Coin Bureau’s Guy Turner Interviews Ryan & David

Coin Bureau’s Guy Turner interviewed Ryan and David on November 15, 2023. We’re re-releasing this episode on our channels thanks to Coin Bureau. We hope you enjoy this meta-conversation of Ryan, David, and the Bankless brand. Happy Holidays! ------- TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 1:55 Crypto YouTube vs. Podcast 7:10 Creating Crypto Content 16:55 SBF vs. Erik Voorhees 32:50 Crypto Industry Mistakes 41:05 Ethereum & Crypto Cycles 55:43 Crypto, Social Media, Madness 1:03:00 Podcast Guests 1:09:00 Final Thoughts ------ RESOURCES Full Coin Bureau Interview https://youtu.be/HVpQroG434E?si=Yl0IR-LUd8dRQZ3l ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://bankless.com/disclosures

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

• 0:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  Hey Bankless Nation, this is a special episode, actually an interview we recorded with Guy from Coin Bureau about a month ago. So some of the prices, some of those details might be dated, but I think we talked a lot about the Bankless story, David, so we thought you guys would enjoy it during the holidays.

• 0:16David Hoffman?

  Importantly, this is an interview of us by Coin Bureau. This is not a Bankless podcast, but we are putting it on the Bankless podcast feed.

• 0:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, so I hope you guys enjoy. As usual, I was shocked that he did a podcast. I still, to this day, have no idea why SBF came on a podcast with an $8 billion hole on his balance sheet.

• 0:39Speaker 02

  Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Coin Bureau. We have two very special guests with us today. I am deeply honored to welcome none other than Ryan Sean Adams and David Hoffman, better known as Bankless, one of the best crypto podcasts out there, an invaluable source of information for not just all things Ethereum, but all things crypto and beyond as well. I've been listening to Ryan and David for years now, and they just keep on getting better and better. I'm really glad that they've been able to join me today. It's pretty early in the morning for them. But guys, welcome and thank you so much for joining.

• 1:16David Hoffman?

  Thanks for the kind word, Guy.

• 1:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it's a pleasure to be here.

• 1:20Speaker 02

  It's great to finally meet you. Like I say, I've been listening to you guys for the years now, and you guys have had so many incredible conversations with some of the top names in the space. And there's no way we've got time to sort of dig into all of those today, but I do want to sort of get your thoughts on a few episodes that you've done, a few people that you've spoken to. But I thought an interesting thing to do to start with, because one thing I've kind of noticed is that crypto, the crypto podcast world and the crypto YouTube world seem to be sort of quite separate poles a lot of the time. And obviously, you guys have a YouTube channel, but I think you're sort

• 2:04Speaker 02

  of best known as podcasters. So I thought for anyone unfamiliar, for anyone who gets most of their information from YouTube, could you guys give us your backstory a little bit, like how you came to, how you got into crypto, and how you came to do what you do with Bankless?

• 2:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  You want to start, David?

• 2:25David Hoffman?

  Yeah, sure. I think to start things off, Ryan and I are definitely podcast people, I would say. We both are big podcast consumers and I don't really know how anyone would start a podcast without having that as their foundation. Like first, we enjoy podcasts and then we are like, okay, we could, we could start a podcast. And so that's probably why Bankless is known as a podcast is because that's where we came from.

• 2:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, like David, how much, how much, how much podcast listening do you do versus YouTube? Would you say?

• 2:54David Hoffman?

  Uh, yeah, like three to one ratio and it used to, it used to be a 10 to one. It's gone. YouTube has increased lately and I would say that's been on track with Bankless's emphasis on YouTube. Like we nailed the podcast game relatively early, but the YouTube game is still like new to us.

• 3:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  We snuck at YouTube.

• 3:13David Hoffman?

  Yeah, we snuck at YouTube. We're working on it. But we started first, you know, as podcast consumers and then podcasters. And that's really where Bankless came to be. It filled this niche in the early days of Ethereum where there were a lot of people that had a lot of shared ideas and understanding about what this Ethereum thing is and what it could be. And this was back in like 2018 to 2019, when it was very, very early and no one knew what Ethereum was or where it was going. It's like we had just coined the words DeFi. And so we started the podcast to help articulate that story. And a lot of Ethereum people at the time were like, oh, thank God, finally someone is saying the words that I feel about Ethereum. And that's kind of where

• 3:56David Hoffman?

  we got our first early foundations in this space.

• 3:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I think like the perspective at that time, 2019, when we kicked things off was we had just come out of 2017. And Guy, you remember this, right? The highs of 2018, the elation, all the way, and we're going to change the world and crypto is everything, all the way to the lows of 2018, 2019, and the absolute despair. And so David and I were on a kind of a similar quest and journey where we were fully bought into this crypto thing. And we, obviously, we had bags from 2017. So we were trying to figure out like, oh my God, are we wrong? Like, did we, did we miss? Something? Do we screw something up? Like, so for me, it was just going down to base principles and trying to figure out if I was crazy or everyone else was crazy.

• 4:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  And so Bankless really began as a quest, right? It was just a couple of investors on the journey to make sense out of crypto. Like, what are the use cases? What are blockchains good for? How do they actually accrue value? And so we basically open sourced this quest. And it was a series of conversations between David and myself. And then we'd bring guests on and we developed what we call the Bankless thesis. Indeed, the name of the podcast is kind of a thesis for crypto, which is what does crypto do? Helps us go bankless, right? We have a money system, an alternate money system that does not rely on central banks or commercial banks in order to thrive. So even the name of the episode is kind of, or the name of the thesis is in the podcast format.

• 5:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  But like, one other thing I'll say is I think that podcasting is a different medium than YouTube. Yeah. Right? So our podcast, like, the reason it hasn't translated so well previously to YouTube is just we tend to go on for a long time. Long time. It's like deep, long-form conversation. And, you know, YouTube, at least my impression of YouTube, and I think there's some convergence. I think things change. But YouTube, just like, give me the answers, right? I want like, I want to see 15 minutes, like articulate something. And it takes David and I longer than 15 minutes to actually go through an idea maze and talk to a guest. So that's why, that's why we're probably native podcasters rather than YouTubers.

• 6:13Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, because I mean, you guys have been, you guys have been working together for so, for so long now. And you, you know, you gel so well together. I think that's part of the appeal, isn't it? It's like, it's not just two guys who, who really care about what they're talking about and what they're into. But also just like, you know, really sort of bounce off each other so well. I think that's why, you know, I think that's one of the many reasons why it works, why Bankless works so well as a podcast. Yeah, I mean, you know, from my experience of it, like from my experience of YouTube, because I mean, when we started, when we started Coin Bureau, you know, all those years ago, we had to sort of, we had to kind of figure out YouTube as we went along. And it was sort of like, surely, surely what people want is just like really short, like, you know,

• 6:54Speaker 02

  a couple of minutes. And then we were quite surprised when they wanted kind of, turns out they wanted kind of longer form stuff. But it's just, it feels like, a lot of the time, it feels like the sort of goalposts are almost shifting in a way because you're sort of trying to, you're trying to find that balance. Like, people do like longer form stuff on YouTube, but only, only up to a point. And then there's a sort of moment where they're sort of like, no, this is enough. Like, I can't, I can't deal with this anymore.

