ROLLUP: Bitfinex Hack | Super Crypto Bowl | Aave Social Network | Vitalik Supports Assange DAO

2nd Week of February 2022 ------ 📣 ZERION | Trade Across 7 Networks and 500+ protocols https://bankless.cc/Zerion ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/ 🎙 SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/ ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum 🍵 MATCHA | SMART ORDER ROUTING https://bankless.cc/Matcha 🚀 SLINGSHOT | LAYER 2 SOCIAL TRADING https://bankless.cc/Slingshot 🏦 GEMINI | TURN FIAT INTO CRYPTO https://bankless.cc/Gemini 🦁 BRAVE | THE BROWSER NATIVE WALLET https://bankless.cc/Brave 🦄 UNISWAP | DECENTRALIZED FUNDING https://bankless.cc/UniGrants ------ Topics Covered: 0:00 Intro 4:35 MARKETS 4:38 BTC Price 5:01 ETH Price 5:55 ETH BTC Ratio 6:05 $BED https://www.indexcoop.com/bed 6:15 $GMI 7:21 10 Billion DAI! https://twitter.com/MakerGrowth/status/1491036054581039104 9:56 Inflation is 7.5% https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/10/january-2022-cpi-inflation-rises-7point5percent-over-the-past-year-even-more-than-expected.html https://twitter.com/cryptoconan/status/1491811541448073216?s=21 13:26 RELEASES 13:52 Aave Social Network - Lens Protocol https://twitter.com/LensProtocol/status/1490782690651656197 15:29 Celestia DA Bridge https://blog.celestia.org/celestiums/ 17:26 Polygon Edge https://twitter.com/MihailoBjelic/status/1490036508493250560?s=20&t=ku_imokA2_X2W25WRHIePg https://twitter.com/MihailoBjelic/status/1490036508493250560?s=20&t=ku_imokA2_X2W25WRHIePg 18:57 FTX -> Arbitrum https://twitter.com/FTX_Official/status/1490903050269396992 19:42 RAISES 19:46 Polygon $450M https://techcrunch.com/2022/02/07/polygon-raises-450m-from-sequoia-capital-india-softbank-and-tiger-global/ 20:48 Alchemy $200M https://twitter.com/AlchemyPlatform/status/149104968410152550 7 21:50 Jobs https://pallet.xyz/list/bankless/jobs 23:42 NEWS World’s Worst Bank Robbers 23:44 U. S. Gov $3.6B BTC https://twitter.com/EamonJavers/status/1491092102792749056 25:50 Hacked by Who?! https://twitter.com/HeatherReyhan https://twitter.com/investmentshulk/status/1491113539117133824?s=21 https://twitter.com/cobie/status/1491120382610669568?t=w59M8_pRckbclQKtaR5gwA&s=19 https://twitter.com/cobie/status/1491120382610669568?t=w59M8_pRckbclQKtaR5gwA&s=19 27:10 Tarun’s Event https://twitter.com/tarunchitra/status/1491104365683552256?s=20&t=7rhxCFfpl3s2nZQnnF-zTw https://twitter.com/tarunchitra/status/1491104365683552256?s=20&t=7rhxCFfpl3s2nZQnnF-zTw https://twitter.com/ruthienachmany/status/1491130571774631936?s=20&t=7rhxCFfpl3s2nZQnnF-zTw https://twitter.com/ruthienachmany/status/1491130571774631936?s=20&t=7rhxCFfpl3s2nZQnnF-zTw 29:20 BTC Recovery https://twitter.com/alistairmilne/status/1491124444739555329?s=20&t=dMmstO0dMdWVacUpF3_vqg https://twitter.com/alistairmilne/status/1491124444739555329?s=20&t=dMmstO0dMdWVacUpF3_vqg 30:59 Bitfinex’s $LEO Explodes https://thedefiant.io/bitfinex-leo-surge/ https://twitter.com/ruthienachmany/status/1491130571774631936?s=20&t=7rhxCFfpl3s2nZQnnF-zTw https://twitter.com/ruthienachmany/status/1491130571774631936?s=20&t=7rhxCFfpl3s2nZQnnF-zTw 34:37 Offensive Tweets & Cancel Culture https://thedefiant.io/cancel-culture-crypto-offensive-tweets/ 36:50 KPMG Crypto Treasury https://twitter.com/KPMG_Canada/status/1490728332345987078?t=9Ec_FV1tK2F5VzyihZalvw&s=19 https://twitter.com/KPMG_Canada/status/1490728332345987078?t=9Ec_FV1tK2F5VzyihZalvw&s=19 37:28 BlackRock Crypto Trading https://twitter.com/DeItaone/status/1491481431159234565 38:19 Apple Tap to Pay Crypto https://cointelegraph.com/news/upcoming-apple-iphone-feature-to-give-merchants-a-way-to-accept-crypto-payments 38:49 We See You Wells https://saf.wellsfargoadvisors.com/emx/dctm/Research/wfii/wfii_reports/Investment_Strategy/cryptocurrency020722.pdf 38:41 L222 39:41 USDC on Immutable https://twitter.com/Immutable/status/1491588322262585344 40:05 Set Perp Protocol Optimism https://twitter.com/SetProtocol/status/1490747638899163138 40:52 ETH 40:55 Merge Soon, Then Moon https://twitter.com/peter_szilagyi/status/1489136403376136193?s=20&t=sFPJZ5K6BXKnKZEnwYnzig https://twitter.com/peter_szilagyi/status/1489136403376136193?s=20&t=sFPJZ5K6BXKnKZEnwYnzig 43:39 ULTIMATE ASSET https://twitter.com/RyanSAdams/status/1491788486772330501?s=20&t=4ptQSEhHpc3HQNRP8zC1FA https://twitter.com/RyanSAdams/status/1491788486772330501?s=20&t=4ptQSEhHpc3HQNRP8zC1FA 48:18 Vitalik Supports Assange DAO https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/1490686148087320576 https://assangedao.org/ 48:17 NFTs 48:30 Exchanges to Run Ads https://www.theblockcrypto.com/linked/133226/crypto-exchange-giants-will-reportedly-run-ads-during-super-bowl 49:04 Bud Light x Nouns https://www.theblockcrypto.com/linked/133113/bud-light-partners-with-nouns-dao-for-its-upcoming-super-bowl-ad 49:34 Dapper Labs SB Launch https://www.ledgerinsights.com/dapper-labs-to-launch-nfts-for-super-bowl-nfl/ 50:07 Nintendo NFT Interest https://twitter.com/Blockworks_/status/1489559692502351878 50:42 Zynga Wants In https://www.theblockcrypto.com/linked/133707/gaming-giant-zynga-plans-to-launch-nft-based-game-this-year 50:50 Ready Player Me Punks https://punks.readyplayer.me/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=January2022 https://punks.readyplayer.me/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=January2022 51:22 Disney Hiring https://www.theblockcrypto.com/linked/133042/disney-is-looking-for-a-business-developer-with-nft-experience 51:35 Gucci Buys Sandbox Land https://www.theblockcrypto.com/linked/133727/gucci-buys-virtual-land-on-the-sandbox-as-part-of-metaverse-experience-bid 53:25 Brie Larson PFP https://twitter.com/brielarson/status/1489655405084954625 54:44 Heidi Klum Cryptopunk https://twitter.com/heidiklum?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor 53:00 INTERNATIONAL 53:03 China Debuts Digital Yuan https://blockworks.co/china-debuts-digital-yuan-at-winter-olympics-amid-warnings-from-us-senator/ 56:20 Russia Recognizes Crypto https://blockworks.co/russia-moves-to-recognize-crypto-as-a-form-of-currency El Salvador Bitcoin Bond https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/133720/el-salvador-plans-to-issue-first-bitcoin-bond-next-month 58:35 MISC 58:39 Selkis on Tucker Carlson https://procrypto.substack.com/p/the-digital-freedom-alliance/comments 59:28 Binance buys $200M stake in Forbes https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/133786/binance-forbes-taking-200-million-stake 1:02:30 TAKES 1:03:05 Web3 Quality vs. Web2 Quality https://twitter.com/RyanSAdams/status/1489331768448761857?s=20&t=_gnBi6D_sVv_0OYh_pywpQ https://twitter.com/RyanSAdams/status/1489331768448761857?s=20&t=_gnBi6D_sVv_0OYh_pywpQ 1:04:22 L2 Token Distribution https://twitter.com/TrustlessState/status/1491590027192811521?s=20&t=-P7HJB_lZQzU2V6APMlIWQ https://twitter.com/TrustlessState/status/1491590027192811521?s=20&t=-P7HJB_lZQzU2V6APMlIWQ 1:06:03 William Peaster https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/how-to-get-ready-for-l2-tokens 1:06:15 RAC on NFTs https://twitter.com/RAC/status/1490431021505867776?s=20&t=BMjgVFj3aZ65a53JTsHzbQ https://twitter.com/RAC/status/1490431021505867776?s=20&t=BMjgVFj3aZ65a53JTsHzbQ 1:09:17 Justin Kan Gaming NFTs https://twitter.com/justinkan/status/1490923171817848842 1:10:25 Web3 Echo Chambers https://twitter.com/bantg/status/1490317595421069313?s=21 1:12:05 What David’s Excited About 1:14:12 What Ryan’s Excited About 1:16:42 MEME of the Week https://twitter.com/Ommiii_/status/1491110034453188610?s=20&t=Zx6quzNoLrPuX_5IzBrATg https://twitter.com/Ommiii_/status/1491110034453188610?s=20&t=Zx6quzNoLrPuX_5IzBrATg 1:18:00 Disclaimer 1:18:20 Moment of Zen https://twitter.com/MoonOverlord/status/1491111919633469443?s=20&t=Uvvt4-DdIf5RrkIRleR92Q https://twitter.com/MoonOverlord/status/1491111919633469443?s=20&t=Uvvt4-DdIf5RrkIRleR92Q ----- Not financial or tax advice. Do your own research. See our investment disclosures here: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/bankless-disclosures

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

• 0:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's hard to be bearish ETH above 3K, in my opinion.

• 0:03David Hoffman?

  Congrats, the three-week bear market is over. I'm not saying, didn't say it.

• 0:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  You can't say it. It's over this week. We'll see what next week brings.

• 0:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Alright guys, it is the second week of February. David, what time is it?

• 0:21David Hoffman?

  It's the Friday Bankless Weekly Roll-Up Time, Ryan, and this one is gonna be a doozy. This one is gonna be like two hours long. So much crazy stuff happens in crypto. And I don't even know where to start. So many things happened in like every single different sector. We got Bitcoin stuff to talk about, we got exchange hacks to talk about, we have social dynamics to talk about. We had like the amount of NFT things that are happening is absolutely insane. Oh my god, where to even start?

