ROLLUP: Coinbase Insider Trading | Three Arrows Capital Speaks! | The Merge Approaches

4th Week of July, 2022 ------ 📣Rhino. Fi | Massive Mystery Airdrop https://bit.ly/3o9trRE ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/ 🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/ ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🌱 LENS | ACCESS CODE: STAKING https://bankless.cc/Lens 🚀 ROCKET POOL | ETH STAKING https://bankless.cc/RocketPool ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum 🦁 BRAVE | THE BROWSER NATIVE WALLET https://bankless.cc/Brave 🌉 JUNO | BRIDGE FIAT TO LAYER 2 https://bankless.cc/Juno ⚡️ ZKSYNC | THE LAYER 2 SCALING ENDGAME https://bankless.cc/zkSync ------ 0:00 Intro 4:00 MARKETS 4:05 BTC Price 4:30 ETH Price 5:44 ETH/BTC 6:35 Total Crypto Market Cap 6:48 Gas Markets 8:18 Federal Reserve 18:34 NFT Price Floor Numbers https://nftpricefloor.com/ 21:06 Merge Sell Pressure https://twitter.com/DeFiSurfer808/status/1550215641248026624 23:53 ETH vs. BTC Bear Market Chart https://twitter.com/FelixOHartmann/status/1551323998465794050 31:15 NEWS 31:20 Three Arrows Capital Speaks 32:05 3AC Speaks https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-07-22/three-arrows-founders-en-route-to-dubai-describe-ltcm-moment#xj4y7vzkg 36:00 RSA Takeaway https://twitter.com/RyanSAdams/status/1550481320933003265 41:50 Coinbase Insider Trading 41:55 Former Coinbase PM Arrested https://www.theblock.co/post/158960/former-coinbase-product-manager-arrested-on-insider-trading-charges 45:05 Jake Take https://twitter.com/jchervinsky/status/1550156019296247810 46:05 Jake 2nd Thread https://twitter.com/jchervinsky/thread/1550515627961589762 48:25 Coinbase Does Not List Securities https://blog.coinbase.com/coinbase-does-not-list-securities-end-of-story-e58dc873be79 50:30 Statement of Commissoner Caroline D. Pham on SEC https://www.cftc.gov/PressRoom/SpeechesTestimony/phamstatement072122 52:38 SEC Probe https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/26/coinbase-shares-tumble-after-report-that-its-facing-sec-probe.html https://twitter.com/0xSisyphus/status/1552300223682281472 52:55 Coinbase Down Bad 53:29 Cathie Wood $ARKK Sold 1.41M Shares https://twitter.com/unusual_whales/status/1552085054653730816 53:53 Remember DeFi? https://twitter.com/RyanSAdams/status/1550450216201076736 56:40 Georli Testnet Merge https://twitter.com/BanklessHQ/status/1552712874543439876 59:30 ETH 59:57 zkEVM Differences https://twitter.com/socketdottech/status/1550149054243360768 1:03:32 Uniswap Fees CRUSHING IT https://twitter.com/haydenzadams/status/1551579707736473601 1:04:20 Uniswap Fee Switch Debate https://gov.uniswap.org/t/fee-switch-design-space-next-steps/17132 1:06:00 AntPool Believes! (Will no one fork Ethereum?) https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/07/26/antpool-supports-ethereum-classic-ecosystem-with-10m-investment/ 1:09:10 ETC Pumping lately https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/ethereum-classic 1:10:40 NFTs 1:10:50 POAP Making Moves in the WNBA https://twitter.com/leadinscientist/status/1552298253194076166 https://poap.gallery/event/55974 1:12:30 REGULATION Crypto Transactions Less Than $50 https://decrypt.co/106006/bipartisan-bill-seeks-to-eliminate-taxes-on-crypto-transactions-under-50 1:13:20 MISC 1:13:35 Solana Physical Stores https://twitter.com/Scott_eth/status/1551539635137953793 1:14:05 Chipotle Dips into Crypto with ‘Buy the Dip’ Promo https://decrypt.co/105916/chipotles-buy-the-dip-promo-includes-200k-in-crypto-for-customers-coinbase-accounts 1:14:35 RELEASES 1:14:40 Mirror’s Web3 Subscriptions https://dev.mirror.xyz/Jn62zF5n62BfowdaFgm3uIx3Fgp2vIR7b-HTSxKVXqk 1:15:25 WalletConnect Chat https://twitter.com/WalletConnect/status/1550061470595137536 1:15:50 RAISES 1:15:55 Aptos $150M From FTX Ventures, Jump Crypto & More https://medium.com/aptoslabs/entering-the-next-phase-of-the-aptos-journey-with-added-funding-and-new-partners-d4daa03dd17c 1:18:18 Unstoppable Domains reaches unicorn status $65M Series A https://blockworks.co/unstoppable-domains-reaches-unicorn-status-after-latest-raise/ 1:18:45 Jobs https://pallet.xyz/list/bankless/jobs 1:20:10 Devcon https://devcon.org/tickets/ https://forms.gle/x6GHpq8MAZJCwwsq5 https://devcon.org/en/bogota/ 1:23:20 Questions of the Week https://twitter.com/MyMoneyPlanCH/status/1552341093911613441 https://twitter.com/FunnaEth/status/1552329571487432704 https://twitter.com/Sjr05d/status/1552324854522810368 1:33:27 TAKES 1:33:30 CT Sentiment (Hot and Cold) https://twitter.com/CryptoCronkite/status/1552244606166831104 1:33:55 What Leads? ​​https://twitter.com/TrustlessState/status/1552452639249600514 1:35:50 Seattle NFT Museum https://twitter.com/TimBeiko/status/1551312206704381952 1:36:50 Vitalik: Update on Roadmap https://imgur.com/zrS4A3N https://imgur.com/bb4AmvR 1:40:40 What David’s Bullish On 1:43:50 What Ryan’s Bullish On 1:47:16 Meme of the Week https://twitter.com/HsakaTrades/status/1552648542153351169 1:48:15 Closing & Disclaimers ——- Not financial or tax advice. 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?

  Just remember, I'm the better looking one, of course.

• 0:01David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I'm the one that actually exists in real life, so.

• 0:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, David's the one that you're actually gonna see at a conference.

• 0:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  Hey, Bankless Nation, happy last week of July. Summer's almost over, but happy Friday morning to you. We're gonna be drinking a cup of coffee as we enjoy the weekly roll-up. We hope you are as well. David, how you doing today?

• 0:24David Hoffman?

  Oh, absolutely fantastic, Ryan. Some more Three Arrows Capital fallout. We said last week that it was probably coming, but as far as it goes, that's like the only contagion stuff we have to talk about this week.

• 0:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is it? This is the last time we talk about Three Arrows Capital?

• 0:38David Hoffman?

  Well, I don't know about that, but like the topics like Celsius seems to be over, Voyager's over, it's only Three Arrows Capital that's left.

• 0:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right. Getting some closure this week, hopefully. We're also gonna be talking about Coinbase. An employee got arrested for insider trading.

• 0:53David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 0:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  You could be an insider trader at Coinbase, and there's some fallout with the SEC and Coinbase that got into another tussle. And even the CFTC is weighing in on this. We're gonna cover that as well.

• 1:04David Hoffman?

  Big drama, big drama in the regulatory space. And the last testnet, the last testnet ever. This is the last step before the actual merge is scheduled. It's here. The Gorley testnet is coming in the 6th to 12th of August. We don't know when, because it's set by a TTD number. We'll talk about that later. But Ryan, it's happening. The merge is happening.

• 1:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Lights in the background. That's great. As always, guys, this comes at you every Friday morning. This is the best way to recap your week in crypto. Hope you're joining us. And make sure you like and subscribe if you are. So if you're on YouTube, make sure you like this video and subscribe to the channel. And if you are listening to this on podcast form, rate and review wherever you listen to your podcasts. On Spotify, by the way, this is now in video version. We partnered with Spotify. They partnered with us. I don't know, one or the other. We now have Bankless video capability on Spotify, which gives us another platform beyond YouTube. It's pretty cool. Enjoy it.

• 2:00David Hoffman?

  Yeah, if you're a Spotify listener, you can become a Spotify viewer. And then at the crypto conferences, people can stop mixing me and you up.

• 2:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's great. Just remember, I'm the better looking one, of course.

• 2:13David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I'm the one that actually exists in real life, so.

• 2:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, David's the one that you're actually gonna see at a conference. So it's definitely gonna be David, alright? Alright, we should also talk about our friends at RhinoFi. I know they wanted us to get the message out that

• 2:28David Hoffman?

  Formerly.

• 2:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  Formerly, they were called Diversify, and now they are RhinoFi. Formerly, they were also a decentralized exchange, and now, they are more than that. You can swap. You can also trade, of course. You can deposit into liquidity pools. What else can you do with RhinoFi?

• 2:45David Hoffman?

  So RhinoFi just abstracts all of the many, many chains that are existing and coming online in this multi-chain future. So all the basic stuff like Ryan said, like trading and swapping, but you can also put your assets into liquidity pools. You can also invest some in various parts of the multi-chain future. And as we just go and grow and grow in complexity, stuff like this is gonna be more and more needed in order to just like manage all of your DeFi stuff across all of the chains. The reason why it looks like this on Ryan's windows, because every time we start recording, I have him squeeze his window.

• 3:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  Real tight.

• 3:19David Hoffman?

  Yeah, real tight. But it would look a little bit more expanded on your desktop when you go to the link in the show notes to go check it out.

• 3:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, go check it out. I think part of the reason that we got so burned last cycle, not we, I mean crypto collectively and using C5 platforms, is because DeFi user interfaces weren't there yet. It was just easier to deposit in Celsius and BlockFi. But now with RhinoFi's of the world, we are upgrading our DeFi experience. And just a reminder, C5 failed this cycle, but DeFi didn't. This is a way to double down on it, start leveling up, using tools like RhinoFi. It's 100% bankless. So this is all on a layer two.

• 3:56David Hoffman?

  100% organic.

• 3:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  100% bankless, organic experience for you here. Alright, David, let's get to the markets. Bitcoin, what's it doing?

• 4:04David Hoffman?

  Some good things. Bitcoin started the week at $23,200, ending the week at $23,700, up 2.5%. Up 2.5%. Nice green week.

• 4:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  Good job, Bitcoin.

• 4:15David Hoffman?

  Green weeks stacking on green weeks. We got, I think, three green weeks in a row, Ryan. Knock on wood, knock on wood.

• 4:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Does that happen?

• 4:20David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 4:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  That can happen during the market?

• 4:22David Hoffman?

  That's allowed?

• 4:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Hmm, it's allowed. But the bigger story was this one. What's this chart telling us? This is a Bitcoin chart again, but let me actually pull up the Ethereum chart.

• 4:33David Hoffman?

  Yeah, we need that one.

• 4:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  Because I think the lines are a bit steeper upward. What are we looking at?

• 4:36David Hoffman?

  Started the week at 1570. We are currently clocking in at 1726.

• 4:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wow.

• 4:43David Hoffman?

  Up 8.7%.

• 4:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  Look at that.

• 4:46David Hoffman?

  Was it last week that ETH was up 30%?

• 4:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  Mm-hmm.

• 4:49David Hoffman?

  I think it was.

• 4:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 4:50David Hoffman?

  Again, just stacking on the greens.

• 4:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Do that math in your head.

• 4:53David Hoffman?

  Oh, don't ask me to do that.

• 4:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  That 8% plus the 30%, we're 38% on two weeks.

• 4:56David Hoffman?

  No, that's not how it works. You can't add percentages.

• 4:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  I know.

• 5:00David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 5:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  I didn't know that. Yes, I do. I'd have to go back to the 14-day.

• 5:05David Hoffman?

  Right, right, right.

• 5:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  The good news is, we're green, we're up, and we're heading in a good direction. I think there's a story here. Did you see it just suddenly leap up?

• 5:14David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 5:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  I guess that was Wednesday, the day of recording. And that's something to do with the Fed, actually. Jerome Powell spoke that line, that nice green candle into existence, I think. And we're going to get to why that is in that story, but before we do, let's take a quick-

• 5:28David Hoffman?

  God, I'd love to be able to speak green candles into existence.

• 5:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, only Powell can. Sorry.

• 5:32David Hoffman?

  That'd be a sick superpower.

• 5:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  You have to apply for the position of central banker, David.

• 5:36David Hoffman?

  Oh, I'm out.

• 5:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  Do you want that job?

• 5:37David Hoffman?

  I'm out. Nope. No, I don't.

• 5:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  Sounds like a terrible job.

• 5:40David Hoffman?

  Yeah, it sounds like an awful-

• 5:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  Honestly, everyone hates you all of the time. Sorry, Powell. ETH/Bitcoin ratio, what's the ratio telling us?

• 5:46David Hoffman?

  Up 6.2%. Is up 2.02. My ETH/BTC trade finally coming back to parity.

• 5:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  Is that a real trade you made, or is that a trade in your head?

• 5:57David Hoffman?

  A long, no, a long time ago. I've been holding it.

• 6:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, really?

• 6:00David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I've been knuckling it, yeah.

• 6:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  Do you know, sir, I've never had the guts to make that trade. People trade on the ratio, I'm just like-

• 6:06David Hoffman?

  Short Bitcoin, long Ether, yeah.

• 6:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I mean, I would do that by just holding ETH over Bitcoin over the long time horizon, but actually trading this ratio is scary to me. Spooky territory.

• 6:18David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 6:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  I admire you, David. Have I told you that?

• 6:20David Hoffman?

  Well, thank you. You shouldn't admire me for other reasons other than my trades.

• 6:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Your trading, not your trading game?

• 6:28David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 6:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  We could always look at the DPI ratio if you're curious about ratios. But how about the crypto market cap? Are we above a trillion this week?

• 6:37David Hoffman?

  Yeah, we're above a trillion. We were at 1 trillion last week. We are up to 1.138 trillion. The math is easy this week. We are up 13.8%.

• 6:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Nice. Uh, gas prices still down on Ethereum?

• 6:49David Hoffman?

  Uh, gas prices like crazy low. 10. 10 Gwei, average Gwei fee. You know, you know what would be like super ironic, Ryan?

• 6:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  What?

• 6:57David Hoffman?

  Is if like we merge and

• 6:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  And there's no burn?

• 6:59David Hoffman?

  Ether is not deflationary.

• 7:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  There's no ultrasound money after all of this?

• 7:04David Hoffman?

  After all of that. Uh, so like the, the deflationary threshold is seven and we are at 10.

• 7:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  Ah, we're just hanging on.

• 7:13David Hoffman?

  We're hanging on. Tooth and nail.

• 7:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  Um, I don't know. What's so funny is when transaction fees are high, people get bearish. Or because they're like Ethereum is not scaling. What's the matter? Transaction fees are so high. Now on the flip side, when transaction fees are low, they're like bearish again. No one's using Ethereum, David. It's like a lose lose scenario.