• 7:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I was actually gonna ask you, Guy, because I think you do this really well with, with your YouTube channel and kind of your platform. But it seems to be, there can be a challenge with anyone who is in crypto media with presenting candy to the audience versus presenting vegetables, right? We like to say at Bankless, what we're trying to do is like healthy candy. But like, sometimes that's difficult, because if you go by attention spans or narratives, then you're just talking about maybe the latest meme coin. And what is the substance there? Like, how does that actually help us change the world and fulfill the promise of crypto and actually go bankless, right? And so if you give, almost like the

• 8:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  audience just the candy, oh, here are the 10 coins that are mooning, and you need to buy right now, then I feel like you lose the plot. But if you don't do any of that, and if you're just deep into the research, and you're talking about like ETH research posts all the time with big brain cryptographers, then you're not changing the world either, because you don't have an audience that actually cares about that. I'm curious from your perspective, because you seem to balance this very well. How do you like manage this? The candy versus the health foods?

• 8:34Speaker 02

  It's, it's tricky. It's a good, it's a good question. Yeah, it's that idea of, yeah, calories and calories or sweeties. And it's, you know, healthy calories, healthy candy, as you say. It's, it's tricky. One of, I think one of the things that we found that that kind of helped us grow was that, was the sort of realization that You know, crypto is no longer in a bubble. And I think this was coming, this was really sort of coming out sort of 2020, 2021, I think. This realization that crypto had evolved from just this thing that a few people were interested in and only that kind of existed in and of itself. And suddenly it was much more susceptible to macro forces to it was a part of, you know, it was becoming a part of the

• 9:17Speaker 02

  kind of traditional system, which isn't, you know, which isn't great in many ways, but that's that's still that's kind of cold, hard facts. And I think, I think sort of we pivoted a little bit to covering sort of more macro content as well in order to just kind of,

• 9:33Speaker 02

  you know, flesh out the ecosystem for those who are maybe sort of had a kind of passing interest in crypto, but like, you know, kind of like you say, they didn't want, they didn't want to listen to like a deep dive into the latest EIPs or anything like that. But they're still, you know, they've still got enough interest. They still want to know what's going on.

• 9:52Speaker 02

  But yeah, you can't, they don't want, they don't want the hardcore tech. But it is tricky because, and I think especially during kind of periods like we've, we've just come out of. And I think this is why I certainly here, I it's here at Coin Bureau, I'm kind of getting the sense of it from you guys as well. You know, sentiment is kind of really sort of picking up because in a bear market, when things are really bad, it's so difficult to keep people engaged and entertained. And you sort of feel like, well, I should try and find some good news to cover. And then you're like,

• 10:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  Pivot AI.

• 10:28Speaker 02

  You know, everything sucks. Everyone's at each other's throats and all this sort of stuff. It's, it can be really difficult. So, yeah, it's, I guess, striking that balance between what you think your audience wants to see and what you think they should see and sort of try and give them both. Cause yeah, I mean, it would be very, it would be very easy to do like top, top 10 meme coins for, for October. It's just like, even as a little piece of you dies.

• 10:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, we try to balance it out a little bit, but we will like still do a show on an entire EIP. Like we did a show called Dank Sharding. And like, we didn't even, No, no, Blob Space, Blob Space. Blob Space. Blob Space.

• 11:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  So like, but as it can't be all of our episodes. That's how we we just do a portfolio. Right? So you get a some vegetables mixed in with everything else.

• 11:18David Hoffman?

  I think that's where we've kind of settled is there's just an extreme amount of variety on Bankless. So you get the one and a half hour long, very technical deep dives with Justin Drake. And at the end of that, you're you end up saying like, I can't really regurgitate anything, but I still kind of got it anyways.

• 11:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  And then And if you feel like that, that's how David and I feel.

• 11:43David Hoffman?

  And then and then there's like the 45 minute shorter form episodes where we're specifically talking about market movements. And like, kind of doing the dopamine content that everyone in crypto pays attention to. Whether you're, you know, an ADIQ Dgen who just got in or you're Justin Drake, like one of these, like both, everyone kind of pays attention to like market drama, no matter what. Maybe Justin doesn't actually.

• 12:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  There's plenty of market drama.

• 12:07David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 12:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Isn't there? Always, all the time in crypto.

• 12:10David Hoffman?

  I would say in in the YouTube game, and this is something that we identified pretty early at Bankless, I would say.

• 12:18David Hoffman?

  We didn't, our, the first podcast episodes were no video, just because we didn't have that set up. The technology wasn't there and we weren't very good at, like, we could have done it, but we weren't very good at it. But it was something like that you tapped on to, Guy, when you said just like the the the chemistry between me and Ryan is really, really good. A lot of, I say like, content producers as an industry. When people watch content, they kind of want to just catch a vibe. They they want to like feel things. And one of the ways that we, me and Ryan, got traction in the early days is that we were able to articulate some of the grand visions of crypto in the in the grand scheme of things and the fullness of time.

• 12:58David Hoffman?

  And you put those into words, but that was a, that was an articulation of the way that a lot of people felt about this industry. And then we're also doing it like me and Ryan lean inherently optimistic. And then we also kind of have this like, we think similar similarly, so we can bounce ideas off of each other.

• 13:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, but I, David is gas and I am brakes.

• 13:18David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 13:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  So there's also this contrast too.

• 13:21David Hoffman?

  Yeah, but you have the difference is in you and me, which is like the gas and brakes and like the you're a business background. I'm a psych background, but these are actually complimentary, not, not like they don't conflict. And so like the bankless brand just makes people like feel things at times, sometimes negative things. Some people don't like this at all. But like the idea is like the, the people do feel stuff and like we have like leaned into that a little bit.

• 13:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's not an apathetic brand. By the way, you could tell that David and I are still podcasters because we have these big ass headphones on. We were just talking about, David just sent me.

• 13:56David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I want to, I want to get the invisible headphones. I want to get.

• 13:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  At that point, you'll know that we are trying to like do more with YouTube. When we get the invisible headphones.

• 14:05Speaker 02

  That's, that's the moment you transition, the headphones come off and suddenly, suddenly you're a YouTuber and it's all, it's all good.

• 14:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. Is it better on the other side, guy? Is it better to be on the YouTube side?

• 14:16Speaker 02

  It's okay, it's okay. It has its, it has its moments. It can, it can get a bit weird as well. People can.

• 14:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, you guys, you guys deal with some characters on YouTube that I just don't, I don't think exist in the podcast game. Like there are some absolute like crypto YouTube personalities, I would say.

• 14:33Speaker 02

  There certainly are.

• 14:36Speaker 02

  I was, yeah, sometimes you just find yourself kind of, you know, it's like, what is going on? Is this real? Is this, am I actually, am I actually seeing this? Am I actually, am I actually a part of this world? Yes, it would seem that I am. Good Lord. It's, uh, yeah, it can be very, it can be very strange. There's, there's never a dull moment. But yeah, I mean, going back to what you were saying, David, I think, you know, I think. The chemistry that you guys have is is really sort of tangible, but I think like all the best podcasts, I think when it's two people talking like, you know, you you feel like you're in the room with you guys. And I think that's, but I think that's the big attraction for, for, you know, for people with podcast, podcasts, you know. I think most people tend to consume podcasts like, you know, when they're, when they're

• 15:21Speaker 02

  kind of, you know, walking or or going, you know, kind of going about their day. And I think that's part of the joy of it because you can just sort of, you know, you can get on with your day whilst also having, whilst also being in the company of these of these people talking about, you know, blob space and all this kind of, you know, all this sort of weird stuff. Yes. Because I listened to you guys on my, on my way into work. I've got one of those, I got one of those electric scooters because I thought I'm gonna, I'm not gonna go down the Dubai route of buying a, buying a big supercar and getting stuck in traffic. So I listened to you guys on my, on my scoot in and it just like, you know, it just makes the time go beautifully. It's, but it's obviously, you know, YouTube is a kind of, is a kind of different, different medium entirely.

• 16:05Speaker 02

  It takes, it takes a bit of cracking, but it's, yeah, it's rewarding. Come, come over to the other side and join our nut.