• 0:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, we could start with the world's worst crypto bank robbers. That happened this week, okay? There was an FBI bust, a hilarious story, alright? This should be circulating on late night, it's that funny. So we're gonna talk about that. $3.6 billion heist, and it caught up with them.

• 1:03David Hoffman?

  Heisted by insane people, by lunatics. Lunatics robbed a bank.

• 1:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  Stay tuned to the roll-up just for that story, it's worth it. Also, Apple tap, you can now pay via crypto adoption. BlackRock is getting into crypto as well. The world's largest asset manager, I believe, they're finally coming to crypto. Gucci buying some land, where? In the metaverse. And the crypto Super Bowl, that's what I'm calling it, David, because I think we're gonna be inundated by crypto Super Bowl commercials. And I might just watch the Super Bowl for that. I don't know if you're watching it.

• 1:38David Hoffman?

  There's a bunch of predictions about like, alright, which NFT projects are making it into the Super Bowl? Are Bored Ape's gonna make an appearance?

• 1:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  What will happen to prices?

• 1:45David Hoffman?

  What Budweiser gonna do? Yeah, right, like, yeah, people are playing that game right now.

• 1:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it's gonna be fun, guys. A lot of things, but first, we want to tell you about a couple of announcements. The first is this, David, it's been a long time since we talked about Bankless Premium Membership. And we appreciate our friend Hardison underscore CJ on Twitter tweeting this out. "How I felt listening to Bankless HQ Premium Feed episode, top secret."

• 2:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  You know, the Bankless Premium episode, David, we're putting some awesome content out on that. And I think if you are not a premium subscriber, you don't have access to that.

• 2:18David Hoffman?

  It's a whole podcast that you don't get.

• 2:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's a whole extra Bankless podcast that comes at you. In addition to podcasts come early at you on the premium feed. There's a lot of other benefits to becoming a subscriber. Anything else you want to mention?

• 2:32David Hoffman?

  Yeah, the in parentheses, coffee mug with the semiconductor for the win at Trustless Day. What the hell does that mean? Well, Bankless Premium subscribers definitely know. And so the debrief episodes are where Ryan and I just like reflect on the episode that we just recorded prior and just kind of capture and, and connect that to other existing knowledge that we think that we have about the rest of the crypto space. So some alpha, question mark.

• 2:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, also you get a nice premium badge, NFT badge for 2022 when you sign up and you get some extras. Unlocks things, maybe things that are coming in the future. You get yield guides, premium access, lots of good benefits there. Also, David, we should talk a bit about our friends at Zirion. This is not my wallet, but it's a wallet I would like to have. And what's cool about Zirion, of course, is this gives you one click access to your entire DeFi portfolio across chains. So it's not no longer just about Ethereum main net. Now we're looking at some Layer 2 chains here. So we're looking at Optimism, we're looking at Avalanche. They're adding more networks over time. So I think they have seven already

• 3:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  listed. And a major theme for this year has been the great migration from L1 Ethereum to Layer 2. And you can bridge within Zirion as well. Take a look at these bridging functions, David.

• 3:52David Hoffman?

  Bridger. There are so many different bridges, bridges out there. There are so many different destinations out there. Zirion supports seven different chains, but all inside of just one Zirion application. In addition to all the bridges that can get you onto those different chains. So sometimes I get caught up in choice paralysis, like, do I use hop? Do I use connect? Like, do I use?

• 4:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  Where do I go next?

• 4:12David Hoffman?

  Where do I go? Like, and so Zirion can just make that super simple for you, all in one place. And that is the power of Zirion blockchain. Belong in the back and Xerion puts itself in the front. So you don't have to deal with the blockchain. Just use Xerion.

• 4:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  NFT viewer too. It's really, it's all your, your assets. So connect your wallet, start using Xerion, hop across some bridges. We'll include a link to the show notes so you can do that. All right, David, markets time, man.

• 4:37David Hoffman?

  Markets.

• 4:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bitcoin, Bitcoin, baby.

• 4:38David Hoffman?

  Good weeks. Good weeks. Happy about it. We're happy about it. Yeah. Bitcoin started the week at $36,600, which was also the low. And it is currently clocking in at $45,000, $45,250, which is also the high. So started the week at the low, ended the week at the high. It's the best possible outcome. Uh, we're real happy about it. So, uh, up 20% this week, Ryan.

• 5:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  How about Ether? What's Ether doing?

• 5:03David Hoffman?

  Yeah, Ether started, started the week at 20, $2,600, currently at $3,212. Uh, the high is 3,280. So almost currently at its high, uh, up also roughly 20% on the week. Almost as much with Bitcoin. Bitcoin did win the race this week. I think Bitcoin is up like one to 2% more than Ether this week.

• 5:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's pretty impressive. And I, I feel like it's getting rid of those, uh, bull market blues. I feel like the market is moving.

• 5:28David Hoffman?

  Bear market blues?

• 5:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, bear market blues. Uh, I feel like the market is moving squarely into like, uh, neutral territory. Like, we're not sure what comes next, but we're no longer as bearish. It's hard to be bearish ETH above 3K, in my opinion.

• 5:40David Hoffman?

  Congrats. The three week bear market is, oh, I'm not saying, I didn't say it.

• 5:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  You can't say it. It's over this week. We'll see what next week. We'll see what next week brings, but, um, yeah, it's, it's, you know, definitely looking good on this pop back up. How about the ETH Bitcoin ratio? How's that looking?

• 5:56David Hoffman?

  Down just a little bit, down. I think it was at point 074 last week. It is currently at point 071. So down a little bit. Um, no, not too much action there.

• 6:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bed index as usual is tracking all of these assets. So this is what it looks like on the one week. It is up about 7.3%. This is of course Bitcoin, Ether and DeFi. Also, if you want to get in some more risky, I, I guess a bit higher risk and reward DeFi assets. We have the, uh, bankless DeFi innovation index. This is the GMI token. Gonna make it.

• 6:27David Hoffman?

  Gonna make it.

• 6:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's an index of all of. These like DeFi 2.0 protocols and in addition to the DPI, this is a pretty good tracker of what DeFi is up to. And it doesn't look great on the month, of course, like anything. Looks pretty good on the week, though, up 10% this week.

• 6:43David Hoffman?

  It beat bed on the week. Yeah. So newer DeFi tokens, more experimental DeFi tokens, more on the frontier DeFi tokens. More, more upside if things go well, more downside if they don't. But this week it beat out the Ben index. So the bankless GMI index, which has a much, the bed index only has three assets, right? But I guess DPI has many, many, many. The bankless GMI index has a much larger number of assets in it. Things like Tokamak, things like OM, a bunch of the newer like DeFi 2.0 type stuff. And so if that is your cup of tea, go check that out at the index co-op application.

• 7:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Another thing to check out is the growth stats on Maker. They just passed 10 billion DAI.

• 7:27David Hoffman?

  Yay.

• 7:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's pretty impressive. You don't have your soundboard, so you can't click the applause.

• 7:31David Hoffman?

  Doing it manually. That's 10 billion DAI. That's $10 billion of non-blacklistable stablecoins, which is a really important point. DAI does not have a blacklist and there's 10 billion of them out there. I would like.

• 7:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  Although, although I will say, you know, the USDC or anything that's centralized that is backing some of the collateral of Maker could be blacklisted. But that's, it used to be a higher percentage. Now it's lower, right? And it's, you know, it can be adjusted up or down based on, based on that.

• 7:59David Hoffman?

  But that's what, that's what the Maker contracts do. It takes risk into its contracts and it outputs this un-blacklistable stablecoin. So it's supposed to be a risk filter using the, the strength of the MKR market cap and also kind of security through like mingling, right? Like, and so I, I think it's a fair take to say that like, even though that USDC inside of Maker Vaults is blacklistable, the DAI on the other side of that is still like, has strong security properties.

• 8:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  I, I agree with that take too. And I do think that blacklisting is yet another risk that Maker sort of tries to abstract and, you know, take away from, from DAI. But what's cool about this is. 10 billion is a big number, David. I remember one of our early Bankless podcast episodes, maybe the first 10, the first dozen anyway, with Mariano Conti, this is back in 2020, 2020, I think. And he gave out a number that blew people's minds at the time, blew our minds at the time. DAI was like under 100 million, if I'm remembering correctly. And he gave this crazy prediction that by the end of 2020, DAI might hit 10 billion dollars. Uh, sorry, not 10 billion, 1 billion dollars.

• 9:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  And now here we are at 10 billion. It's pretty crazy.

• 9:16David Hoffman?

  The market cap, the supply of DAI at that time was roughly 50 million dollars. Uh, so asking for a 1 billion supply was insane. Now we're at 10 billion dollars.

• 9:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  It was, it was at the time.

• 9:27David Hoffman?

  And Maker, MKR is one of the few applications that's actually generating significant on-chain revenue via their product. And that is what stands out about Maker Dow versus any other thing that's in DeFi. And for some reason, the MKR prices does not reflect that.

• 9:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's the turtle, man. It's, it's slow and steady. It's like my turtle at MFT, David. It's just like, you gotta love it. It's just cranking up on a yearly basis. And actually, we say it's slow, but this is pretty fast for all other traditional markets to go from 50 million to 10 billion in like the course of two years. Let's talk about something else that is very fast.

• 9:59David Hoffman?

  This is why this role is going to last two hours.

• 10:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Inflation is searching 1, uh, 7.5%. This is annualized. This is inflation on US dollars. And inflation is continuing to heat up, crank up even more than expected, highest since 1982. The numbers just came out. I saw this meme. I thought it was kind of funny, kind of sad. What are you gonna do? You just gotta laugh at it. This is me washing $200 worth of groceries in 2022. And it's like this picture of like a tiny sink, a miniature, miniature fruit in a tiny sink and a strainer. Yeah, what's going on?

• 10:35David Hoffman?

  I, I mean, I'm, with regards to how this impacts crypto, I'm conflicted because like more inflation drives people into harder assets like crypto assets. But also more inflation means the Federal Reserve is going to be more aggressive against fighting that, which means they're fighting our assets. So like, I'm conflicted.

• 10:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I think ultimately this is part of the same story, which is crypto is going to do quite fine over time relative to fiat. But yeah, who knows what it'll do in the short run. I wonder if inflation is going away sometime this year. We're going to drop. Remember our Jim Bianco episode? He sort of predicted that it will get higher, it will also peak, and then by the end of the year, we might see something like 3% to 4%, right? As sort of the new normal for inflation moving forward. It's hard to know.

• 11:21David Hoffman?

  Who knows? Yeah, we will figure it out. But crypto is bullish regardless of inflation.

• 11:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, that remains true. And we'll talk about a bit more reasons why it is bullish when we get to releases. Before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible.

• 11:36David Hoffman?