• 7:33David Hoffman?

  Yeah. Bearish when fees are high, bearish when fees are low. I mean, okay, then that just means you're just a bearish person.

• 7:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, probably. Uh, I'm optimistic in both of these cases, so it's a good time to get your transaction fees through. But I do hope, I mean, just for the posterity of it, like post-merge, we gotta be ultrasound, right? We gotta be burning more Ethereum.

• 7:50David Hoffman?

  We gotta be. I will, I will just personally spam the network with my info.

• 7:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  Please do. Just for like, you know, five minutes or something.

• 7:59David Hoffman?

  Just for the meme, yeah.

• 8:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, okay. Uh, okay, well, let's talk about

• 8:02David Hoffman?

  By the way, five minutes of spamming Ethereum, I'm pretty sure that is at least like half a million dollars. So I will not, I will not actually be doing that.

• 8:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  We call in, we create a DAO for it, you know, ultrasound DAO. I don't know.

• 8:13David Hoffman?

  Social sound backstop.

• 8:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  Get Lubin to help. Um, okay, markets, the Fed press release. So, um, the big Powell raise, uh, came out, I guess, uh, on Wednesday. Uh, the Federal Reserve issued a statement that said they were going to increase the federal funds rate, that's the interest rate, of course, uh, to two and a quarter to two and a half percent. That is a 0.75. Increase, bringing the target rate to 2.5%. So they call that 0.75 is 75 bips. This is of course, the biggest rate hike, I believe, let me see, since Volcker.

• 8:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  The fastest tightening of monetary policy since Fed Chair Paul Volcker battled double-digit inflation in the 1990s is the headline here. Weak economic data was the reason, although Powell did say here, here's a quote from him, "I do not think the US is currently in recession." He told reporters that after the end of the latest policy meeting. And he cited unemployment rate that is still near a half-century low and solid wage growth and job gains. It doesn't make sense that the US would be in a recession. What's interesting about that statement, though, is I remember the last summer, he was telling us about transitory inflation. And this summer, he's saying, "I don't think the US is not in a recession." And that wouldn't make sense at all.

• 9:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  So I'm not actually sure whether he believes that or not, or is kind of playing the act, or what this is.

• 9:47David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so I've been thinking about this a lot this last week, actually, after listening to like Lynn Alden and Luke Grom and our podcast, but also content that Kyla Scanlon has been putting out. I actually think that every single word that comes out of the Fed Reserve is an act. There is nothing that is actually him. There's nothing that is not specified. Everything is done as like a theater.

• 10:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's another lever to tinker with the economy.

• 10:17David Hoffman?

  Yes, that's, yeah, yeah, we talk about what are the levers of the two of the Fed? They have interest rates, and they have quantitative easing and tightening. They also have how they appear as a big tool, a narrative. And so that is actually probably the biggest tool. And so I think when you read these statements by the Fed, and you see the words that the Fed, the Fed Chair does not think that the US is currently in a recession. That is not what the Fed Chair actually thinks. That is what he wants you to think, that he thinks that.

• 10:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  That doesn't work forever, right? Because if

• 10:50David Hoffman?

  Okay, so this is, well, markets are just a hall of mirrors.

• 10:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  Sure.

• 10:53David Hoffman?

  It's like, well, they think this, so I think this, so they think that, so I think this.

• 10:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right, but like, it's kind of the Keynesian beauty, like, once we start to know that the Fed chair is actually not telling us the truth, but is telling us what he wants us to believe, then

• 11:08David Hoffman?

  It's like conception, you have to, you have to go one layer deeper at that point. And then, and then so does the Fed, and then we go one layer deeper.

• 11:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, my God. Wow, if we could just outsource this to robots and code, that would be so much simpler.

• 11:21David Hoffman?

  Zero layers deep, wow, wouldn't that be nice?

• 11:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  The question is, though, is this a peak in the inflation rate? I think that's a question. We had 9.1%, remember, last time, but what was interesting about this, I think, David, is what we'll get to next, the market actually liked this.

• 11:36David Hoffman?

  Yes.

• 11:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  So, think about this, we go 0.75, 75 bips up, pretty big raise, pretty big move to tightening, but the market had kind of expected this to happen. And then what do you think the market does? Does it go down or does it go up? Well, up is the answer to that. NASDAQ shot up, crypto shot up. And we're going to get into a thread as to the reason for that, but let me ask you, David, were you surprised at that?

• 12:03David Hoffman?

  Nothing surprises me anymore.

• 12:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  So tightening and we go up.

• 12:07David Hoffman?

  I just don't have an opinion as to the direction of the market. I've been in buy-only mode for the past like three months.

• 12:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  Do you know, it sounds, it seems counterintuitive, though, right? It's like you actually like raise rates and then NASDAQ and crypto would pop up. And that's why we're seeing the ETH pop of 9% this week and also Bitcoin up this week. It was, it was actually after the Fed meeting.

• 12:28David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 12:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  Why don't we get into this thread? What is Macro Elf saying? This is, this is a voice I've increasingly enjoyed on macro topics, but why don't you read this out? It's a whole thread about this.

• 12:38David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so Macro Alf, A L F, says Powell hikes 75 basis points and yet Nasdaq and Bitcoin are going to the moon. What the heck? While I disagree with the unfolding market narrative here, let me try and explain why we are witnessing such a rally. Despite openly recognizing economic growth as if softening, the Fed unanimously, exclamation point, decided to hike bps by 75%. It's all about inflation, inflation, inflation. But markets convincingly started to rally only when Powell went ahead and said the following, quote, "We are now at levels broadly in line with our estimates of neutral interest rates, and after front-loading our hiking cycle, until now, we will be much more data-dependent going forward. Let's

• 13:19David Hoffman?

  find out why this is so relevant." So Macro Alf continues and says, "The neutral rate is the prevailing rate at which the economy runs at its potential without overheating or excessively cooling down." I think that is called threading the needle. I think that's called a soft landing. With a 75 bps hike, the Fed just reached its estimate of a neutral rate. From here, they aren't contributing to economic heating anymore. And then here we see a graph. And then he continues, "But that also means any hikes from here are going to put the Fed in an actively restrictive territory." So I think he's saying that we have established an equilibrium with the economy. The economy is not going to go up, it's not going to go down, it's going to be flat. And so he continues and says, "But

• 14:02David Hoffman?

  that means that any hikes from here are going to put the Fed in an actively restrictive territory. The bond market knows that every time the Fed becomes restrictive, they break something." So Powell was asked a couple of very important questions. I'm guessing after the statement, they had like a press seminar thing where the reporters could talk to them. What about bond market pricing? 70 bps cuts in 2023? What about financial conditions? So what about forward guidance? And so this is when they quote, "From here on out, we are fully data-dependent."

• 14:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  And that's the key quote. That's the quote at which the rally started, the rally started happening in the markets. Before that, it was kind of nothing. The 0.75 did nothing to the markets. But this statement, "From here onwards, we are fully data-dependent," that was the differentiator.

• 14:49David Hoffman?

  Right. And so the question of "What about forward guidance?" is answered by "From here onwards, we are fully data-dependent," meaning forward guidance is gone. And so, again, the thread continues. Why is this relevant? It all starts from a very strong opinion that the bond market has developed, the strong opinion that the bond market has developed about inflation over the last few months. It's going to move down and very fast. Inflation, the bond market thinks the inflation is going to go down fast, bigly. Between July 23 and 24, the CPI is priced to print at about 2.9%. So where were we at? 9.1% last month? Allegedly, the bond market, and between July 23 and July 24,

• 15:34David Hoffman?

  the CPI is priced in from the bond market to be at 2.9%, basically at target. So the bond market is pricing in that the Federal Reserve is going to get inflation under control in about one year's time. So if Powell is not nearly on autopilot anymore, and the markets have a strong opinion on inflation and growth collapsing, they can also price all other assets based on this scenario. So basically saying, "If the bond market is pricing this in, so is everything else." If you look under the hood, market action also validates this narrative. Hence why, you know, QQQ, the Nasdaq is going up, Bitcoin is going up, crypto is going up. And so, what's performing here, outperforming here, Nasdaq and crypto, of course, as I just said. If the Fed isn't going to tighten financial conditions on autopilot anymore, real yields will actually start declining again.

• 16:20David Hoffman?

  And here, we actually do see yields start to decline. And they continue, again, we're almost done. "When real yields decline, value-intensive and risk-sentiment-driven assets classes outperform." That's because the marginal return for owning cash USD becomes less attractive, and the incentive to chase risk assets is larger, such as QQQ, the Nasdaq, and Bitcoin. I think this rally has legs? Question mark. I can rationalize the narrative being built post FOMC, but no forward guidance equals a very, very volatile Fed ahead of us. One small hawkish turn and it's all gone. You must price in some additional risk premium here, not less. Basically, what he is saying is that the bond market has priced in, we're solving inflation in one year's time.

• 17:03David Hoffman?

  So as soon and because the Federal Reserve is not operating under a forward guidance scenario anymore, they are saying we are completely data driven at this point. If the data comes out and shows that we are not solving inflation within one year time, the market is not positioned for that and will likely react to that in a volatile manner, like hint into the downside. And so that's like the main conclusion to this thread.

• 17:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, so the TLDR is that data driven statement has a market thinking that the Fed is done increasing for now. Like nothing more than sort of expected. It won't get super ultra aggressive, right? That's what the market thinks. But the reason this rally might be tenuous is because if the market is wrong about that and inflation is much more persistent, it may drive the Fed's hand to change because now the Fed is data driven, apparently. So can you trust this rally? Is a question of, I don't know. Can you like, what is inflation going to be in the future? That's sort of how tenuous this is right now. So I don't know.

• 18:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, it's cool to see a rally like this, I suppose, but we're probably not out of the woods yet. And I guess we're all pretty data dependent from here on out.

• 18:22David Hoffman?

  Absolutely. Yeah, the data is going to be the thing leading the market is an interesting place to be.

• 18:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  NFTs. You know, last week we were talking about.

• 18:33David Hoffman?

  Nice transition.

• 18:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it's just a nice soft transition to something that matters a lot less than the global monetary policy.

• 18:40David Hoffman?

  Soft landing.

• 18:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  The NFT price floor. Actually, I was looking for a dashboard of kind of the biggest like by market cap NFT projects and I found this, nftpricefloor.com. Someone sent it to us. We can include this from time to time. But quick recap, David, what are we looking at? Just like maybe the top five. How big are the top five NFT projects by floor cap?

• 19:04David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so I really like this measurement. Floor cap, which is the price floor multiplied by the number of assets, which is basically what a market cap is, judged by the floor. So coming in at number one, of course, Board Ape Yacht Club, floor cap of 857,000 Ether, followed by CryptoPunks at 714,000 Ether. That gap is way closer than I thought it was. Once upon a time, like Board Apes were like almost three times CryptoPunks. Now they're almost at parity, followed by Mutant Apes, other Deed for Other Sides, Moonbirds, Clone X, I don't know what that is, and then Autoglyphs.

• 19:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  Do you know 857 to Board Apes equates to about 1.5 billion?

• 19:48David Hoffman?

  I don't want to know.

• 19:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  1.5 billion. That's the value of 10,000 Board Ape NFTs right now.

• 19:53David Hoffman?

  But there's not enough, there's not that much liquidity there. There's 477 Ether that was traded in the last 24 hours. I got decent volume, I guess.

• 20:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  I wonder if like, NFTs continue to become more financialized, if we'll see this kind of, you know, free up a little bit. Do you know what I mean? Like, to your point, they're super illiquid right now, but like, what happens if you can kind of lend against them, borrow against them?

• 20:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  I don't know. Does that change the liquidity of them?

• 20:19David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I think it should.

• 20:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, that's interesting. Anyway, we'll look at this from time to time to see the health of the NFT market. Let's move to...

• 20:26David Hoffman?

  I expect there to be different things there in the future. I would not expect like this. Remember, do you ever remember? What was it? Coin market cap before there was CoinGecko?

• 20:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, it's still there.

• 20:37David Hoffman?

  And like, looking at like, the total market cap in 2017. Like, it's completely foreign to what it is now, because like, things rotate out of like, the top 10.

• 20:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, okay.

• 20:47David Hoffman?

  I expect there to be big rotation out of the top 10.

• 20:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, that's a good take. So you don't think CryptoPunks, you know, stays in the top 5?

• 20:56David Hoffman?

  Oh, CryptoPunks. CryptoPunks in the top 5.

• 20:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  David's a CryptoPunks maximalist. I just, I was fishing that out of them.

• 21:01David Hoffman?

  Anyways, I got this NFT project to chill.

• 21:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. CryptoPunk maximalist, okay. Um, merge. David, you want to talk about the merge?

• 21:08David Hoffman?

  I do want to talk about the merge, Ryan. How did you know I wanted to talk about the merge?

• 21:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's so exciting, okay? It's happening, and I guess, you know, a quick tease in the market section today. Um, this is from DeFi Surfer. More than 7 billion of annual sell pressure. It's $20 million of daily sell pressure will be eliminated the day the merge is complete. How press reminds us of that.

• 21:31David Hoffman?

  Yes.

• 21:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is not how press, but something that he would say. Going to be fireworks for the month following the merge. I don't know if you saw this chart, David, but again, once again, we're talking about post-merge. ETH issuance is going to be reduced, like, 4.1% to 0%, hopefully negative, in the negative territory, right?

• 21:48David Hoffman?

  Not gonna work.

• 21:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  I hope so. Um, and that's an 87% reduction. Incredible. Issuance reduction of 87%. The triple halving. It's like, 3 halvings in a row, if you're used to kind of Bitcoiner terminology. And that is happening. So, if the testnet is happening in early August, we'll get to what that means for like, potential mainnet deployment. But we know what this means for issuance is a massive amount of sell pressure will be removed from the market at day 1.

• 22:22David Hoffman?

  So, Ryan, I just want to help put into context how big $7 billion is. Off the top of your head, do you know how much capital, how much dollars MicroStrategy has purchased of Bitcoin? Not how much Bitcoin that they have, in dollar terms, how many dollars they've used to purchase Bitcoin.

• 22:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  I'm gonna throw, I'm gonna throw a number at you, okay? You ready to catch?

• 22:43David Hoffman?

  Hit me.

• 22:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay. 2 billion.

• 22:46David Hoffman?

  Four billion.

• 22:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay.

• 22:48David Hoffman?

  They have spent $4 billion on Bitcoin. And with this, with the, you know, post-merge Ethereum basically gets, we have this current equilibrium of where we are now. And post-merge, we have this, a new equilibrium, which is equivalent to a $7 billion buyer coming in yearly. Every single year.

• 23:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  Dollar cost averaging.

• 23:10David Hoffman?

  Until history ends.

• 23:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  More reliable than Michael Saylor even.

• 23:13David Hoffman?

