an insane week. But this one is an insane week for the first reasons of the first time. Sanction Week, I think, is what we're going to be, is going to be the theme of this week. But it's also Documentary Week, Ryan, because behind me, you actually can't see it, but there's two cameras coming out of the Infinite Garden Ethereum Documentary. So this particular weekly roll-up is going to be, components of it will be put into the Ethereum Documentary, which everyone is super excited about when it finally comes out.

• 0:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's crazy. I can't believe they're interested in this little podcast with you every week, David. But man, I feel like the theme is pretty fitting. You said sanction week, and I think the theme is as well. It's crypto just got real.

• 0:56David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 0:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like it got real on the geopolitical stage. People have asked us not to talk about geopolitics on Bankless, but like, how can we not?

• 1:05David Hoffman?

  Nonsensical, nonsensical.

• 1:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  We have to, we have to. At least we have to view all of this through the crypto lens. So that's what we're going to do, because who is in the middle of all of this? It's crypto. Crypto is straight in the middle of all of these sanctions, all of these bank freezes that are going on, and I think will continue to be for the rest of the 2020s.

• 1:22David Hoffman?

  That has always been the promise of crypto, is that it will one day enter the geopolitics stage. And so now that crypto has indeed done that, Bankless is now a geopolitics podcast.

• 1:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's a little scary.

• 1:35David Hoffman?

  It's a little scary.

• 1:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  When you say it like that, now I'm scared. Okay, forget everything I just said. This is just about crypto, not politics. Anyway.

• 1:42David Hoffman?

  We're going back to NFTs.

• 1:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  We're going to talk about some NFTs, but first we got to talk about weaponized banks, what that means. Some of the financial sanctions, the fallout from the Russian invasion of Ukraine, all the economic sanctions. We're going to talk about governments trying to make crypto exchanges comply to this.

• 2:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Shiver up my back, a little bit of a shiver. But all of this is also a decentralization stress test. There's reports of MetaMask blocking users from Venezuela this morning. Not quite true, but we'll talk about what is true as a result of this OpenSea as well. And then some good news, because we've got to throw in the good news. eBay talking about accepting crypto. That's a big deal. Crypto raising more in donations to Ukraine than the UN, the United Nations. Pretty impressive. Also, this Pixelmon phenomenon, David, you've got to catch me up on this. There's like this NFT meme character named Kevin.

• 2:38David Hoffman?

  Yeah, we have a new meme. We have a new meme out of a complete just flop of an NFT project. And now we have a meme called Kevin about it. We'll have to talk about that.

• 2:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  It gets weird. All right, before we do, got to talk about our friends at Opulus. They're doing something really cool for the crypto space. So you know how we say on Bankless, get a job in crypto, right? Well, sometimes that's hard. If you're working for a DAO, do they have health? Do they have benefits? Can they process payroll? Opulus can do all of those things for you. They are set up to work with the Web3 employer, the self sovereign contractor. And they provide health benefits, they provide payroll. David, what did I miss? What else do these guys do?

• 3:18David Hoffman?

  That's largely it. It's basically a collective of a DAO collective, helping workers work a self sovereign life. And so this is like sharing and getting better and better healthcare rates. The larger the collective grows. And if you sign up and get your payroll served to you by Opulus before May 1st, you get 1,000 bank tokens and 1,000 work tokens, which is the Opulus token. So, so, you know, a nice little carrot to get you to sign up for Opulus.

• 3:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  Nice incentives to come work in crypto. Pretty cool. All right, David, let's get to the markets, man. Bitcoin. Bitcoin this week.

• 3:52David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so listeners will remember the last time we were talking about markets, it was right during the depths of

• 3:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  We were red.

• 3:59David Hoffman?

  Yeah, it was red, because Russia had just invaded Ukraine. And so there's fear spooked the market. So that is the where we started last week at the low price of $36,000 Bitcoin. We have since climbed up to 42,200. We hit a high of 45,000 and now we're back down to 42,200. So up 14-ish percent on the week for Bitcoin.

• 4:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's kind of recovered, all right? So look at this dip. This is kind of the, you know, Putin invades Ukraine news, massive dip, you know, the next day. And now we're back up, back up to where we started. Is that the case?

• 4:36David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so like no one could really know exactly why or what the markets do. But like, you know, the dip happened right at the Russian invasion. So people got spooked about, you know, the potential of World War III. But I think the market turned around on the fact that like, global geopolitical currency tensions is probably a good thing for crypto. So that's kind of, I think, what's been happening the last seven days.

• 4:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  As sad as that is, there's definitely some truth to it. And we're going to get to that in the news section. But how about ETH? Did ETH have that kind of a recovery?

• 5:04David Hoffman?

  Yeah, definitely. Started the week at $2,450, right at the dip, the Ukraine dip. Hit a high of $3,050, but could not sustain, could not keep its head above water. Currently at $2,815.

• 5:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's funny, this week, and I think as a result of the bounce from the Ukraine dip, Bitcoin gained more than Ether. And I think this will show up when we take a look at the ETH to Bitcoin ratio. You could probably see it a little bit there. It's a little down on the week. Is that the case?

• 5:30David Hoffman?

  Yeah, it's down about 4% on the week. I think we were at 0.68 last week and now we're at 0.066. So down roughly 4%.

• 5:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  So Bitcoin received a bit more, I guess, tailwinds from the Ukraine bounce. And do you think there's a reason for that? Is just Bitcoin, people are fleeing their banking systems in Bitcoin a bit more than Ether at this point in time?

• 5:51David Hoffman?

  Yeah, one of my favorite quotes that I've heard is Bitcoin in times of war and Ethereum in times of peace. Bitcoin has global liquidity and global recognition. And so when Ukrainians and also Russians who are trying to escape the ruble or Ukrainians are trying to escape an invasion, they don't really go down the rabbit hole of like, which crypto do I buy? They just buy Bitcoin. Like, that's what they do.

• 6:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's got the brand recognition. That's what they do. Although I do, I do feel like Ether is underrated. As a, I guess we put it this way, a wartime coin because of DeFi.

• 6:25David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 6:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right? I mean, you could trade with it, you can lend with it, you can borrow with it. You can't do all of that with Bitcoin. I feel like it's underrated, but it doesn't have the brand recognition right now that Bitcoin does. So maybe that accounts for all of this.

• 6:37David Hoffman?

  Oh, gosh. Wow. Looking at that chart, the ETH BTC chart, Ryan, man, it is, you have that out since like December for the last three months. That is just down and to the right for three months in a row.

• 6:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, yeah, it's going down.

• 6:49David Hoffman?

  I don't like that.

• 6:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  But I mean, historically, it's, it's still looking pretty good on the, on the, what, on, let's see, the five year. It's looking pretty good.

• 6:57David Hoffman?

  Don't want it to go down anymore, though. There's, there's a floor coming.

• 7:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  We'll see. It's still early in 2022, and this year is totally surprised, I think, all of us. How about the bed index? That's a little bit more stable because you get Bitcoin, ETH, and DeFi, a third, a third, a third, all together. What does that look like on the week?

• 7:15David Hoffman?

  Yeah, it's roughly flat on the week. Started at $99, currently at $101, so up about 2%.

• 7:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Remove some of that volatility. It's nice. David, you know what? Coinbase had a record revenue week, quarter, excuse me, that they reported last week. The numbers even surprised analysts. Take a look at this. 2.5 billion in revenue last quarter.

• 7:37David Hoffman?

  Wow.

• 7:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  In Q4. Monthly active users swelled to 11.4 million. Analysts thought they were only going to hit 2 billion. They come in at 2.5 billion. Quite a surprise. Coinbase really, really chugging in the fourth quarter of last year.

• 7:53David Hoffman?

  And these stats do not include the signups that they got from the Super Bowl. So those stats are coming next quarter. So it's going to be interesting to see how they can follow through on this. And also, what also kind of happens from just crypto tailwinds from this whole like sanction conversation, like crypto, for better or for worse, is in the news. And so that's generally good for signups.

• 8:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  I would also say like they haven't even released their NFT platform, which they're planning to do at some point too. And they've got five, six, seven million early signups to that already too. So a lot of, lot of good things ahead for them. Also, a lot of good things ahead for the Ethereum network because we just hit a major milestone. 10 million ETH locked in the beacon chain. That's ETH staked. This is crazy to me. 10 million ETH. We're, we're just over a year later, a year from launch, aren't we? And we already have 10 million ETH locked up in this thing. It's just under 10%. What are your thoughts here?

• 8:49David Hoffman?

  Yeah, count it at 10% at the rate that it's currently climbing with more and more Ether locked. Yeah, 10, 10.1 million. I think 10% will be 11.8 million ish. And that's just crazy. Like 10% of the network in proof of stake, that is what you call a secure network. Like 10% of the total supply of ethers protecting the network. That's a lot.

• 9:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  Especially when it's worth how many billions?

• 9:14David Hoffman?

  Right. Yeah, exactly.

• 9:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Which is 10% worth.

• 9:16David Hoffman?

  Yeah. And that's, that's only at the pre-MEV level of ETH APR. So when the merge finally happens, all of the gas fees end up going, going to the stakers. And it's going to juice that APR up to something like, I think modestly 12 to 16%. Justin Drake, when we had his show with us modeling Ether ultrasound money, predicted something as high as 22%, depending, but that was when gas fees were like 300 Guay. So things change. But like, the point is, is when the merge happens, the incentive to stake is going to go from where it is at now at 5%, 4.9% APR, to something like 12 to 15%. So like, we are not even getting started yet with the reservation demand of Ether to stake to the proof of stake network.

• 9:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  Do you know what? That's so important. I think it warrants repeating. All right? What David just said there is the current APR when you stake your ETH is 4.9%. It's already got 10 in ETH terms. And you can't, by the way, you can't withdraw it right now. So it's a one-way ticket. All right? And people are doing this. 10 million ETH worth of, of individuals and stakers are doing this at a 4.9% rate. Post-merge, maybe this summer, pretty soon, months away.

• 10:29David Hoffman?

  TM.

• 10:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is gonna shoot up to like 12 to 15%.

• 10:34David Hoffman?

  In ETH terms.

• 10:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  In ETH terms, and I do think that's conservative. So what's gonna happen? It's gonna, you're gonna, big slurping effect, because it's gonna slurp out all of the ETH that was like, oh, I don't know if I want a one-way ticket to stake my ETH. I don't know if 4.9% APR is worth it, but like, is 10% worth it? Is 12% worth it? Like, post-merge, where there's a lot less risk? Oh, yeah. And so that's gonna just suck in a whole bunch of ETH supply. And when there is limited supply, but demand stays constant, what happens, David?

• 11:09David Hoffman?

  Uh, price goes up, Ryan. That's what happens.

• 11:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  You said it, not me.

• 11:14David Hoffman?