  Gemini Exchange has been my exchange of choice ever since I got into crypto. I use Gemini to both buy the dips and also manage my regular automatic monthly purchases of my preferred crypto asset. On Gemini, you'll find over 50 different cryptos, including many of the top DeFi and Metaverse tokens like YFi and Axie Infinity. Using Gemini Earn, you can earn yield on your various cryptos, including 8% on the GUSD stablecoin. Gemini is available in all 50 states and more than 50 countries worldwide. So if you're looking to upgrade your crypto exchange, sign up at Gemini with gemini.com/go-bankless and get $15 of Bitcoin after you trade $100 or more within the first 30 days. That's gemini.com/go-bankless.

• 12:19David Hoffman?

  Bankless is proud to be sponsored by Uniswap. Uniswap is a new paradigm in asset exchange infrastructure. Instead of a cumbersome order book system where trades are matched with other humans, Uniswap is an autonomous piece of software on Ethereum that lets you trade any token at the current market price. No human counterparties or centralized intermediaries, just autonomous code on Ethereum. Input the token you want to sell and receive the token you want to buy. The Uniswap Grants Program is accepting applications for grants. Do you have something of value that you think you want to contribute to the Uniswap ecosystem? No matter how big or small your idea is, you can apply for a unique grant at uniswapgrant.org and help steer Uniswap in the direction that you think it should go. Thank you Uniswap for sponsoring Bankless.

• 13:02David Hoffman?

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

• 13:46David Hoffman?

  Whether you're new to crypto or a seasoned pro, it's time to switch to the Brave Wallet. Download Brave at brave.com/bankless and click the wallet icon to get started.

• 13:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  Alright guys, we are back with the hot releases of the week. Let's start here. Something is blooming, says the Lens Protocol. I think this is AVE's social network? That's what Lens Protocol is? What's going on here, David?

• 14:07David Hoffman?

  Yeah, this is the hotly discussed Web3 social media platform being developed by some of the team behind AVE. So everyone's kind of hungry for details, and we're starting to get some of those details out right now. I think the high-level TLDR, before we know too much, is that we are taking a social graph, as in like, imagine like, all of your connections on Twitter or Facebook, that's a social graph, like a social web, all of your connections. And then Lens Protocol is working on building that on-chain as part of like, the trustless, verifiable, immutable properties that blockchains give it, and so that we can have a social graph like Facebook, but that's open, rather than enclosed, because Facebook doesn't let you export your social graph. Because it's on-chain, you can export your social graph, and that makes it like, you

• 14:51David Hoffman?

  know, composable, other people can build on this, is the idea. And so this is an on-chain social graph that's being deployed onto Polygon. So Polygon is the network of choice. I think we're all kind of waiting to see what happens next and how this rollout plan occurs. We are in conversation with Christina from AVE, who is checking with compliance as to whether she can come talk about this on a Bankless panel about social media and digital identity in the Web3 era. So hopefully, stay tuned for that, because it's going to be a really hot panel.

• 15:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, this is a bit more of a protocol than I thought it would be, David. There's no app yet, but I guess that's what you have to build out first is sort of the protocol, the primitives for the social graph, and then you can build the apps on top of it. David, here's something from Celesta. So their data availability bridge has launched, I believe, and Celesta is like a data availability layer. How would you explain what a data availability layer is, David?

• 15:45David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so when you make a transaction on a blockchain, it gets embedded into a block, and that is you putting your data into a blockchain, and all blockchains that have a history are help store their history on their data availability layer. Now, we talk about like the modular concept of blockchains and how you can take apart each different module or component, and the data availability layer of blockchain is just one component that's separate from consensus. How consensus comes, how things come to consensus is different about what we are coming to consensus about, and data availability is what we are coming to consensus about, or what we've already come to consensus about and are now storing. And so this is an innovation in the storage aspect of what has already been having consensus had about.

• 16:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes, well, so, okay, so here's how I think of it. So we've got three layers in the modular blockchain, right? You have consensus, that's what's true. You have data availability, that's what's happened, and then you have execution, that's what's happening right now. And so the modular chain, the modular blockchain design splits these three pieces up into separate parts. And so Ethereum mainnet is really going to be the consensus layer primarily, and then later, when we have data shards, it will turn into a data availability layer as well. So that means there's opportunity to outsource some of the transactions, the data availability transactions, which is basically the history, the blockchain history, if you will, to somewhere

• 17:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  else, and Celesta thinks it can be somewhere else. Polygon also has a solution to this, like Immutable is offloading its data somewhere else right now, not on Ethereum main chain, so it's cool to see this space emerge, and it fits right into the modular chain thesis that we have. If you have no idea what we're talking about right now. Now, go listen to the Modular Blockchain Podcast that we put out a few months ago, and that'll get you up to speed. Really important concept. Speaking of Polygon, David, Polygon Edge, it's a new product from Polygon. It allows anyone to spin up their own EVM chain in minutes. So this is like sidechain as a service, I think. That's how I understand it.

• 17:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  It has Layer 2 support, more consensus modules, trustless bridging, that sort of thing. And founder of Polygon says multi-chain Ethereum is coming. It feels like it's here. What's your take on this?

• 18:08David Hoffman?

  Well, we've seen how lucrative it is to take the geth codebase and fork it and spin up your own L1.

• 18:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, Avalanche?

• 18:17David Hoffman?

  Oh, you said it, not me, Ryan. But yes, Avalanche. Polygon Edge is turning this into a service. Like, yeah, like, let's allow anyone who wants to spin up an EVM chain, enable them to do that. And then it's just a super awesome way to capture business in Mindshare if this becomes a valuable service. And maybe this is a litmus test as to like, do actually people want to spin up their own sidechains? Or do they want to just issue their own L1 tokens? Like, what does the market really want? We'll find out.

• 18:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I do think that sidechains are going to become somewhat of a commodity. If you could just like spin them up and pump them out and print them like this, as Polygon is doing. But it definitely builds the network effect for the EVM, things like this. Also, speaking of network effects, it looks like some of the Layer 1s are getting it. FTX, major exchange that you know, of course, it now supports Arbitrum on mainnet. So I think this is withdrawals and deposits to and from Arbitrum, the way Binance supported it about a month ago. What's weird here is like, when Coinbase? Where's Coinbase in all this?

• 19:18David Hoffman?

  Yeah, Coinbase coming in third, at least. I mean, FTX saw the demand out of using Binance to get Ether onto Arbitrum. So they're like, even FTX, which isn't inherently Ethereum aligned, is like, oh, we want some of that value too. So they're doing it. When Coinbase? When Coinbase? Brian, don't make me text you.

• 19:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  Or actually, we probably should text him.

• 19:40David Hoffman?

  We should text him.

• 19:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Let's work on that. Raises on the raises section, speaking of Polygon, we were earlier, they just raised $450 million from Sequoia Capital India, SoftBank, and Tiger Global, pretty massive raise for this Layer 2, which is really what Polygon is. It has sidechains, but it has a suite of Layer 2 solutions as well. And it just goes to show you, alternative Layer 1s aren't the only ones building out war chests, right? This is going to be very much a fight for the execution layer of crypto, and Polygon is raising a war chest in order to engage in that fight.

• 20:20David Hoffman?

  Yeah, we all know that we're moving into a multi-chain world, whether it's a multi-layer 1 world or a multi-layer 2 world, and Polygon kind of has real estate in both sides. And so it's kind of like a bet on a many-chain world. And we know that we can't have one dominant, single blockchain, like, in order to scale this ecosystem, we need to have many chains. Guess who has many chains? Polygon. Polygon's got a lot of chains.

• 20:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  They've got chains of every flavor. L2 chains, L1 chains, sidechains, any chain you want is Polygon. Let's talk about this raise, too. Alchemy, $200 million raise at a $10.2 trillion, billion-dollar valuation.

• 20:56David Hoffman?

  Crazy.

• 20:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  $10.2 billion. If you guys don't know what Alchemy is, it's probably because it sits behind the scenes. Anytime you use, like, MetaMask or many of the apps today, there's that historical data that your DeFi apps need to call. And likely, they're calling something like Alchemy. Alchemy powers a ton of this. It's sort of like the AWS for blockchain data. So we're not talking about kind of the consensus layer running ETH nodes so much as all of the indexing that needs to happen to make the front ends of DeFi applications work, like, a ton of that is powered by Alchemy. So that's how you justify that $10.2 billion valuation, just the massive growth of DeFi and blockchain indexing. I

• 21:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  do think they have plans in the future to decentralize a little bit, but they are centralized right now. So think of this as like blockchain AWS, in my opinion. Any thoughts on that?

• 21:50David Hoffman?

  Nope, that's about right.

• 21:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  Jobs time, David. You ready, man?

• 21:54David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 21:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  You're not in your regular place. I don't know if you can get up and dance for this, but...

• 21:56David Hoffman?

  I'm sitting down, so I'm sitting down dancing today.

• 22:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  You're sitting down, celebrating. Guys, this is your reminder. We do this weekly because it's important. 2022 could be the year you get a job in crypto, because we've got jobs, don't we? Lots of jobs.

• 22:11David Hoffman?

  Binder's full of jobs.

• 22:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  We've got tons of jobs. A senior product engineer at Moment ranks, a community manager as a contractor at DYDX, governance growth lead at DYDX, business operations and finance associate at DYDX, marketing associate at DYDX, lots of different skillsets here, accountant, smart DeFi, web3 engineer at Goldfinch, a senior GoRust engineer at Syndica, smart contract tech lead at StarX as well. I could go on, but there's this new feature on the Bankless job boards I should mention as well. We are building a talent collective, so this is a little bit different. This is where the talent gets to submit their profile and then the web3 companies get to go prospect that...

• 22:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it's like, so think of like LinkedIn, your own web3 LinkedIn profile and employers come to you. So maybe you want to play a little hard to get or just put the feelers out there.

• 23:03David Hoffman?

  Alright.

• 23:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Submit your profile to the talent section and, you know, web3 job finders, web3 talent hires, talent acquisition will come find you. That's the way this network works.

• 23:18David Hoffman?

  Let me tell you, in this day and age in the crypto industry, the market favors talent more than it does jobs. There are more jobs than there are talent.

• 23:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  They will find you.

• 23:29David Hoffman?

  They will find you, yeah.

• 23:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Put yourself out there. If you are passively seeking, it's a good idea. And of course, if you're an employer, you know, we've got some talented folks in the Bankless community that you can connect with. Alright, David, let's move to news, man.

• 23:44David Hoffman?

  Talented folks, huh? Let's get into this.

• 23:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  We have some talented folks. We have some not-so-talented folks as well in crypto, to be fair. This is a story.

• 23:53David Hoffman?