  Yes, much more reliable. Michael Saylor is out of cash. I don't know if you've noticed, but his like cash, the amount that he's bought is like, now he, whenever he like, oh, Michael Saylor bought Bitcoin. It's like he's adding 0.01% of like to his, to his stack.

• 23:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 23:26David Hoffman?

  $7 billion yearly, yearly.

• 23:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. What's great, what's cool about this too is like, if you're an ETH holder, every time the Ethereum block space sells some blocks to somebody, which is what this is, is Ethereum selling blocks, you get money. How great is that?

• 23:44David Hoffman?

  It's so awesome.

• 23:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, anyway, we're excited about the merge. Uh, let's talk about this going into the merge. All right. This is from Felix Hartman. And this is a total market capitalizations, the old, good old Bitcoin dominance chart. This is what Felix says. "We're well into the bear market, yet unlike the previous one, Bitcoin dominance is still bleeding lower while ETH dominance is on a steady ride, rise. ETH is now a mere 120% outperformance away from flippanting Bitcoin. ETH did around 120 performance, outperformance from January 2020 to September 2020. So nothing crazy." David, is the flippanting back on the menu, sir?

• 24:26David Hoffman?

  Okay. So flippanting's always been on the menu, but also people are like, oh, one day like Ether might flip Bitcoin. Like all the ETH people say that, me including. But like, people like forget that like, the flippanting is just the first flippanting. Like then there's the second flippanting and then there's the third flippanting. Like we just start lapping Bitcoin over and over and over again. Like you're allowed to be.

• 24:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  You mean like doubling?

• 24:50David Hoffman?

  Yeah. You double Bitcoin, then you triple Bitcoin, and then you quadruple Bitcoin.

• 24:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. Come on, man. Don't, don't grave dance on Bitcoin, okay?

• 24:58David Hoffman?

  I see. It can be number two and be fine. I'm sorry, but fundamentals are fundamentals, right?

• 25:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  What do you think about this take? Because I've seen this increasingly and it happens whenever ETH is coming closer to flipping Bitcoin, especially in the Bitcoin maximalist community. It's like, if you flip in Bitcoin, you destroy the entire sovereign, non-sovereign store of value meme. Like you kill it all.

• 25:22David Hoffman?

  It's one of the many, many ass-backwards takes out of the Bitcoin maxi camp. What they mean to say is like, if you flip Bitcoin, well, then you like, you remove the king and then you just make it so like, somebody can flip you.

• 25:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes.

• 25:34David Hoffman?

  No, the correct take is if Bitcoin gets flipped by the second chain, then it'll probably get flipped by the third chain and it'll probably get flipped by the fourth chain too. It's a problem for Bitcoin. If somebody, if something flips Bitcoin, it's because they effing deserved it because their fundamentals are strong, not because some like magical, ooh, we popped the immaculate nature of Bitcoin and it's like manifest destiny to be the biggest crypto ever. It's that fundamentals matter and Bitcoin hasn't been paying attention to fundamentals since Genesis.

• 26:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  Would you say the same thing, David? If Ether got flipping? And I will remind you, it has.

• 26:07David Hoffman?

  If Ether got flipped?

• 26:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  XRP.

• 26:08David Hoffman?

  Yes.

• 26:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Flipped it.

• 26:10David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 26:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  One point in time, something else did too. Am I miscalling this?

• 26:13David Hoffman?

  Uh, Bitcoin Cash.

• 26:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  XRP at least, maybe XRP twice.

• 26:16David Hoffman?

  It was Bitcoin Cash that flipped it.

• 26:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bitcoin Cash as well.

• 26:18David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 26:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  So did, did XRP and Bitcoin Cash deserve it? Or are you talking about a flipping that is more sustained in terms of timeline?

• 26:25David Hoffman?

  Yeah, more sustained and like not when markets are just super illiquid and young. And also that happened during the irrationality of the bear market. Like, but simultaneously when XRP flipped, like, yeah, flipped Ether, Ether was also $80, which I would also say was extremely irrational. That was just an irrational time in the market.

• 26:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  I, I also find it ironic that like, kind of if you're Bitcoin maximalist, your whole purpose in life is to actually like flip in gold. Isn't that the whole thing? And like, well, if gold can be flippant, I don't know, that, that is the king by Bitcoin. Like, I don't know, it's just like, of course, better stores of value.

• 27:03David Hoffman?

  If Bitcoin flips gold, the world just destroys, Ryan.

• 27:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's what a gold maximalist might say. Peter Schiff gets you on the podcast.

• 27:11David Hoffman?

  No, no, no.

• 27:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  No? Have you ever heard him speak?

• 27:15David Hoffman?

  Oh God, yeah, it's awful.

• 27:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  I haven't in a long time, it's been a while.

• 27:18David Hoffman?

  Okay, actually, he's one of those people where like, his macro takes are super awesome. His asset takes are terrible.

• 27:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Hmm, yeah, I know those people, I know those people.

• 27:25David Hoffman?

  All the Bitcoiners.

• 27:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Those people don't have enough ETH.

• 27:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  Let's talk about this for a second.

• 27:30David Hoffman?

  The maxi hats are on today.

• 27:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  Sorry. Toning down, I'm just excited about the merge, David. He who controls the infrastructure controls the universe. This is Greg tweeting this out and this is a kind of an org chart of SBF, Sam Bankman-Fried, beloved crypto banker. And he has been on a buying spree this cycle, right? Assets that are kind of like have depreciated massively. Other crypto banks helped bail out BlockFi. And I think the take here is that's great. Sam managed his money very well and is very well positioned for this. It's also a little bit alarming to me to see even more consolidation in the C5 space.

• 28:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like, all of the companies that managed to stay healthy and retain a balance sheet are now buying all of the companies that didn't. And so what we get, the result of like all of these kind of acquisitions is further and further consolidation and centralization. CZ is also doing the same thing. And I'm just like, okay, these are smart business people. I get it. But it's another reason why DeFi looks like very hopeful and very bright is because we've always been concerned at Bankless that if we just replace one set of bankers with another set of central bankers, we haven't really achieved anything in this whole crypto journey. And like, I'm not faulting SBF or CZ for being like responsible and good business people

• 29:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  in doing this, but I'm just saying like, the system is kind of broken if it's all consolidated with a new set of bankers. Like, we got a new JP Morgan on the scene and he's SBF.

• 29:11David Hoffman?

  All right, coming up next, like I said, Three Arrows Capital is on the table. They speak, Suzu and Kyle Davies, they did an interview with Bloomberg. They actually said words, so we're going to read out some of their quotes to hear what they have to say. I'm going to go ahead and put on my Fed cap for that one, saying like, of all the words that coming out of Kyle Davies and Suzu are not their true selves, but instead an act, because that's probably what they have to do in the moment. Anyways, after that, Coinbase insider Trading opens the window for the SEC to target the entire industry. So there's two parts to this story. An insider trading at Coinbase, that's bad, but just like kind of an open shut case. What the SEC is doing as a result of that is terrible and needs to stop. And now it's triggered the attention of the CFTC.

• 29:57David Hoffman?

  So we're going to get into all those details and more and the rest of the show. Right after we get through some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible. Arbitrum is an Ethereum layer two scaling solution that is going to completely change how we use DeFi and NFTs. Some of the coolest new NFT collections have chosen Arbitrum as their home. While DeFi protocols continue to see increased liquidity and usage. You can now bridge straight into Arbitrum for more than 10 different exchanges, including Finance, FTX, Huobi and Crypto.com. Once on Arbitrum, you'll enjoy fast transactions with cheap fees, allowing you to explore new frontiers of the crypto universe. New to Arbitrum, for a limited time, you can get Arbitrum NFTs designed by the famous artists Ratwell and Sugoi for joining the Arbitrum Odyssey. The Odyssey is an eight week long event where you can play on-chain activities and receive a free NFT as a reward.

• 30:40David Hoffman?

  Find out more by visiting the Discord at discord.gg/Arbitrum. You can also bridge your assets to Arbitrum at bridge.arbitrum.io and access all of Arbitrum's apps at portal.arbitrum-one. In order to experience DeFi and NFTs, the way it was always meant to be, fast, cheap, secure and fiction free. The Brave browser is the user-first browser for the Web3 internet with over 60 million monthly active users. And inside the Brave browser, you'll find the Brave Wallet, the secure, multi-trained crypto wallet built right into the 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. And most crypto wallets are browser extensions, which can easily be spoofed. But the Brave Wallet is different. No extensions are required, which gives Brave browser an extra level of security versus other wallets.

• 31:24David Hoffman?

  Brave Wallet is your secure passport for the possibilities of Web3 and supports multiple chains, including Ethereum and Solana. You can even buy crypto directly inside the wallet with Ramp. And of course, you can store, send and swap your crypto assets, manage your NFTs and connect to other wallets in DeFi apps. So whether you're new to crypto or you're a seasoned pro, it's time to ditch those risky extensions and it's time to switch to the Brave Wallet. Download Brave at brave.com/bankless and click the wallet icon to get

• 31:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  Hey guys, we are back talking first about Three Ours Capital. I wouldn't mind, David, if this is the last time for a while we talk about Three Ours Capital. And I feel like this kind of gives us maybe a little bit of closure on this story. But the story is Kyle Davies and Suzu, who are the founders of Three Ours Capital and definitely in the spotlight. They spoke this week. It's their first interview. Wasn't on a bankless, it was on Bloomberg in written form. And we have some of their quotes here. David, what are some of the choice quotes from this article? That in Bloomberg, Three Ours Capital founders break their silence over the collapse of the crypto hedge fund. What did they say?

• 32:25David Hoffman?

  Yeah, first one comes in from Suzu and he says, "People may call us stupid. They may call us stupid or delusional, and I'll accept that. Maybe."

• 32:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  He said maybe?

• 32:35David Hoffman?

  But they're gonna, you know, say that I absconded funds during the last period where I actually put more of my personal money back in. So that's not true. Like the absconding is not true. Again, like my take, I was gonna say this to the end, but I'll say it here. This kind of feels like a whole like PR stunt. Like, why would Three Ours Capital take an interview with Bloomberg is because they need to, they need to fight their image right now. Because it's probably relevant in court. That's my take. I'm gonna go ahead and poison the well here with that. Quote number two from the, from the article, "Advisers in charge of liquidating the fund said in the July 8th filings that Sue and Davies hadn't cooperated with them and that the founders' whereabouts were unknown. Sue said death threats had forced them into hiding." Quote, "This does not mean that we've been, that we haven't been communicating with all relevant authorities,"

• 33:20David Hoffman?

  said Sue in a telephone interview with Davies and two lawyers from Saltair LLP. "We have been communicating with them from day one." Again, again, PR management. Again, is my take, is my take. Quote number three, "This whole situation is very regrettable," Kyle Davies says. "Many people lost a lot of money." Yeah, it is very regrettable. That's certainly true. Quote number four, "Efforts by Sue and Davies to deflect blame are a sharp contrast to the pair's previously relentless campaign of cheerleading crypto assets and belittling critics. Nerves were raked in new this week by creditor claims that the founders put a down payment on a $50 million yacht before the fund went under, a claim Suzu said was a part of a smear campaign.

• 34:02David Hoffman?

  The boat was, quote, "bought over a year ago and commissioned to be built and used in Europe," Sue said. He rejected the perception that he enjoyed an extravagant lifestyle, noting that he biked to work and back every day and that his family only had two homes in Singapore."

• 34:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Living on the poverty line here.

• 34:19David Hoffman?

  We had two homes. Quote, "We have never been seen in any club spending lots of money. We have never been seen, you know, kind of driving Ferraris and Lamborghinis around," Sue said. "This is kind of smearing us, I feel. It's just a classic playbook of, you know, when this stuff happens, when fun blows up, then you know, these are kind of the headlines that people like to play." Quote number five.

• 34:44David Hoffman?

  "What we failed to realize was that Luna was capable of falling to effectively zero in a matter of days, and that this would catalyze a credit squeeze across the industry that would put significant pressure on all of our illiquid positions," Sue said. "After that day when Bitcoin went from 30,000 to 20,000, that was extremely painful for us," says Kyle. "And then that, that ended up being the kind of the nail in the coffin." Last quote, "For Kyle and I, there's so many crazy people in crypto that we kind of, that kind of made death threats or all of this kind of noise," said Sue. "We feel that it's just in the interest for everyone if we can be physically secured and keep a low profile." I think that is, maybe it is in the interest of everyone, maybe not. It's definitely in the interests of Kyle Davies and Suzu to be physically secured and keep a low profile, that's for sure.

• 35:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, and of course, death threats are not cool.

• 35:33David Hoffman?

  That's probably, that's probably true. They are probably actually getting death threats.

• 35:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I mean, that is a legitimate reason for hiding, but like I.

• 35:43David Hoffman?

  Death threats and not cooperating with the council.

• 35:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Did you hear an apology?

• 35:48David Hoffman?

  No.

• 35:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  Did you hear?

• 35:49David Hoffman?

  I heard, I heard that it was very regrettable.

• 35:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  You know, maybe we made some mistakes along the way. That, that's, um, I read this article because it was fascinating, because as I said before, like, I feel like I wanted some closure from this.

• 36:03David Hoffman?

  Sure.

• 36:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Because, like, I can't, hearing this now, if you're just new to crypto, I can't describe to you how revered these guys were. Three Ours Capital.

• 36:12David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 36:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  Were during the.

• 36:13David Hoffman?

  They were like trader gods.

• 36:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Trader gods, greatest traders to ever live. Like, just, this is just what it felt like crypto Twitter and the broader community kind of bought up. Like, you want to see the best traders in the world. It's Suzu, Kyle Davis, Three Ours Capital. And so I wanted to understand how mechanically they went bust, right? From their perspective. And this is what I gleaned from the story between the quotes about yachts and such. So how did Three Ours Capital go bust? Number one, they failed to manage risk. Yeah, kind of requiring to go bust. Quote, quote from the article, "We believed in everything to the fullest." Not the kind of thing you want to say if you're managing risk. And by the way, these are not just lessons for Three Ours Capital. These are lessons that are applicable to us.

• 37:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  How do we not fall in the Three Ours Capital track? So they went all in on these speculative projects. They used margin, they didn't hedge. It's kind of like gambling. If you're approaching crypto like that, it's not the way to do it. Number two, they got wrecked by Luna. "We failed to realize that Luna was capable of falling to effectively zero in a matter of days." What happened, I think, David, is something that can happen to you everyday investors, people on the bankless journey is you get FOMO. You get, in this case, alt one FOMO. And what happened was Three Ours Capital missed a number of big alt one runups, right? They missed that whole Solana thing that multi-coined friends got in on. And so they started to believe their own narratives. They wanted to play catch up and they added risk in an effort to catch up.