• 16:13David Hoffman?

  We're working on it. Our team is corralling us over there and they're doing a good job.

• 16:18Speaker 02

  Okay. You just have to, you know, you, you, you have to lose it at some point and just, you know, give over, give over to the nuttiness of it all. You'll enjoy it. I wanted to, so like, like I said earlier, you know, there are so many great episodes that you guys have done. I want to take you back in time, if I may, to sort of just over a year ago, because my, my wife Katie and I had just moved into our house here in Dubai and she'd set me the task of building the bed that we'd had delivered. And I noticed that there was a Bankless episode on and it was the debate that you guys hosted between Erik Voorhees and Sam Bankman-Fried. And I kind of put it on and my wife came up about an hour later and found me just sat

• 17:02Speaker 02

  on the floor, surrounded by a completely unbuilt bed, just sort of, you know, with my headphones on. She was like, what, what?

• 17:14Speaker 02

  Please tell me what is so fascinating that you completely failed to do this. But yeah, I mean, I remember that was such an incredible, an incredible episode to listen to. It was an incredible debate. I just wanted to, I just wanted to get your guys' take on it. You know, after everything that's happened, obviously, we're talking in the wake of SBF being found guilty. He's looking at, you know, possibly, possibly a hundred years plus in jail. But looking back on that time, do you guys, what do you guys make of all that? I mean, I think it's, I think it's fair to say that Eric kind of won that debate hands down.

• 17:46David Hoffman?

  Yeah, certainly.

• 17:48Speaker 02

  What did you, what did you make of it all at the time? Did it, did it feel as surreal as it kind of came across to listen to?

• 17:55David Hoffman?

  Yes, definitely. And there's, if you go, if you look at, I mean, only we can see it because we only, we have the backend to the, to the particular episode, the analytics. But you can see the chart of viewers, concurrent viewers who are watching the live stream. Like it spikes up as all live streams do, and then it hovers around some flat line for a little bit. And then the debate really picks up and you can see the moment when friends are texting friends or people are sending out tweets and they're like, yo, everyone get in here and watch this. Eric is dismantling SBF. And so like, it's right, it's right around halfway through and like the, the viewership like triples very, very quickly. And at, at the same time, like everyone talks about like, oh, this like, this huge episode that the bankless did that you guys produced.

• 18:40David Hoffman?

  Ryan and I stopped talking about like one third of the way through the podcast. And like we, we had like a mid-roll sponsor break that, you know, we do for every single live stream. And I'm texting Ryan, it's like, technically we should be doing sponsors right now, but like, we can't end this. Like, we just have to let this roll. And, and so like, we just went hands off, like the, the episode wrote itself. It's SBF like handed Eric his jugular and Eric was like, okay, thank you. And he proceeded to just dismantle SBF.

• 19:16David Hoffman?

  Yeah, it was a surreal moment, I think, for the entire industry.

• 19:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think it was, and I think that this was part of the unveiling. So let's remember, go back in history, rewind a bit further. So this was, this happened in the end of October 2022. But if you rewind to January 2022, the three smartest people in crypto were Doquan, SBF, and Suzu. Okay, these were the legends. These were the people we put on a pedestal, right? SBF, this phenom that built an exchange faster than Brian Armstrong, right? Like, he was so big at the time. And then, of course, we saw the downfall of Doquan.

• 20:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  We saw the downfall of Suzu. But who is still standing in October 2022? The savior of crypto, Sam Bankman-Fried. And so this debate actually happened 12 days before all of the shit went down and everything came to light. And so we were actually, first of all, I was shocked that he did a podcast. I don't, I still to this day have no idea why SBF came on a podcast with an $8 billion hole on his balance sheet. That, to me, does not make logical sense. That is some kind of like SBF-level hubris.

• 20:39David Hoffman?

  Well, we didn't yet know that SBF didn't shut up. Like, he had just entered that arc of I talk.

• 20:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  He does not, he does not have the shut up gene. And I think we saw that in court. He decided to testify on his own behalf. Like, he just, he's got something that most human beings don't have. And so the reason he came on was because he was pushing for this anti-DeFi legislation in DC behind closed doors in a way that would effectively pull up the ladder. From the decentralized exchange front ends and accrue more power to his exchange. And so we were like, SBF, come on, talk to us about it.

• 21:20David Hoffman?

  Engage with us.

• 21:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  And then, yes, and then Erik Voorhees wrote a blog post about the same issue. So we're like, you know what's even better than us talking to him is Voorhees talking to him. And so that was the genesis for the conversation. But I thought it would be a bit more equal, like sparring back and forth. But at the time, the piercing moral clarity of Erik Voorhees, just to kind of like, why are we here? Like, what are we doing, Sam? Juxtaposed with the kind of like,

• 21:48David Hoffman?

  Compromising Faustian bargain that was SBF.

• 21:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  It was so clear, even at the time. And we didn't know that, that he was short $8 billion, but we knew he was short like values. We knew he was short, like, the reason we're all in crypto.

• 22:02David Hoffman?

  And Sam articulated, like, I am here not for decentralization.

• 22:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  I'm a mercenary.

• 22:08David Hoffman?

  I'm a mercenary.

• 22:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  I'm just gonna make as much money as possible and then I'm gonna give it away.

• 22:12David Hoffman?

  And I think people were okay with that until he stepped into Congress, until he like started to play into the, the regulatory arbitrage game.

• 22:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Anyway, I, that, the, the other interesting thing about that episode, David, is like, when we were going through it, like, uh, SBF seemed like shaken during the time. Like, if you watch, like, he, he was unable to articulate in the same way that he usually is.

• 22:33David Hoffman?

  He started to fall apart.

• 22:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  He started to fall apart.

• 22:36David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 22:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Uh, and, you know.

• 22:39David Hoffman?

  If, if, like, I, I, I speak English, but I, I'm guessing if you didn't speak English and you watched that episode, you would understand that like, yo, that the Eric guy won the debate. Like, you don't have to understand the words that were said to understand that, like, Sam Bankman-Fried just, like, fell apart.

• 22:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  I don't, what, what did you think of it, guys? So at the time, of course, the entire industry didn't know that, what, what SBF was up to behind the scenes. But, uh, yeah, what did you think of that when you were trying to assemble that bed?

• 23:11Speaker 02

  It was like, you know, the more, the more that it went on and the more, you know, because Eric just sort of killed him with logic and clarity, like you said, didn't he? It was so, it was so clinical.

• 23:24David Hoffman?

  Yes, it was.

• 23:26Speaker 02

  It was sort of like, I don't, I, you know, when you, you know, when you sort of feel like, oh, you feel on edge, even though you're, even though you're completely, you know, in agreement with, with the party that's winning, you're like, Eric is absolutely right here. Like, wow, it was still kind of, it was still sort of painful to listen to in, in, in a way. Because it, you know, even though the, even though right was winning out, it was still like, this is, I mean, this is kind of, this is embarrassing for, for SBF, you know, this. And, and I guess at the same time, you're like, wow, hang on, this is someone who was, you know, the JP Morgan of crypto a few months before that, you know, as you said, the savior of it, or so we thought.

• 24:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  And Guy, I'm so glad we did that episode and that it's on the record. I'm, I'm glad on behalf of Bankless, but I'm also glad on behalf of the crypto industry, because I think after that crypto has been painted in a, such a light that it's full of SBFs and scammers and people who don't, you know, like, take accountability for their actions, right? And indeed, we had a, an episode with SBF, like even before that, in March of that year, where it was just like, you know, we've had CZ on the podcast, we've had Brian Armstrong, we've had the Winklevoss twins, where you've got a big exchange, let's talk about your vision for it, right? And so I am so glad we had an episode pre-FTX

• 24:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  collapse, where there's someone in crypto who represents like why we're here, calling this man to task, like on behalf of our industry. I feel like that is evidence we can point to as an industry and just be like, no, we knew something was going on.