  Yeah, who are they actually talented or not is something that we're gonna have to figure out. All right, we have to start with the big headline. Okay, so for context, in 2016, a very significant exchange called Bitfinex got hacked for what was then, I think, like $72 million worth of Bitcoin, over 100,000 Bitcoins. I think it was like 116,000 Bitcoins. So remember, 21 million supply, 116,000 of those Bitcoins was hacked out of the Bitfinex exchange.

• 24:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's like Michael Saylor levels of Bitcoin.

• 24:25David Hoffman?

  Yes, yes, that's exactly right. I think that's exactly around the right number. Imagine all of Michael Saylor's Bitcoins getting hacked from this exchange. A very big deal. This happened before my time in crypto, but it just caused a bunch of drama and hubbub, and no one knows what happened to the Bitcoins. Turns out, the Department of Justice found the Bitcoins in the hands of two individuals, Ayla Lichtenstein, 34, and his wife Heather Morgan. Both residents of New York were arrested and charged with money laundering of the cryptocurrency stolen from Bitfinex in 2016. The Department of Justice says that it has recovered a whopping $3.6 billion worth of Bitcoin.

• 25:08David Hoffman?

  I think they recovered something like 96,000 of the 116,000. So not all of it, but like significantly most of it.

• 25:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  So this is a big bust and a good recovery. And so, you know, when I first read this, I was picturing some like, you know, elite crypto hackers out there, some shadowy super coders, right? Not only did they heist-

• 25:30David Hoffman?

  Living off of the United States, somewhere else.

• 25:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, no, you know, they didn't only heist billions of dollars worth of crypto, but they also hid it for like almost a decade.

• 25:40David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 25:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, so like, what are we expecting there? And, uh, yeah, so I was expecting some sort of shadowy super coder to emerge, but instead, we got something else, David. What did we get?

• 25:52David Hoffman?

  We got these ridiculous insane people who are like the, the, the woman wants to be a rapper and she's terrible.

• 26:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Struggling influencer is what I might say.

• 26:03David Hoffman?

  Significantly struggling, rightfully so struggling influencer. Who is like acting like an actual, actual lunatic on Tik Tok and Instagram, making very just ridiculous raps. The behavior of these two people who are very, very public is insane. It's insane who they are. They are not right in their head. And like, I'm trying to like, think that it's a show, but I don't think it's a show. I think it's real. Here's a video of her eating these fluffy pancakes and commentating out it. We'll put the links in the show notes about how crazy some of this stuff is.

• 26:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's just fun. It's just good entertainment, you know?

• 26:41David Hoffman?

  It's one of those things. It's like, I, I watch these videos. I'm like, why do I even care about this world?

• 26:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Look at this.

• 26:47David Hoffman?

  What the hell is going on? There's, okay, for the listeners, this is a, this is the, the lady, the woman hacker, drinking a, Heather, drinking a bottle of something with her toe, with her feet. So like bottle in her feet, drinking it, going straight to the mouth. This was, this was a couple, oh my God, it's absolutely.

• 27:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  Billionaires are getting weird, David. That's what's going, like this person's a billionaire hacker, right? You know, next slide, what is this?

• 27:13David Hoffman?

  Yeah. So this is Tarun Chitra. We've had him on the podcast. He used to host these like kind of web three style talks dinners every now and then. And he hosted Heather Morgan once, once at one of these talks in 2019. And the, the, the talk that Heather gave was how to socially, social engineer your way into anything. And so she gave like these.

• 27:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  I'd say she's qualified.

• 27:37David Hoffman?

  Yeah, quite call, clearly she took her own advice. I mean, this is three years after she and her husband hacked Bitfinex, right? Allegedly hacked Bitfinex. And so like some of the pictures that came out from this were absolutely insane. Did you have that, that tweet pulled up?

• 27:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, there's more than this?

• 27:54David Hoffman?

  Yeah, scroll, scroll down. There's a few pictures. Yeah, here we go. Here we go. How to socially engineer your way into everything. From proven cold email tactics to event crashing and infiltrating black, black markets around the world. There's something for everyone. Let's go to the next photo. Yeah. So like. Actually, go to the next one, go to the next one. Okay, useful objects for event crashing: badges, press passes, professional camera, a notebook, money for tipping if you needed to bribe people you ray out of it, a black shirt because you look like security, layered outfits and accessories.

• 28:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is so shady.

• 28:26David Hoffman?

  We actually, we actually don't know how, we are still discovering how they actually got the Bitfinex Bitcoins. We don't know that yet. So that is.

• 28:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, this might be the answer, right?

• 28:37David Hoffman?

  This might be the answer.

• 28:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  They probably socially engineered their way into like $3.6 billion worth of Bitcoin.

• 28:43David Hoffman?

  Right. And so, okay, just TLDR and social engineering. It's not like Hackerman where you're tapping on your keyboard exploiting some weakness in Bitfinex's like walls. It's doing something like calling an employee, pretending you're like an exec, and you get them to give you some information. And so it's a social, it's social. Like you are talking to someone and they just give you something.

• 29:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's way easier and probably like a greater, you know, weakness in most of our systems and structures.

• 29:08David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 29:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  Some places I've infiltrated. Wow. Imagine documenting your crimes like this, David.

• 29:16David Hoffman?

  Mm-hmm.

• 29:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  Just for the clout, you know, you just gotta, you gotta make sure everyone knows. This is a tweet from Alastair Malin. "Imagine being a hacker or money launderer and keeping the unencrypted private keys to $3.5 billion of Bitcoin in an online account linked to your name. Mind blown." Are you telling me that this is how, this is where the FBI found it? It wasn't like on a ledger, it's not on some like, you know, private keys that they manage, you know, encrypted somewhere. This is on a, an unencrypted online account linked to their names.

• 29:54David Hoffman?

  So it was encrypted, but apparently very poorly. So here's from, from the DOJ report. They say, "After the execution of court-authorized search warrants of online accounts controlled by Liechtenstein and Morgan, special agents obtained access to files within an online account controlled by Liechtenstein. Those files contained the private keys required to access the digital wallets that directly received the funds stolen from Bitfinex and allowed the special agents to." Awfully seized and recovered more than 94,000 Bitcoins that had been stolen. Covered Bitcoins valued at 3.6 billion. So apparently it actually was encrypted. There's another report and the link in the show notes will provide more details. But apparently it was just encrypted poorly.

• 30:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  Ah, okay.

• 30:34David Hoffman?

  There is good and bad encryption out there and apparently like, so they stored it online with poor encryption.

• 30:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  Under their names.

• 30:41David Hoffman?

  Under their own names.

• 30:44David Hoffman?

  Okay, but again, how we actually know these people attacked Bitfinex, we don't know. We just know that they had the Bitcoins and they were like, you know, money laundering it.

• 30:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  David, why did it take the FBI so long to find this?

• 30:55David Hoffman?

  I don't know. I don't know. Well, like, we're gonna have to, this is gonna be an ongoing, like, report. We're gonna, we're gonna be following this one for a while.

• 31:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, I, I, I think the other big question is, okay, 3.6 billion dollars. What happens now? The FBI owns it?

• 31:08David Hoffman?

  This is part of the mess.

• 31:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  They've seized stuff in the past and they've like in, in, you know, previous seizures like the Silk Road, they've auctioned it off, right?

• 31:15David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 31:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Is that kind of what happens or where did the proceeds go? Who actually should be, own this money?

• 31:20David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so this is part of this big mess. And so there is, Bitfinex attempted to make all of its customers whole again via issuing equity or IOUs. To say, hey, we're gonna repay you guys once we figure it out. And I, from like my limited knowledge on this, it's like they actually did make customers whole again. Via a combination of issuing this LEO token, which is kind of like a pseudo equity. It was like Bitfinex's version of BNB. And you actually could see the LEO token price. LEO was a promise. It was either, it was some sort of like commitment on like a value or if you ever got, if they ever got the Bitcoins back.

• 31:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  Pseudo equity kind of thing?

• 31:57David Hoffman?

  Pseudo equity with a promise to repay Bitcoins if it was re seized by the FBI and then given back to Bitfinex, the rightful owner of the Bitcoins. But like customers have kind of been more or less paid out by this, by this hack.

• 32:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  Everyone felt good with it. They felt like, it's not like Mt. Gox, they felt like they were made whole.

• 32:16David Hoffman?

  Right, exactly. You could actually see the LEO token spike in price well before this news broke. So like, people start, yeah, yeah.

• 32:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  Efficient markets.

• 32:25David Hoffman?

  Yeah, right. And so, but now the LEO, the LEO token price, which is in theory And IOU based on the backings of the Bitcoins that's now been seized. It went from something like $5 to $8 on the news that the Bitcoin had actually been seized. But now there's a bunch of drama about who actually gets the Bitcoins because people have differing opinions on this. So a quote from Eric Voorhees says, "Bitfinex doesn't owe me anything. They made me whole years ago." Eric Voorhees lost some Bitcoins in the Bitfinex attack. But apparently, many customers disagree. Particularly given Bitcoin's appreciation from less than $600 in August 2016 when the exploit happened to around $44,000 now. The tokens were worth about $71 million at the time of the hack, the Bitcoins, and now is valued at $4.5 billion.

• 33:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, there's definitely, look, this is going to be settled in courts, right? There's going to be lawsuits from customer, like, there's going to be, this is going to be a long, drawn-out process to see who actually gets that money.

• 33:21David Hoffman?

  Right. So like, some customer says, "I think that this is ridiculous. That's my Bitcoin that they took from my multi-sick wallet. I would like my Bitcoin back." Arnoff, this customer says, "He doesn't remember if he signed away any rights to his stolen Bitcoin while accepting the Bitfinex reimbursement. They can have their equity back," says Arnoff, who claims to own about $50,000 of illiquid Bitfinex stock. "I'll take my Bitcoin. Thank you very much." So TBD on how this Bitcoin actually gets distributed.

• 33:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Man, hilarious, hilarious. I guess, you know, what are the takeaways? Other than like, something like this is going to make the best crypto movie ever. Like, incidents like this.

• 33:57David Hoffman?

  So, a super cringe crypto movie.

• 34:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Are you embarrassed that this is why we're making headlines?

• 34:03David Hoffman?

  It's like, one of those things, like, if you go, like, if listeners are that curious, go to the link in the show notes, go to this Heather's Twitter page and TikTok page and like, watch how absurd her behavior is as an individual on this planet.

• 34:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  Stay tuned for the moment of zen.

• 34:17David Hoffman?

  Stay tuned for the moment of zen, because that's one, like, hide your kids, because you don't want your kids listening to it. It's just, you can't make this up. You can't, if you were to write this down and like, give this to like, a producer of a movie, they'd be like, "What the hell is this?" Like, this is lunacy. It's absolutely insane, dude.

• 34:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's the best, it's the best. Books will be written, movies will probably be made in the future. This is crypto. Every week, something like this happens.