• 37:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  They didn't have to do this, but they wanted to get more out of the alt one narrative. And so they went in on Luna and they went in big. Big. Also Avalanche, I think. Yeah. Number three, they got wrecked by staked ETH, de-pegging from ETH. The quote from the article is, "Are there people who, there are people who also leverage long-staked ETH versus Ether who will get liquidated as the market goes down?" The answer to that question is yes. So they didn't appropriately manage the risks when they were entering into kind of these, these markets that were somewhat obvious, right? Of course, you can't make the assumption that DAI is always going to stay pegged to a dollar. You can't always make the assumption that staked ETH is always going to maintain its peg with ETH.

• 38:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  And if you are margining and risking some of your assets based on that assumption, that is a bad move. Number four, they got wrecked by GBDC, as many people did. Because everyone did it, then the trust went To the discount and then went to a far bigger discount than anyone thought possible. So like during these kind of market events, things can happen that you don't expect. Like GBTC de-pegging in such a big way and they didn't consider that. And then of course, like they didn't do the classic thing of they weren't ready for Bitcoin to go to 20K. This is Suzu again. Bitcoin went from 30K to 20K. That was extremely painful for us. That ended up being the nail in the coffin.

• 39:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Crypto investor, are you ready for a 90% drop in your assets? Okay, in the last bear cycle, ETH went down by 95%. I knew many a good crypto investor who got their positions liquidated.

• 39:23David Hoffman?

  Hello.

• 39:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  In something like Maker Dow. So like, these people are great investors. Full, full confession. I was one of them too.

• 39:32David Hoffman?

  There we go. Where's that PoA? I think we both would have that PoA.

• 39:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, I like, so I didn't get liquidated, but I came closer than I ever want to feel again. All right. So like, you gotta be ready for these drops. Summary of the lessons for us from the Three Hours Capital bust. Number one, how do you avoid this in the future? They went bust because they took too much leverage. They believed their own hype. They bought the top unspectative assets. They weren't ready for a 90% drawdown and they invested more than they could afford to lose. At the end of the day, this is basic stuff. It's almost noob level stuff, right? It's the stuff that we all need to embed deep in our psyche if we want to survive on this journey. And I think the final lesson from all of this is the pros aren't always what they seem.

• 40:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, the trader gods didn't end up being gods after all. You gotta do your own research. Don't listen to what David and I say. Don't listen to what Suzu says. Do your own research on this stuff.

• 40:28David Hoffman?

  Yeah, there's a, there's a, there's that quote that everyone's an expert in the bull market. So like, it's more about being an expert in the bear market. That's where true colors show up.

• 40:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  What is the fallout reaction from this interview? Like, it wasn't very favorable.

• 40:44David Hoffman?

  No, there's a number of... Yeah, The Block put out an article that had some reaction takes to the Bloomberg article. And so, a quote from the Block article says, "One disgruntled party told The Block that they were absolutely disgusted after reading the interview, and said, 'Stop hiding and deflecting blame and own up to your own mistakes. Cooperate fully with the relevant parties and do not ghost those involved with this.'" And a second quote from Arthur Hayes, and this one's awesome. "Arthur Hayes, no stranger to controversy, he's the guy that got charged by the CFTC for operating BitMEX, was scornful in a thread on Twitter taking issues with Sue's claim that he wasn't flashy. Come on, y'all. Sue ain't flashy. He rides a bike to work and then to the marina where his super yacht is moored.

• 41:25David Hoffman?

  Only two homes, brah. You straight summoning it in the Campong, aka Tanglin." I don't know what these references are.

• 41:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's rich people references, sir.

• 41:33David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I'm assuming rich neighborhoods in Singapore, maybe? He wrote, referring to different Singapore neighborhoods, yeah.

• 41:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  There it is. That's the story. Case closed. That's what we can learn. I hope we can move on from this, and I know we will. David, let's talk about this next item, which is big. Coinbase insider trading. And I think there's two pieces to this story. Why don't you tee us up with both those pieces?

• 41:56David Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah. So, the first one is just a headline, right? Coinbase product manager arrested on insider trading charges. You know, kind of more or less the full story. You kind of get it. There's not really too much crazy there. Two brothers profited by $1.5 million in illegal trades on 25 different crypto assets and at least 14 different separate Coinbase public listings. And so, the idea here is that Coinbase lists these tokens, these people that know about it ahead of time buy the tokens, and then they sell the tokens after the listing, after the token pump. Coinbase has been listing a lot of just ridiculous tokens lately, like ones that I don't even think are on Uniswap of all places.

• 42:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wait, really?

• 42:34David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I don't know if that's true, but it's like the names of the tokens are like... Like, what was that? What was that? Right? Let's go Brandon coin?

• 42:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  What?

• 42:44David Hoffman?

  Yeah, stuff like this. It's some bad tokens. It's like already questionable. So like, they're kind of digging themselves a hole. But anyways, these two brothers charged with doing illegal trading. But that's like the much smaller side of this story. The much bigger side of the story is that the SEC is charging these two brothers for trading illegal securities. And that's where so much collateral damage comes into this whole entire.

• 43:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wait, are there? There's two charges here. One is like wire fraud.

• 43:11David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 43:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  Which is the like the base charge.

• 43:14David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 43:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  But they're also charging them for legal securities?

• 43:17David Hoffman?

  Yes. So the SEC is claiming that the assets being traded are securities. And so they're taking these two brothers, I think, and there's also a third person, a friend. And they're taking these people to court for wire fraud and for and for trading illegal securities. So what this does, Ryan, is it implicates Coinbase as an illegal securities exchange. It implicates every other exchange that also trades these assets as an illegal securities exchange. It implicates the issuers of these tokens as issuers of unregistered illegal securities. And the worst part about this, Ryan, is you know who the defendants in this case are? These three brothers, these two brothers and this other guy.

• 43:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, so they're picking, they're picking on them. Like, I understand. They were, they're at fault. There's a real wire fraud.

• 44:03David Hoffman?

  Yes.

• 44:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Charge here.

• 44:04David Hoffman?

  No one is contesting that.

• 44:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  But the SEC is trying to make a broader point, I suppose, in court?

• 44:10David Hoffman?

  Right. Yes. And so the, like, say, these, these people plead guilty. I think this is the way this works. They, these brothers plead guilty because they don't have the resources to fight the SEC. And whether or not they trade securities is not their fight. They, they're fighting whether they should go to jail or not over wire fraud. They don't care if there were securities or not. Who does care is Coinbase and the token issuers, who aren't defendants. And so since they're not defendants, they can't stick up for themselves because they're not involved in the case. It's ridiculous. It's actually the most spineless move I can think of.

• 44:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like, it's, it's, it's like, okay, so yes, wire fraud, front running bad.

• 44:47David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 44:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  The thing they did is inexcusable. Charge them. Like, we have a legal system for a reason. Let's use it to its full extent. It's the securities thing that the SEC is sneaking in.

• 44:58David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 44:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  That implies a much more insidious agenda. Okay, let's see what Jake Chervinsky says. I'll read it.

• 45:05David Hoffman?

  In a thread reader, please.

• 45:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  The SEC alleges in today's complaint that nine digital assets are securities, but don't explain their analysis for even one.

• 45:15David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 45:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  They also didn't sue the issuers or exchange where the tokens traded, the people with reserves to fight back.

• 45:22David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 45:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  They just went after one man and his family.

• 45:25David Hoffman?

  Thread reader, please.

• 45:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's hard to overstate what a mess this will be. The SEC's jurisdiction turns on whether these assets are, in fact, securities. This means the case may require nine mini-trials, one for each asset, to resolve their security status, without the issuers or exchange to defend any. Wow. This is like a winning on a technicality? Is this what the SEC is trying to do here in order to push its, I guess, regulatory apparatus into controlling more of crypto?

• 45:57David Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah. It's super, super nefarious. Jake had another great thread, which we'll read here. "The SEC filed a complaint yesterday accusing 10 companies of violating the securities laws, nine digital asset issuers and one exchange. None of them are the defendants in the case. None of them will get their day in court. And if this isn't regulation by enforcement, then nothing is." Here's a thread. "Defendants are three individuals, Coinbase employee, brother, friend, etc. We've already talked about this. In addition to the SEC suit, the DOJ indicted them for criminal wire fraud, blah, blah, blah." Trying to scroll down, Ryan. "To be clear, I'm not trying to excuse insider trading." Of course, another weird, that's what we're saying. "The SEC alleges that the defendants committed securities fraud by using material,

• 46:39David Hoffman?

  non-public information to trade ahead of Coinbase listing announcements. To establish jurisdiction, the SEC claims that the assets in question, the nine digital assets, are unregistered securities. As far as I know, the SEC has never addressed these assets before. We've learned the SEC's views on the facts, patterns, that it believes qualify them as securities for the first time in a federal complaint rather than in guidance of rulemaking. This is regulation by enforcement. It's not uncommon to learn for the first time when an enforcement agency has identified a violation when a complaint is filed, but typically that happens when the agency files an action against the person who they think broke the law. This is different, very different." Here, the SEC isn't just accusing the defendants of breaking the law. The SEC is also accusing 10 unrelated, uncharged companies of breaking the law.

• 47:24David Hoffman?

  Nine for failure to register digital asset securities and one for operating under an unregistered national securities exchange. Despite leveling accusations against uncharged companies in public, the complaint is devoid of legal analysis. They didn't even give any analysis as to why the tokens are securities. The SEC just makes a few allegations of fact and then similarly concludes that they satisfy Howey, but surely these are securities.

• 47:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's the Howey test, which is kind of the legal court justification for why things are securities in the US.

• 47:54David Hoffman?

  Yeah. To win, the SEC must prove that one or more of these assets is a security. In a real sense, these companies are on trial too, but the SEC didn't name them as defendants. They are only allowed to defend themselves in court. They are not allowed to defend themselves in court. On principle, this is deeply unfair and unjust. Yes, that's probably a good place to wrap it up.

• 48:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  It goes on, yeah. You know, there's a lot more to this, but I think we kind of get the gist. Okay, so that's what's going on. Besides the defendants who are in this regrettable position of also trying to defend against the SEC here. Coinbase wrote a post fighting back here. The title of this blog post is Coinbase Does Not List Securities: End of Story. This is by the chief legal officer of Coinbase. The TLDR is Coinbase does not list securities on its platform, period. I think the TLDR is all we need to read here.

• 48:51David Hoffman?

  Just read the title.

• 48:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 48:53David Hoffman?

  And it's like, the tone of this is like, hey, SEC, F off. We're not, we're not listing securities.

• 48:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  We don't even know, like, why are you saying these are securities? You're providing no justification for why. You've given no clarity, despite the crypto industry having asked for this for like the last seven, eight years. And now you're just blanketly saying through this enforcement action that certain things are securities or not? I can't. My question, though, is, David, is this actually, in one way, sort of a good thing? In that, like, the SEC will also have to prove in court that these nine assets are securities. I don't know, maybe some of them genuinely actually are securities. I can't, like, attest to you each of them. It's just the principle of, like, we have no idea what's a security and not. There's no clarity. We have absolutely no clarity from the SEC.

• 49:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  And they keep pointing to the Howey test, which is like, is it 1930s, 1940s? Legislation about an orange grove has not been adopted for the modern world, and certainly not adopted for the world of cryptocurrencies. And they can barely say Bitcoin is not a security. They barely say that. And sometimes they say ETH is not a security. And other times, it feels like some of them try to wheel that back a little bit, too. And so we have absolutely no clarity, even though some of these assets are clearly commodities. And this is what the SEC is doing. And I don't know what the end game is, or why they're doing it, David.

• 50:20David Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah. I think this is just an illustration of what happens when one agency just gets off the rails and tries to do a power grab. And so the CFTC is playing in this game as well. So they release a statement, and they release a statement that starts with a quote, which I really love. And the quote is, "In the words of Federalist Papers, number 49, 'The people are the only legitimate fountain of power, and it is from them that the constitutional charter is derived. Government is and should be the servant of the people, and it should be fully accountable to them for the actions which it supposedly takes on their behalf."

• 50:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  First principles, baby.

• 51:01David Hoffman?

  Yes, we love the first principles thinking. And then they continue, "The case, SEC versus Wahi, one of the brothers, is a striking example of regulation by enforcement. The SEC complaint alleges of dozens of digital assets, including those that could be described as utility tokens and/or certain tokens relating to decentralized autonomous networks, are securities." The fact that the CFTC is making a public statement about the errant nature of the SEC... That's a big deal.

• 51:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, yeah, this is a commissioner saying basically to the SEC, guys chill.

• 51:33David Hoffman?

  Chill.

• 51:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like just chill, Gary.

• 51:35David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 51:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, you've gone too far. You're crossing some lines here. And it's not even clear that this is SEC's jurisdiction, right? I mean, there's some turf war between the CFTC and the SEC. And the CFTC so far has been much like more pro-market innovation.

• 51:52David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 51:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  And not enforcement like through

• 51:57David Hoffman?

  Through enforcement.

• 51:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  Regulation through enforcement.

• 51:59David Hoffman?

  See, the problem with that, Ryan, is that like the CFTC is like, okay, like you guys, industry, there's some rough edges, but like, good job, keep going. Let's see, let's see where this goes. We'll like be relatively hands off. Bitmex, no, no bad. We're going after you. But like for the rest of you guys, like, keep going cautiously. And then the SEC is like, oh, CFTC, you're just like leaving this open for us? We can have all of this. We'll take it. Like, we'll take all of this.

• 52:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's the same reason libertarians never win elections.

• 52:26David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 52:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right? Just because it's just like, the tactics they use of just, you know, aren't, aren't working. So the bigger government policy ends up winning. But this is really hurting coin stock. I don't know if you've seen this, David, but Coinbase shares tumbled 21%. And this was right after the report that it's facing an SEC probe. I guess that's what you call it, being probed by the SEC. Sounds lovely. Coinbase valuation, look at this since IPO, David.

• 52:54David Hoffman?

  That's brutal.

• 52:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  Down bad. We got a bear market here, of course.

• 52:58David Hoffman?

  Sure, but like it was ironically, I think when Coinbase IPO'd, yeah, that was the top of the main market. Felt like the top of the market, man.

• 53:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's kind of funny because I'm like, kind of bullish Coinbase, coin at these prices.

• 53:11David Hoffman?

  Ironically, you know what it takes for it to be especially bullish Coinbase? For the SEC to get just like a leash on it.

• 53:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, through the court system. I mean, how, where else is the leash going to come? It's got to be executive order, which doesn't seem to want to bring that in or the court system. This is interesting as well. Related, unrelated, who knows? Kathy Wood of Arc, she's a Bitcoin bull, of course, Arc Invest. They just sold nearly 1.14 million shares of coin at all time lows of $53 and their average purchase price was $254. It's down bad on that trade.

• 53:48David Hoffman?

  It's called down bad.