  Demand, demand number goes up. Uh, like, there's not much, like, floating supply of Ether on the secondary markets. Uh, and so like, imagine all this, the yield farmers out there, the stablecoin yield farmers that are scraping tooth and nail to try and break through 20% APY on their dollars. All of a sudden, they're gonna be able to get like 15% on their ETH in a risk-free, rug-pull-free way. Where are all those dollar farmer yield farmers? Like, the game changes when you can get ETH risk-free, ETH 15% APY. All those yield farmers are gonna take their dollars, and they're gonna buy ETH, and they're just gonna yield-farm the Ethereum network at a risk-free rate of 15% on your Ether. Like, this-

• 11:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  Don't say your friends at Bankless didn't tell you, because we've been telling you. It's, definitely. And, um, you know, the, the other thing about that is, um, I just think a lot of people aren't aware. Uh, they, they see that, well, okay, David, Ryan, people should know about this. How come ETH prices down this year, you know, so much? Like, that is macro-related, all right? That has nothing to do with the fundamentals of Ethereum at this point in time. The fundamentals are only getting stronger, okay? We are getting closer and closer to that execution date where the, uh, proof of work is gonna go away, and the proof of stake network is going to be dominant, and the merge is going to happen.

• 12:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  So, um, the risk is being boiled out of this asset class. The fundamentals are strong. Just because price is going down has nothing to do with the fundamentals of Ethereum. It's more to do with the macro landscape and buying opportunity?

• 12:52David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 12:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  I don't know. You guys decide.

• 12:54David Hoffman?

  The whole entire crypto industry just prices Ether alongside all the other things in the crypto industry: Bitcoin, Solana, Avalanche, Cardano. All these things are relatively priced to each other, when none of these networks have this coming for them. And this is the main difference between a smart contract, proof-of-sake network with actual blockspace demand, and literally everything else in this industry. Like, it is not priced in.

• 13:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  What more can we say? Well, speaking of opportunities, talk about the job opportunity in crypto, because our friend here, logicbeach.eith tweeted this out: "Okay, David and Ryan, I did it! I got a job in crypto. Please stop yelling at me now!" Okay, Logic Beach, we will stop yelling at you specifically.

• 13:35David Hoffman?

  This is not for you, Logic Beach, anymore. You can feel free to tune this part out.

• 13:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  But let's yell to everyone else. What do we want them to do, David?

• 13:42David Hoffman?

  We want them to get a job in crypto, is what we want them to do, which is why we have the Bankless Jobs Board, where we post all of the best jobs in crypto. Should I start reading these off, so Ryan can start dancing?

• 13:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  No, no, no, no. Stop, stop. You dance. Senior Product Manager at SuperRare. This is a feature job. That's a cool one. SuperRare, NFT platform. Senior Product Engineer at Moment Ranks. Community Manager, a Contractor at DYDX Foundation. Governance Growth Lead, DYDX Foundation. Business Operations and Finance Associate, DYDX. Marketing Associate, DYDX. We got a Head of Marketing at status.im. Operations Manager at MakerDAO. Lead Financial Analyst, Strategic Finance. I could go on. But we don't have time in the show to read all of these fantastic jobs. Do yourself a favor. Get a job in crypto. Stay tuned into the Bankless Job Boards at bankless.pallet.com/jobs, where you can find all that. We're

• 14:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  not going to stop yelling at you until you get a job, all right? This is not for Logic Beach, because he did the work.

• 14:41David Hoffman?

  Nice job, Logic Beach.

• 14:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  But for everyone else, we'll be back next week.

• 14:45David Hoffman?

  I wonder if they're gonna put that in the documentary.

• 14:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  I hope they do. Alright guys, we're gonna be back with the news of the week, but before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible.

• 14:56David Hoffman?

  Slingshot is a decentralized trading platform that combines the performance and ease of a centralized exchange with the openness and transparency of DeFi. Slingshot aggregates liquidity from all of DeFi in order to find the best price on thousands of crypto assets. Every token on Slingshot comes with a price chart and trade logs to give you insights into the market's activity in real time. Slingshot is available on Polygon, Arbitrum, and Optimism, saving you from the high gas fees and low transaction speeds of the Ethereum L1. There are no fees to trade on Slingshot, and any positive slippage is given to the users. Trading on Slingshot is a social experience. You can even set your chat avatar to your favorite NFT, or soon, a Slingshot 2099 NFT avatar. Once you bridge your assets to Polygon, Arbitrum, or Optimism, go to app.slingshot.finance to trade,

• 15:39David Hoffman?

  and use the chat box to share your trades with others, and find other tokens to ape into. Arbitrum is an Ethereum scaling solution that's going to completely change how we use DeFi and NFTs. Over 250 projects have already deployed on Arbitrum, and Arbitrum's DeFi and NFT ecosystems are growing rapidly. Arbitrum increases Ethereum's speed by orders of magnitude for a fraction of the cost of the average gas fee. When interacting with Arbitrum, you can get the performance of a centralized exchange while tapping into Ethereum's level of decentralization and security. If you're a developer who wants low gas fees and instant transactions for your users, visit developer offchainlabs.com to get started building your application on Arbitrum. If you're a user, keep an eye out for your favorite DeFi apps or NFT projects building on Arbitrum. Many of your favorite apps are already live, with many more coming over soon.

• 16:23David Hoffman?

  You can find these apps at portal.arbitrum.1, and you can bridge your assets over to Arbitrum using bridge.arbitrum.io in order to experience DeFi and NFTs the way it was always meant to be: fast, cheap, and friction-free. Gemini exchange has been my exchange of choice ever since I got into crypto. I use Gemini to both buy the dips and also manage my regular automatic monthly purchases of my preferred crypto asset. On Gemini, you'll find over 50 different cryptos, including many of the top DeFi and metaverse tokens like YFI and Axie Infinity. Using Gemini Earn, you can earn yield on your various cryptos, including 8% on the GUSD stablecoin. Gemini is available in all 50 states and more than 50 countries worldwide. So if you're looking to upgrade your crypto exchange,

• 17:06David Hoffman?

  sign up at Gemini with Gemini.com/goBanklist and get $15 of Bitcoin after you trade $100 or more within the first 30 days. That's Gemini.com/goBanklist.

• 17:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  Hey guys, we are back with the news of the week. We got to talk about weaponized banks. But before, just setting the context, this is crypto. I feel like this week crypto just entered the world stage of geopolitics. Okay, it had the world stage from a brand recognition perspective. I think the awareness of crypto really popped off in 2021. But now we're entering a different arena. We're entering the world stage. And I think this tweet from Eric Wall sums it up. Why don't you read it out, David?

• 17:47David Hoffman?

  Yeah, Eric says, this is the moment crypto leaves the basement and clashes with the real world. This is it right here today. We'll put this link in the show notes, but he just goes and puts all of the thread, the tweets from just major leaders of the world and just aggregates them. So Elizabeth Warren tweeting about how cryptocurrencies risk undermining the sanctions against Russia. Bloomberg talking about how the Biden administration is calling on some of the biggest digital currency exchanges to help ensure that Russian individuals and entities targeted by US sanctions aren't using crypto markets to get around them. And a tweet from a somebody from Ukraine receiving how or somebody from Russia about how the accounts of users were frozen in their Russian Federation

• 18:31David Hoffman?

  and Belarus. We have an individual, a Ukrainian individual, a tweet that we covered this Monday in the newsletter about how he says that he is physically safe in Kazakhstan, but his savings are gone and says that crypto is the only money that I still have today. I can safely say that without crypto Bitcoin Ether and NFTs it's going to save my life when he gets back home. So crypto is an influence in the global current events and we've seen it dabble in this before. But this is the moment where everyone is looking at how crypto would be involved if this happened closer closer to home closer to crypto. Russia didn't have crypto assets and it's not using crypto assets to escape sanctions.

• 19:14David Hoffman?

  But people are treating crypto as if they are, and that is the conversation that's being had right now.

• 19:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, and so we're about to break that down. I think the conversation really starts with with number one, this this weaponization of banks. And this is nothing new. Banks have been weaponized in the past, but I think this is the first time we've seen it weaponized on a geopolitical scale in in the way that it has been recently with with Russia. And of course, last week we talked about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. So we won't talk much more about that right now. I think we should pick up the story with the sanctioning of Russia. Because the EU, the US, many, many countries around the world are fairly unified in the sanctioning, the economic sanctioning

• 20:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  of Russia for its actions in Ukraine right now. And the first thing that they did was they swifted Russia.

• 20:09David Hoffman?

  Swifted.

• 20:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  What does this term swifted mean?

• 20:13David Hoffman?

  Yeah, the swift, the swift network is a payments network, a communications network between banks that allows the passaging of messages that ultimately relates ultimately concludes in the settling of money across banks. It's, I think it's more or less like the last line of defense of bank connected networks. And so it is, it's a global monetary payments network system. And if you're not connected to Swift, you're basically not connected to anything.

• 20:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's like Ethereum for TradFi.

• 20:40David Hoffman?

  More or less.

• 20:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  The existing banking system.

• 20:42David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 20:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  What they used to settle that connects all of them. And so what did they do here?

• 20:47David Hoffman?

  See, I love this quote, "In an unprecedented act of global sanctions coordination, the United States, the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Canada, and the European which is basically the executive branch of the EU have all agreed to expel Russian banks from the SWIFT payment networks except for a few Russian banks that receive money to pay for energy supplies towards Europe because Europe still needs Russian energy because they're kind of cold without it. So they so most Russian banks have gotten SWIFTed which means that the money inside of Russia is locked inside of Russia can't get out and the value of your money goes down when you can do less with it and so money that's stuck in Russia can't do stuff in the global stage so that money has become devalued which is a conversation we're about to get to.

• 21:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  So they no longer have a transmission network to pay for things to send funds everything like that. The second action I think is almost maybe bigger than the first.

• 21:41David Hoffman?

  A one-two punch where the second punch hits way harder.

• 21:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, so the second punch was this asset freezer. So the Central Bank of Russia apparently had assets in US and European banks over $600 billion worth of assets their money. These are foreign currency reserves. So a central bank has all sorts of different reserves. They keep gold on their balance sheet and Russia's no exception, but they also keep, you know, like the majority of their money is in foreign reserves. So they might have, you know, US treasuries, they might have dollars, they might have euros, they might have yen. Well, all of a huge chunk of these funds are actually in the US banking system.

• 22:24David Hoffman?

  Or within reach of it.

• 22:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Within reach of it and the US and the EU just shut it down. They didn't take it. They just froze it at this point in time. $640 billion of the Russian Russia Central Bank frozen. That's huge.

• 22:44David Hoffman?

  Yeah, and they did this with a statement saying that any individual or business or entity is no longer allowed to engage with the Central Bank of Russia. Once again isolating the Russian financial system, the Russian money system to basically only work inside of Russia and also Belarus.

• 23:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  You got to think like they probably Putin expected to be SWIFTed, but I'm not sure.

• 23:06David Hoffman?

  I don't think he did.

• 23:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  You don't think?

• 23:09David Hoffman?

  Oh, Swift did probably.

• 23:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  But the second thing.

• 23:12David Hoffman?

  I don't think. Russia has engaged in like what Putin has been calling like becoming sanction proof. And that means like having having these foreign reserves. This was a part of Putin's plan to become sanction proof, except it wasn't.

• 23:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  You forgot they could just press buttons on a keyboard and just be like, oh, sorry, you can no longer access this money.

• 23:33David Hoffman?

  Yeah, the details of how this works are kind of beyond me, but as it turns out, there was a huge Achilles heel in Putin's plan to become sanction proof. And now $640 billion, which in context is one third of the total crypto market cap. So one third of the entire crypto market cap is worth of value is being frozen away so in where Russia can't get it. And in addition to that, other Russian oligarchs are having their like mega yachts, which is basically a way to preserve wealth. Being frozen seized.