• 34:41David Hoffman?

  And on a completely different end of the spectrum, something equally loud also has happened in like the cryptosphere. This has been a very touchy subject for a lot of people, so we're just going to like to cover this.

• 34:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Just the facts, man.

• 34:53David Hoffman?

  Just the facts, just the facts. Okay, so the facts are Brantley Milligan, one of the OGs behind the ENS protocol, and also has always been very, very publicly Catholic, had some 2016 tweets, Merge, talking very negatively about a lot of individuals who identify in certain capacities.

• 35:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  He said homosexual acts are evil. He also said contraception is a perversion, among other things.

• 35:18David Hoffman?

  So is porn and masturbation, you know, Catholic stuff, very out loud and open. And this has, and the thing is like these tweets got surfaced from 2016, but then Brantley like doubled down on it on a public Twitter space. And that's really what really set off this conversation. Since then,

• 35:36David Hoffman?

  I believe members of the nonprofit True Names Limited, the employees have voiced concerns about working with Brantley. Brantley has, his contract has been terminated with True Names Limited. And now, as a result of this, there is kind of like this cultural infighting, I guess, about like woke culture versus whatever the opposite of that is. And now we're trying to find out like, is this woke culture? Is this cancel culture? Or is this just people expressing like they don't want to work with somebody that says that they openly hate homosexuals? This is something that like the crypto community is trying to like unpack and come to terms with and come to some sort of conclusion and have closure with. A lot of fighting on Twitter. It's been very draining. Yeah.

• 36:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it has been. It's just unfortunate. I guess we'll kind of leave this story there. I think it's, you know, unfortunate overall. You know what? Actually, going back to the hack thing, the 3.6 billion dollar hack, when that news broke, I almost felt like it was like some healing for crypto. Like crypto was getting very, you know, like heavy topics, very serious, right? And there's like a lot of vitriol back and forth. And then we got this great story. And everyone is just like, okay, let's, let's pause, let's have a moment and just laugh at the absurdity of what's going on.

• 36:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it's getting weird again. That felt pretty good. Anyway, that's the story. We got some adoption news too. Man, big institutions in crypto, they're here, they're coming. So KPMG of Canada, they just added Bitcoin and ETH to their balance sheet, people. That's huge.

• 37:06David Hoffman?

  That's big.

• 37:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  KPMG, Canada, big auditing firm, big accounting firm, and they're adding Ether and Bitcoin to their balance sheet. I can't believe I'm saying that.

• 37:15David Hoffman?

  Two of the big four have Bitcoin and Ether on their balance sheet.

• 37:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  By the way, we told you it would be Ether too. Sorry, not bankless listeners, I know you guys already know, but like, we told people it wouldn't just be Bitcoin, it would also be Ether, and these are the assets that they're adding. Pretty cool to see. BlackRock as well. What are they doing here, David?

• 37:34David Hoffman?

  Offering crypto trading. So diving, getting their toes wet into the world of crypto. BlackRock, the world's biggest asset manager, biggest, most money under management, starting to get its roots into the world of crypto. I'm happy to say that in the last couple of weeks, I have helped a, or helped convince a BlackRock VP person exit from BlackRock into Web3. Yeah, so yeah, got them into the world of Web3.

• 37:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  So should we thank you for this, David?

• 38:01David Hoffman?

  The soul, yeah, you can thank me for this one. This was my doing.

• 38:05David Hoffman?

  But you know, there's BlackRock who's getting into crypto, and then they're just straight up working in Web3. Go to where the puck is going, or skate to where the puck is going. But you know, good job, BlackRock, you're catching up.

• 38:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Trillions in assets. I mean, they're pretty massive, so of course they couldn't ignore this space for long. Neither can Apple. New Apple iPhone feature, giving merchants a way to accept crypto payments. And so, I don't know if you use Apple Pay on your iPhone.

• 38:32David Hoffman?

  All the time, exclusively.

• 38:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  Now you can just connect it to a Coinbase card, a crypto.com, Visa card, something like this, and you're basically just paying using crypto. This isn't super DeFi yet, but like, at least it's bankless money, right? Ether is bankless money, Bitcoin is Ether, uh, bankless money, and you could pay via that, which is pretty cool to see. Here's another adoption story from our friends at Wells Fargo. What's this, David? It's a whole report.

• 38:58David Hoffman?

  Yeah. Understanding cryptocurrencies. Is it too early or too late?

• 39:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's too late for you, Wells Fargo.

• 39:06David Hoffman?

  So Wells Fargo finally trying to do some education. I have not read this report, so we'll see how actually like good it's.

• 39:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, their main, their main takeaway is where, look at this line, cryptocurrencies appear to be near a hyper adoption phase similar to that of the internet during the mid to late 1990s.

• 39:21David Hoffman?

  That's bullish.

• 39:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  I guess they're listening to bankless. It's bullish crypto, not so bullish Wells Fargo. Where do you guys go? If crypto is here to stay, is Wells Fargo here to stay? I don't know.

• 39:32David Hoffman?

  Ryan, do we just put them out of their misery and just buy Wells Fargo?

• 39:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  Someday. We're gonna at least, you know, the arenas that they have. We gotta, we gotta replace Wells Fargo arenas with like bankless arenas.

• 39:43David Hoffman?

  Bankless arenas, yeah.

• 39:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. FTX, look, we already talked about this, but Layer 2, FTX is supporting Arbitrum Immutable. They now have USDC on the immutable chain on Layer 2.

• 39:55David Hoffman?

  Via Moon Pay. So USDC on Immutable via Moon Pay. So straight USDC on ramp right onto the L2. I think you can buy with debit and credit cards via Moon Pay. So just easier and easier to buy stuff on Immutable.

• 40:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Also, SET is deploying its perpetual protocol on Optimism. What is this, David?

• 40:14David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so with Perp Protocol, perpetual protocol is being integrated into SET, which is being integrated on top of Optimism. So we got it, we got a trifecta here. Perpetual Protocol, we did a meet the nation with them, if you want to learn more about what they are, but it's kind of all in the name. Perpetual Protocol, perpetuals need to be on L2s because they have a lot of computation. They got integrated into SET Protocol, which is one of the same teams that's also powering the Index Co-op and some other assets.

• 40:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  Index Protocol, basically.

• 40:42David Hoffman?

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And now they are also on Optimism. So kind of in one fell swoop, we got three things on Optimism all at once. So that's pretty cool.

• 40:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  Stacking these money Legos, and now we're doing it, we're doing the stacking on Layer 2 now, which is good to see. Stacks on stacks. Look, we haven't even gotten to Ethereum stuff, but the good news is the merge is coming soon. Merge soon, then moon. Actually, we'll probably moon before that, but who knows? But the merge is gonna happen soon. And how do we know it? It's because developers are talking about it, the people actually shipping the code, where, you know, everyone's usually, usually asking these people like, okay, when's it gonna be done? When's it gonna be done? So when they say it's coming, when they say there are PRs that are one major PR away from being ready for the merge, that's a good thing. And I think that's what Peter is saying. Who is Peter? And why is this, this kind of a tweet important, David?

• 41:34David Hoffman?

  Peter is an OG open source, just open source maximalist, I think is the right way to call him. Just believes in open source and has been working on the Geth client for, since the beginning of Ethereum.

• 41:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Tirelessly.

• 41:48David Hoffman?

  Tirelessly, without, without thanks, sometimes, you know, without, Avalanche is built on Geth, by the way. And so like the entire Avalanche ecosystem was built on Peter and the Geth team because they were tirelessly building Geth because they believe in the concept of open source software. Peter tweets, although not really visible from the outside, the go Ethereum codebase, that's Geth, is one major PR away, pull request away, from being done, ready for the merge. And that PR itself is also done, it just needs test TM, hashtag Ethereum. Basically saying, it's like, yo, guys, like, we're kind of ready to like, start to break this thing. And if we can't break this thing, that means we're ready, ready.

• 42:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  If we can't break this thing, David, I'm gonna say, because Peter's not, but if, if the tests, if there's not a major issue in the testing process, I think this thing goes live early summer.

• 42:39David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 42:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think we're talking June and July.

• 42:41David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 42:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  As long as we get through this testing phase without bugs. What do you think?

• 42:46David Hoffman?

  Yeah, that, I think that's right. The merge is coming. There are people murmuring about that's why Ether has done so well in the last two weeks. It could also just be reverting to meme, who knows? But the merge trade is definitely a thing.

• 42:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  Did you say reverting to meme?

• 43:00David Hoffman?

  Mean.

• 43:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, I like reverting to meme, too. That's good. I think we're doing that, too. Reverting to ETH is ultrasound money, reverting to meme, I think that's what's happening.

• 43:09David Hoffman?

  This is, I love these tweets because I never understand what these tweets are.

• 43:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, you don't understand this?

• 43:15David Hoffman?

  Yeah, this is, this is when developers tweet out, pick snapshots of the compiler, the command line, and they just get really, really excited. Yeah. Like, I have no clue what this means, I have no clue going on. But this is the time of the year where developers tweet out command line snapshots and get really, really excited, which means like something is happening in, in the development space.

• 43:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I'm excited. This is a test net from one of the beacon chain developer groups. This is from Prismatic Labs, who have the prison client, so good news, too. And can I summarize a little bit of this for the layman? Because we just talked about the dev takes. But I think, and this is a tweet I just put out, I still don't think people get it. Ethereum is about to become the world's best bond market after the merge. Where else can you get a bond denominated in a deflationary asset backed by an economy with triple-digit GDP growth? The outflows from fiat bonds go to ETH. I still think this narrative about ETH being a non-sovereign bond store of values is unknown right now, David.

• 44:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's like, I think that people still don't understand it, they still don't get it. This is like a T-bill, except it's equity, so you get upside exposure, and it's denominated in a deflationary asset, and the economy is growing 400% per year. When I say the economy, I'm talking about block-based sales. That's what it's grown, it grew over 400% last year. Okay, imagine that. GDP in an emerging economy growing at 400%, the thing that you're buying is a bond in this economy, which is also like buying stock in the publicly traded market, and it's all denominated in an asset that is a store of value that's deflationary, unlike all of the fiat systems.

• 45:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Tell me how this doesn't just slurp out all of the liquidity and all of the capital from the traditional fiat bond system. I think that's what happens here. In the same way that Bitcoin has kind of slurped out of all the capital, like some of the capital from gold, and is on a trajectory to do that more and more over time, Ethereum's coming for the bond market. You know, $30 trillion, $40 trillion sovereign bond market, that's what it's gonna do.

• 45:31David Hoffman?

  Yeah, and I really just want to keep on going on this, but we have such a long agenda to get through.

• 45:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, we do.

• 45:38David Hoffman?