• 53:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I guess like a take is a reminder take here is, I feel like a lot of People are trying to solve problems through regulation right now in Coinbase. Like, so even if you think about the Coinbase insider trading problem, David,

• 54:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  what if we just allowed everyone to list assets? And there was no such thing as front-running? Imagine that. We don't have to imagine that. It's called Uniswap. The take here is, stop trying to solve everything with regulated crypto banks. That's what the genslers want. The answer to listing, uh, front-running is Uniswap, where anyone can list. The way to prevent another Celsius is by using AVE, where loans are on-chain. We have the solution. It's called DeFi. I do think that DeFi doesn't solve everything. But it does solve some of these problems here, including lack of transparency in a black box. We had the Celsius's and the BlockFi's of the world. And also, including Coinbase front-running.

• 54:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  If you're listing an asset on Uniswap, anyone can list anytime. There's no insider information whatsoever for an asset listing. And it eliminates the problem completely. You eliminate the need for regulation. That is the model for DeFi. Or the regulation happens on-chain, and everyone can be a regulator. Anyone can audit this thing at any time. That is the better solution than, uh, you know, clamping down in a big way.

• 55:16David Hoffman?

  The whole point of labeling something as security is because of information asymmetry. Like, if you are the issuer or the manager, then you know things than the buyer does. And that gives you a bunch of power. A lot, not everything. You are, you just said that DeFi doesn't fix everything, so we're alluding to the same thing. But like, DeFi fixes a lot of the information asymmetry. Like, the majority of it. And it really reduces information asymmetry. So like, sure, uh, like, uh, 10 people could get together, make a DAO, issue a token, and that might be considered a security because you have these issuers. But like, you know, maybe, you know, I don't know, join the Discord, see what they're up to if they, if they allow, allow that. You can see their behavior on-chain.

• 55:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  On-chain cash flows are, are, basically, they're like, um, quarterly statements in real time. You get to see revenues.

• 56:05David Hoffman?

  So like, a lot of transparency happens. So even if it's a security, if it's a token on-chain, automatically, there's so much reduced information asymmetry. So, I don't know. Gensler, take it into account, bro.

• 56:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, what we're saying is there's wins for you, Gary. If you come to DeFi, look at DeFi, if you get back to base principles of what are we trying to do? More transparent, fair, orderly, efficient markets. There's some wins on the DeFi front, and we wish you would see that, Gary, in the SEC.

• 56:33David Hoffman?

  It makes us sad.

• 56:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  David, this is not sad, though.

• 56:36David Hoffman?

  Breaking.

• 56:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Some good news, some breaking news. What is happening now with the road to the merge?

• 56:43David Hoffman?

  Yeah, the Ethereum developers have announced the merge date for the Gorley testnet. Kind of weird, it's weird to say they announce a merge date and then the date is arranged. August 6th and 12th. But that's because of the way that this works. They've announced the TTD, which is Total Terminal Difficulty, which is basically a metric that is like related to the hash power of the Gorley network. Basically, as we get closer, we'll kind of know this date. Between 6th and the 12th, it'll happen. The Gorley testnet is going from group of August, which is the last testnet before the merge. Bankless will be live streaming this and host some East Sakers, probably Anthony Cizano if he wants to come. Whoever wants to, whoever's big in the Staking community that wants to come will host them. We're going to live stream this merge.

• 57:27David Hoffman?

  If it all goes well, if it all goes well, Brian, I give it four weeks till merge. Maybe five, five, maybe six, maybe six.

• 57:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  September.

• 57:36David Hoffman?

  September, September. If it goes well.

• 57:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  If it goes well.

• 57:40David Hoffman?

  September, merge.

• 57:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  And the others have gone well, I will say.

• 57:43David Hoffman?

  And the others have gone well.

• 57:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  They will have gone. They have gone well enough to pass that test of going well.

• 57:48David Hoffman?

  Yes, correct, correct.

• 57:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is big, man.

• 57:51David Hoffman?

  This is big.

• 57:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  Big, might be happening. Guys, we're going to stream it here, of course. We're going to have lots of merge coverage for you, so much that you'd be sick of talking about it. But we've got some other things to cover when we come back. First, PoAP and the WNBA. This is a non-speculative crypto use case. Love what PoAP is doing here. Secondly, the Uniswap token, there's some fee switch rumblings. They may be turning on the revenue stream. We'll talk about that, too, and its effect on the larger DeFi token market. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible.

• 58:24David Hoffman?

  Juno is bringing crypto-friendly banking straight into your checking account. With Juno, you can send money from your Juno checking account straight onto a Layer 2, like Polygon, Optimism, Arbitrum, and they have ZK Sync and Starknet support on their way. You can skip the ACH wait times, you can skip all the gas fees, and go straight from your checking account to an Ethereum Layer 2 in seconds. Inside Juno, you can buy and sell crypto with $0 fees, and your Juno checking account comes with a Metal Mastercard that gives you up to 5% cash back on your spending. Juno is also giving you $10 cash back on your first crypto deposit, and $100 when you set up a direct deposit. This ad just writes itself. So go sign up at juno.finance/bankless. Lens Protocol is an open-source tech stack for building decentralized social media applications. It is the new era for social media.

• 59:08David Hoffman?

  We all have toxic relationships with our Web 2 apps. We want to break up with them, but we can't. These applications own our digital lives and all the relationships that we've made. We need to break through to a new paradigm of social networking applications that we control, rather than them controlling us. Lens isn't a social media app. It's a protocol to let 1,000 Web 3 social apps bloom. Lens is a permissionless and transparent social graph that is owned by the user. In crypto, we say "not your keys, not your crypto", and on Lens, we say "not your keys, not your profile". With Lens, your followers go with you to whatever social media application you want to use. And instead of being trapped by an algorithm chosen by that app, Lens lets you choose the way you want to experience your social media. Lens is the last social media handle that you'll ever need to create. So in order to get started, there's a secret code word in the show notes.

• 59:51David Hoffman?

  Enter that code word in the Google form link, and you'll be well on your way to entering the world of Web 3 social. And we're back with the battle of the ZK EVMs. This was a huge theme during ECC Week. Three different teams independently launched their ZK EVM roadmap. Scroll, Polygon, and ZK Sync. It happened to just be ZK EVM Week. Probably, depending on when you're listening to this, I am hosting a livestream with Scroll, Polygon, and ZK Sync today, Friday, if you're listening to this today, 8:00 AM Eastern Time. And so it might already have been happening. Maybe if you're listening to this very early in the morning, it's about to happen. We are hosting all these teams to talk about their ZK EVM. But we have three different teams going after us.

• 1:00:34David Hoffman?

  Ryan, can you explain why we are so bullish on ZK EVMs and what the difference is between all of these various ZK EVM flavors?

• 1:00:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  We talked about it last week, why ZK EVMs are important. And it's basically because you can get all of the goodness and expressivity of the Ethereum mainchain only in a layer two. That is, you know, ZK rollup secured. And there is this term that was bandied about that like people have still have questions about of EVM equivalence. What does it mean? How do you stack these platforms side by side? And I thought this was a great illustration of equivalence. So what you're trying to do is everything that you can build and deploy on the Ethereum mainnet. You want to be able to do the exact same thing, have it be mirrored as close as possible to the Ethereum mainnet on a ZK, in a ZK EVM world. And the different ZK EVM solutions take different approaches to that.

• 1:01:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  If you're to kind of like boil a technical stack into three layers, you have kind of like the very low level runtime layer. It's where everything is kind of eventually compiled down, all the code that somebody writes in Solidity is compiled down to runtime. Above that, you have another layer, the bytecode layer, and then above that you have the actual language. So in the case of Ethereum on the mainnet, you're programming the language of Solidity in almost all cases. And so EVM equivalence and EVM compatibility means some level of the runtime bytecode and language layer mirroring what's happening on the Ethereum side.

• 1:02:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  So Starknet basically allows you to do Solidity, but then it transforms that into another kind of language that is called Cairo. And then it has its own bytecode layer, it has its own runtime, does not mirror Ethereum closely. ZK Sync is kind of next. It allows you to write in Solidity and then it compiles that down. But like the bytecode and runtime are still different than the Ethereum mainnet. Hermes goes a step farther and some of the bytecode, like at the kind of the opcode layer is basically the same as Ethereum mainnet. And then Scroll goes the farthest.

• 1:02:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  The most equivalent to Ethereum of all four of the solutions where it gets down to kind of the bytecode layer. And the runtime, of course, is the ZK EVM. That's kind of the difference between all of these solutions is you can sort of transport your solidity code. On StarkNet, you kind of have to learn some Cairo. On ZK Sync, you can sort of port your solidity code, same with Hermes and Scroll. But with Scroll, it has more equivalence to Ethereum at the bytecode layer. And these other solutions don't have as much, though they have some.

• 1:03:20David Hoffman?

  Well done. I'm impressed.

• 1:03:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Ah, yeah.

• 1:03:22David Hoffman?

  Nice job.

• 1:03:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Someone more technical is just gonna be like, "All of that was trash. Bad explanation."

• 1:03:27David Hoffman?

  But everyone less technical is be like, "Oh, wow. Thanks, Ryan."

• 1:03:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  He's really smart.

• 1:03:30David Hoffman?

  He's really smart.

• 1:03:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  Let's talk about this Hayden tweet, David. So this is the Uniswap token. It is printing money, not the token, but the protocol.

• 1:03:38David Hoffman?

  Protocol.

• 1:03:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  What are we looking at?

• 1:03:39David Hoffman?

  Protocol. Yeah, we're looking at, we've seen this so many times before, but this one is even the biggest. The biggest discrepancy between the Uniswap fees earned through the Uniswap trading fee protocol, $7.5 million in one day versus Ethereum's $2 million. So like Uniswap fees up, Ethereum gas fees down. Like $9 million a day average in daily earned fees for Uniswap liquidity providers, which is just crazy. I mean, we usually would talk about this in markets, but there's more to the story this time. So we have, there's a governance proposal about the Uniswap fee switch. Not necessarily to turn it on, but perhaps about a redesign.

• 1:04:20David Hoffman?

  So this thing, coming out of a latent Q Sac, "Fee Switch Design Space and Next Steps." And he begins saying, "There has been a lot of discussion around whether the fee switch should be turned on. In most of this discussion, I see an assumption that using the fee switch equals money going to uni token holders. I think this is limiting." I'm not gonna read out this whole entire proposal, but there's conversations in the Uniswap governance about the fee switch. So like, anything at this point would be great. And anything is happening. Something is happening. There is a podcast coming out on Monday. About DAO governance and how DAO governance needs to get fixed in order to fix protocol fees. So that's highly relevant. That is with Hozu is one of the best podcasts we've ever recorded.

• 1:05:04David Hoffman?

  But the fact that Uniswap's printing money, there is a proposal being actively discussed called fee switch, design space and next steps.

• 1:05:13David Hoffman?

  Yeah, this is the

• 1:05:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  The fee switch is coming, is that what you're saying? You think it might be?

• 1:05:17David Hoffman?

  It's not not coming at the very least. We are I don't know if we're making steps in the right direction, but we are not making steps in the wrong direction at the very least.

• 1:05:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Look, I think that Hozu episode is is perfect because there is this perception of like our DeFi protocols, our blue chips are not broken. Like they just handled the recent crash phenomenally well. They're still printing money from a revenue perspective. But there's a perception that the tokens themselves are broken from a value accrual perspective.

• 1:05:46David Hoffman?

  Valueless governance tokens has turned into an actual, not a meme, but actuality.

• 1:05:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  Exactly. And so that's the discussion we have with Hozu is how do we fix that? And I'm pretty optimistic that we will fix it and fix it this cycle. And we're starting to see that in governance play out. Anyway, definitely tune into that episode. David, I've had this question of whether I don't, not many people are talking about it, which maybe means like people aren't going to do it, but like, you know, it could

• 1:06:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  I could imagine that the chain that gets forked, you know, merge and becomes kind of the canonical Ethereum chain with with proof of stake, right? That that will obviously happen, but someone will probably continue to operate the Ethereum chain in a proof of work environment, like an Ethereum classic, classic type of move.

• 1:06:32David Hoffman?

  No, classic cash.

• 1:06:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  Classic cash Ethereum. Is, oh, is this a thing that's happening?

• 1:06:37David Hoffman?

  Oh, I don't know, but I would imagine that. What else were we gonna talk about?

• 1:06:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, like, it just seems like opportunity. Do you remember that that time when there was like, I don't know, 50 different flavors of Bitcoin, like Bitcoin Diamond, Bitcoin?

• 1:06:48David Hoffman?

  Bitcoin private, Bitcoin gold, Bitcoins cash, Bitcoin Satoshi's vision.

• 1:06:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  Around the time that Bitcoin Cash forked, yeah, Satoshi's vision, all of these things.

• 1:06:58David Hoffman?

  You could probably append an adjective to Bitcoin and there was probably a fork of that. It was, it was called the fork and fair launch era. And it was equivalent to our DeFi Yield Farm era, but for Bitcoin and proof of work.

• 1:07:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like 2017 era?

• 1:07:13David Hoffman?

  2016 to 17, yeah.

• 1:07:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  2016, 2017. So do you think anyone's gonna do this?

• 1:07:17David Hoffman?

  Uh, yeah, probably.

• 1:07:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like the miners?

• 1:07:19David Hoffman?

  I mean, like, the, it just takes a very minimum amount of coordination to coordinate on the new shelling point, which is the proof of work chain that forks off of Ethereum before it goes to proof of stake. Uh, like, why not?

• 1:07:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well.

• 1:07:32David Hoffman?

  And the thing is, like, if some people do it, then, like, traders do it. And if traders do it, then other traders do it. And all of a sudden, it becomes a shelling point.

• 1:07:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  I feel like all the people that would have done this are busy with their own chains, though.

• 1:07:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  You know, like, um.

• 1:07:46David Hoffman?

  They've already made a chain.

• 1:07:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Justin Sun.

• 1:07:47David Hoffman?

  Yeah, right.

• 1:07:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's like, you know, he's got Tron. You can't fork in another Ethereum.

• 1:07:52David Hoffman?

  Uh, sir, you underestimate Justin Sun, sir.

• 1:07:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  He could do another.

• 1:07:56David Hoffman?

  Justin Sun will do whatever he wants if it makes him money.

• 1:07:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Look, the great news, if you are an ETH holder, is of course, you just get this coin too.

• 1:08:03David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Whether it's valuable or valueless.

• 1:08:06David Hoffman?

  It's gonna be that simple.

• 1:08:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  Just get it. Sell it. Free airdrop, free fork.

• 1:08:09David Hoffman?

  That, I will say that, that you should sell it.

• 1:08:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  You never know, David.

• 1:08:15David Hoffman?

  I don't know how fast or slow, but eventually you should get rid of it.

• 1:08:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay. Not financial advice, but you should definitely sell.

• 1:08:24David Hoffman?

  You should definitely sell.

• 1:08:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  NFT stuff, David. This is pretty cool. Uh, oh, by the way.