• 25:01Speaker 02

  He wasn't our guy.

• 25:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  He was not one of us.

• 25:05Speaker 02

  He wasn't us. Yeah, I think it's so important. It is. It is like, you know, people outside of crypto think that it's, you know, the whole, the whole industry just sort of exists to scam people or whatever. I think it's really important, like you say, to have, to have a record of that, to have a record of people in the industry going, hang on a sec, no, what's going on here? You know, you have to, you have to explain this. And I think, I think Eric around that time was, was talking about this idea of having industry standards as well.

• 25:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right.

• 25:35Speaker 02

  You know, the industry itself saying this is acceptable, this is not, you know, a lot of it, I think, was, was going to be around sort of exchanges and proof of reserves and solvency and things like that. And it was such a great, it was such a great conversation to have because it's like, yeah, yeah, how do we expect, how can we expect government agencies, you know, people who, people, outsiders to come and, to come and regulate us if we can't sort of clean out our own house, if we can't, you know, try and, try and draw up, try and police ourselves, try and draw up regulations for ourselves. And that's, yeah, I mean, that's one of the reasons why I wanted to sort of discuss that, discuss that episode with you because I think, I think it is a really sort of important moment

• 26:17Speaker 02

  in, in the history of crypto, really. It's like, you know, not only was this guy sort of, the whole facade started to fall apart, but it's also like, you know, here is evidence of it. Here is evidence of the industry sort of, you know, policing itself to an extent.

• 26:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, absolutely. And I don't know if you read a post from Balaji Srinivasan, who, who makes this, this point. So it wasn't just that bankless episode. It was crypto media who actually like broke the story. It was like that CoinDesk article from the reporter who revealed the balance sheet. And then it was crypto Twitter that was looking at kind of, oh, what's this money going on in the blockchain? Let, let's look at Alameda's accounts. Let's look at FTX's accounts and see where's the money, right? It was the citizen journalists. It wasn't traditional media that actually broke this and disclosed. It certainly wasn't Gary Gensler, who'd had multiple meetings with SBF earlier in the year. It was really the crypto industry that revealed this. And so that's another untold

• 27:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  story. And I hope, Guy, I hope these stories make the Hollywood like movies and the documentaries when the social network comes out for crypto. I hope they, they, they, they cover it in the right way. But if they don't, then I think, you know, the real ones know, people who were in crypto at that time, you know, they, they know what actually happened.

• 27:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. And I think, well, it's so important to to pass that lesson on, isn't it? To go, look, because that's another thing I wanted to ask you guys, just on that, on the on the subject of that interview. So do you do you think? Do you think crypto has kind of, as an industry, has kind of learned its lessons from that whole saga? Are we are we older and wiser? Or do you think there's still a likelihood that we're we're going to make the same mistakes again?

• 28:01David Hoffman?

  I think this last 2022, the the year of just terrible price action and blowups and fraudsters being revealed as fraudsters, that was pretty unprecedented in crypto. Like, we had some pretty undesirable behavior in the downfall of 2018 in that same same kind of era, but it was not at the same level of the gaping hole that was Three Hours Capital or the absolute just toxicity that was the Do Kwon Army and Do Kwon himself, followed by like, the level of fraud in 2022 was quite unprecedented. And I think a little bit of that was because there had been fraud in the industry before, and no one had really gone to jail yet.

• 28:43David Hoffman?

  And so it was perceived as like a crypto is an industry where you could get away with fraud, and you could make billions of dollars and walk away without ever, like, being tried by a justice system. So I think 2022 was useful in the fact that, like, no, actually, if fraud is fraud, no matter where you are or what industry that you're in. So now that we have this precedent, I'm optimistic. I'm happy that we have that foundation to stand on. I'm also cautious about entering a bull market in which people's values tend to be forgotten. And it is the moment, it is the time in which leaving your values behind is the most profitable, it's the most profitable time to do that. And so, you know, crypto is more mature.

• 29:26David Hoffman?

  If we do enter a bull market, people will do less than desirable things. But at least we have precedent of people, you will go to jail if you do anything significant. So check yourself. So I'm I'm mixed.

• 29:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, the way I would answer that is we will make the same mistakes, just in different ways. Yeah. So I think that if you look at kind of the parallels between ICOs and all of these like futility tokens and all of this money that was raised in 2017, that was the mistake. That was the cardinal sin of the 2017 bull market. And then if you look at, you know, 2021, 2022, it was quite obvious the cardinal sins were there. Algo, stablecoins, you know, margin trades with hedge funds pumping these ecosystems that really didn't deserve it and ultimately centralizing all of our private keys, right?

• 30:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  And trusting the blockfies and the Celsius, Alex Mashinsky, God, he doesn't get enough shame. Alex Mashinsky and, you know, all of those people that stole our funds. We will make mistakes that are fueled by the basic human psychology of boom bust, of bubble every cycle, but we won't make them in the exact same ways. I don't think we will trust another Alex Mashinsky who's wearing a shirt that says, "Don't trust banks." "Don't trust banks." And is himself the least trustworthy banker in existence. Maybe, well, actually, maybe not in existence because he had, you know, quite a list of other untrustworthy crypto bankers at that time. But so, and in fact, David and I just did an episode, I think you listened to it, Guy,

• 31:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  because you mentioned this before we recorded, with an investor who's outside of crypto, just a TradFi kind of investor named Morgan Housel, and wrote a book called The Psychology of Money, where he's just like, "The reason it will never change is because human beings don't change. We're running the same, like, homo sapien software that we always have. And so, we're gonna have these, you know, envy greed filled booms and these busts that we have to live with. We're gonna throw the crazy wild party and everyone's gonna get drunk and then someone's gonna have to clean up afterwards." That's just how it is. And I guess I've come to terms with kind of accepting that. And my belief is, and I think our hope is, and the optimist in both David and I, is

• 31:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  like, "Well, the benefit at the end of this is going to be worth all of the painful, you know, hangovers and parties that we've had along the years because we are building an open, permissionless money system for the world." If it was all neat and orderly, if it wasn't chaotic... That would be an indication that it was a centralized system. Like, it's almost like it has to happen this way if it's bottom up and decentralized. Like, that's how you know it's, uh, it's new and it's a movement from the bottom up.

• 32:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was, I was listening to that episode with, that you did with Morgan yesterday. And can I just say to anyone watching, um, if you, if you listen to anything, uh, before the bull market starts, you should listen to, uh, to Ryan and David, uh, speaking with Morgan Housel. It was such a good episode. Um, obviously the psychology of money is, is a wonderful book and, um, I haven't had a chance to read his new one. That was what you were discussing, wasn't it? Same as ever, I think it was called.

• 32:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Same as ever. And he just talks about the timeless principles of, of life and investing things that don't change.

• 32:52Speaker 02

  Yeah. It reminded me of something, um, something my grandmother used to say. She, she always used to say, like, if something, if, if something is easily got, then it isn't worth having. And I think I really kind of felt that with listening to that discussion. It's like, yeah, you know, it has to be hard because as you said, we're starting, we, we started from zero. We started from, from Satoshi started from zero 15 years ago. And I mean, that's no time in the grand scheme of things. And we're still kind of, we're still building, we're still making mistakes, we're still screwing up things. Some things are working, some things are collapsing into dust, but that's, that's the way it has to be. Otherwise, we, otherwise that you don't get progress from that.