• 24:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Their NFTs.

• 24:05David Hoffman?

  Is there? Being seized in whatever port they really they reside in. So I heard a couple of stories of Germany freezing Russian or not freezing seizing Russian oligarchs mega yachts. Because it's basically like a sore value for them.

• 24:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right? So those two things happened, the one, two combo punch. And what were the results of this? First, we got to talk about Russia's currency. What happened there, David?

• 24:28David Hoffman?

  Yeah, kind of like I was alluding to earlier, when the Russian ruble, the currency of Russia that's getting locked inside of the Russian border. It can now no longer be used to buy stuff in the rest of the world. Therefore, its utility value as money goes down. It's literally worth less. It can do less things. And so we saw a at its peak, a devaluation of 40% in the Russian ruble inside of one day. So in terms of in real terms, all the Russian Russian citizens that had savings in the Russian ruble lost 40% of their savings and wealth in one, one day, just because of all the sanctions.

• 25:05David Hoffman?

  And you know, there's a lot of frustration out there because the sanctions are targeting Russian individuals, Russian citizens, when we're trying to sanction Putin. And so people are saying like, why are we, why are we? harming Russian individuals. Well, an answer for that, regardless of whether you think it's a good answer or a bad answer, is that causing social unrest in Russia is bad for Putin. Causing the people of Russia to be mad at their leadership is a sanction on Putin. So ultimately, it impacts Putin's choices at the end of the day, because his leadership ultimately comes down to do the oligarchs support him? Do the people of Russia support him? And if everyone is not supporting Putin, then, and we can influence that choice by devaluing the Russian ruble, then this is what sanctions do.

• 25:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  And yet, at the same time, there is a lot of pain on Russian citizens who aren't responsible for some of these actions as well. And, you know, we see actually that in the market as well with the Bitcoin ruble, daily volume going up.

• 26:06David Hoffman?

  You're gonna have to scroll over to see that last bar, Ryan.

• 26:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, let's see the last part.

• 26:09David Hoffman?

  Oh, for effect, wow.

• 26:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  So what's happening, it seems like, is the Russian people are trying to escape the ruble. They're trying to escape the collapse of their currency. And it's not, the currency is not just going down, I think, because of SWIFT sanctions. That's definitely part of it. Also, it no longer has as much backing from the Russian Central Bank. You know, $640 billion in assets just kind of frozen in time. And so that is resulting in the ruble going down. But people are buying Bitcoin. They're fleeing their currency and they're buying Bitcoin as a result. And you can see this in the charts.

• 26:45David Hoffman?

  Yeah, that was the volume chart, the volume between the Russian ruble and the Bitcoin, a huge spike in volume, right as people started to flee the ruble. Another reason why the ruble is going down in value is because everyone's selling it. Everyone's selling the ruble and they're buying Bitcoin at an insane premium. We saw Bitcoin being priced up to $20,000 higher than it is in the rest of the world, because that's how badly people who own the Russian ruble are selling their ruble to pay for super expensive Bitcoins, because they want to get out. They need the Bitcoin escape hatch. And so they're paying an insane premium because they are fleeing the ruble.

• 27:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's not only Russians either. It's also Ukrainians that are fleeing their local currencies to buy cryptocurrency as well. So this headline is Ukrainians buy record sums of Bitcoin on Binance after the Russian invasion. So what's happening on the Ukrainian side, David? It seems like the same thing.

• 27:43David Hoffman?

  Yeah, well, so that's because this isn't sides, right? This is the Russian nation state. This is Putin invading another nation state, Ukraine. And then we have the individuals of both Russia and Ukraine exhibiting the same behaviors, kind of showing the differences between large institutions and small individuals. Small individuals are being scared about the value of their fiat currencies. And so they are buying Bitcoin. Regardless of whether it's a Ukrainian citizen or a Russian citizen, people are being scared out of their fiat currencies and they're using Bitcoin as a way to escape the choices that nation states are making.

• 28:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  I do want to get back to this tweet that we were alluding to from a Ukrainian who says this, "My Ukrainian credit cards don't work anymore." So picture yourself, you're a citizen of Ukraine. Things are falling apart, obviously.

• 28:33David Hoffman?

  You've left your home.

• 28:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  You've left your home. You're looking for somewhere safe potentially. That's the position this individual finds himself in. He says, "My Ukrainian credit cards don't work anymore. I'm safe physically in Kazakhstan, must have gotten over the border, but all my savings are gone. Anything you kept in your bank account, gone. Crypto is the only money I still have. And today I can say without exaggeration that Bitcoin, Ether and NFTs are going to save my life while I can't come back home." Individual fleeing his country with his crypto assets. Can't take anything else with him except his crypto assets. This is why crypto is a technology and is a money system for the people,

• 29:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  regardless of what nation states do, right? Whether you're a Russian citizen or Ukrainian citizen, you're trying to get out of this mess. You need this escape hatch, this pressure release valve. And that's what the Ukrainian people and the Russian people are using crypto for right now.

• 29:35David Hoffman?

  Especially during times of war, the form factor of how you hold crypto assets becomes incredibly important. Being able to hold a ledger inside of your fist and being able to move around the world like that and having all of your savings go with you is great. You can also memorize the 12 words of your seed phrase in your brain. So you don't even have to hold anything and doesn't matter where you are in the world. Your savings are in your head. This is technology that always enables the individual most, more than it does institutions.

• 30:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's amazing. You have an internet connection. You have your assets. That's all there is to it. And you can move them anywhere in the world. Let's talk about maybe the second story.

• 30:13David Hoffman?

  The other half of the story, yeah.

• 30:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right. So the first part is nation states sanctioning other nation states, in particular Russia, at this point in time. Now, the US Treasury, and I think, you know, Western nation states are trying to bring these sanctions to crypto. They want the same banking rules to apply to crypto. So if they can sanction American banks from interacting with Russian citizens or the economy of the Russian Federation, then they also want it to apply to crypto exchanges as well. So here, the US Treasury is formally asking crypto

• 30:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  rules, formally adding crypto rules to Russian sanctions guidance. And they are asking crypto exchanges to block sanctioned individuals regardless of where they're headquartered. A lot of this practically looks like a block of anyone who has a Russian passport, a passport from Russia. So they're asking the Krakens of the world, the Geminis of the world, Binance, Coinbase.

• 31:18David Hoffman?

  We have KYC'd all their customers.

• 31:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes. If you have someone from Russia on your platform.

• 31:23David Hoffman?

  Axe.

• 31:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  Deactivate it. Get them out of here, like censor them, stop them. So that has been an ask. I don't think it's enforceable yet, but you have to wonder at what point this will become executive order and enforceable. So what's happening now, David? You know, what are the exchanges? How are they reacting from this ask of the US government?

• 31:47David Hoffman?

  Yeah, generally, the theme is that exchanges have declined to do this. Both Binance and Coinbase have publicly stated that they will not block Russian users or Russian IP addresses despite the requests of the Ukrainian government and also the United States sanctions. So this is one of the reasons why crypto is in the main stage is that crypto exchanges are not, they aren't required to comply. They have been asked to comply because they are not regulated under the same format as like the United States bank banking system because they're not banks. And so it's only a request to comply and Binance and Coinbase have said that we are not doing that. Coinbase, Coinbase hasn't said that they will not do that forever.

• 32:29David Hoffman?

  They, there's a row that Coinbase has given out for itself that it could comply in the future, but as of right now, they are not. And, you know, and to talk about, one of the, but Binance tweeted, "We will not be freezing Russian users' bank accounts because it goes against the ethos of cryptocurrency." Yeah, here, here's the Blockworks tweet saying this. And I take, I take this point, but also the founding principles of crypto are for the crypto networks of which Binance is not. Neither is Coinbase. Coinbase is a centralized entity. Binance is a centralized entity. You have to expect these things to receive the regulatory pressures of the United States. And what has the foundational principles of crypto is crypto.

• 33:12David Hoffman?

  And so like the self-sovereign, censorship-resistant, seizing-resistant crypto assets can be expressed by individuals by removing their money from Coinbase and Binance and offering and taking self-custody because that is where you get all the beneficial properties of crypto. I don't necessarily think it's the job of these centralized exchanges to exhibit and express the values and properties of the crypto. To networks themselves, especially when people like Brian Armstrong and people at Coinbase can go to jail for not complying with regulations. And so we're not, maybe we're not there yet, but we have to remember that if you're a centralized entity, you are going to become regulated.

• 33:50David Hoffman?

  And so I don't think the banner of just like, we get to hide behind the values of crypto works if you have an address with your office, your office addresses on it.

• 34:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I think it's very laudable that the exchanges are resisting this. Number one, that's great. I mean, they are, they are embracing crypto values. But you have to ask yourself, how long will they practically be able to resist this? And the answer to that is not long. I mean, the SEC sent Coinbase's stern letter and said, don't, don't release your lend product. And they didn't release their lend product, right? When like the full authority of the US government starts to ask you to do something, sanction a particular set of individuals, for instance, you can bet all of these exchanges will have to do it. They'll have to. And that puts us in a, in a bad place. But I guess my tweet, like my take on this is similar to yours. I tweet this out, David.

• 34:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  I'm grateful some crypto exchanges are trying to resist the shutdown of all Russian citizen accounts. That's noble, but that's not the point of crypto. If we're building a banking system that can be shut down, it will be shut down. We need DeFi, not crypto banks, bankless. That's what we need. This is the reason for DeFi. This is the reason that Bitcoin and crypto banks aren't enough. This is the reason we need decentralized banking services so that we're not put in this place.

• 35:14David Hoffman?

  All of a sudden, the things that we've just been saying over and over and over again for the last like two years make a lot of sense right now.

• 35:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's what, that's what I'm saying. What does Jake Trivinsky say about this? I haven't read this tweet yet.

• 35:27David Hoffman?

  So this is a really important point. This is Jake Trivinsky, esteemed lawyer in the crypto space. Russia isn't using crypto to evade sanctions. It has shown no interest in trying to use crypto to evade sanctions. And crypto couldn't use crypto to evade sanctions even if it wanted. We'll talk about that point later. Russia is using gold. To evade sanctions, however, Russia has been stockpiling gold for like a decade now. And then Jake finished his saying, but policymakers want to talk about new regulations for crypto. And so this is a really interesting point. This crypto is in the conversation, but not actually in the actions of the world at the present moment, other than the individuals protecting themselves from the devaluation of nation-state currencies.

• 36:11David Hoffman?

  That's the only time we have seen crypto being used that's relevant to Ukraine. There's no, there's no actual actions that we see anyone taking to evade sanctions using cryptocurrency. There's zero evidence for this.

• 36:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  There's no evidence.

• 36:24David Hoffman?

  In the conversation.

• 36:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  You're saying there's no evidence that Putin is using AVE to like, you know, take out a loan for himself and try to.

• 36:31David Hoffman?

  We're gonna, I'm gonna come back to this point a number of times, but there's a reason why I talked about how the 560 billion dollars of crypto, or 630 billion dollars of crypto of, of assets that were frozen by the banking system of, by freezing the central bank of Russia. Like I said that that is one third of the crypto market cap. Like Putin cannot use tornado cash to evade sanctions with 630 billion dollars. Like you cannot hide or route around sanctions using one third of the crypto market cap.