• 1:08:28David Hoffman?

  We didn't even finish. We didn't even start that story. This story, this story is that.

• 1:08:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  It was a different story?

• 1:08:34David Hoffman?

  Antpool, which is a proof-of-work mining farm for Ethereum, supports Ethereum Classic ecosystem with $10 million investment. Ethereum Classic is the proof-of-work Ethereum chain that forked off of Ethereum with a DAO hack. It's the one that has embraced proof-of-work. Antpool, a proof-of-work miner, has invested $10 million to support the Ethereum Classic ecosystem. Makes sense, because these people have hefty, hefty financial investment into proof-of-work, and so they would love it if Ethereum Classic had a vibrant ecosystem so they could, they could just, like, mine that chain and sell those tokens, because, like, you go, I mean, what is the Ethereum Classic market cap, Ryan? It's gotta be under a billion, right?

• 1:09:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  I was just looking at this. What are we?

• 1:09:14David Hoffman?

  Market cap? Oh, wow, five, five?

• 1:09:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wow. Wow. No, this is 8.5 billion, my friend.

• 1:09:19David Hoffman?

  Well, yeah, but it's also up 40% on the day.

• 1:09:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, it's been appreciating relative to ETH recently.

• 1:09:24David Hoffman?

  Yeah, well, big time, right?

• 1:09:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  People are doing this trade.

• 1:09:26David Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah. And so, but also this like quarter trillion dollar network Ethereum is going to turn like all of the revenue towards proof of work miners off. And then like these miners that are mining this like, you know, quarter or 200 billion dollar network are all going to go and start mining this eight billion dollar network. Uh, and so like margins are going to get real thin. And so these miners are investing in Ethereum Classic because they need to pump up the chain because that's their revenue source.

• 1:09:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, maybe that's David, maybe, maybe that's why there won't be many forks, uh, or any forks of a pre-merged Ethereum is because Ethereum Classic kind of has that niche already.

• 1:10:03David Hoffman?

  Yeah, but, but if you fork off of the most, most recent chain, you get a lot of like Maker Dow and all like Compound, all these things are still like the contracts are on Ethereum. Things like DAO will break because the Ether price on the new Ether price will go to like zero or like very, very low, like USDC is not going to be honored. A lot of things that are going to be extremely chaotic on that chain, but like, I don't know, like you can pick something up from the ashes.

• 1:10:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  There you go. For the enterprising young scammer.

• 1:10:29David Hoffman?

  Just, uh, just long enough for me to sell. Just let me sell.

• 1:10:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  There you go. Hey, maybe something could come of it. I, we shouldn't be so, so sure here, David.

• 1:10:39David Hoffman?

  Yeah, something as in more Ether for me.

• 1:10:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, let's talk about PoApp, NFT stuff.

• 1:10:45David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  Um, this is Roz saying, I'm a giga fan of PoApp because they found product market fit outside speculation. And this is a tweet of PoApp.

• 1:10:55David Hoffman?

  Few have done that.

• 1:10:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  At, in a stadium on the Megatron. Uh, scan to collect your WNBA NFT. It's a PoApp. Uh, and this is a partnership with the WNBA.

• 1:11:08David Hoffman?

  Yeah, the WNBA releases like this, like to do like, what is this?

• 1:11:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:13David Hoffman?

  And they say, we're excited to announce that everyone attending the 2022 WNBA Commissioners Cup Championship presented by Coinbase on July 26th will have the opportunity to mint a free collectible NFT called a PoApp. This is the first ever WNBA issued NFT and it serves as a digital proof that you attended the game, kind of like a ticket stub or souvenir. Cool, cool.

• 1:11:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's very, good explanation of what a PoApp is, actually.

• 1:11:38David Hoffman?

  Yeah, right? Yeah.

• 1:11:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  Good job, guys. And that's exactly what a PoApp is. Um, this is the PoApp itself on.

• 1:11:44David Hoffman?

  Wow, it's pretty.

• 1:11:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  Dot gallery. Yeah, it looks great. And I think about.

• 1:11:50David Hoffman?

  Eighty-four, eighty-four people.

• 1:11:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  No, no, no. Apparently 700 people or so inputted their emails. We're still, you know, we'll start working at something like this. And, you know, but these are new people entering the crypto world that previously wouldn't have. And these are definitely more the normie side, right? This is not an speculative asset use case. It's nothing DeFi. I guess it's NFTs, but all you had to do was show up to a game, to an event. That's cool. I love that.

• 1:12:19David Hoffman?

  So like 84 people got them. So 84 people pulled out their phone, scanned their QR code, and had a mobile wallet to collect that PoA. 84 people at a WNBA game had a mobile wallet. That's kind of cool.

• 1:12:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  Let's talk about this, David. There is a bill before Congress bipartisan bill seeks to eliminate taxes on crypto transactions. Under $50.

• 1:12:42David Hoffman?

  If I had one of those Kizou things, I'd be like, meh!

• 1:12:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, cool, but just under $50?

• 1:12:48David Hoffman?

  $50?

• 1:12:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  How about like $500 or something?

• 1:12:51David Hoffman?

  Yeah, come on, $500, please, please.

• 1:12:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, yeah, but these are some of the...

• 1:12:56David Hoffman?

  That's not even dinner. Like, if I have to pay somebody back for dinner, it's like over $50.

• 1:13:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right? I mean, I guess this is gas fees, maybe, sometimes, most of the time on Ethereum.

• 1:13:06David Hoffman?

  I guess so. Yeah, that'd be nice. That'd be nice.

• 1:13:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  Some progress. I don't know.

• 1:13:10David Hoffman?

  It's something.

• 1:13:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  We'll have to see if that goes anywhere.

• 1:13:12David Hoffman?

  Do you know that "it's something" meme? It's something!

• 1:13:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  I haven't seen that meme, but yes, I see it now. Other news, Solana has physical stores now. It's like the Apple store. There is a Solana store. Looks like in the background, there's some t-shirts. Looks like there's a shoe over there.

• 1:13:32David Hoffman?

  Yeah, what is that?

• 1:13:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  There's some NFT frames as well.

• 1:13:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  I can't say anything more about this, you know? Solana's got a store.

• 1:13:42David Hoffman?

  Solana's got a store. Is it open 24/7 or is it closed?

• 1:13:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  Where is this store? I would kind of like to visit, actually.

• 1:13:48David Hoffman?

  Come on, that was a funny joke.

• 1:13:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  What'd you say?

• 1:13:51David Hoffman?

  Is it open 24/7 or is it closed?

• 1:13:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, dude!

• 1:13:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  Great. Edit that, delete that.

• 1:13:57David Hoffman?

  Don't do that. That was a good joke.

• 1:14:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Let's move on. Chipotle Buy the Dip promo includes $200,000 in crypto for customers Coinbase accounts. The restaurant chain is also giving away $2 million in guacamole and queso to celebrate National Opioid Day.

• 1:14:14David Hoffman?

  Oh god, it's a bear market. God, next, next, next.

• 1:14:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  You wanted to include this, David, so you have to live with it. Now tell us why this is significant for a roll-up, sir.

• 1:14:23David Hoffman?

  Oh, Chipotle has adopted crypto.

• 1:14:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bullish guacamole. Next.

• 1:14:30David Hoffman?

  Let's do it again. Introducing web 3 subscriptions coming out of Mirror. This is a real announcement. We're back to being totally serious. Mirror says that they are excited to announce the launch of web 3 subscriptions. This new feature allows readers to subscribe to any Mirror publication with their wallets and receive email notifications when content is posted. For creators, web 3 subscriptions open the door to building a wallet-based community, as opposed to an email-based community, that can be used across web 3. So basically, rather than using your email and password, you use your Ethereum wallet. And a big headline, big like line that they title a paragraph is, "The Future of Community is Wallet Native." Big fans of that. Big fans of that.

• 1:15:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  I like, I really like what Mirror is doing. It's like Mirror the Substack killer? I don't know. They're making some progress. This is all about winning the hearts and minds of the creator community, and I think that's better done with NFTs. David, what's this?

• 1:15:21David Hoffman?

  As previous Substack customers, we would know.

• 1:15:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  Current, sir.

• 1:15:26David Hoffman?

  Oh, yes. Oh, yeah. Oopsies.

• 1:15:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  Don't jump the gun.

• 1:15:29David Hoffman?

  Wallet Connect. Say hello to the future of chat with Wallet Connect Chat. You can DM any user using any wallet on any chain. So Wallet Connect releasing a chat feature. Cool. Nice, nice. Next.

• 1:15:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  I like this. I want to do it. I just don't know who to do it with, David.

• 1:15:45David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, we have like, we chat on Discord, right?

• 1:15:48David Hoffman?

  Yeah, we chat on Discord, yeah.

• 1:15:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  Chat you up, but.

• 1:15:52David Hoffman?

  Okay, Ryan, you want to take this one? You should take this one.

• 1:15:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, yeah, okay. This is raises. So we're talking about raises. So Aptos is a Layer 1 chain that just raised $150 million from FTX, Jump, Crypto, and more, and friends. I think Aptos was the former people involved with the DM project, the Novi project at Facebook.

• 1:16:14David Hoffman?

  Ah.

• 1:16:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, so Aptos consists of the leaders, engineers, and strategic talent behind years of development at DM and Novi. You remember when DM was like a big thing?

• 1:16:23David Hoffman?

  Big Ethereum.

• 1:16:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  And in 2018, it was the blockchain that was going to come eat Ethereum and all of the other smart contract chains. It's called DM. It's best engineers in the game. They were at Facebook. And they developed this, not solidity, this programming language called Move. Well, it's back. Now it's called Aptos. And I've actually heard in the developer community, some rumblings, that Move is kind of cool. Kind of works better in some ways, maybe, than solidity. That does not say much for the Aptos chain. I'm not sure about that, but the same tech. And it kind of begs the question, it's like, you look at some of the investors here, FTX and Jump Crypto. Besides Aptos, there's another chain that's similar to this, that also uses Move rather than solidity, it's called Sue.

• 1:17:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  And so, is this the rise, David, of the ETH killer killers? Question mark? Is this a Solana killer?

• 1:17:13David Hoffman?

  Around the roller coaster we go.

• 1:17:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it's interesting. And the set of investors, of course, are typical investors who funded other Layer 1s in the past. The skeptic take here is, rotator's going to rotate, and we get a new crop of alt Layer 1s every single cycle, and here's another one. I guess the more optimistic take is, awesome, more funding. Move is potentially a really cool technology. Who knows what these blockchains can bring to the table? Doing more experiments, getting more funding for these experiments as well. What's your personal take, my friend?

• 1:17:50David Hoffman?

  I don't know how to differentiate it other than the backstory of Facebook. I'll wait until I see a community.

• 1:17:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  There you go. What a reasoned, rational take from my co-host here. Also-

• 1:18:02David Hoffman?

  I'm just exhausted, Ryan.

• 1:18:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  Are you hot in there? Do you have the AC off?

• 1:18:07David Hoffman?

  No, I'm exhausted of all the alt-right ones.

• 1:18:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  I thought you were exhausted because we just did like a three-hour podcast with Balaji this morning. We do a lot of podcasts, guys. Unstoppable Domains, they just reached unicorn status after their latest raise. So, over a billion dollars, that's what unicorn means. A $65 million Series A.

• 1:18:26David Hoffman?

  I don't, how does Unstoppable Domains make money?

• 1:18:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  They sell domains, sir.

• 1:18:30David Hoffman?

  They've gotten drowned out by ENS.

• 1:18:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  Nah, they sell domains. It's a good business model. .crypto. I have a .crypto. I did not purchase it, but I have one.

• 1:18:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  Let's talk about jobs.

• 1:18:42David Hoffman?

  You didn't give them money.

• 1:18:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bankless Jobs Board. A few cool jobs, of course, as always. This is your reminder to what, David? What do they need to do?

• 1:18:50David Hoffman?

  Get a job in crypto. Do you listen to how much fun me and Ryan have? I mean, Bankless probably has the most amount of fun out of any company.

• 1:18:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  Everything's like this. We do, I mean, I'm just-

• 1:19:01David Hoffman?

  We have a lot of fun.

• 1:19:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  We want you to get a job.

• 1:19:03David Hoffman?

  Other companies, other companies also have fun.

• 1:19:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes.

• 1:19:07David Hoffman?

  And so, you should get a job in crypto because they are probably more fun than your Boomer Web2 TradFi job.

• 1:19:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, there's also some Bankless jobs, alpha.

• 1:19:14David Hoffman?

  Oh, wow. I wonder why I was talking about how fun it is to work at Bankless.

• 1:19:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  But first, Vertex Protocol. A marketing coordinator.

• 1:19:20David Hoffman?

  That's non-technical.

• 1:19:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bankless UX UI designer.

• 1:19:23David Hoffman?

  That's non-technical.

• 1:19:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  Senior newsletter editor. We are looking for that.

• 1:19:27David Hoffman?

  It's literally the best job on the market, also non-technical.

• 1:19:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  Really hard to do, but if you got it, you got it. Streams. Looking for a financial analyst. Stakefish.

• 1:19:35David Hoffman?

  Is that, wait, is that, is that non-technical?

• 1:19:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's definitely non-technical.

• 1:19:38David Hoffman?

  That's non-technical? Okay.

• 1:19:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, cool. Stakefish. Smart contract software engineer. Stakefish. Back-end engineer. Stakefish. Blockchain marketer.

• 1:19:46David Hoffman?

  That's non-technical.

• 1:19:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Stakefish. Front-end software engineer. Stakefish DevOps engineer. Bankless Academy. Product manager.

• 1:19:53David Hoffman?

  Don't know what that is, but it's definitely non-technical.

• 1:19:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bankless Academy. I know what that is. Up and coming.

• 1:19:57David Hoffman?

  I mean, I do know what that is, but I don't know what they're up to.

• 1:19:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Guys, there's so much for you there. Go follow the Bankless Jobs Board at bankless.pallet.com. Make sure you plug in your email. You'll get these updates. Via email, when they come up, and know what the jobs are. David, DevCon's coming up too. We should do a quick PSA for DevCon. What's DevCon about? And what's some of the alpha around DevCon?

• 1:20:19David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so it's a little bit like DevConnect that we did back in Amsterdam. Amsterdam was the first DevConnect. DevCon, this will be the seventh? No, sixth, sixth DevCon. This one, it's held all over the world. If I was on my game, I would be able to list off every previous city that DevCon's ever been to. Even though, Ryan, I have been to zero of them, and I'm very bummed about that. But I will be going to DevCon number six. So DevCon ticket sales are underway. They are re-releasing tranches. You can get your tickets at devcon.com/EN for English/tickets. Or devcon.org is... Oh, did I say .com? .org. Devcon.org for your tickets. It's in Bogota, Colombia. Some people got a little bit turned off by like, "Ooh, Colombia is scary."

• 1:21:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  Everyone's asking, "Is it safe, David?"