  And you know, we could keep on going. So many people, there's a lot of tribes, especially in the last half of 2021, around all these alternative layer ones, and people are doing this whole relational trade, these comparative trades, like, well, if Ethereum is this market cap, then Solana should be this market cap, or Tezo should be this market cap, or Avalanche should be this market cap. That is baking in the assumption that those assets actually compare to Ether, the asset. Are you sure that they are actually comparable? Because I don't think they are. And so, you know, once this merge actually happens, and some of these actual metrics actually start to become instantiated in the value of the asset, we will see whether you can actually compare those things. I think it's apples to oranges.

• 46:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  So do I. Time will tell. It's bullish, though. Look, the merge is gonna be bullish. We all know this. David, let's, uh, let's talk about this Assange Dow. So this is Julian Assange. Tell me about this story. Looks like it has support from a pretty major backer at this point in time. So what is it?

• 46:35David Hoffman?

  Yeah, this is coming off of the heels of things like Constitution Dow and, um, and Ross Olbrich Dow, Olbrich Dow, trying to get Ross, uh, out of, uh, prison for the Silk Road. Now we're, uh, making Assange Dow to help fund, uh, Julian Assange's basically like probably legal costs, uh, which we kind of know, I think are coming because he's probably gonna get, uh, arrested somehow, somewhere. And so the Assange Dow has netted, uh, $55 million in Ether, 17,000 Ether. Vitalik Buterin donated, uh, 10 Ether. Martin Koppelman also donated 10 Ether. Uh, and so people are pushing Ether into Assange Dow to help fight for Julian Assange.

• 47:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  Here, look, it's a crypto use case. Uh, you can't do this with GoFundMe. Okay? You try to do this with GoFundMe, they deplatform you. I mean, this is what happened with, um, the, the Canadian trucker incident that, that, that's going on in, in Ottawa right now. And, you know, whether you support that or you're not, it doesn't really matter. They just got, uh, deplatformed by GoFundMe. And actually, in this case, David, GoFundMe said to you, um, like the truckers that were raising money for this, this protest, uh, yeah, and we're gonna confiscate your donations and give them to other charities. That's what they actually said at first rather than refunds, right? It's like, our money system, I, I don't think that held up under scrutiny, but they can do that, right?

• 47:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is why we need uncensorable money systems, right? Whether you, whether it's this cause, Assange Dow, you know, or some other cause that you support, like at some point in time, you're gonna be on the receiving end of deplatforming. And that's not cool when it happens to you. So free money, public money systems, that's what we need. I'm glad, um, there's ways to organize this now. Uh, David, we gotta zip through all of the NFT stuff that's going.

• 48:24David Hoffman?

  We're gonna go really fast here.

• 48:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  Let's talk about the Super Bowl, though.

• 48:26David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 48:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  How many ads do you think are gonna be on the Super Bowl? I think I asked you this and like a couple of weeks ago and you were like, like three or something. And I, I gave a higher number. I think I said like seven to 10 or something. What about now? How many ads, how many crypto ads or NFT ads, some allusion to crypto? How many do you think we'll see in the Super Bowl?

• 48:45David Hoffman?

  Seven.

• 48:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Seven. See, it's up. It's up. It's by my estimates. Alright, so like, we know crypto exchanges are gonna be there, right? You gotta see some FTX, definitely. I would be surprised if not, but-

• 48:58David Hoffman?

  Unsure about Coinbase, but FTX definitely.

• 49:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Definitely. So there's gonna be at least some exchanges there, and if you group like the crypto.com's and the mix to as crypto banks, then you know, they'll be there. And then we've got like Bud Light and Nouns Dow.

• 49:10David Hoffman?

  So we know that one. So we're two, two strong ones.

• 49:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 49:14David Hoffman?

  Bored Apes? Probably. Like, this is what they're good at. So Bored Apes, like, a likely third. We're already up to three.

• 49:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. I, I mean, I think you're gonna see them scattered throughout all of these different brand commercials who just like, why do they come to NFTs? It's clout collection. They're trying to get the, you know, the coolest, hippest, you know, most vibey cult, you know, culture thing. And so they're, they're gonna, they're gonna have NFTs. Dapper Labs is gonna be there as well. So that's like a guaranteed three. We already have at least three that are guaranteed. So I think we get to seven.

• 49:45David Hoffman?

  Is this just launching NFTs for the Super Bowl? Is this actually-

• 49:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, I don't know. That's true. I don't know if this is gonna be a commercial. This is Super Bowl related, though. I guess we'll see, though. And yeah. I don't watch the Sup- like, I, I kind of watch the Super Bowl, like, you know, some years. But this year, I'm watching it for crypto commercials.

• 50:02David Hoffman?

  Totally. I also don't watch the Super Bowl. I just make guacamole and drink IPS.

• 50:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's good. We can still do that. This year with crypto commercials.

• 50:11David Hoffman?

  I plan on it. Yeah. Alright, and that's not the only thing about NFTs. Nintendo also expressing interest in the metaverse and NFTs, and they feel their potential. I mean, think, again, anybody that has a brand is probably interested in NFTs. So, you know, think Mario, think Yoshi. All the things, Pokemon, all the things that Nintendo got. They want to make the metaverse out of it. And they kinda already have. Like, remember Pokemon Go? Yep. What was, what was an early version of the metaverse other than Pokemon Go? And so like, this is a natural fit. So Nintendo getting into NFTs.

• 50:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, especially if you're a video game company like Zynga, they plan to launch NFT-based games this year. We just, last week, we talked about Immutable and GameStop creating a whole marketplace for this. This is a Ready Player Me punks game. David, what is this?

• 51:00David Hoffman?

  This isn't actually a game. It's like a meta-platform. So if you have a CryptoPunk, this is for you, where you can get a new sort of like avatar to put your CryptoPunk avatar into, and then the avatar apparently can go in many, many different games. And so it's like one, one NFT avatar thing to, that's interoperable with many, many, many games. And if you have a CryptoPunk, you can go claim one of these.

• 51:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wow. So NFTs are becoming like, you know, brand Legos in the same way that DeFi was like money Legos. And we're stacking these brand Legos up. Of course, who's the biggest brand Lego builder out there in the traditional space? It's Disney. And they are hiring a business developer with NFT experience right now.

• 51:37David Hoffman?

  That's a hot role.

• 51:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  Disney's coming, okay. Gucci.

• 51:41David Hoffman?

  Gucci. Gucci is buying digital land in the sandbox as part of a metaverse experience bid. Gucci, the apparel bag brand, wants virtual real estate. Like, when I read this headline, I was like, oh, maybe the dot com bubble of this age is like the metaverse bubble.

• 51:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  A little bit. You know, you know, all the brands, do you remember way back in the day, there was this virtual world called Second Life, where all of these brands started like putting up, you know, shops and storefronts and that sort of thing. And it totally died off because people, like Second Life was boring. People didn't actually interact on it. I wonder if this time, it's a little different. And I, I, I understand why people resist that language. This time it's different. But this time, we have economics, assets, property rights. And I think that's the thing that's been missing from the virtual worlds and the metaverse this entire, like, that's the thing that gives the metaverse life.

• 52:37David Hoffman?

  That's the thing that makes a bubble happen.

• 52:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  It will trickle bubbles. It will trigger bubbles, but also it will trigger real, organic things that last. And don't just like do the Second Life thing where it's kind of a ghost town of brands. There will be some ghost towns. Don't get me wrong. I just think previous digital worlds didn't have the, the energy and life breathed into them that, you know, that, that crypto brings with, with property rights at the base layer.

• 53:03David Hoffman?

  Right, how do you, in a virtual world, how do you, in like, in the Second Life Gucci store, how do you buy stuff without crypto?

• 53:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right, and how do you-

• 53:11David Hoffman?

  How does money work?

• 53:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  How do you like, I guess, become an entrepreneur? And how do you like, you know, develop, develop some, some piece of property, some land or some asset, and make it better and receive upside for that, right? It's like, everything is kind of owned at the end of the day by Second Life, isn't it?

• 53:28David Hoffman?

  Anyway, it's a two hour long roll.

• 53:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  We'll see how that develops. Yeah. Celebrities too, Brie Larson, she's buying an NFT, what's this?

• 53:34David Hoffman?

  This is a new NFT that I've seen, actually only celebrities get, so maybe celebrities are finally ahead of me and-

• 53:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  Are you, you tell me they have their own Telegram channels? They're front running us now?

• 53:42David Hoffman?

  Yeah, probably, yeah. Celebrity Alpha NFT, Flower Girls NFT bought by Brie Larson. If you want to experience what anti-NFT hate is, you can definitely scroll down on this tweet-

• 53:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, cool.

• 53:53David Hoffman?

  And experience it for yourself.

• 53:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  There's some Brie Larson hate too, I'm sure.

• 53:55David Hoffman?

  Oh my god, that is a lot of capital letters. Oh my god, oh, this one's, this was so ridiculous.

• 54:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Someone just took a breath before they just typed in all caps for like-

• 54:03David Hoffman?

  Okay, so here's the top reply to Brie Larson's NFT. "Oh my god, not you too, I don't know how many celebs need to hear this, but..." Takes deep breath, it's literally written out. "NFTs in crypto are horrendously bad for the environment, worse than the entire carbon footprint of some countries, so bad it's tearing Kazakhstan apart in civil war. NFTs are apparently causing civil wars in Kazakhstan, guys."

• 54:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Look at how many likes this has, David.

• 54:22David Hoffman?

  Almost 12,000 likes.

• 54:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's got more than the parent, it's, she's been ratioed.

• 54:27David Hoffman?

  She's got ratioed, she got ratioed.

• 54:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  Look, this, if you, if you haven't listened to Bankless long enough to know why this is a terrible take and completely false and inaccurate, definitely go listen to some more episodes. That's just crazy, it's just like, false, stupid.

• 54:43David Hoffman?

  Also, RAC has a fantastic thread, we'll talk about that in a hot second.

• 54:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes, yes.

• 54:47David Hoffman?

  Heidi Klum, Heidi Klum has a Crypto Punk.

• 54:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  Crypto Punk?

• 54:50David Hoffman?

  Yeah, me and Heidi Klum are basically BFFs. No, she has way too much taste. Yeah, so, yeah. Welcome to the family, Heidi.

• 55:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  But when turtle, but when turtle, seriously, Heidi.

• 55:03David Hoffman?

  When turtle.

• 55:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  That could be next.

• 55:05David Hoffman?

  I'll ask her.

• 55:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  What's happening here?

• 55:09David Hoffman?

  China, you're getting into China CBDC type stuff.

• 55:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think there's, there's, there's three things here, David, that all have the same thing in common. Maybe just like, read them out real quick and talk about what they have in common.