• 37:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think Chainalysis is gonna figure that one out.

• 37:06David Hoffman?

  Really, really easily.

• 37:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, you know, we're gonna get back on this thread of, you know, how, how crypto and geopolitics and sanctions are affecting this, the world. But maybe a quick detour here and some good news, because it's nice to have good news. The good news is the crypto community really rallied around the people of Ukraine, who are obviously going through a devastating time right now. Can you talk about a few of the things that the crypto community is doing right now? We said in the intro that the crypto has now raised more funds than the UN, which is pretty cool.

• 37:40David Hoffman?

  Buy a lot.

• 37:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  Let's talk about a few of these mechanisms. So what's this first one, Ukraine Dow?

• 37:44David Hoffman?

  Yeah, Ukraine Dow spun up by Nadia from Pussy Riot, who has received her own oppression from Putin for, by making anti-authoritarian, anti-Putin statements with her, with her band Pussy Riot, has started the. Ukraine Dow and Ukraine Dow I think has raised something like oh gosh like the last I checked it was $5 million it might be way more than that actually. But literally just a single JPEG of the Ukrainian flag. It's a square JPEG, blue on top, yellow on the bottom. That JPEG is has a party bid, a collective party bid for I think $5 million last I checked. It might be way hard. Can you click that party bid link around just to get my numbers right?

• 38:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Which one?

• 38:23David Hoffman?

  Down a little bit, just below the join discord. There you go. And so party bid is basically a way to collectively bid on a single NFT with all of your friends. And okay, that just sent you to the discord. Anyways, the last I checked it was like $5 million. And so this is on the air of like on the tailwinds of Constitution Dow where we figured out that DAOs can just be collecting funneling money into a specific purpose. And so this Ukraine Dow spun up really, really fast and collected a bunch of money.

• 38:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  By the way, if you want to hear more about this, on overpriced JPEGs this week, Carly had Nadia from Ukraine Dow and from Pussy Riot on on the show. So that's on the bankless YouTube. You can click on that and check that out now. Another thing that happened is the actual Ukrainian government put out some links, links to their Bitcoin and Ethereum wallet for fundraising. And they received nearly $10 million in crypto donations at this point in time. That that number might be outdated a little bit too. But the crypto community has really rallied around this. This is Hayden from Uniswap tweeting out, there is a new interface donate.uniswap.org

• 39:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  where you can actually take any ERC token that you have and deposit it and convert it directly into the funds that the Ukrainian government wants to wants to receive. So it's a one click donation in an interface, which is pretty cool to see.

• 39:49David Hoffman?

  And this is Ukraine Dow did raise $6 million from a party bid. That's confirmed.

• 39:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  There you go. That's awesome. And this is a tweet from Kyla about the UN thing, David. What's this?

• 39:59David Hoffman?

  Yeah, this is where we got this headline. And again, this was March 1st, so three days ago. And Kyla says, "Pretty incredible that as of right now, the UN and crypto has pledged the same amount of money towards Ukraine." And that was three days ago, where we were matched with $20 million from the UN and $20 million from crypto. And now crypto is up to $50 million. So two and a half times what the United Nations has donated to the Ukraine, crypto has raised in four days. Insane.

• 40:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's pretty awesome. I'm proud of that. I'm very excited about that.

• 40:32David Hoffman?

  Let's think about the name, "United Nations." What about just united people of Planet Earth? Because that's what's going on behind Ukraine Dow. That's what's putting money into Ukraine, is the united people of Planet Earth.

• 40:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  Absolutely. Yeah, we don't necessarily need an institution to donate through. Let's talk about this too. So this is the Ukraine tweet. These are the actual wallets, Bitcoin and Ether. It's super cool. So the Ukrainian government has an Ethereum address. You can look up on EtherScan and you can see what they're holding, the donations that have come in. This looks like $2.2 million in Tether, $1 million in DAI, 180k worth of USDC.

• 41:16David Hoffman?

  But most importantly, 1,500 Ether, clocking in at $4.2 million. So $4.2 million of Ether and basically $3 million of stable coins, sent directly to the Ukraine Dow. No, not Ukraine Dow, just straight up the Ukrainian government.

• 41:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, this is their wallet. And it's just amazing. You can look up a government's public wallet on EtherScan.

• 41:38David Hoffman?

  People are sending them NFTs. That's so funny.

• 41:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  Look at this, Shiba NFTs, McDonald's NFTs.

• 41:42David Hoffman?

  They have no idea what they're doing.

• 41:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  God knows what else is in here. Yeah, well, there was also, so there's also talk, the story continues of an airdrop.

• 41:49David Hoffman?

  Before we go there, just also $10 million is in Bitcoin, is in the Bitcoin address as well.

• 41:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's fantastic.

• 41:55David Hoffman?

  Lots of Bitcoin, lots of Bitcoin.

• 41:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's fantastic. So what was with this airdrop, though? So I think the Ukrainian government as well tweeted out, "Airdrop confirmed snapshot will be taken tomorrow", basically implying if you've donated to the Ukrainian wallets so far, they were going to airdrop something, something good, you'd presume. That came out on March 1st, so just a day ago as of recording. And then take us from there, it sounds like people were expecting an airdrop.

• 42:24David Hoffman?

  You say the word airdrop and the crypto community comes flocking. And so you can literally see when the airdrop gets announced and the ETH donations per hour just rockets off the chart. And so like, you know, there was, there were some takes about how like the, before the airdrop announcement, like all these people were just donating via altruism. And then post the airdrop announcement, people were donating because of greed, like they wanted, wanted the airdrop. But that's, I think that's kind of a nihilist take. My take on that is people were donating for altruism before the promise of the airdrop. And then after the promise of the airdrop, the airdrop was just like the nudge, the carrot, to get a lot of people who do care about Ukraine, that's why they were sending them money. They just need a little bit of a carrot, just need a carrot to get over the edge.

• 43:07David Hoffman?

  And that's the power of Ethereum and incentives. Like we can create governance tools, we can create incentives, we can mechanism design our way into the outcomes that we want. And if all that you need is like the promise of an airdrop to donate millions of dollars to Ukraine, airdrops are great.

• 43:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  Except it turned out everyone had to be altruistic after all, because then the Ukrainian government tweeted out, "After careful consideration, we decided to cancel the airdrop. Every day, there are more and more people willing to help Ukraine to fight back against the aggression. Instead, they're going to do an NFT to support the Ukrainian armed forces soon." Maybe they didn't fully think through the airdrop before they tweeted in the excitement and now they thought about it.

• 43:50David Hoffman?

  I don't think they have an airdrop roadmap.

• 43:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right, so they thought about it and there's going to be no airdrop. So everyone turned into altruists after all, David, so that's optimistic, great.

• 44:00David Hoffman?

  The joke I heard is that the SEC came down on Ukraine and said, "Hey, you guys can't do an airdrop."

• 44:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  Gary Gensler, wow. Well, you had a take about this too. Why don't you tell us what your take is here?

• 44:12David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so this is me retreating Eric Connors $40 million donated to Ukraine on Ethereum thus far. And so like, when we usually donate money to crises like this, it's usually done via things like Red Cross or through like humanitarian routes. And humanitarian donated money is earmarked to only be for certain things like food, medical supplies, shelter, clothing. This has no such contingencies. We are donating $50 million straight into the hands of the Ukrainian government. They can go buy bombs. That's probably what they're buying with it. So like, the individuals of the world are now responsible for like weapons financing at the nation-state level. Like, the Ukrainian government can do whatever they want with this money.

• 44:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's scary. Don't you think that's scary?

• 44:57David Hoffman?

  Super scary.

• 44:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  Is that kind of sobering to you?

• 44:59David Hoffman?

  Super scary, yeah, right. Like, we talk about how private keys in crypto puts power in the hands of individuals. One of these powers is having to consider the ethics of global, like, weapons financing at the nation-state level. Like, we saw the error that the United States made when we financed and just weaponized, who was it? Saddam Hussein?

• 45:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Many world governments over the years, I would say.

• 45:23David Hoffman?

  Right. And then it comes back to bite us in the ass later. And like, now we're putting money in the hands of Ukraine so they can go buy weapons so they can defend themselves. Like, this is now something that individuals have to consider when they send money.

• 45:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Careful with your new power. Careful with your new power, crypto people, for sure. So what's happening with OpenSea?

• 45:43David Hoffman?

  Yeah, well, OpenSea's never pretended to be DeFi, but they call themselves Web 2.5, which I agree with. Somebody on Twitter says, "I woke up to my OpenSea trading account being deactivated slash deleted without notice or explanation. Hearing lots of similar reports from other Iranian artists and collectors. What the hell is going on? Is OpenSea straight up purging its users based on their country now?" So this is still unfolding. This again happened this morning. Interesting timing that this is happening right next to MetaMask and censoring Venezuela while we're having this global conversation about crypto and sanctions. Like, weird timing. I think we kind of need to wait for the dust to settle on this one, because this is, I

• 46:25David Hoffman?

  don't know how much more other Iranian artists and OpenSea users have reported this, but, you know, here's another one.

• 46:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  I do feel like there are some lawmakers and those in power in governments who are out for blood and sort of using sanctions in Russia and these sorts of things as an excuse to tighten things up on the crypto side of things. Here's kind of a question I would pose to everyone. If you're looking at this stuff and you're saying like, oh, wow, there's still, you know, centralization vectors in crypto. I just got to say, like, if crypto doesn't work, where else do we go? Like, what other option do we have? I think you're muted, David.

• 47:05David Hoffman?

  I just didn't, I didn't, I don't have an answer for you, right?

• 47:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  You're speechless.

• 47:08David Hoffman?

  Speechless, yeah, I got nothing.

• 47:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  He wasn't muted, he was speechless.

• 47:11David Hoffman?

  Do I have, I just hold my crypto, my crypto, my dollars in my Wells Fargo and I just wait for the government to just bully me around.

• 47:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right? I mean, you can, you can critique it and say it's not decentralized enough, or you can like jump in and help us make this entire space more decentralized. Here's another example.

• 47:28David Hoffman?

  God, this was the worst.

• 47:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  The largest crypto exchange in Korea is now stopping the withdrawals to non-custodial wallets in global exchanges. After March 25th, all Korean exchanges only allow transacting between Korean exchanges, not Metamask, not another exchange like Binance. It's just a closed system.

• 47:52David Hoffman?

  It's a closed system. If you own Ether or Bitcoin on a Korean exchange and you can't withdraw it to a self-custodial wallet, a wallet that you own, what's the point? You don't actually have it. You're just like, it's just this paper thing, this fake thing that you're trading that allegedly, like, they could just like send all of the Ether outbound and you could still trade on the centralized exchange without anything actually being there. It wouldn't actually matter. Like, if you can't withdraw it, it's not crypto.

• 48:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is apparently from, resulting from some government regulation. The tweet here is, "The Korean government says I'm going to prohibit withdrawals from Korean exchanges to non-KYC wallets like Metamask by March 2022." And that's what they're doing. This is what's happening right now. I need to, uh... To follow the story, it's impossible to follow everything that's going on in every single country around the world, but it seems like things are getting stress tested to infinity. Go bankless while you still can.