• 33:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I completely agree. I don't think there's an, uh, an easy path here. The volatility is the price of entry. That's another thing that, uh, that Morgan Housel said. If you want something to five X, okay, the, the reverse of that is you have to be comfortable with an asset losing 80% of its value. Like, that's kind of the trade off that we make. And so, yeah, we, we don't get to have our cake and eat it too in crypto. We can't, it can't always be infinite up. That's not how, that's not how life works.

• 34:06Speaker 02

  Well, of course, because I mean, that was the point that was a point he made, wasn't it about the, you know, these this idea of people years ago sort of trying to figure out how to stop recessions. It's like, well, you you can't like if if you never had a recession, that would that would create the perfect conditions for an absolutely massive recession, you know?

• 34:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, I just think I imagine how we're how much worse our industry would actually be if we didn't have 2022. And we still had an algo stablecoin that was now rather than 30 billion, it was now 300 billion. Okay. And then and then um actual retail, non crypto retail got involved because some fintech app started offering it. And we had Sam Bankman Fried, who had grown to the largest exchange in the world with FTX. And he was it was larger than Binance at this point in time. And it wasn't $8 billion in loss uh private keys. It was $50 billion. Like, and then we had Alex Mashinsky and BlockFi and all of these things were continuing to grow. Imagine that.

• 35:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like, to me, it's uh we dodged a bullet, honestly. It was like 2022. It's painful was as it was, was the best possible thing that could have happened to crypto.

• 35:17David Hoffman?

  Yeah, we we did clean up all of the mess in 2022. In in 18 months. I mean, it was one year of time between the fall of FTX and Sam like being charged guilty. I remember um one of the very early takes that I heard in the middle of middle of 2022. I think right after the fall of FTX was from a friend of our pod, Nick Carter. And he he said that um it was Nick Carter and Matt Walsh. And they they said that uh we're not going to be able to have a bull market until we clean up the fraudsters and the scammers and we throw them in jail. And I remember listening to that take and like not wanting to believe it. This was like November, December of of 2022, because I was like, man,

• 35:54David Hoffman?

  Doquan's still out there, SBF just we had a new one, right? Like uh 3O's capital, they're they're still running free like we we have to like according to this take, we have to get every single one in jail before we can have a bull market again. And like, it's obviously not perfectly correlated. Like, we could find some internal catalyst, like DeFi summer to have a bull market, but just like the sentiment of just like, we will never be legitimized as an industry until we throw away the scammers and frosters. And then on the dot, the week that SBF gets charged guilty, like, tokens pumped 50% off the ground. Like, the take was super prescient. And again, correlation, not causation, et cetera.

• 36:36David Hoffman?

  But I thought it was a great take. And also, at the same time, we can now feel good about prices going up rather than bad. Like, I wouldn't feel the same if SBF was walking free and like, DoKwon wasn't in jail and 3O's capital was still being 3O's capital after all of the harm and fraud that they caused. And then we just had another bull market with them. That would not make me feel good.

• 36:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, I'm actually curious from you guys. Are you surprised that this is happening so soon? I mean, there's an element of me as like, this is my third cycle here. And I'm just like, wow, we've recovered from that?

• 37:10David Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah. I do feel like that.

• 37:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like you said, at some level, I'm like, it was only a year ago. It was only a year ago when we had that conversation with SBF. And so much has happened. And now you're saying we've healed and we're back to bull market? Like, too soon?

• 37:28David Hoffman?

  It seems fast, but also it's the same exact time as last cycle. And I think time just goes faster now because we're older. We've done, we've seen this before.

• 37:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay. I know first cyclers are like, what are you guys talking about? We went through so much pain. That was the worst. Yeah. But I don't know. I'm just like, wow, that was quick.

• 37:48Speaker 02

  Well, you guys were talking about this the other day, weren't you? Because you're like, there's always that, there's always that thing in the back of your mind. It's like, okay, so it goes in cycles, but is it really gonna, are we really gonna have another cycle? Is this actually gonna happen?

• 38:01David Hoffman?

  It can't be that easy.

• 38:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  If everyone thinks it's gonna go in cycle, it's not gonna go into the cycle, right? A four-year cycle.

• 38:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:07David Hoffman?

  And then it's like, going back to the Morgan Housel thing, right? If it's, if it's easy, it's not worth doing. It's like, yeah, the four year cycles, if they really play out that way, that's super easy. But come on, you had to live through 2022 and 2023 wasn't great either. Like, those weren't, that was hard. That was a hard thing.

• 38:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  That was hard. That was hard. You guys earned it. Hey, if you're still listening to Coin Bureau, if you're still listening to Bankless, it's likely you lived through all of that. And I feel like you have, you've got veteran status now. All right, you are going to be the OG for future generations of crypto. I mean, we are still like, you know, one fifth of the US owns crypto. We are still on the early side. I mean, barely anyone's using DeFi and actually, you know, has possession of their own private keys and is actually bankless. We're still very early.

• 38:55Speaker 02

  I couldn't agree more. I couldn't agree more. And it's, um, yeah, it's like, it's like that OG status is, is kind of hard earned, isn't it? Like, you really have to, you really have to walk through the fire to get that. And, um, I mean, I guess you look back to, you know, some of the, some of the triage, like, you know, like Erik Voorhees, who was there sort of almost at the beginning and went through Mt. Gox and went through, you know, all that sort of stuff. It's like, these guys have, these guys have earned a right to have an opinion for, by, you know, by through years of just kind of putting up with, I guess, what, what might be termed, you know, even worse back in the day, like Mt. Gox was sort of, was almost terminal, wasn't it? I remember getting into crypto about that time. I heard about crypto sort of, um, late 2013, and then I think it was

• 39:40Speaker 02

  sort of early 2014, when Mt. Gox started to crumble. I was like, whoa, this, hang on a sec. And then it survived. And I was like, okay, wow. This is, this is more resilient than I thought. That was a moment for me. But like, to have been someone in it, you know, invested in it, or like, I speak to a lot of people who had, who had money on Mt. Gox, and they were just like, yeah, I remember trying to do that. I remember trying to get it off. It was, I remember just like, like, trying to email Mark Karpelis directly. And it was like, it was, it was pretty wild. It's like, you, you guys have earned it.

• 40:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, we've come such a long, I mean, that was a magic, the gathering, like, uh, card changing, trading exchange that converted to a crypto exchange, you know, it's like, we have come so far since then. We have real companies here. You know, like, it's, it's 10 years. I mean, it's not a long time.

• 40:39Speaker 02

  No, we have, yeah, we have real companies. We have, we, we have, we will have ETFs before too long. It's, it's crazy to think. Touching on, touching on ETFs, I, I like, obviously you guys are not, not entirely, not solely focused on Ethereum, but you know Ethereum is, is kind of a, a large part of, of Bankless's focus. So can I just get your, get your take on, on where Ethereum is at the moment? Obviously, it's been kind of in Bitcoin shadow a lot recently. Network activity has been down, you know, ETH went inflationary for a bit again. There's kind of a lot of fud flying around about Ethereum, which I think is sort

• 41:20Speaker 02

  of always the case. I don't think that's necessarily anything new. And then, of course, suddenly, we're now talking about Ethereum ETFs as well. So yeah, I just, I just wanted to get your guys' take on it. You know, is ETH, has Ethereum still got kind of quite a lot of work to do before it can really join the party? Or are you sort of more optimistic?

• 41:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Are you, are you ready to cope, David?

• 41:47David Hoffman?

  Yeah, like you said, like Ethereum always kind of occupies this uncanny space in which it never really seems to be popular. I think in from January of 2021 to like May of 2021, Ethereum was like in vogue for the moment of time in which I thought like, okay, finally, like it's getting the recognition it's deserved. Like DeFi is now being recognized, NFTs are now being recognized finally. And then people just went down the market cap stack into like more shinier objects, right? And this is where like the whole Sol, Luna, Avax, like trade came, came about. And I was like, oh, let's find the even shinier object than Ethereum.