• 55:22David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so we got China and the CBDC at the Olympics that's currently going on. We have Russia also coming to recognize crypto after recently banning it, question mark? And then also an El Salvador Bitcoin ban. So three different countries.

• 55:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bond.

• 55:37David Hoffman?

  Bond, thank you. Three different countries all doing some positive things in relation to crypto. Interestingly enough, China rolling out the digital yuan, allowing a lot of people to use it in China while these Olympics are going on, has actually triggered the attention of the American regulators. And they're kind of like, oh, what? It's real? Like, oh, people are, oh, we have to do something about this.

• 55:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  Stop using that.

• 55:59David Hoffman?

  Don't use that. That's bad. We don't want you to use that.

• 56:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  What about our sanctions?

• 56:03David Hoffman?

  We're gonna have another hearing about this, American CBDC.

• 56:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  We'll write two more white papers.

• 56:08David Hoffman?

  Absolutely ridiculous. So some oh shit moments happening from the West about how China's CBDC is working at the Olympics and how people are able to experience it for themselves. So there's that. All right, next one, which is Russia coming to recognize crypto.

• 56:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think the unifying theme here is like, all of these countries are kind of like, a little FU to the IMF, right? I mean, they see the IMF as sort of a rival power. They see systems like SWIFT being used for Western US sled sanctions. And they're opting out. They're opting out of that. And you can kind of understand why, but this is basically the game theory that crypto proponents have always predicted. This is the way that crypto gets propagated, where, you know, some country says, well, your payment system, your money system, is not credibly neutral. It's not credibly neutral. So we're gonna either go off and build our own, or just default to one that is credibly neutral for the world.

• 57:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  And this is why, you think Putin is like embracing freedom here? He's just like, you know what? I'm listening to Bankless, and I'm real excited about the liberation.

• 57:15David Hoffman?

  Those Bankless guys are right.

• 57:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, those Bankless guys are right. I mean, look at the potential for freedom for my citizens and for the world. And so that's why, you think he's saying that? No. He's just saying FU IMF, US doesn't control me, so we're just gonna embrace crypto to piss them off. That's what's happening. That's the game theory.

• 57:35David Hoffman?

  And the insane amount of sanctions that the United States has on Russia makes it a very easy choice to make. Like, well, I can't use the global financial system because of sanctions. I will use crypto. Like, it's just a logical conclusion.

• 57:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  And so how does the US react as a result of this? Do they double down and go like, start shaking their finger at the rest of the world and saying, nope, you have to use our SWIFT system. No one used this. Or do they wizen up and actually think about how they can embrace and adopt crypto as payment rails, maybe export the US dollar in order to try to retain some reserve currency status of the dollar and also adopt these credibly neutral rails? Obviously, we think they should do the second. And by the way, guys, we had a fantastic podcast with Representative Tom Emmer that we're releasing next Monday, where we discuss this very thing. So, a member of Congress who sees it the way we see it

• 58:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  and is actually fighting for this sort of thing in Congress. So stay tuned for that. But, look, the geopolitics continue to play out and crypto remains a big part of the story. El Salvador as well, you know, it's like, doing a Bitcoin bond, hanging in there. Did you see this, by the way? So Ryan Selkis, our friend, he went on Fox News. He was on Tucker Carlson. Did you watch this?

• 58:49David Hoffman?

  I did not watch it, but the two faces right here are fantastic.

• 58:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it was great here. This is like meme-able as well. This is a meme template. I mean, the TLDR is basically, you know, Ryan's had some things to say, negative things to say about the Biden administration's handling of crypto. And of course, like, you know, Fox News and Tucker Carlson absolutely eat that up. And so invited him on to talk about the US's, you know, strategy on crypto and how they're falling behind. So it was a good conversation. But, look, this is another example of crypto bleeding into every area of media and gaining some mainstream attention. You'd never see this sort of, you know, interview a few years ago.

• 59:27David Hoffman?

  I'm looking forward to additional interviews beyond Tucker Carlson.

• 59:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Same.

• 59:34David Hoffman?

  Okay, this was pretty interesting, speaking of media. Binance taking a $200 million stake in Forbes. I think the play here is Binance has just bought $200 million worth of positive PR. That's my kind of negative take, but I think it's pretty accurate.

• 59:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I think that's a good take. And I've always, you know, with crypto banks, I think we've always been excited because they're pushing the adoption of crypto, yet also been wary because they can become the next centralization vector, right? And so like, what happens when a major crypto bank starts owning the media? It's not something a protocol can do. Ethereum is never going to own a Forbes and be able to co-opt and covert media. And so it's okay right now for crypto adoption, but it's just another centralization vector. So I look at this with some hesitation.

• 1:00:24David Hoffman?

  Or Forbes says Binance, good.

• 1:00:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:00:27David Hoffman?

  Headline coming to you soon.

• 1:00:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  Exactly. David, we're going to get to the takes of the week in just a moment, but guys, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible first. Stay tuned.

• 1:00:39David Hoffman?

  When you shop for plane tickets, you probably use Kayak, Expedia, or Google to compare ticket prices. So why would you limit yourself to just one exchange when you trade crypto? When you make your trades, you want to make sure you're getting the best possible price on your trade, and that's why you should be using Matcha. Matcha has smart order routing that splits your trade across all the various liquidity sources in Ethereum, and is also operational on Polygon, Avalanche, Binance Smart Chain, and other chains. Trading on Matcha is super easy because it pools the liquidity for me in a single, easy-to-use platform and allows me to make limit on-chain orders. So you can set and forget your DeFi trades, and they will go through automatically while you're away. So when you're making a trade, head over to matcha.xyz/banklist and connect your wallet to start getting the best prices and most liquidity when you trade your crypto assets.

• 1:01:24David Hoffman?

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

• 1:02:09David Hoffman?

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

• 1:02:51David Hoffman?

  You can find these apps at portal.arbitrum-one, and you can bridge your assets over to Arbitrum using bridge.arbitrum.io in order to experience DeFi and NFTs the way it was always meant to be: fast, cheap, and friction-free.

• 1:03:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Alright guys, we are back with some takes of the week. Let's start here. This is a take written by Cooper Turley and Lucas Campbell from the Bankless team. "Web 2 allows you to focus on the quantity of your fans. Web 3 allows you to focus on the quality of your fans." Interesting distinction: quantity or quality over quantity is the difference between Web 3 and Web 2. What do you think this means?

• 1:03:29David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I think the connection here is that because we have native money and Things like private keys that allow us to put money directly into the hands of users, we can actually start to reward users differentially based on their value to the artist or value to the system. So what this does is that if you are an individual fan who is, you know, the biggest fan of all time, like you can be rewarded for expressing that you are the biggest fan of all time. Where in like, if you're the biggest fan of all time, but you're just listening on Spotify, you are intermingled with lesser fans. And so Web3 and private keys allow you to more granularly acknowledge the differing levels of fandom in this space. And so we are allowing actual quality of fandom to rise up out of the, there's the

• 1:04:13David Hoffman?

  sifts, the basal level of just like Spotify plays.

• 1:04:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is the rise of the super fans and Web3 definitely provides a conduit for that. It's less, less of an aggregation technology, the way Web2 has been. This is your take, David. Why don't you read it out?

• 1:04:30David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so I've been trying to help my friend get onboarded into, into layer twos and we're doing some, some airdrop farming on Arbitrum, which I think everyone's trying to do these days. But then I was like, had this like choice paralysis as to like how to actually use the applications on Arbitrum in a way that would actually cast a net to like farm the airdrop. And I was looking at all the apps and it's like-

• 1:04:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Farm a future Arbitrum airdrop that you're speculating on.

• 1:04:55David Hoffman?

  Yes, yes, yeah, right, exactly. Thank you for that. And so I was, it just made me think like, how are these layer twos actually going to distribute tokens? Because it seems like a really hard problem because we want to reward whales and liquidity, but we don't want to centralize the token supply. We want to mitigate airdrop farmers, which is kind of what we're doing, but without also disqualifying small fries. Like, how do you, how do you differentiate people that just put $500 or $200 into Arbitrum? And just because that's all the money that they have versus people that are spreading out $200 all over the place on many different addresses trying to farm the airdrop? Like, how do we do that? And also, how do we fairly reward applications that have differing uses and different, differing, different levels of adoption and quality?

• 1:05:39David Hoffman?

  Like, really, I don't really see a good solution to algorithmically retroactively do this. In the same way that like ENS or Uniswap had a fantastic like programmatic sort of, you know, retroactive airdrop. And so really, the only way I kind of see this like working out is like a top-down, best judgment distribution from the actual teams. So this is just something I'm thinking about. If you have ideas about how Layer 2s might distribute airdrops, let me know, because I want to use that strategy.

• 1:06:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Also, we published an article in Bankless this week about some speculation from William Peaster on how this, how Layer 2s might do that. So, link to that in the show notes as well. Here's another take by RAC, and I think this whole thread is really worth, worth using.

• 1:06:25David Hoffman?

  The whole thread is fantastic.

• 1:06:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's a thread about NFT hatred. And he starts it off like this. Okay, so you hate NFTs. Cool. Let's talk about it. This is an artist, music, music artist.

• 1:06:37David Hoffman?

  Great artist.

• 1:06:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  So coming from a creator background, and he is talking about the benefits of NFTs. And I really feel like he is, he is addressing the criticisms head on. It's like a 10 tweet thread or so. And it's definitely worth watching. There was a large YouTube video that, that blew up, like got 4 million views or something like this. Do you remember what that was called, David?

• 1:07:02David Hoffman?

  Line up something?

• 1:07:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes, line up something. Yes. Anyway.

• 1:07:07David Hoffman?

  Line go up?

• 1:07:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes, line go up. This, this massive criticism about NFTs, I feel like RAC is hitting them thread, is addressing them head on. We probably don't have time to, to go through all of them. But how about this, this tweet? I'll, I'll read it out, David, and get your comments. "A lot of people seem to miss the entire point of NFTs is to make content free, while making ownership scarce. Nobody is forcing you to pay for an NFT. You can still enjoy it for free alongside everybody else. You like my music? You can have it for free." That's the thing is like, I don't understand about the whole NFT anger hatred is it's not a zero sum game here. Like, people who hate NFTs, like, you're not losing anything, don't buy them. This is only upside for the creator.

• 1:07:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  The creator gets this, not some big corporation, you know, faceless evil empire, music, you record label, executive. It's the creator, it's directly to the creator. It's something I've never understood about this argument. What do you think?

• 1:08:06David Hoffman?

  Yeah, this goes back to exactly what we were saying about web two is quantity and web three is quality. That allows fans that really, really care to buy NFTs. And that is the funding model for artists to incentivize them to produce more total aggregate free content. Let the people who want to pay the money, pay the money so that the artist can get funded without all these intermediaries taking their unfair cut. So that the artist can be more creative and do more creative stuff. I think people are still just wrapping their heads around what it means to have like internet property ownership. Where in like before in the web two world, there was no such thing as owning anything digitally on the internet. And so like now that we in the web three world, we have digital property. That means that like I have this thing and you don't have it.