• 48:49David Hoffman?

  Yeah, like get your money off of extensive exchange. If you know how to safely and securely store your money in a self sovereign way and with, you know, manage your private keys appropriately, you have a hardware wallet, you should probably do it. It's time. It's the right decade to do it.

• 49:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  And if you don't know, you should also be figuring that out like right now.

• 49:08David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 49:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's the right decade to have that skill set.

• 49:10David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 49:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, let's move on. This is the decentralization stress test. Some happy stuff. eBay talking about taking crypto payments. They already accept NFTs. They want to get in with Gen Z's and millennials. And to do that, they want to take the leap to start accepting cryptocurrencies. So I guess this is an announcement that they're going to be doing this in the future. They haven't started yet. It's pretty big. This is one of the like the OG web 1.0 marketplaces and them accepting cryptocurrency would be a big deal, I think.

• 49:43David Hoffman?

  Yeah, an announcement, evident announcement, but you know, we like it. I wonder what the stock price did. Ooh, down 2%. Unrelated, couldn't have been us.

• 49:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Couldn't have been related at all. What's this, David? Lido.

• 49:57David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 49:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  What are they doing? Some staking?

• 49:58David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so Matic Network is a proof of stake network. Lido is a proof of stake delegated staking network. And now you can stake your Matic as if you were a validator inside of Lido and start earning Matic rewards. And so Matic staking via Lido, now a thing.

• 50:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  There you go. There's also been some consensus drama this week, David. I haven't had time to dig into the drama. Have you touched it a little bit?

• 50:23David Hoffman?

  Yes, I know enough to talk about this.

• 50:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, what's happening?

• 50:26David Hoffman?

  Interesting juicy story. So there are many shareholders of consensus, people that own equity in the company. And you know, consensus owns a lot of things, right? It owns MetaMask.

• 50:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Fura.

• 50:38David Hoffman?

  It owns Fura, right? And there is a report going out that under Swiss law, where I think consensus is made. That key assets and IP that Consensus owns was sent to a new version of Consensus, like a different LLC, a different company. And so MetaMask and Infura were secretly given away to a JP Morgan-backed entity via what is claimed to be an illegal transaction. And so basically, Consensus sold or gave some of what they owned to a new company that is also owned by Joseph Lubin. So Joseph Lubin just spun up another company. So read

• 51:19David Hoffman?

  the report to get all the details on this. Spun up another company and gave MetaMask and Infura to that company. And he owns a larger share of that new company, along with a few other people from JP Morgan, which has left the rest of Consensus and all the shareholders of Consensus that have been with Consensus since like 2015, feeling very rug pulled. And so they took them to court. And I think from what I've gathered is they're probably going to win that case. Multi-billion dollar audit. And Consensus does not want to be audited because in the early days of Consensus, they played employees with Bitcoin, which they didn't account for. And so like, you actually can't really audit Consensus because it's not, there's nothing there for like the first like two years of its life. Anyways, Consensus is a little bit of a mess.

• 52:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  I'm sure it'll get figured out.

• 52:06David Hoffman?

  Yeah, we'll hope, we'll hope.

• 52:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  There's got to be some resolution in sight. I don't think there's any resolution for this on the NFT side, though. Pixelmon?

• 52:15David Hoffman?

  This one is dead. So here's the Pixelmon website, which is a very good-looking website with this very awesome pixelated animation 3D character. Pixelmon kind of gives you an allusion to some sort of Pokemon-type pixel game. Pretty fun, right?

• 52:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's amazing. I want to buy, how do I buy?

• 52:31David Hoffman?

  How do I buy? Well, once, a while ago, it's too late, Ryan, they raised $70 million to build out what is, I'm guessing, some sort of virtual pixel NFT crypto game, kind of like Pokemon Go, perhaps, I guess. And they raised $70 million on like this pre-sale to buy these Pixelmons, these characters. And so the game got released. And once again, people are feeling just a little bit rug pulled.

• 52:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wait, it wasn't a $70 million game?

• 52:57David Hoffman?

  It was not. It does not look like a $70 million game. In fact, it looks like a bunch of carbon copies and forks from other games. Oh my God. So here's this, this, this Pixelmon art. The first one that got revealed is so terrible that it's turned into a meme. Kevin is now considered a historical NFT because of how bad it is.

• 53:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  This has got to be the worst NFT I've ever seen in my life.

• 53:21David Hoffman?

  Worse than your turtle?

• 53:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  Come on, David. Turtles are cute. This, there's nothing redeemable about this. I don't know what it is. Is it some kind of a lizard with a pink, like, I don't know, side ponytail?

• 53:34David Hoffman?

  It's a Pixelmon, Ryan. It's a Pixelmon. For the listeners, it's really ugly.

• 53:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, so people were expecting something?

• 53:42David Hoffman?

  Not only were they expecting like a world with like landscapes and like, you know, area. They get these like very, very shoddy fake weird pixel characters that don't look good at all inside of this like generic grassland with no indication that these things do anything.

• 54:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  You know, the shame of it, and if you want the full story here, William Peaster does a fantastic job on Metaverse. We'll include a link in the show notes. The shame of it, it was, they, they were aggressively hyping this project, the makers of this project, Cyber. In, in December 2021, the founder said, "Pixelmon, Pixelmon is the next blue chip." This is financial advice. Don't do your own research.

• 54:21David Hoffman?

  Whoa.

• 54:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, that's kind of a red flag for me, but, um, look, people ape in.

• 54:27David Hoffman?

  When people shill, their, their thing is like, oh, it's going to be the next thing. And they put a lot of energy and, and effort into marketing and promoting. And perhaps they're not putting that same energy into actually developing. That should be a red flag.

• 54:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's when you know. That's when you know. And the question, I think, for, for the community is, um, you know, was this intentional? Like, was this an intentional rug pull? Or was this just? Really incompetent execution.

• 54:56David Hoffman?

  I think people have come to the conclusion that it's closer to an intentional rug pull. Because the Pixelmon characters, there is a Minecraft mod called Pixelmon. And they are thinking that they have just taken 3D stock models ripping off of this actual Pixelmon Minecraft mod. And then allegedly hired somebody from Upwork for a very small price to just do some very basic work. So I think what happened, if this guy has any brains, is he did the minimum amount of work to not be considered a scam. But it's still a scam, right? Like, he did the work, there is a game, there are Pixelmons out there, you can trade them.

• 55:38David Hoffman?

  It is a complete flop, the game did not meet expectations, everyone feels scammed, yet technically, he delivered.

• 55:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  You know what, though? Like, this is the part in time where it's like that one guy ruins it for everybody else.

• 55:53David Hoffman?

  That's right.

• 55:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  Because this is gonna cause lawsuits, I would imagine, or it could.

• 55:59David Hoffman?

  Rightly so.

• 56:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  It will be a case study for Elizabeth Warren to be able to say, "This is exactly everything that's wrong with crypto."

• 56:07David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 56:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  $70 million, investors got ripped off, and this is why we need the SEC to gatekeep everything that you guys do.

• 56:17David Hoffman?

  Giving Elizabeth Warren so much ammo.

• 56:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  So much ammo, shadowy, super NFT-ers.

• 56:23David Hoffman?

  The guy is Anon, right? His name's Cyber, that can't be his real name. Instead of returning the funds to minters, the Pixelmon dev wallet spent hundreds of ETH on other NFTs like Bored Apes, Azukis, and others. Cyber has a history of failed Kickstarter's. Kickstarter's like, "You can do scams on Kickstarter's."

• 56:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Sad.

• 56:42David Hoffman?

  This sounds like a serial scammer.

• 56:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  You know, the one thing we get out of it, though, David, is Kevin.

• 56:48David Hoffman?

  We do get Kevin.

• 56:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  For what that's worth. Some people actually think this meme is like, Kevin and this Pixelmon is so bad that it's actually going to be valuable.

• 56:58David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 56:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Over time, because it's become a cultural artifact. What do you think? You think that's...

• 57:02David Hoffman?

  It's on the trajectory. Congrats, crypto industry, we have a new meme.

• 57:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  Would you buy Kevin?

• 57:10David Hoffman?

  I don't, probably not.

• 57:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I'm definitely, I would definitely not buy Kevin.

• 57:14David Hoffman?

  Sorry, sorry Kevin.

• 57:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  But we're talking about it.

• 57:18David Hoffman?

  Sorry, all Kevin's out there.

• 57:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  So it's getting more airtime. That's what they want. All right, let's talk about an exploit that happened on Arbitrum. Again, NFT news here.

• 57:28David Hoffman?

  That's more Pixelmon stuff.

• 57:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 57:30David Hoffman?

  These are all the ugly Pixelmons.

• 57:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  Sorry, can't stop. I gotta look at this guy again.

• 57:35David Hoffman?

  Okay, so here's Kevin in the Pixelmon universe, and then here's the actual Pixelmon, like Minecraft mod, which was like, what was used more or less to market the whole Pixelmon thing. Like, yeah, like that looks like a $70 million game.

• 57:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, that's okay. I'd buy that. I wouldn't buy these things. All right, what happened with Treasure on Arbitrum? There was an exploit.

• 57:55David Hoffman?

  Yeah, Treasure, the NFT ecosystem marketplace on Arbitrum has been exploited. The details of this are currently unfolding. The exploiter has been able to force NFT listers on Arbitrum to sell them their NFTs for $0, basically. And they've taken a number of different NFTs, I think over 100 now at this point. So if you have NFTs listed on Treasure, you might want to go check that out, make sure you're okay. Sorry if you're not. I don't know how pervasive this is. People are still trying to figure out what's going on and how this exploit happened. But as of now, the Treasure marketplace is not necessarily considered to be safe.

• 58:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, take that into account. Also, a release this week, a Scolera NFT index on Kuiper Finance. Kuiper Finance was that new index protocol that we talked about a couple of weeks ago in the releases section. Now there is an NFT index where you can get exposure to blue chip NFTs that has just been deployed on it. So that means basically you buy a token and you get exposure to a basket of NFTs, at least price exposure to that. Kind of cool to see that. That's coming out of DeFi Pulse. Any other thoughts on that?

• 59:05David Hoffman?

  Yeah, we've seen NFT indexes before from NFTX and a few others. Also, Bitwise has their blue chip NFT products, which doesn't have too much demand for it. As you can imagine, boomers aren't really ready to buy Fidensas. But I believe in Scott as a builder and I think Kyprofannius has the potential to be something very cool, so I'm optimistic.

• 59:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it's very cool. I think we need more DeFi and NFT index products as well. What about this? Do we need more digital, digital streetwear, digital clothing?

• 59:39David Hoffman?

  This is, I know, this is, this is real. This is real clothing, isn't it?

• 59:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, this is real?

• 59:43David Hoffman?

  This is, this is Dom, the guy behind the Loot phenomenon. If you guys remember Loot. There are, there's this cool new website, blitware.com, that allows you to mint an NFT and also receive an actual jacket of the same like pattern, the geometric pattern of your NFT.

• 1:00:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, that's awesome.

• 1:00:02David Hoffman?

  So, real world, physical world, virtual, virtual world, metaverse world, pairings behind your NFT and your jacket.

• 1:00:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  How much are these things?

• 1:00:11David Hoffman?