• 42:28David Hoffman?

  And Ethereum's roadmap and what it wants to do is so incredibly ambitious and multifaceted that it, it like not, most people don't have the whole entire scope of it able to like be realized inside of their brains. Like it, it takes a lot and a lot of knowledge and a lot of appreciation for the many, many, many moving parts of Ethereum to really understand the, the grand vision of the whole entire thing. And so, and then also at the same time, Ethereum's market cap is is big. It's $300 billion right now, $250 billion. And so it's not, it's not a penny stock anymore. And so when so much of crypto is kind of like the crap stable and rolling of the dice and like trying

• 43:13David Hoffman?

  to trying to get the 10x, the 100x quickly, like Ethereum doesn't really occupy that space. And so it's always, there's that one meme of the like, the guy up against the wall and there's like 50 swords pointed at him. That's always kind of felt like Ethereum.

• 43:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  You know what movies that from that's from David?

• 43:30David Hoffman?

  It's like a Pixar movie?

• 43:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, Tangled.

• 43:33David Hoffman?

  Tangled?

• 43:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  Tangled, yeah.

• 43:34David Hoffman?

  Sure.

• 43:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, fun fact.

• 43:36David Hoffman?

  Yeah. And so like Ethereum occupies the space where, yeah, it's getting the Ether ETF because of its size, but then also just the ambitiousness of the roadmap is too long to be realized and catch that dopamine hit of people in the short term investing cycle that is a bull market to be interested in that. So it's just always occupying this like uncanny valley of just like, it's too big to be a fun speculative bet and the, it's, it's moving too slowly in its roadmap to satisfy a lot of the now, now, now investors.

• 44:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  So I guess that's good cope, David.

• 44:14David Hoffman?

  Yeah, thanks.

• 44:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  Excellent cope. Here's my cope on it. So first of all, I think things in Ethereum are going just fine.

• 44:24David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 44:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like, I think it is executing incredibly well from a fundamentals perspective. And you just look at the growth of, of layer twos. And also, it's doing pretty well from a institutional narrative perspective. There will probably be two ETFs that we get this bull cycle season. One of them, sorry, XRP lovers, it's not going to be XRP. Unfortunately, that was fake news. But it's going to be Bitcoin and Ether. And those are the two ones that I think will get institutional capital attention. But what I think's going on is this reminds me a lot of 2020. And if you remember 2020, so this was like when we were just starting

• 45:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  to recover post COVID, it was about this time back in 2020. And the things that we're pumping were smaller cap DeFi tokens and Bitcoin, not Ethereum.

• 45:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  And so there was very much this narrative of Ethereum is just a gas token. It's just for payment only. What does it really do? You, you want to own a store of value, which is Bitcoin. You want to own, own your money. And then you want all of these DeFi tokens, which gives you exposure to the DeFi economy, the neo banking system, and that's all you need. And as David was saying, like Ethereum in that world, in that narrative world, just gets left behind. It's, you know, the, the stepchild that no one loves, right? It's just like, not even part of the, the appetite in that kind of world. I think something similar is playing out right now, but it's not DeFi tokens. It is Bitcoin and all of these very fast alternative layer ones.

• 46:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  And so what, what's interesting to me is actually what happened in the aftermath of, of 2020. Because anytime price runs up, like so high, remember what we're actually doing. Of course, there's, there's the narrative reason it pumps. But if you still believe in fundamentals and, you know, I might be one of the last guys in crypto, still that believes in long-term fundamentals. Okay. But if you think that the world of fundamentals is, is a real world and that narratives are shorter term, but fundamentals are the things that last. What happened with DeFi tokens is they pulled forward a whole bunch of future expectations. And I'll admit, I got caught up in it too. The thesis for DeFi tokens in 2020 was that these governance tokens would pivot into,

• 46:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  like governance would vote in profit share essentially. So that you'd have on-chain revenue and on-chain profit associated with these DeFi tokens. And so what happened? A massive run-up. The whole market realized that this would be huge. And so DeFi tokens absolutely went on a tear. And all of these, these future expectations, hopes were pulled into the present. Okay. What has happened since then? It's been completely flat.

• 47:12David Hoffman?

  Three, three-year bear market in DeFi tokens.

• 47:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  And let's talk about the reality. Very few DeFi tokens are more than governance tokens today. Okay, very few of them actually pay back token holders with on-chain profits. Very few of them have actual solid fundamentals. So a lot of the expectations that was pulled forward at that time turned out to not be true. And I worry a little bit about this alternative layer one run-up, right? Because I don't know that a block space is as valuable as people think it is. Or at least what's happening is a lot of future expectations are being pulled to the present. And I don't know that these tokens and assets will be able to sustain that over like the one to three period of time, a year period of time.

• 47:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  So I don't know, maybe none of that matters. And by the way, if you're a narrative investor, or if you're a trader, it honestly, it doesn't matter.

• 48:06Speaker 02

  It does not matter.

• 48:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  It totally doesn't matter. You should go chase these things and do well, like God bless. Like that's a character class that you're choosing. So like, just kill it, crush it. I hope you crush it. But if you're a fundamentals investor, then you're looking around and you're kind of scratching your head. And you're wondering, well, like, I'm not seeing on-chain activity yet that matches this. I'm not seeing like total value locked increase. I'm seeing a lot of hopes and expectations being pulled forward. And maybe those expectations come true. But if they don't, we're looking at a pretty flat asset class after the bull run. So that's my cope.

• 48:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  And I do think, I do think Ether will have its time, like, just like in, you know, it happened, actually, around this time in 2020. December 2020, Ether had an absolute massive run-up and people woke up to it. And it did pretty well. I think that will also happen this bull cycle.

• 49:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think you're right. I think, and, and I guess this idea of narratives is, is kind of so much easier to buy into, isn't it? It's like the alternative layer one narrative. It's like, oh, it's a layer one, but it's faster than Ethereum. That's easy to understand. Whereas kind of to go back to what you were saying, David, you know, Ethereum is just so sprawling, isn't it? There's so much happening on it. You know, there's a whole, there's a whole layer two ecosystem on it. As you said, there's however many EIPs being worked on. There's, there's things like blob space and dank sharding going on.

• 49:40Speaker 02

  A kind of difficult to get your head around. You're just like, eh, a fast, you know, faster layer one is a lot easier to, to understand. You know, that's, why not just go for that?

• 49:51David Hoffman?

  Yeah. Ethereum has its roll up, centric roadmap, right? And so this Ethereum growth strategy is not to hold growth internally into its layer one. It's allow, it's supposed to allow room for its layer twos to like, take the baton and run with it the rest of the way. So the, when it comes time to be narrative season and no one cares about fundamentals anymore. Now it's like the Ethereum layer one versus Solana, which has the stronger narrative. And Ethereum has sharded its narrative into the Ethereum layer one. Optimism, Polygon, Arbitrum, ZK Sync, uh, you know, uh, you know, pick your next layer two, pick your next layer two. Aztec, like pick your next layer two.

• 50:35David Hoffman?

  And so like it's Ethereum. And one of the reasons why I find so much resonance with Ethereum is it's, it's a pluralist system. It's trying to make room for as many diversity of chains spawn out of its core base. So that every single chain can have its own flavor, its own autonomy, its own ecosystem, its own throughput. And when it comes time to be narrative season, Ethereum has actually given, giving its narrative power away to its layer twos. And so they all have a smaller share of this grander Ethereum vision, but it's never contained inside of one container. And so when you have like the alt layer one versus Ethereum narrative season, well, Ethereum gave up some of that power to its layer.