• 1:08:50David Hoffman?

  And you not having it is, I think, triggering to a lot of the web two folk that haven't got their heads wrapped around it.

• 1:08:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh yeah, that's an interesting point.

• 1:08:58David Hoffman?

  Yeah, but they haven't, they haven't considered that, no, they actually still have the free content. And in fact, it's actually getting even better because we've made this new property thing that's going to the web three people. So I think web two people are just kind of seeing being excluded and they're not seeing the increase of total quantity and quality of content come out of that.

• 1:09:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, there's some social dynamics that are, that are definitely playing out and some pushback. Let's, uh, let's talk about Justin Kan. So he's the guy who built Twitch. Twitch, of course, has millions of users and he tweets this out. Yeah, I built Twitch, has millions of users and gaming NFTs are way bigger. Really cool to see web two builders. That are super bullish on gaming, on NFTs, on Web3 now. That's starting to happen. I feel like this bridge between Web2 builders and Web3 builders is starting to be crossed.

• 1:09:52David Hoffman?

  Yeah, and of course, the most, the next tweet following that thread is anti-NFT hater. Let's see how many likes they got. Oh, only 200. Okay, not too bad.

• 1:10:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, that was bad.

• 1:10:02David Hoffman?

  Okay, yeah, when the guy that built Twitch says that NFTs and gaming is gonna be way bigger, yeah, big deal.

• 1:10:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, Alpha Leak 2, he's coming on overpriced JPEGs for Bankless Podcast with Carly Riley. If you are not listening to that on a regular basis, you should be, especially if you want to stay up to date on NFTs. It is the bankless for NFTs.

• 1:10:21David Hoffman?

  Yes, it is the NFT alpha that I go to because NFTs are just too big of an industry for bankless to cover, so.

• 1:10:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, and I'm still here collecting turtles, okay? It's like, what do I know about NFTs? Dear God. Speaking of Web3, is Web3 an echo chamber? This is a take from Bantag.

• 1:10:39David Hoffman?

  Bantag, yep. I thought that was a fantastic take. The first time I've ever heard a take like this is Bitcoin is money for enemies, as in like two enemies can send Bitcoins to each other because they can use Bitcoin as a trust.

• 1:10:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  I really like that line. Bitcoin is money for enemies.

• 1:10:54David Hoffman?

  Yeah, and so Bantag is taking this to Web3, where Web3 is a place to share with your enemies. If you think that you can make everyone conform to your echo chamber, you are either naive or in the wrong business. Because Web3 is open, public, permissionless protocols, everyone's gonna be on them. And so like with all of this like crypto Twitter infighting that we've had in the last like two weeks, that's just mass adoption. That's just different communities coming into the same spot and like bumping into each other. And that's kind of what we're gonna have to figure out how to establish some sort of stable equilibrium, and that will just happen over time. But yeah, the Web3 is not an echo chamber. It's literally got all of the opinions in it.

• 1:11:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, I love that in Web 3, you can't ban people you don't like. I love that it kind of forces, forces people in the same room together. As he put it, it's, it's, it's, yeah, hug it out, hopefully, right? Resolve your differences, hopefully, but we're all there together. That's cool. All right, man, look, we're almost at the end of this episode. I feel like we just rug pulled everyone because we said in the intro, this is going to be two, two hours, which goes to show you, David and I have no idea how long these episodes are going to last on a weekly basis. We just have no concept.

• 1:12:02David Hoffman?

  We did a pretty good job of going real fast on this one.

• 1:12:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, we did. I guess, yeah, nice. So just turn that into a compliment. What are you excited about this week, though, as we end things, David?

• 1:12:12David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so what I'm excited about is, I kind of said this earlier when we talked about ETH asset. ETH asset, we just did that show with Ryan Ellis about the DCF model for ETH. And then a community member came in with their own version of a DCF model and said, no, like, I think these are the numbers. We have people debating about the numbers and the metrics of Ether the asset. That is the only asset that has the properties to be able to even facilitate that type of conversation. And so when Ether, when Ethereum goes through the merge and we have the reduction of supply issuance, because proof of work goes to proof of stake and the average individual can stake at home or stake through some service, the, what Ether the asset is fundamentally changes

• 1:12:54David Hoffman?

  and the whole comparative trade about like, well, if Ether is worth this, Solana should be worth this. That's just going to go out the window because these things, you can't compare these things at that point in time. And so what I'm excited about, Ryan, and I know this can be a little toxic, ETH maxi, whatever, is being able to say, I told you so. Around the time of the merge, when ETH just does some gangbusters price action, either before the merge or right afterward, the merge, or for like the next following decade, the differences between Ether the asset and every other asset inside of crypto and also outside of crypto is uncomparable. And so I'm looking forward, Ryan, to seeing that play out and, and having people say like, oh, like, oh, they were talking about what is now everyone else is talking about.

• 1:13:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  For David, it's not about making money, it's about being right.

• 1:13:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  It does, I mean, look, I understand what you're saying because it has felt like sort of for a long time, being a prophet in the wilderness, like we were talking about ETH and its value proposition since $80 on bankless, right? Like a couple of years ago. And so we're already on the path to some of that gratification of like being able to talk about. And I do think that Merge will be another major catalyst on that trajectory. That's cool, man.

• 1:14:11David Hoffman?

  I know you're totally excited about that too, Ryan, but I know you're also excited about other stuff. So what else are you excited about?

• 1:14:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I'm excited about other stuff. You know what? This week it kind of hit me with the whole, you know, the whole $3.6 billion hack and how crazy that was and how, you know, the lunacy of that thing, that everyone just can't stop talking about crypto. Like, it's saturating everywhere. It's like, because we got everything. This is a car, every week it's a carnival. We get to do this on the roll up. So it feels like this, like it's finance. So we got the Bloomberg side. We've got entertainment. So this is like the, you know, e-celebrity news sort of thing. We've got all these celebs buying in. We have politics. We're just talking about Russia and China, geopolitics, Beijing Olympics. We've got

• 1:14:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  economics. Okay, this is about like wealth inequality and like, you know, bringing more people into the economy. We've got technology. It spans all media. People, that's why people can't stop talking about crypto. And it's going to saturate every single part of media the way the internet did. So that's what's cool to me. It's just, it's all the weird stuff that happens. It feels very weird. Like, it feels very natural and it feels very organic. And I don't think the world's going to be able to stop talking about crypto. And ultimately, what is that? It's bullish. That's bullish for this asset class. Because even when they're saying negative things about it, They're talking about it, aren't they? And I don't see that going away anytime soon.

• 1:15:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  We're going to continue to be in the news cycle for either some weird entertainment things, some celebrity adoption, a new music artist, like billions of dollars in hacks. Like, it's going to be in the news cycle for this entire decade. That's what I'm excited about.

• 1:15:54David Hoffman?

  And I think that just goes to show that crypto is about everything. Like, it's not just money. Crypto is going to take over the world because it's relevant to literally everything. That is like the fundamental bull case for crypto. It's relevant to politics, it's relevant to geopolitics, it's relevant to money, it's relevant to finance, it's relevant to culture. Just how like, exactly what you said, the internet touched everything, crypto will also touch everything. So the fact that everyone's talking about it is just, you know, one of the big fundamentals behind this whole space.

• 1:16:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bullish crypto content producers, I think, David. We're never gonna... You know, here's a funny story.

• 1:16:26David Hoffman?

  Really strong job security.

• 1:16:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  When we first started this podcast, I was like, "Uh, but can we do a weekly podcast? Are we gonna have enough things to talk about each week?" This is when we were doing one episode a week. That's what I was worried about at the time.

• 1:16:39David Hoffman?

  Yeah, now we'd have 4.5 episodes a week. 5.5 if you're a premium subscriber.

• 1:16:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, there you go, yeah. Nice premium show at the end, David. Glad we fit that in. Hey, meme of the week time? What are we looking at this week?

• 1:16:52David Hoffman?

  Boom, okay, so this is of course a reference to the Bitfinex hackers, where we have the expectation where the hackers are like the Ozark family. I'm not, I don't follow this...

• 1:17:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, I just watched it. I watched like the last season, it's good.

• 1:17:03David Hoffman?

  Yeah, okay, so Ozark family, I'm assuming some sort of like very professional, well-done, optimized hackers of some type.

• 1:17:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, money, they're professional money launderers, basically.

• 1:17:13David Hoffman?

  Yeah, there you go, yeah. Good at their jobs. And then in reality, we have these two like squares, like insane lunatics who, I mean, I guess they were successful money launderers for a while.

• 1:17:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  Struggling influencers?

• 1:17:26David Hoffman?

  Struggling influencers who held almost $4 billion worth of Bitcoin on private keys that were on a cloud database and poorly encrypted.

• 1:17:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  Guys, that's the meme of the week, just waiting to see what happens next week.

• 1:17:38David Hoffman?

  Lesson learned, if you steal $4 billion worth of Bitcoin, don't store it in the cloud.

• 1:17:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  David, I'm gonna shout out risks and disclaimers, but first, you want to give them a teaser of the Moment of Zen that's coming up?

• 1:17:52David Hoffman?

  Just don't listen to it. It's terrible. It's so bad. It's Heather trying to be a rapper. Don't listen to it. Definitely don't let your kids listen to it. But after Ryan gives out his disclaimers, it's coming.

• 1:18:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it's definitely risky. It's probably the riskiest thing about this entire episode. Of course, though, none of this has been financial advice. ETH is risky, Bitcoin is risky, DeFi is risky. You could 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. And now, it's time for your Moment of Zen.

• 1:18:52David 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 Anythings, and weekly rollups,

• 1:19:35David Hoffman?

  where we summarize the week in crypto and other fantastic content. Thanks, everyone, for watching and being on the journey as we build out the Bankless Nation. Hey, we hope you enjoyed the video. If you did, head over to Bankless HQ right now to develop your crypto investing skills and learn how to free yourself from banks and gain your financial independence. We recommend joining our daily newsletter, podcast and community as a Bankless Premium subscriber to get the most out of your Bankless experience. You'll get access to our market analysis, our alpha leaks and exclusive content and even the Bankless token for airdrops, raffles and unlocks. If you're interested in crypto, the Bankless community is where you want to be. Click the link in the description to become a Bankless Premium subscriber today.

• 1:20:19David Hoffman?

  Also, don't forget to subscribe to the channel for in-depth interviews with industry leaders, Ask Me Anythings and weekly rollups where we summarize the week in crypto and other fantastic content. Thanks everyone for watching and being on the journey as we build out the Bankless Nation.