  I don't know. You're gonna, you're gonna get one?

• 1:00:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  Nah, I mean, like, what would I, what would I do? An MF'er? A turtle? What'd I do?

• 1:00:17David Hoffman?

  No, I don't think you get to put your own NFT there. I think that like each jacket has its own pattern and that's what the NFT is.

• 1:00:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:00:25David Hoffman?

  Listeners would probably, if they are interested, they should probably go research more. Each blitware will be auctioned off as a one of one NFT of the design.

• 1:00:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  I see.

• 1:00:32David Hoffman?

  The winner, the winner of the piece will be able to redeem the NFT for a bespoke one of one matching physical garment custom made to their size requirement. Okay, so those are the details. We even had them in our note. I forgot to read them.

• 1:00:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  I can't, you know what? I kinda want my NFT though. I'm gonna wait on this.

• 1:00:45David Hoffman?

  Yeah?

• 1:00:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I wanna, I like want my own NFT on my clothes. That's what I want.

• 1:00:50David Hoffman?

  You'd have to buy an NFT first, Ryan.

• 1:00:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Dude, I have some NFTs, okay? All right? I'm not a nobody in NFT circles.

• 1:00:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  What about World of Women?

• 1:01:00David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  KPMG, this is an interesting pairing.

• 1:01:03David Hoffman?

  Yeah, KPMG decided to purchase a World of Women NFT. So they tweeted out, "We completed the purchase of digital art from the highly acclaimed World of Women non-fungible token community."

• 1:01:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's awesome.

• 1:01:14David Hoffman?

  Yeah, a lovely, lovely World of Women NFT. Very nice.

• 1:01:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, that's very cool.

• 1:01:18David Hoffman?

  I like the earrings. Now, inside of KPMG's balance sheet.

• 1:01:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, weird.

• 1:01:24David Hoffman?

  Weird.

• 1:01:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like, stodgy accountants, that's where it's coming from. They're buying NFTs, there's no one's excited about this. This is KPMG Canada, by the way.

• 1:01:30David Hoffman?

  Our first foray into this rapidly growing asset class. You love it.

• 1:01:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:34David Hoffman?

  You love to see it.

• 1:01:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  We'll skip Ether, skip Bitcoin, let's go straight to the NFTs. Put those on our balance sheet, guys.

• 1:01:40David Hoffman?

  Sanction this.

• 1:01:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  How do you say this? Rakuten?

• 1:01:46David Hoffman?

  Rakuten, that sounds right.

• 1:01:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Japanese online retail giant Rakuten. They just launched an NFT marketplace as well. So, I think that's gonna be, I think that's a big deal.

• 1:01:56David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  The traditional web, you know, e-commerce websites launching NFT marketplaces. There've been a few of those recently. This is, this is the latest out of Japan Rakuten.

• 1:02:07David Hoffman?

  It doesn't say if this NFT marketplace is like specific to one type of NFTs. It sounds like a generalized NFT marketplace. So, we'll see how much adoption they get. I wonder if they just mainly stick to Japanese adoption, but...

• 1:02:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  I just, I feel like it's gonna be hard to compete against the crypto-native NFT marketplaces, right? It's like, when you're kind of stuck in the, the old world and you're trying to transfer to the new world. I get why you wanna do that, but I don't know. Maybe your best bet is just to acquire...

• 1:02:35David Hoffman?

  It said further down in the article that it allows people to spin up their own websites for buying and selling NFTs. So maybe it's like a Shopify-type thing where like, you know, you get to custom make your own NFT platform?

• 1:02:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  We'll have to see.

• 1:02:46David Hoffman?

  It'd be kinda cool, actually.

• 1:02:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  Puma, another, the latest brand to adopt an NFT.

• 1:02:50David Hoffman?

  I used to wear Pumas, Puma shoes.

• 1:02:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, Pumas are great.

• 1:02:53David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, okay, well, what are they doing?

• 1:02:55David Hoffman?

  They bought a cool cat, which, which is pretty cool of them. Because we like the cats. And, I mean, it makes sense, because Puma is a cat, and of course, they're pretty cool. So they have to buy a cool cat to put on the Puma balance sheet.

• 1:03:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  This looks like a good one. Is this a good one, David?

• 1:03:10David Hoffman?

  I think so.

• 1:03:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  Tell me if this is good.

• 1:03:11David Hoffman?

  I like the tint of the glasses matching the shirt. Great.

• 1:03:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay.

• 1:03:15David Hoffman?

  And like the beanie, very chill. Very chill cat. Very cool cat.

• 1:03:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  Chill cat. Alright. Good job, Puma. Another brand entering NFT ecosystem. Alright, last thing on NFTs, David. MFers.

• 1:03:26David Hoffman?

  MFers.

• 1:03:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  They're making derivatives? There's many MFers? What are MFer derivatives?

• 1:03:31David Hoffman?

  Well, first off, MFers are the profile pictures that both me and Ryan have. They're these kind of facetiously cute, smiley, little stick figure NFTs and like, for some reason,

• 1:03:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  They're ridiculous.

• 1:03:42David Hoffman?

  They're a little bit ridiculous. I think they're the perfect amount of ridiculous. The thing is, they're also so simple that they make it really, really easy to generate derivatives of. And because Sartoshi, the guy behind MFers, has opened up the Creative Commons license to everyone, you are free to make MFer derivatives as many as possible. And so there have been so many MFer derivatives. So I put out a tweet.

• 1:04:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  But what is derivatives? Like, that sounds like a financial product to me still, but it's not, right?

• 1:04:08David Hoffman?

  Right, yeah.

• 1:04:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  We're just talking about like a...

• 1:04:09David Hoffman?

  So just like versions of MFers stylize differently. So there's the base MFers, which are now like the CryptoPunks of MFers, but now there's a bunch of derivatives. So there's Azuki MFers, which are MFers that look like Azukis. There are X MFers, which are the X copy versions of MFers. There are, there are Ahead MFers, which are MFers that are looking straight at you. There are invisible MFers. The number of derivatives is absolutely insane. There's little MFers for the cute little guys. GM MFers, Buttface MFers, 3D MFers, Dead MFers, like Punk MFers. The number of derivatives is absolutely insane.

• 1:04:53David Hoffman?

  And so like the MFer ecosystem has absolutely exploded, which is kind of cool.

• 1:04:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  But each of these derivative MFers have their own like price and, you know, it's not like existing MFer holders hold these or get these, but so what does it do for the main MFers?

• 1:05:08David Hoffman?

  Well, some of them do because every, every single derivative has its own rules. So some of them are, you can mint because you have your own MFer. Some of them, the fees that are baked into the royalty fees actually Go to the OG MFers Treasury. So the X copy MFers, X MFers, I think like 30% of the fees that they that they take from the royalty fees are sent to the actual MFers Treasury.

• 1:05:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  As like tribute?

• 1:05:31David Hoffman?

  Yeah, as tribute. Yeah. And so like, there's this growing ecosystem of MFers, the MFer community treasury, all of the MFer derivatives. And it's turned into starting to take into like so much like real estate and mind share out of the NFT community.

• 1:05:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's really cool. And it's all because the the creators of the MFer project did this Creative Commons license. So anybody can do whatever they want with it.

• 1:05:51David Hoffman?

  And also made an NFT project that's very, very easy to like, you know, iterate on. Like, they're just stick figures.

• 1:05:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's really fascinating, actually. And I guess like, it's all pie expanding value, right? So it's not like these derivatives take away from the main MFers. They add value to it. And these derivatives capture value on their own as well.

• 1:06:09David Hoffman?

  No, this is definitely me like being excited about my own bags. But to like, take that with a grain of salt. But also like MFers are really cool. Like the ecosystem and culture and community around them, I find it really fascinating.

• 1:06:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  I don't have, I don't have serious MFer bags, and this is exciting. So there's some validation for you. This is pretty cool. This is pretty cool. Maybe I'll buy some more MFers.

• 1:06:27David Hoffman?

  Look at the cute little MFers. Those guys are so cute.

• 1:06:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  This X copy MFer gets me, man. He's copying the styles. I love it. That's very cool. Discord grinding. What is this? You were talking about this a couple of rollups ago. But it's in decrypt, it's the newest crypto side hustle. People are hiring people to grind in Discord for them? That's what's happening. What is Discord grinding?

• 1:06:50David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so this is people trying to get on the whitelist for NFTs. So very hot NFT drops, they need to figure out how do they enable whitelisting to happen to individuals that are aligned with the community? And probably aren't robots, so these things aren't gamed. And so Discord grinding has become a thing where people are in Discord engaging. Like, that's it. That's what they do. They engage. That's what the job is. Because in Discord, you can like rank people based off their engagement, like how active they've been. And so people, there's a meme of people going into Discord and be like, hey, guys, like, how is everyone doing today? Like, what's you guys, what's you guys up to? I just ate like my French toast for breakfast. Like, what did you guys have for breakfast?

• 1:07:33David Hoffman?

  Just like fake, fake social engagement to be good community members.

• 1:07:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  And they do this. Okay, so they get on the white, wait, okay, so it's all about getting on the whitelist. Because what these NFT communities are doing is they're basically going through all of their Discord participants. And they're saying, okay, here's a threshold for how engaged you have to be in order to be on the whitelist. And everyone wants to make that cut, meet that threshold. So they're hiring fake community managers to talk in Discord. That's what's happening.

• 1:08:01David Hoffman?

  Right. Yeah, you guys, listeners might be familiar with Ryan's line, give the protocol what it wants. It's like Uniswap wants liquidity, you know, Ethereum wants security. Well, NFT communities want engagement right now, like they haven't completely refined this mechanism. And so right now, what these NFT protocols, what they want are engagement. And so people are hiring people to make engagement happen.

• 1:08:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  There's a Charlie Munger quote out there too, which is, show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome, right? That's what we're getting. Incentive gaming.

• 1:08:32David Hoffman?

  This can't be long for this world. This is unsustainable. But I think this is indicative of things to come for what it takes to be a good community member. This is, hopefully, we can refine this behavior so it's not gamed. And rather than injecting fake engagement, we inject real engagement. What my talk about East Denver was how we will train our protocols to respond to us with appreciation and love, rather than like feeding us with rage and advertisements. And I see this as a very early step in that.

• 1:09:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's funny because, you know, every incentive structure that you put in place does tend to get gamed over time, right? So there was a time when Discord engagement was pretty pure. It was a good marker of community engagement. Now it's been distorted and kind of wrecked. All right, let's get to some regulatory stuff, David, while we finish the news here. So first, I don't know if this is really, well, let's talk about this. This is definitely regulatory. Bitmex co-founder Arthur Hayes just pleaded guilty on Bank Secrecy Act violations. So Bitmex co-founder Arthur Hayes, this is something that's been caught, I don't know, in the, not in the court system yet, but in the justice. The system for a year, close to that anyway.

• 1:09:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  When these charges first came against Arthur Hayes. So what's going on?

• 1:09:46David Hoffman?

  Yes, well, it's not really any surprise. He was kind of like on the run, on the lam a little bit. Struck a deal with his lawyers, struck a deal with the courts. If he turned himself in, you would have a softer plea deal. And so now I think what's ended ultimately happening is Arthur's probably going to have to pay a fine. Bitmex is probably going to have to pay a fine. He's going to have to serve some amount of time in prison. But this actually might be the last news about Arthur Hayes that we hear about this story. Because this is the conclusion?