• 51:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  Do you know what's funny though? As I'm listening to your talk, David, is like, um, you know, just to play devil's advocate.

• 51:21David Hoffman?

  I'm spinning a narrative right now.

• 51:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  On that, right? Yeah, yeah. One man's narrative season is another man's like a fundamental season. Look, the fundamentals are finally showing up.

• 51:30David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 51:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  So I can, I can hear somebody in the, uh, listening to this in the Solana community, listening to these, uh, old coping, uh, ETH Maxies drone on of which, by the way, we are not ETH Maxies. That's

• 51:40David Hoffman?

  And I'm also not coping. I don't feel like I'm coping.

• 51:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  No, fantastic. Everybody like, uh, I hope you make insane profits, uh, during, during this cycle, but somebody's listening to that and they're like, David, you're absolutely wrong. This is actually the fundamentals catching up. Okay.

• 51:55David Hoffman?

  Sure.

• 51:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  So this is like, finally, the market has woken up to high TPS, uh, integrated, uh, blockchain, block space. And like now the, uh, it's no longer narrative. It's fundamentals that are actually catching up. So that's why it's very hard to parse. Right. And you only know who's right in the long run, in the very long run.

• 52:17David Hoffman?

  Well, we do know as the bull market continues, real fundamentals do get thrown out the door.

• 52:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Sure.

• 52:22David Hoffman?

  Everyone was like, oh, like Terra Luna has solved alchemy at the top of last market.

• 52:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  The new central bank.

• 52:31David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 52:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. Bye, Jerome Powell. We don't need you anymore.

• 52:35Speaker 02

  Yeah. But it is, I mean, yeah, I suppose from, from the perspective of someone new to crypto, you know, this just is so much easier to buy into a relatively simple narrative, isn't it?

• 52:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  And probably way more profitable guy.

• 52:49David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 52:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  Probably you'll make way more money.

• 52:51David Hoffman?

  On the upside, on the upside, on the downside, well, when it's no longer narrative season and you've been buying narratives all year, all of a sudden you're on the other end of the trade.

• 52:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. But then on the downside, you just trade to staples, David.

• 53:02David Hoffman?

  Oh, it's simple.

• 53:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Again, this is why.

• 53:04David Hoffman?

  Simple.

• 53:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is why if you gotta choose your character, there's one thing we say on bankless is know who you are, choose your character class. Like you're, you're entering an RPG, you know, you're, you're playing Diablo. Are you a sorcerer? Are you a necromancer? Are you a barbarian? Like what's, what's your skill tree? What's your attribute? Like, what are you going to do? Are you a trader? Are you a long-term investor buying holds?

• 53:24David Hoffman?

  I'm a bard.

• 53:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  Out there finding. David's a bard. Is that a mix of things?

• 53:30David Hoffman?

  No, no.

• 53:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bards don't do anything. You just have an instinct.

• 53:31David Hoffman?

  It's just a guy with a guitar who like sings stuff and like cheers on everyone else.

• 53:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, at least the bard is happy. The bard may not accomplish much, but at least the bard is happy, David.

• 53:43Speaker 02

  The bard is recording it all for posterity.

• 53:46David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 53:49Speaker 02

  It's the songs that will be sung in the future about all the degenerate characters and their and their aspect.

• 53:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's, it is funny to talk to people. I spoke to my, I spoke to my brother in law the other day, who's one of the biggest D gens that I know. And he was just like describing, you know, how he's, how he's allocated. And he's like, it's a, it's a pretty fine balance. But so long as everything stays reasonably okay, I should be fine. It's like, just made me, made me stressed just thinking about it. But like, yeah, everyone has their, everyone has their, their sort of way of doing it. It's one of the beautiful things about, about this, about this industry, isn't it? You can, like you guys say, adopt your character, you go for it. And, yeah, the, the rewards are amazing. The downside is, is, is pretty painful, but it's, it's a heck of a ride.

• 54:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think your character class can change cycle to cycle, like probably both David and myself were a bit more D gen in our, in our younger days. And David is even more D gen than me, right? And so.

• 54:51David Hoffman?

  But on, on the, on the D gen scale, I'm not D gen. But like, yeah. Ryan, yes.

• 54:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. So, so as you kind of like, your life circumstances change, you've been through more cycles, you just, you tend to get a bit more, you know, grandpa wisdom, which I guess is what I at least offer the podcast.

• 55:11Speaker 02

  And I wanted to ask you as well, like, I listened to, I listened to your bankless takes episode the other week, which I, which I loved because it sounded like you guys were sort of really, really kind of letting off steam. I think you'd had some sort of interactions with the Solana community and, you know, it all been, it had been a kind of fascinating week. But I wanted to ask you, like, do you find, do you find all that kind of, I think we'd call it shithousery in, in, in the UK, but all that kind of mudslinging that goes on, all the chaos of crypto Twitter, do you, do you secretly love all of that? Or do you think it's, do you think it's more something that we could probably do without and we'd all be a bit, we'd all be a bit happier and a bit richer?

• 55:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, it's hard for me to know how much of this is crypto-specific versus more a symptom of social media and kind of the algorithms and like the different rewards that and like dopamine rewards and the different kind of incentives that that rest behind different influencers. And because I don't, I don't know, Guy, that any other area is that much different. Like if you go look at like politics, social media or politics, Twitter, I mean, shithousery, that's a good term for that, too. Go look at like even AI, which is kind

• 56:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  of like, you know, very technical. It's much of that. So the way we, I've been thinking about social media recently is Sam Harris is another podcaster who kind of describes it as a funhouse distortion of reality. So you see all of the other humans interacting and not as they really are in person. It's not their true character. It's just this warped view of who they are. And they see you the same way. And so I'm convinced that a lot of the people who get in these shitfest Twitter battles, actually, if they had a conversation with one another, and you remove them from the gladiatorial arena of social media, and they weren't, they didn't have an audience, they weren't trying to impress each other,

• 57:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  and you just brought them together for a conversation, they would speak to each other like real humans, like real, like real adults with empathy, with kind of a mutual sense of, you know, understanding the way we're talking to each other right now, Guy. And you'd remove all of that. So part of me wonders how much of it is the medium. There's another element that is like crypto has a scoreboard, there's a top 100 market cap, fortunes are made and lost, there is actual economic value in propaganda that can be extracted fairly immediately. There are a lot of scams. A lot of people got totally wrecked in 2021 and

• 58:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  2022, and they don't trust anybody and are pushing like out those feelings of distrust online. So part of it's a symptom that is relevant to crypto. But I don't know, I like... I find it kind of exhausting sometimes and the best thing I can do during those times is like just turn it off. Like I, you know, you know, it's hard when you're in kind of like media, right? Cause then you lose your source of information, but uh, change the way you're interacting, you know, ignore things, mute if you have to, set your profile on private for, for a period of time, whatever you need to do to kind of uh, play the marathon. And it's similar to like playing

• 58:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  the marathon with your investing, right? It's just rather than a financial volatility with, with um, social media engagement, you have to get used to kind of like the emotional volatility of like one week, everyone hates you. And then you're the next week, you're like a god, you know? That's, that's just how it goes. Uh, at least that's how I've experienced it.