• 1:21:04David Hoffman?

  Vitalik's going, I'm going. And I'm gonna go anyways, even if he doesn't go.

• 1:21:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  Looks beautiful.

• 1:21:09David Hoffman?

  I'm definitely going. Like, yo, there are hotels and stuff. It's fine. It's fine. Yeah. It's gonna be great. It's happening in October, like 11th through 14th of October. So I will certainly be going, which is, yeah, I'm very excited.

• 1:21:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  There is also a special discount for students, builders, and in particular, students from Latin America. So we'll include a link to where you can find that as well. David, we've got some hot stuff coming up next, including questions for you and I from the nation, including, "Is ETH a Veblen good?" Question mark.

• 1:21:46David Hoffman?

  I love this question.

• 1:21:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  "What is a Veblen good?" Another question. "What's Ryan and David's life like when they're not working?" Does that even exist?

• 1:21:53David Hoffman?

  Who let that question in?

• 1:21:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  Hot takes from crypto Twitter, of course. We've got a few hot takes for you as well. We'll be right back, but before we get there, we want to tell you about these fantastic sponsors that make Bankless possible.

• 1:22:05David Hoffman?

  ZK Sync is an Ethereum Layer 2 network that is pushing the frontier of high-performance blockchains that don't compromise on security or decentralization. ZK Sync has combined the power of zero-knowledge rollups in the Ethereum virtual machine, enabling developers to build the greatest Web3 projects possible, ones we haven't even seen yet. Crypto needs its killer applications to onboard the world, but crypto-killer apps need ZK Sync as a platform to build on first. It's generally accepted that zero-knowledge rollups are the conclusion of crypto-blockchain scaling technology, and ZK Sync is leading the charge into the final frontier of crypto-economics. So if you're a developer who wants to build your app on a future-proof foundation, which gives your users the best UX possible, check out ZK Sync's website at zksync.io.

• 1:22:46David Hoffman?

  And yes, there's also going to be a token, so give them a follow on Twitter too, @ZKSync. Rocketpool is your decentralized Ethereum staking protocol. You can stake your ETH in Rocketpool and get our ETH in return, allowing you to stake your ETH and use it in DeFi at the same time. You can get 4% on your ETH by staking it with Rocketpool, but you can get even more by running a node. Rocketpool is the only staking provider that allows anyone to permissionlessly join their network of validating Ethereum nodes. Setting up your Rocketpool node is easier than running a node solo, and you only need 16 ETH to get started. You're getting an extra 15% staking commission on the pooled ETH that uses your node to stake. You also get RPL token rewards on top. So if you're bullish ETH staking, you can boost your yield by adding your node to the

• 1:23:28David Hoffman?

  decentralized Rocketpool network, which currently has over 1,000 independent node operators. It's yield farming, but with Ethereum nodes. You can get started at rocketpool.net, and you can also join the Rocketpool community in their Discord. You can find me hanging out there sometimes in the chat, so I'll see you there.

• 1:23:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Hey guys, we are back, starting with the questions for the nation. As a reminder, if you have a question for David and myself for the rollup, get it in. Go follow us on Twitter, that's @BanklessHQ on Twitter. If you have a question for the rollup, we're throwing a thread out there every Wednesday, and just add your question to the list. The first here this week is from mymoneyplan.ch. "Is ETH a kind of Veblen good? That is a good that's demand increases as its price increases, like designer handbags, the Gucci, the Prada, that sort of thing? Is ETH a Veblen good? David, what do you say?"

• 1:24:16David Hoffman?

  Ryan, the answer is unequivocally yes. Yes, it is. And we have two ways of answering this question. One, we can just kind of reason about this. Ether, the yield, the real, real world yield, as in like what you can buy with ether yields, goes up when ether price goes up, right? And so, but not, how am I trying to say this? Okay, so 32 ether gets you like 5% to 7% yield at like $1,000 price. It'll still get you a 5% to 7% ETH-nominated yield at $1,000, or $10,000, or $100,000. So the yield does not go down in real terms as the price goes up,

• 1:24:57David Hoffman?

  which makes it desirable as price goes up, because the yield is always the same. We've also can see this in the transactional volume of this thing. Whereas, we were talking about today, Ryan, where the volume of gas markets, or the gray prices, super low, because it's a bear market. But when it was a bull market, we had 40, 400, 500, 600 sustained gray gas prices for weeks. Because as like, as an economy heats up on Ethereum, more transactions happen on Ethereum, more ether gets burnt, more yield goes to stakers. And so as ether price goes up, because the bull market is on, the yields go up, the ETH burn goes up, and the price goes up.

• 1:25:40David Hoffman?

  And so this turns into a positive feedback loop, which is exactly what a Veblen good is. So this thing actually perpetuates itself forward. Now, it doesn't do that in a short timeframe. It does it over like 10, 20-year-long horizons. And so this like self-perpetrating bull market, I think will take a long time to play out. But yes, this thing is a Veblen good. You also, it also gets more liquid as the price goes up. That's like a normal property of all assets. But it's especially true of ether, because it has its own native liquidity inside of things like Uniswap and Bouncer, and like all these exchanges. And so Ethereum provides ether its own liquidity, which scales with price. It provides increasing yields as price goes up. So price goes up, but yields increase faster in real terms, not in these terms, in real terms.

• 1:26:24David Hoffman?

  And so is ether kind of Veblen good? Does it get more demand as price goes up? Answer, Ryan, is yes. Yes, it does.

• 1:26:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  There it is, all along. ETH wasn't ultrasound money, it was luxury money. All along.

• 1:26:39David Hoffman?

  That is a terrible branding.

• 1:26:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  The Prada of money, the Gucci of money, sir.

• 1:26:42David Hoffman?

  I do not subscribe to this brand.

• 1:26:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  Veblen, good. That's what you just said, David. I quoted you directly. Let's go to the second question. How does your day, week normally look like in terms of work outside of the hours you record? Would love to know how you guys go about your days. Why don't I pull up the bankless calendar, David, and see if there are any hours that you are not recording this week? Because I think you might be recording during more daytime hours than you're not recording, sir.

• 1:27:09David Hoffman?

  Oh, yeah, yeah. This week was special. This week was, I did a lot of podcasts this week.

• 1:27:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, why don't you answer? When you're not recording, what are you doing?

• 1:27:19David Hoffman?

  This week has been so far, wake up at like 7:00 in the morning and then, and then kind of clock out at like 7:00 PM, go get dinner and then come back and write a little bit more for like an hour. It's, this week has been, I like, only bankless, kind of insane. What is it like normally? It's that, wake up at 7:00, maybe I clock out at like 5:00, go to the gym, go get a dinner with a friend, and then I come back and start writing more.

• 1:27:53David Hoffman?

  I don't necessarily think that I have a healthy work-life balance.

• 1:27:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  See how fun this is, guys? This is crypto. Well, look, man, when it's a hobby.

• 1:28:00David Hoffman?

  Get a job in crypto, guys.

• 1:28:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's also your job. It's kind of hard to like, separate. I mean, I have a similar schedule to you. It's like, I wake up at like 6:30, 7:30, I spend some time with the family. I have kids, I have a puppy, a dog, I do all of my family stuff, and then I get into bankless. I'm usually like, trying to catch up on what happened the previous day. Is sort of where my day starts. So that's like email, Twitter, Discord, Telegram. Like digesting massive amounts of information and data and like sorting it, putting it in different places.

• 1:28:36David Hoffman?

  I do all those same steps, except I skip email, but then I get Discord messages from Ryan saying, "See email."

• 1:28:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  See email, or I will screen, I will literally screenshot David an email.

• 1:28:46David Hoffman?

  Force me to check my email.

• 1:28:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Show this to you. Here you go. And as I just described it, like information sorting, I'm like, oh my God, am I in AI? That was like, is this what I do? I digest information.

• 1:28:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Anyway, I do that for a while and then, man, we have so much going on at Bankless. If it's not the podcast, it's look at the newsletter, trying to improve the product. We're launching a new website. We've got some other initiatives, some member initiatives that we're doing and we have a team of like-

• 1:29:15David Hoffman?

  Hang on, we have to stop talking about Bankless. What he says, Fuma says, would love to know what you guys do about your days.

• 1:29:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh my God, I misread it. Outside your work hours?

• 1:29:23David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so outside of work hours and not know how we work.

• 1:29:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is outside of the hours you record. So I was getting to the other non-recording hours.

• 1:29:32David Hoffman?

  Okay, yes, yes.

• 1:29:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  I guess, okay, so in terms of hobbies and such, my hobby is also crypto and DeFi and like philosophy and economics and history and all of the things that crypto touches. So it's all, it's all kind of one in the same. I am a, I guess I love to read books. I'm reading a book on kind of, you know, there's a new Christopher Nolan movie coming out called Oppenheimer. Are you a Christopher Nolan fan, by the way?

• 1:29:56David Hoffman?

  Yeah, certainly, certainly.

• 1:29:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Ever talked about this? Okay, so Oppenheimer is coming out and I just recently started reading a book called The Making of the Atomic Bomb.

• 1:30:04David Hoffman?

  That sounds great.

• 1:30:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  It is great, David.

• 1:30:07David Hoffman?

  Sounds great.

• 1:30:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Are you making fun of me?

• 1:30:09David Hoffman?

  No, no, that's a really interesting period, like with like United States, like we, we kicked Germany's ass and then we stole all their rocket scientists and then, and then we started making rockets.

• 1:30:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  And the book starts before that. It starts with kind of the scientists who actually discovered the physical property of a thing that hypothetically existed, but they didn't actually know existed called the, the atom, the freaking atom. And once you discovered that existed, then everyone's like, well, what do we do with it? And some brilliant scientists were like, we can harness the energy of the sun from this thing, both for good. Like, it's just fascinating. So it's all of these scientists who discovered-

• 1:30:44David Hoffman?

  Imagine saying that line in like the late 40s, we can harness the energy of the sun.

• 1:30:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  Look, it's the atomic era for a reason. Anyway, I do stuff like this. I go on historical tangents, I listen to podcasts, spend time with my family. That's my life, man.

• 1:30:58David Hoffman?

  You exercise, right? You used to have exercise on your calendar in the morning, right?

• 1:31:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  I used to. I haven't gotten to it, man.

• 1:31:04David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I

• 1:31:05David Hoffman?

  I've actually been, since coming back from ETC, I've actually gotten into it. I got, I got some sore glutes. I got some sore glutes right now.

• 1:31:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  You know, I used to lift, right?

• 1:31:14David Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally.

• 1:31:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like, probably not as hard or heavy as you, but like, yeah, I have not lifted in like two years.

• 1:31:20David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's been bad. Yeah, I need to get back into this. Bank, yeah, I need to do this.

• 1:31:24David Hoffman?

  Oh, okay. I also need to redeem myself because I said, like, I made it seem like I eat food and do bankless stuff. And sometimes I skip the food stuff. I thoroughly enjoy rock climbing. So there's a rock climbing gym not too far away. So I'm often there.

• 1:31:39David Hoffman?

  Also, big, big smoked salmoner. I don't know. I was gonna say smoker.

• 1:31:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  Didn't know that.

• 1:31:43David Hoffman?

  But that doesn't, doesn't land so well.

• 1:31:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  No, smoker is different.

• 1:31:46David Hoffman?

  I smoke some real good salmon, Ryan.

• 1:31:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  Really?

• 1:31:49David Hoffman?

  You have never had my smoked salmon, but yeah, you can ask my San Diego friends, the alfalfa boys.

• 1:31:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Do you, can you smoke that? Like, in your, this might be a super noob question, like, in your apartment?

• 1:31:58David Hoffman?

  No, you cannot smoke stuff.

• 1:32:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  I was gonna say, right?

• 1:32:02David Hoffman?

  So this is back in San Diego, but I've, so like, I've got this fire escape and you are not, you are not supposed to put things on your fire escape at all. But like, it's right next to my window. And so I'm thinking about getting one of these like green eggs, because they come in various sizes. Famous green egg smokers get the medium size and just like, carry it through the window.

• 1:32:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Just share some with the rest of the apartment and no one will complain. It'll be fine. All right, we still have one more question then.

• 1:32:26David Hoffman?

  Okay.

• 1:32:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  Very important question, is Bankless doing a merge watch party and how do I get an invite?

• 1:32:31David Hoffman?

  We are going to be a part of a merge watch party. We will not be hosting the merge watch party. The actual merge watch party will be done by the Ethereum Foundation on the Ethereum Foundation YouTube. And me and Ryan will be there, or at least I will. And, but it will be the gory testnet that we will be housing a watch party, hosting a watch party.

• 1:32:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  Did you just say at least I will? Dude, I'm not missing the merge live event. You kidding me?

• 1:32:55David Hoffman?

  I'm just, I don't volunteer.

• 1:32:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's virtual, right? I don't have to appear in person. You know I'm gonna be there.

• 1:33:01David Hoffman?

  Yeah, you can pre-record yourself and put it.

• 1:33:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Guys, that's gonna be really exciting. How do I get an invite? Invite will be available. Everyone can come.

• 1:33:08David Hoffman?

  It's on YouTube.

• 1:33:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  The entire crypto community comes. This is the biggest event in crypto, I think, since the launch of Ethereum. Before that, it's probably the launch of Bitcoin. It's like the third biggest event to ever happen in crypto. Are we overhyping this, sir? Let's get to takes.

• 1:33:22David Hoffman?

  No, no. It's the biggest event. It's the biggest event in crypto since the launch of Ethereum.

• 1:33:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  What's this take from Kronk?

• 1:33:28David Hoffman?

  Kronk. CT sentiment, crypto Twitter sentiment. In November 2021, we're all going to be billionaires in this super cycle. July 2022, Germans will have to eat their own cats this winter to survive. Oh, wow, that was dark.

• 1:33:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's a little dark, but you know, crypto sentiment runs real hot and then real cold.

• 1:33:46David Hoffman?

  Real, yeah, right.

• 1:33:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  And it's been real cold lately.

• 1:33:48David Hoffman?

  Generally counter-tradable? Question mark?

• 1:33:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  Good question.

• 1:33:51David Hoffman?

  Sometimes.

• 1:33:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  You got a hot take, though. How about I read this? A hot take from David Hoffman. Number one, the 2017 bull market was Ethereum-driven. Explanation. Bitcoin had its own story, but it was ICO mania at the center stage.

• 1:34:05David Hoffman?

  That wasn't the hot take. That was the lead-up to the hot take.

• 1:34:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  That was the lead-up, okay. We're still building. Number two, the 2020 to 2021 bull market was clearly Ethereum-driven. DeFi, NFTs, gaming. Number three, the next bull market will be... Three-three? Bull markets.

• 1:34:23David Hoffman?

  Three out of three.

• 1:34:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  Three out of three bull markets led by Ethereum. Bottom line, Ethereum leads. Rocket. Send that tweet to the moon.