• 1:10:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  I read this story and I wasn't sure about the prison. It says that there's a maximum penalty of five years. They're definitely paying the fines, but it didn't say whether the prison sentence would be like whether Arthur would actually go to prison or not. Not sure on that. So.

• 1:10:32David Hoffman?

  I mean, Arthur Hayes definitely has the money to buy his way out of prison if they give him that route. So that's definitely true.

• 1:10:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  He also. Is that the way prison works? It's like Monopoly?

• 1:10:40David Hoffman?

  Yeah, a little bit. Yeah.

• 1:10:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  You pay a little bit?

• 1:10:42David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I mean, it's not explicitly in detail, but that's part of the meta game. And I don't know, like, and Arthur's been writing articles. We have a take from him in the take section. But like he's, if this story concludes, and this is the last, like, part of the US versus Arthur Hayes story. And he's still paying attention to crypto. He's still writing articles about crypto. So what does Arthur Hayes do next?

• 1:11:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  We should get him on the Bankless Podcast and talk about it.

• 1:11:08David Hoffman?

  Exactly what he should do next. That's exactly right.

• 1:11:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, let's ping him after this. Anyway, let's talk about this. SEC is now probing fractional NFTs for securities infringements. So what are fractional NFTs and why does the SEC care?

• 1:11:22David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so fractional NFT, you put an ERC 721, an NFT into a contract that spits out an ERC 20 token. Fractional, the application fractional does this. And they've always been very careful about how to engage with this because an ERC 20 token that's based off of ERC 721 collateral technically is a security, even though it doesn't like feel like it should be, it technically is. And so now the SEC has their eyes on fractional NFTs. You know, with, with all the bad actors and all the scams out there, you know what they should go after? Fractional NFTs.

• 1:11:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  It does seem like it's such a, I don't know, like a letter of the law thing, not spirit of the law thing, right? But even Hester Pierce is like, kinda, this is what the letter of the law says. She says that plain vanilla NFT collectibles don't have revenue potential. They're unlikely to fall foul of regulations. But these fractional NFTs, because there's a collective investment, they might be considered NFTs. But it's just like, when we were, these, the SEC, the SEC, like the securities laws that we have in the books right now, do you think they even contemplated something like this?

• 1:12:35David Hoffman?

  Not a chance.

• 1:12:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like, why should a shared JPEG have a 10K filing associated with it? Have to listed, right? Like, it's just, it's stupid, isn't it? The laws have to change.

• 1:12:48David Hoffman?

  The dog community from the Doge NFT, Pleaser Dow bought the Doge NFT, put it through fractional to make the dog token. So there's a dog token that's backed by the Doge NFT. And now there's a vibrant community of dog token holders because they all own a share of the Doge NFT. The Mona Lisa of NFTs. And like, well, Pleaser Dow has very good lawyers, and so they've definitely thought about this. So this is not like they just did this willy nilly. But like, this is kind of like what this is in the conversation of. It's like, well, the dog community, by the way, is happy. Like, no one feels sad about how they own a share of the Doge NFT. No one feels like they have been just scammed by like, that's not on the table. No one feels bad here. No one feels like they got harmed.

• 1:13:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  No one's getting hurt.

• 1:13:32David Hoffman?

  No one's getting hurt. People are just having fun owning a share of the dog NFT.

• 1:13:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, we'll see how that progresses. It's another bizarre argument. We have old laws in the books. Citadel is getting into crypto in the months to come, is the report. This is Kenneth Griffin. Remember Kenneth Griffin, David? Who's he?

• 1:13:51David Hoffman?

  I do. He's the guy that bought the Constitution from the, from the, from the cold, from the grips of Constitution Dow. He's the guy that bought the Constitution.

• 1:14:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Last minute, didn't he say something like he bought it from a bunch of kids or something?

• 1:14:04David Hoffman?

  A bunch of punk kids, yeah.

• 1:14:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  Outbidding a bunch of punk kids? Well, he, there's not a lot of fans of Citadel or Ken Griffin in the GME community or the retail investing community either.

• 1:14:15David Hoffman?

  He's kind of an internet villain these days.

• 1:14:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I guess he's coming to crypto, but that's our territory. So we'll see there, Ken. See how it goes for you.

• 1:14:23David Hoffman?

  Yes, the news is that Citadel is now market making in crypto. That's the news.

• 1:14:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  Sorry, we got caught up on Ken Griffin, didn't we? FTX has pledged up to $1 billion for a philanthropic fund to improve humanity. What's this?

• 1:14:38David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so SBF has always stated his interest in being a, what did you call it? An activist philanthropist or something where like he takes all of the profits from his business and basically cause soft like verbalizes his commitment to donate basically all of it. He said this, he talked about this on the Sam Harris podcast for people that want more color there. And so, yeah, FTX pledging a billion dollars for improving humanity. We also are having SBF on the podcast. We're recording with him sometime next week. So that's gonna be pretty exciting.

• 1:15:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  I'll have to ask him about this. What, what does he plan to do with this $1 billion in philanthropic funds to improve humanity? David, we got the takes coming up and the meme of the week.

• 1:15:18David Hoffman?

  Some really good takes.

• 1:15:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  A pretty hot moment of zen, I think, or at least a bizarre one.

• 1:15:23David Hoffman?

  A one that I'm very sorry about.

• 1:15:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  You guys, we apologize in advance, but you're also gonna want to watch this. Before we get to all of those things, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible.

• 1:15:34David Hoffman?

  The Brave browser is the user-first browser for the Web3 internet with over 50 million monthly active users. Control your digital footprint with built-in privacy and ad blocking. Inside the Brave browser, you'll find the Brave Wallet, the first secure crypto wallet built natively inside of a Web3 crypto browser. Web3 is freedom from big tech and Wall Street, more control and better privacy. But there's a weak point in Web3, your crypto wallet. The Brave Wallet is different. Brave Wallet is built natively inside the Brave browser. No extension required, which gives the Brave Wallet an extra level of security versus other wallets. With the Brave Wallet, you can buy, store, send and swap your Crypto assets and you can even manage your NFTs and connect to other wallets and DeFi apps, all from the security of the best privacy browser on the market.

• 1:16:18David Hoffman?

  Whether you're new to crypto or a seasoned pro, it's time to switch to the Brave Wallet. Download Brave at brave.com/banklist and click the wallet icon to get started. When you shop for plane tickets, you probably use Kayak, Expedia, or Google to compare ticket prices. So why would you limit yourself to just one exchange when you trade crypto? When you make your trades, you want to make sure you're getting the best possible price on your trade, and that's why you should be using Matcha. Matcha has smart order routing that splits your trade across all the various liquidity sources in Ethereum and is also operational on Polygon, Avalanche, Binance Smart Chain, and other chains. Trading on Matcha is super easy because it pools the liquidity for me in a single, easy-to-use platform and allows me to make a limit on-chain orders. So you can set and forget your DeFi trades and they will go through automatically while you're

• 1:17:01David Hoffman?

  away. So when you're making a trade, head over to matcha.xyz/banklist and connect your wallet to start getting the best prices and most liquidity when you trade your crypto assets. Banklist is proud to be sponsored by Uniswap. Uniswap is a new paradigm in asset exchange infrastructure. Instead of a cumbersome order book system where trades are matched with other humans, Uniswap is an autonomous piece of software on Ethereum that lets you trade any token at the current market price. No human counterparties or centralized intermediaries, just autonomous code on Ethereum. Input the token you want to sell and receive the token you want to buy. The Uniswap Grants Program is accepting applications for grants. Do you have something of value that you think you want to contribute to the Uniswap ecosystem? No matter how

• 1:17:43David Hoffman?

  big or small your idea is, you can apply it for a unique grant at uniswapgrant.org and help steer Uniswap in the direction that you think it should go. Thank you, Uniswap, for sponsoring Banklist.

• 1:17:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  Hey guys, we are back with the takes of the week. David, let's start here. Web 3 won't rug pull you. Web 2 might, though. This is a kind of a story and a take combined from a startup founder who says he lost his company and $100 million by trusting by relying upon Facebook.

• 1:18:13David Hoffman?

  This has just been a core tenet of Ethereum since day one. Facebook is not the only example of a company that's done this, but there are, and Twitter, for example, has its own APIs to have outbound data out of Twitter that allows other companies, other websites to consume that data. And you can create businesses around that, kind of in the same way that we have money Legos on Ethereum. You can use the data coming from other companies APIs that they give out for free willingly, or sometimes they charge. And you can start to build services around that. So like Facebook is so incredibly big that people have built businesses on Facebook. Twitter has become so big that people use the data around Twitter to build businesses. The thing is, when these APIs are centralized, they can just get rug pulled.

• 1:18:56David Hoffman?

  So this founder tells this story of this $100 million business that he had that got deleted because Facebook changed its algorithm. So this has always been one of the core tenets of Ethereum about how you can have unstoppable censorship resistant code that can never change on you. So you have long-term assurances about the viability of your business. This wasn't really relevant in the news, except for how this one founder told the story. So I thought I'd just mention it here.

• 1:19:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I think it warrants repeating for sure. And the founder says it sends chills down his spine to watch others build businesses on Instagram and TikTok as well, given what happened to him. Definitely a good lesson.

• 1:19:35David Hoffman?

  Remember, you don't own your own Instagram account. That is property that you rent from Mark Zuckerberg.

• 1:19:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  Absolutely. So why would you build on someone else's property? I don't understand. Would you build your house on someone else's land? Seems like a bad idea.

• 1:19:46David Hoffman?

  Just build on Ethereum.

• 1:19:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  Arthur Hayes, we're just talking about him. Apparently, he wrote an article this week. I haven't had a chance to read it. It's called Annihilation. What's this about?

• 1:19:56David Hoffman?

  This is basically connecting the costs of war. So this is coming off of the Ukraine-Russian conflict, the costs of war, where like, say, like, it takes money to fund a war. So then it takes money to fund it to build a tank. And then it also takes money to build a building. And then when war happens, a tank comes into a country and it destroys the building. And then the opposing side destroys the tank. And so the value, all the energy, the economic resources that go- Got put into the building and the tank and also the all the lives, not to be not to mention all the effort and energy that it went to creating the lives, all gets destroyed. And so when we think about the values of the fiat currencies that are going into funding

• 1:20:36David Hoffman?

  these things, ultimately, the cost of warfare comes out of the value of fiat currencies. And so Arthur Hayes has a very good job making the narrative of how you can see when countries go to war, inflation happens right afterwards, because that's how they need to finance the war. And so eventually, the efforts and resources expended in the war comes out of the value of the dollar.

• 1:20:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  Totally.

• 1:20:59David Hoffman?

  This is a great article by Hayes.

• 1:21:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Having just finished Ray Dalio's book, where he looks like at empires in history and reserve currencies in history, almost all of the reserve currencies in history died and ceased to become reserve currencies as a result of some protracted war. Sometimes they won the war, but even if they won, it was very costly. War is incredibly costly on the fiat system. That is totally true.

• 1:21:22David Hoffman?

  And this reminds me of the Ether ultrasound article that I wrote. That one didn't get too much traction because it was actually really long. But this was coming after Justin Drake's ultrasound money meme when we were memeing that. And I talk about how like Ethereum, what it does when it does the buyback from EIP1559, and it's putting the money back into the currency where war, for example, out of nation states takes money out of the money to fund the military. Like these self sovereign finance systems like Ethereum take money out of the economy and put it into the money, which is it's important relationship to understand. So I encourage people to go and read that article.

• 1:22:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, you have another take here. I'll read it out. "The full power that crypto brings can only be truly harnessed by the individual." What did you mean by that?

• 1:22:08David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so this is again, kind of coming off of the like Russia sanctions crypto conversation. The larger you are as an institution, the more muted the powers of crypto offer you. And so what I'm saying here is the powers of private keys, the powers of DeFi works best at the individual level. And the larger the institution, the less and less those powers actually work for you. Because then we start to get into it's easier. and easier to censor you, the larger and larger you are. Going back to the conversation of how Russia had one third of the total crypto market cap seized. And people are talking about, oh, if it was in crypto, we wouldn't have been able to seize it. If Russia had one third of the total crypto market cap in crypto, like you, we would have been able to nullify that.

• 1:22:52David Hoffman?

  Like, they would have been still able to send it from address to address, but they wouldn't have been able to pay for anything. Because we would have made it illegal to receive that money and tracing that money, because it's a third of the crypto market cap, would have been trivially easy. And so what's, so the larger and larger of the financial institution, the easier and easier it is to target with sanctions, target with regulations, target with rules. Where the smaller and smaller you get, closer down to the size of the individual, the full might and power and optionality that crypto brings to you can be expressed. So like you, think about just like metaphorically, a hole the size of the individual. You cannot fit Russia through the hole of the size of the individual.

• 1:23:33David Hoffman?

  You cannot fit $600 billion through the, just an individually sized technology. And so this is why the private keys are so cool. Is it always benefits the margins of society the most, which are the people that need it the most. And while it does also, the powers of crypto also do benefit institutions. They don't benefit institutions as much as they do, they benefit the individual. This is why we're seeing Ukrainians and Russian citizens alike, both buying Bitcoin to protect their wealth. Whilst the country of Russia is getting sanctioned meanwhile. And so crypto will always benefit the individual more than it will the institution.

• 1:24:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  I do think it's, you know, I, I do think that this provides asymmetrical advantage to the defender, right? That, that is the principle of cryptography and certainly levels the, the playing field. So it's a nation state actor, the, the crazy thing, the cool thing about crypto and private keys is like. A nation state actor cannot decrypt your assets and take them from you. Like, that is incredible power. Where else in your life do you have this level of power to resist someone with that amount of force? So I do think it's a massive equalizer for individuals, for sure. This is another take, "NFTs are the most authentic reflection of your identity",

• 1:24:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  from Cooper Turley. What's he saying here?

• 1:25:01David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so there was a time where I think we would have put this into the Bankless Weekly rollup and been like, "Oh yeah, this is, this is, like, this is a great, great take, great tweet." But I've learned about different technologies, and so I actually quote retweeted this and said, "People only think that NFTs are good for identity because they don't know of the other options." And so what I'm talking about are these, these new technologies that I've recently learned about called decentralized identifiers and verifiable credentials. And so like, think about the NFTs in your wallet. You might like them, but how much of your identity are they actually? Do they actually reflect where you went for university, or your credentials that you have because you did something? Or your birth certificate, or your healthcare records?

• 1:25:45David Hoffman?

  These are not going to be on-chain NFTs.

• 1:25:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  At most, right now, it's probably like going into my like, I don't know, like, my stamp collection, or my coin collection, or my like, collection of watches. That's more what it's like, which is not the most authentic reflection of my identity, right? Like, a bunch of turtles is not who I am.

• 1:26:04David Hoffman?

  Right. So Evan, Evan, who's proven authority shown in here, talks about how NFTs are like your jewelry. Like, they're your gold chain, or your watch, and they kind of reflect your values, they kind of reflect your priorities, but they do not reflect your soul. And so what Evan is building, we recently had Evan on this social media panel, so if you want to get a taste for what she's building at Disco, go check that out. But if we want decentralized identity, if we want crypto to reflect our personality and our soul, that does not need to be an on-chain NFT, because sometimes you want to actually reserve your identity in a private manner and not give those things out for free by putting it on-chain.

• 1:26:45David Hoffman?

  And so this whole concept of a decentralized identity via verifiable credentials, and basically was considered off-chain assets, like off-chain reputation, has started to just like, be in my brain at all times.

• 1:26:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think that's something we have to dig into more for people to fully understand what you're talking about there. But yeah, I totally agree. NFTs aren't like everything right now, for sure.

• 1:27:08David Hoffman?

  This is Kevin Milwaukee's meme illustrating the same thing where NFTs and putting your identity on-chain is basically giving the world all of your data. Imagine if your soul was on-chain and everyone could transparently see you. You have no privacy. And so like decentralized identity via NFTs is a dead end, where decentralized identity with identifiers and verifiable credentials is like the right path.

• 1:27:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  What are you excited about this week, David? Is that what you're excited about?

• 1:27:36David Hoffman?

  I'm excited about decentralized identity and verifiable credentials. And like, one of the illustrations, Ryan, about why this is so cool is because we actually get to have, like, think about how the conversation of Facebook sells your data, Twitter sells your data. With this off-chain data reputation system, you actually get to determine who you are in an off-chain and private manner, and you get to choose what parts about you you get to reflect around the world. Who do you want to be in this present moment? One of the conversations around Ethereum and identity is like, oh, you can have your Ethereum address that's your work address, or you can have your Ethereum address that's your play identity or your gamer identity, and you get to pick and choose your personas. Like, that is a, was a conceptual conversation for a really long time. People just used Ethereum

• 1:28:21David Hoffman?

  addresses as like the way that we would use this. But that's because people don't know the alternatives. And I think that the alternatives are verifiable credentials, which are off-chain, and decentralized identifiers, also off-chain. And so this, what this really allows us to do is it allows us to pick and choose our hobbies, our interests, who we are as people, and allow those, those properties to find other people that also have those alike things. Kind of like how people self-organize into their favorite subreddit communities of their own accord. Like, who you are as an individual can be automatically like matchmaked by people with alike interests, and you don't have to do it by giving your data to Facebook or Twitter, because you hold it in your self-sovereign wallet. So this, this whole concept has lived

• 1:29:05David Hoffman?

  like rent-free in my brain ever since I've learned it. And so Ryan, that's what I'm excited about.

• 1:29:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  I can tell it's eating your brain up right now. I can tell you're very excited about this. Look, I think that as well, people who just see Ethereum, what we're doing in the space is like DeFi, are totally limiting. It's like, it's like saying that early internet is just like email. You know, like, there's so many cool applications that are going to be built out on this stack in the future. And I do think decentralized identity is one of them. And I'm looking forward to seeing the apps. And I do think your plug for the Web 3 social media panel is a fantastic one. We just did that earlier in the week, so you guys can check that out. And we'll include a link in the show notes if you want more about that.

• 1:29:50David Hoffman?

  All right, Ryan, what are you excited about?

• 1:29:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Private keys, man.

• 1:29:54David Hoffman?

  Hey, that's an important concept of decentralized identity.

• 1:29:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, okay, but like, I'm just excited about the ability to store my life savings in 12 words in my brain. Like, that I have that power. I'm not saying I do that now, but that I have the power to do that. And that each of us has the power to do that. I think we need individual superpowers if we're going to last in the 2020s. Like, these are core skills. I tweeted this out earlier this week. The must-have skills for surviving 2020s. Private key management, you gotta have that. It's key to not only storing all of your assets, but also identity, as you were saying, in the future. DeFi, the ability to use it.

• 1:30:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  Cold storage, encrypted private messaging, exit planning, digital freelancing, crypto investing, VPN tunneling. This is no longer geek stuff. These are everyday survival skills. That story of that individual in Ukraine, I'm sure there are thousands, maybe tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of stories like that that happen every day. And this is the reason why now is an important time to stay on the cutting edge of this and make sure you understand how some of these technologies work. There was a time where this was just for geeks, like, no longer. When they're shutting down people's bank accounts arbitrarily, right? When, like, your currency can lose 40%.

• 1:31:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  Because of some action that the people who run your government do. Like, you need protection from that. We all need protection from that. So I'm glad these technologies exist, and I plan to continue learning these skills. And I hope Bankless listeners will invest in these skills too, because they are must-have skills for the 2020s.

• 1:31:43David Hoffman?

  The technologies that put individuals first are just getting started. The 2020s is going to be chaotic, but at the end of it, it's going to be an individual-first decade.

• 1:31:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  I hope so, and that's what we're fighting for here. That's the direction, hopefully, we're going in. David, you ready for it? Meme of the week?

• 1:32:00David Hoffman?

  Yeah, this is gonna be a good one.

• 1:32:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, it's back to Kevin.

• 1:32:03David Hoffman?

  Back to Kevin. Time Person of the Year. It's Kevin, the Pixelmon, the super ugly Pixelmon. Thanks, Kevin.

• 1:32:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  Thanks for the laughs, Kevin. Sorry for everyone who bought one of these Pixelmon, but, you know, that's how it goes. Maybe it's a good time for the disclaimer.

• 1:32:19David Hoffman?

  Remember, there's a very cringe moment of zen coming afterwards.

• 1:32:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes, I should warn people.

• 1:32:25David Hoffman?

  I'm sorry about that.

• 1:32:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Don't watch it.

• 1:32:27David Hoffman?

  Don't listen to it. It's bad.

• 1:32:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  Don't watch it. You will not appreciate it. You will not like it.

• 1:32:31David Hoffman?

  What's her name? Mark Zuckerberg's sister? Zandi?

• 1:32:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  Randy.

• 1:32:35David Hoffman?

  Randy? Randy Zuckerberg. That's who was coming up.

• 1:32:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  Randy Z coming up for you. Guys, before that, I gotta tell you, none of this has been financial advice, except definitely do not buy a Pixelmon. ETH is risky. DeFi is risky. So are NFTs. You could definitely lose what you put in, but this is the frontier. We are headed west. We're glad you're on the journey with us. Thank you so much. I messed up the ending.

• 1:33:01David Hoffman?

  Yeah, you did.

• 1:33:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's a Pixelmon distracted me.

• 1:33:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  Thanks, guys. Bye.

• 1:33:29Speaker 02

  It's just the start, so GM. Carpe your crypto DM. D Y O R and pick a coin.

• 1:33:42Speaker 02

  B T D by the difference. Our time and hands won't flip it. H O D L and we'll all join. We're all gonna make it. Yeah, we're all gonna make it. We're all gonna make it, everyone. Our project won't go sheen. However, this is a being. We won't get rocked if things go right. See this new coin?

• 1:34:23Speaker 02

  I know she is bigger than this whole she. So fire up and hold on tight. A T H. A T H. We'll fight. Like hell. We'll hold. I'll sell. No! We're all gonna make it. L F G! We're all gonna make it. We've the goddamn floor! We're on a way! Yes, we are! We're all gonna make it. You paper hats are all worthless and weak!

• 1:35:07Speaker 02

  Let's fucking go! Everyone.

• 1:35:27David 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 in crypto and other

• 1:36:12David Hoffman?

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