• 1:34:30David Hoffman?

  We're not, we're not done yet. We're not done yet.

• 1:34:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wait, was that, there's more takes here?

• 1:34:33David Hoffman?

  That was not the hot take. You got two more takes.

• 1:34:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, I didn't know this.

• 1:34:36David Hoffman?

  This is a three-for-one package.

• 1:34:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Sorry, I'm ruining David's incredibly hot take here. The third Ethereum bull market will be a fees-based bull market. The merge will allow Ethereum fees to actually move ETH price. Uniswap, Synthetix, MKR, and all the fee commanding tokens will also lead. The next bull market is based on fees. The third tweet here.

• 1:34:56David Hoffman?

  Here's the hot take. Here's the hot take.

• 1:34:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  We're just building, okay? Now you ready for it?

• 1:35:00David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bitcoin's unsustainable security budget is actually not going to be a issue for like 20 years. As ETH goes through a 20-year bull market, it helps Bitcoin, it helps support Bitcoin price along the way. There, that was the hot take. You actually said that in the tweet.

• 1:35:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, so it ended with, basically, the son grows up and supports the father.

• 1:35:26David Hoffman?

  Yep, yep, yep.

• 1:35:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's

• 1:35:29David Hoffman?

  What's that meme of like the mutant ninja turtles who are like being taught by the dojo person? And then the dope person person all and then the mutant ninja turtles are super strong?

• 1:35:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  I, you know, the Star Trek meme, I see the Star Trek meme of like, are we friends? And the one Star Trek guy goes, no, while the others saying yes at the same time.

• 1:35:46David Hoffman?

  I've been kind of mean to Bitcoin in this episode.

• 1:35:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's Bitcoin saying, no, we're not friends and Ethereum saying, yes, we are.

• 1:35:52David Hoffman?

  Okay, this isn't a take, but I thought that's pretty cool. So I just put it in here. This is Tim Baker. He goes, first time here, here being the Seattle, Washington NFT museum. And I'm impressed beyond the art. The museum also has a main net miner and proof of stake test net running. So there's this NFT museum in Seattle, probably why this has showed up on my radar, because Seattle's my hometown. But also what we're seeing on screen here is what that one specifically is like this Nano pools mining software. And Ryan, this was like the beginning of the first like nine months of my life was like staring at this screen, watching my miners like mine, mine ether. And like, if you zoom, if you zoom in, you see these little like green words that say like, you know, unit confirmed and you're like, boo, I got one. Nice. Yay.

• 1:36:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wow. What a, what a great date idea. Take your perspective, date to the nerd museum in Seattle here at the NFT museum and watch live proof of stake command line. All right, Vitalik, he had a great update at ECC. I watched the video. It's about 45 minutes long. Completely worth it. An update on the Ethereum roadmap. We pulled out two slides here and I think the big question here, there's much more in his full presentation. But the big question I think people have me included is what percentage of Ethereum are we complete? Right? And so Vitalik has given the line before that the difference between Bitcoin and Ethereum is Bitcoin is 80% complete.

• 1:37:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  And Ethereum is about 40% complete. That's a big difference between the communities. He actually said from his perspective about the Ethereum roadmap, that we are 55% complete. Once we finish the merge, so just over halfway complete. I want to ask you, David. So first, first of all, that, that number 55%, does that feel about right to you? What would you have said about completion?

• 1:37:46David Hoffman?

  And so when we did our roadmap episode with Vitalik, he talked about there's like all this extra stuff that there's a chance that we just don't have the time to get it into Ethereum before this thing settles. And this thing, his talk at ECC is about Ethereum settling down, saying like, we're about to go through this period of rapid change with the merge. After that, we need to let things like stabilize. But like, there's a lot of things in the Ethereum roadmap that like are kind of far out there. And we might not actually get to it before we like learn or accidentally unlearn how to coordinate, which is a feature, not a bug. Like eventually these things, these blockchains need to calcify. So I think when Vitalik says that post-merge, we're at 55% done, he's accounting for if we did absolutely everything on the Ethereum roadmap

• 1:38:30David Hoffman?

  and we never really calcified before we like were unable to get some of the last remaining things on. And so I think that's that 55% measurement.

• 1:38:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  What are we looking at here? Because this chart, I think, tells a story here. And describe the axis for us and the shape of this line here.

• 1:38:47David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so we're seeing an S curve, right? And the vertical axis is the capability of the system. So as we go higher, the capability goes up. And then the horizontal axis is of course time. And then we have this, we are here and where we are is like right before the steepest part of the S. So we are on, what Vitalik is saying is with the merge, we are on the cusp of the most, the period of the most rapid change.

• 1:39:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  And increasing capability.

• 1:39:13David Hoffman?

  And yes, and increasing capability, like yes. Like, blockchains aren't necessarily supposed to go through rapid change. So this is a compromise that we're making because we know that we can make a more performance system, higher capabilities, of course. But then what he's saying is like, okay, we're about to go through the merge. And like, that's going to change a bunch of things. After that, like, yo, we need to chill. We need to let things like steep a little bit. Like, we need to, we can focus on some other things other than the protocol. Also, the developers need a break. So like, we're going to go through this period of rapid change and then we're going to chill.

• 1:39:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  But he's also saying, he's also saying that over time, you know, the big criticism of Ethereum is it's always changing. It's like, that's only the case right now. It is eventually, the S curve kind of like curves down and it stops. It ossifies to a certain level of capability. And even in this chart,

• 1:40:03David Hoffman?

  Not the X curve, not the same as curve, the curve of the complexity of the system. So the chart that we were talking about previously was the capability. And then this next chart that we're now going to look at is the complexity of the system.

• 1:40:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes.

• 1:40:15David Hoffman?

  And so we are here is we are right up to the point of maximum complexity. We're about to go into maximum complexity. And so what Vitalik's saying is, once we get to that point of maximum complexity, we should start becoming less complex, not more.

• 1:40:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  Removing things, removing extraneous things. He actually gives examples in the presentation.

• 1:40:32David Hoffman?

  The purge in the whole like purge, purge, merge, whatever thing.

• 1:40:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, exactly. Purge, the great purge, the great Ethereum purge. I'm here for it. David, those are the takes. What are you bullish on this week?

• 1:40:41David Hoffman?

  You know, Ryan, you know how I recorded a bunch of podcasts this week?

• 1:40:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes, yes, I do.

• 1:40:46David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I am bullish on all the podcasts I record.

• 1:40:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  What's your favorite? You have to just name one that you've recorded so far.

• 1:40:52David Hoffman?

  No, I have three, I have three.

• 1:40:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  What are your three favorites?

• 1:40:55David Hoffman?

  So you know the CypherPunk t-shirts that we that we made out of the bankless Dow?

• 1:40:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:40:59David Hoffman?

  I interviewed one of the names that's on the CypherPunk shirt. David Chom, David Chom, coming on the podcast. So that was just an honor. The we stand, this crypto industry stands on the shoulders of giants. And I got to interview one. So that's coming out. I also did this pod, the food podcast, the food podcast I've been talking about. Not what you expect, but the cool thing about it is we use very similar words like anti fragility and like the decentralization of our food supply and how like.

• 1:41:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Did you crypto pill this nutritionist or was he?

• 1:41:33David Hoffman?

  He's already crypto pilled.

• 1:41:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, really?

• 1:41:35David Hoffman?

  Yeah, he's already crypto pilled. So he like, he leaned into this with me and he's like, we like, we have a debt to pay to our soil because we have not been like reintroducing nutrients back into our.

• 1:41:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  Debt to pay to our soil?

• 1:41:46David Hoffman?

  Yes, dude. And so like, he's like, okay.

• 1:41:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  We've had Fiat soil this whole time?

• 1:41:50David Hoffman?

  We've had Fiat soil. And like now we need to like change our, because we have been borrowing and pulling out nutrients from our soil, leaving it empty. And we need to put nutrients back into it. We need to start saving nutrients more than we are borrowing nutrients.

• 1:42:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is some Saffadine Moose type level stuff here, David.

• 1:42:08David Hoffman?

  Dude, it was really, really, no, but it's really, really good. Saffadine Moose is like, he's acceptable. At the best. But like, we have to have this soft landing, if you will, of how we change the way we produce our food, or else if we don't, we're going to like overreach and then crash. Like, these are the same principles of decentralization, anti-fragility, like savings and debt, but we apply all of these same words that we've been using in crypto to like this food crisis that's coming. It's like, it's one thing when like we have a crisis in financial markets, Ryan, because we can just kind of print money. You can't print food. Like, what happens as a result of that is people starve. And so I actually, this was one of, it's a really good podcast from a content perspective, but Ryan, it's also one of the like, I think one of the most important podcasts that I've ever created,

• 1:42:52David Hoffman?

  because of like how important this information is.

• 1:42:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  You have my attention, sir. I will be listening to this one.

• 1:42:57David Hoffman?

  Please, please listen. Please listen.

• 1:42:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  What else you got?

• 1:43:00David Hoffman?

  And number, number three is all the ECC videos of the ECC interview with Vitalik, 30 minutes long, that's out. Kane Warwick is out. I talked to Kane about, I think I teased this last week. I talked to Kane about his fight with Suzu. Just talked to a bunch of...

• 1:43:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  A lot of this content, by the way, is coming on YouTube, alright? But, special thing, for people listening to the podcast primarily, we are doing a massive content dump on Saturday, where we're releasing all, is it seven or eight of these ECC episodes?

• 1:43:28David Hoffman?

  Eight.

• 1:43:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  All at once.

• 1:43:30David Hoffman?

  All at once.

• 1:43:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's just a fun experiment.

• 1:43:31David Hoffman?

  Eight hours, but broken up into eight different episodes, so you can, you know, pick and choose as you see fit.

• 1:43:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, get the full ETH experiment, right? So you listen to six out of eight, or, you know, listen to all eight, listen to all eight twice.

• 1:43:42David Hoffman?

  Listen, listen to all eight.

• 1:43:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:43:44David Hoffman?

  They're all good. Add reduced, add reduced. You go from six minutes down to like less than two minutes, so you're welcome. Ryan, what are you bullish on?

• 1:43:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  What am I bullish on? You know what? DeFi tokens. Okay, so, the Hsu podcast that we are releasing on Monday, the theme of that episode was supposed to be how we fix DeFi tokens. But the actual content was a bit more bearish, and turned into a question of can we fix DeFi tokens? And the truth is, Hsu wasn't 100% sold that we could. And yet, as we had this discussion... About all of the flaws with DeFi token accrual mechanisms right now and the regulatory landscape that exists, the difficulties, by the end of that episode, David, I was more

• 1:44:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  bullish because I see these, all of the difficulties that we outlined, though they are large, are also surmountable.

• 1:44:44David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 1:44:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like, it's, these are problems that can be solved.

• 1:44:48David Hoffman?

  We've solved them before in humanity.

• 1:44:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  Exactly. And so I left that episode more bullish on DeFi tokens, particularly at their current values. When you see, like, the Uniswap, we were talking about that case, how much money it's printing, David, I was just running the math, and 78 million dollars a day, was that what it was? Something like that?

• 1:45:08David Hoffman?

  7.8.

• 1:45:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  What was it per day?

• 1:45:11David Hoffman?

  7.8 million dollars a day.

• 1:45:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  7.8 million dollars a day, so what is that? 7.8 million dollars, 400 and, uh, wait, wait, 46, 50 million a year is what that amounts to. Is that it?

• 1:45:27David Hoffman?

  No, no, it's 2.9 billion.

• 1:45:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  2.9 billion?

• 1:45:31David Hoffman?

  A year. 7.8 times 365 is 2.85 billion.

• 1:45:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, yes, of course, yes, sorry. I was multiplying that only by 6, not 365. 2.8 billion dollars a year.

• 1:45:45David Hoffman?

  Where the fuck did you get 6 from?

• 1:45:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  I don't know why the 6 was in my calculator instead. Proof of humanity right here. I can't calculate everything. So 2.8 billion dollars. And, like, that's just one protocol. And, anyway, I am bullish on DeFi tokens in the future. I think the problems ahead of us from a governance perspective are completely solvable. I think regulatory is an issue, it's an obstacle, but actually, the constraints that regulatory have given us, I mean, we're growing in a different way, in a different direction, and they're okay, and they will also be removed over time. So DeFi tokens is the thing I'm bullish on, David.

• 1:46:23David Hoffman?

  I will have to say that the fees collected by Uniswap, $2.8 billion of fees are fees that are paid to liquidity providers and you have to pay them. So I think Uniswap fairly might get 5% of those fees. If it took a five, oh, that's a pretty steep charge. But let's run that number. $140 million a year in revenue for Uniswap. If Uniswap took a 5% cut on the 0.03% average trading fees of Uniswap LPs.

• 1:46:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  142 million a year. And what's the cost of that? Like, very low?

• 1:46:54David Hoffman?

  Couple million.

• 1:46:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right? So this is kind of, it's kind of close to profit at that level. Really cool.

• 1:47:00David Hoffman?

  I am similarly bullish.

• 1:47:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Meme of the week, sir.

• 1:47:02David Hoffman?

  If we can fix, if we can fix DeFi tokens by fixing DAO governance, got to fix DAO governance first.

• 1:47:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  True. True. That's, that's the topic of Monday's podcast. David, meme of the week. What are we looking at?

• 1:47:14David Hoffman?

  Meme of the week. Here we go. So this is the famous Friends meme where Phoebe and Joey are, Phoebe's trying to get Joey to say the words. And so Phoebe goes "Ree," and Joey goes "Ree," and Phoebe goes "Seh," and Joey goes "Seh," and then Phoebe goes "Eschen," and Joey goes "Eschen," and Phoebe goes "Recession," and then Joey goes "Risk on season!" Yeah!

• 1:47:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's awesome. Yep.

• 1:47:39David Hoffman?

  Which one, which one are you positioned for, Ryan?

• 1:47:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Um, I am positioned for both. Surprise, Phoebe and Joey. I got both sides. That's the crypto barbell strategy, my friend.

• 1:47:51David Hoffman?

  Risk on recession!

• 1:47:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  The crypto barbell strategy is all-weather, okay? That means you have cash on one side, you have crypto on the other side, you get the maximum risk on, and then you also have the safe haven, risk off, and nothing in the middle. That's me.

• 1:48:06David Hoffman?

  That's a good meme. This is one of the better memes you've had. Nice meme.

• 1:48:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, who did this?

• 1:48:10David Hoffman?

  Nice meme. Some intern that works with Huska Trades, whoever that is.

• 1:48:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  Cool. Up and coming meme more talent here. Guys, as always, crypto is risky. None of this has been financial advice, never is, on Bankless. You could definitely lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the Bankless journey. Thanks a lot.

• 1:48:30David 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, podcasts, 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 Anything's, and weekly rollups where we summarize the week in crypto and other

• 1:49:15David Hoffman?

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