• 59:08Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. It's, it shows how, it shows how badly I'm in the bubble, doesn't it? That I, you know, it's just, oh, uh, crypto Twitter is sort of my, my experience of social media. But yeah, you're absolutely right. I mean, there's all these other, all these other, every, I guess everywhere has its own, you know, sort of social media gathering. It's probably, you know, good chances even more toxic than, than some of the stuff you get with, uh, you get with crypto. But it is, it is lovely when you meet people in the flesh, isn't it? When you go to a, when you go to a conference and people come up and are just, you know, all they want to do is just talk about crypto. And you, and I remember sort of the first time, first couple of times I went to actual sort of live crypto events. I was like, am I going

• 59:51Speaker 02

  to get people come up and, and, and just scream at me? Be like, you, you, you did all over this project and that, you know, how dare you? And, and no one did. Everyone, you know, everyone who came up and said hello was like, I really, I really enjoy watching your videos. Thanks. You know, it's great. And then, and then just talk about crypto. It was, it was an amazing feeling, but I was so nervous before I went there. Cause I was like, what's

• 1:00:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, this is, I, that's been my experience and the few times I do get out, but um, this is why my co-host David is just basically addicted to uh, in real life crypto meetups and conferences. I don't know. He must go to like a dozen or so a year. So I'm, because it's, it's exactly, it's, it's refreshing to the soul, uh, very much. Um, people are, um, actually reasonable.

• 1:00:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like nice, pleasant to talk to and passionate and very similar, I think. That's the thing about crypto is what I would say is for all of our differences, there is a common core set of values that we all believe. So you might believe in a, you know, a high transaction throughput, integrated blockchain versus the modular vision, right? Or you might believe in like Bitcoin over Ethereum as your store of value or whatever, or vice versa, right? But the thing that we all believe is that it is a fundamental economic freedom and good for the world to hold your own private keys, right? For an individual to essentially be able to act without a bank account

• 1:01:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  and to have possession of that. We all believe in kind of a censorship resistant global platform for the world. We all believe in what we're trying to achieve here, which is bank the unbanked and unbank the banked. So we don't have to go through centralized intermediaries. And at the end of the day, I think we don't probably as crypto unify on those core values enough, but they are there. And you see them in particular when we're under attack, I think. That kind of comes out. There's one thing that in the US, the IRS is coming out with some very anti DeFi, anti crypto legislation.

• 1:02:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  We just got 120,000 comments from the crypto community responding to the IRS comment, right? I mean, the crypto community does respond and is alive and well when it's under attack and unifies in those ways. And I think that gives me hope.

• 1:02:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Beautifully put, Ryan. Beautifully put. Yeah, it's, it's, we're all, we're all going, the destination is the same. We're just all kind of going there via different paths, sometimes, sometimes radically different paths. But we, yeah, there's kind of more that unites us than divides us, I think, at the end of the day. I just, there was one more thing I wanted to ask you, Ryan, because you've spoken to like every time, every time I'm researching something and I want to, you know, I want to get, I'm researching a particular person in crypto, I always try and listen to interviews of them and every time you guys have spoken to them already. It's like, well, I'll just, I'll just go to the

• 1:03:00Speaker 02

  Bankless episode. I mean, like, just in the past sort of few months, you've spoken to, you've spoken to like Arthur Hayes, Lynn Alden, Sergey Nazarov, Vitalik, CZ, you know, kind of everyone who's everyone in, in crypto. And I wanted to ask you, is, is there anyone in particular on your kind of wishlist for future interviews? And, and who was the most sort of, who was the most kind of surprising, who surprised you the most? Or who was kind of like the most, the most unpredictable offstage, perhaps?

• 1:03:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, I would say on the wishlist, we've for a very long time had actually Elon Musk on, on the wishlist as somebody who would be just a fascinating discussion. Like, he talks about crypto so much, but it's not, it's not clear how deep he is in it. And then there's also the AI angle, that kind of thing. So that would be probably close to the top of our list. As far as a big, like biggest guest that was most surprising, Mark Cuban, you know, kind of a celebrity wealthy individual in the US. He came on the podcast in the very early days for Bankless. And it was

• 1:04:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  an absolute shock to David and myself that number one, he was in crypto and like using DeFi protocols. Like, he could talk about AVE, he could talk about Compound, he could talk about Solidity. He's learning to write Solidity. Yeah. And the fact that he was willing to come on, you know, a crypto podcast at that time. So that was incredibly surprising. I don't know. Guy asked David, who was the, the, like, most surprising guest off camera that we've had? Maybe while you think about that, I'll just say the person that is exactly the same way off camera, on camera, no matter what, is Vitalik Buterin. Like, I, you know, we, David and I have talked about-

• 1:04:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  You know, you've never met Vitalik off camera. Not, not in person, but off camera.

• 1:05:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  And I meet everyone through you, David, didn't you know? Everyone you've met, I've also met. So yeah, I just, you know, it would be top, top three betrayals for me if it turned out that Vitalik was not who he actually purports to be and seems to be. But I think that he actually is like, I think that he's actually a fantastic person. And he is, he's the same both off camera and on camera. I don't know, David, would you add any surprises, weirdest guest experiences, anything like this?

• 1:05:33David Hoffman?

  I think we do a pretty good job of kind of vetting guests so that the weird, we don't invite the weird ones on. There was one episode that we did in the height of the bull market last year, where we had, we were just getting flamed by all these other communities, but like, why won't you, you guys are just dumb ETH maxies, you guys only talk about Ethereum, why aren't you talking about other ecosystems? Talk about Solana, talk about Terra Luna, talk about Avalanche. And so we were like, you know, F it, we'll just do all of them at once. And so we invited Emin, Do Kwon and Anatoly on a show just for one single podcast, put them all together. That show was also a mess. At the

• 1:06:17David Hoffman?

  end of that show, I like very much realized that like, Do Kwon's kind of an asshat. I would never really be friends with Emin, but Anatoly, I'll totally get a beer with. And then like, interestingly enough, it's like Solana that is the ecosystem that, you know, figures out how to survive through the bear market and attract a real community. And I don't think that there's a coincidence there.

• 1:06:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, there you go. That's the alpha. So invest in the founders you get a beer with. The founders you get a beer with. That's what we're running the show with.

• 1:06:44David Hoffman?

  Vitalik doesn't drink, doesn't drink beer, but he'll drink green tea.

• 1:06:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wine and green tea, right?

• 1:06:51David Hoffman?

  He only did that once. That's not a thing.

• 1:06:54Speaker 02

  Invest in something where you can have a carrot juice with the founder.

• 1:06:57David Hoffman?

  Yeah, exactly. Much more wholesome.

• 1:07:01Speaker 02

  I mean, I'm reassured to hear Vitalik's like that because I think if, you know, if that was an act, that would be, that, I mean, it would be amazing. It would be an amazing piece of.

• 1:07:11David Hoffman?

  He would be the biggest.

• 1:07:12Speaker 02

  Worrying as well.

• 1:07:14David Hoffman?

  Yeah, he would be the biggest, just like fraudster of all time of that. He was able to keep up that act. That would just be something unreal, but no.

• 1:07:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, we don't, we don't need that. As to Elon Musk, like I, I think I would, I would love to, to hear you guys interview him because yeah, I think Ryan, as you say, like he does talk about crypto a lot, but it's like, it, it seems to be like, I mean, he was kind of on it on Joe Rogan a couple of weeks back, wasn't it? And he sort of dips his toe in and he starts talking about it. And then the conversation goes somewhere else. You're like, no, come back, talk, talk more about crypto.

• 1:07:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  Now he's talking about Twitter becoming basically a replacement for banks. And you can do all of your banking on Twitter. And so we go and we're just like, that's, that means crypto, right? Like, how else are you going to do this? Because you're going to have to use the legacy banking system unless you use crypto.

• 1:08:08David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 1:08:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  And so I, you know, maybe that will draw him in. We'll have to see.

• 1:08:13David Hoffman?

  He's amenable to crypto. Elon, Elon's a crypto guy.

• 1:08:18Speaker 02

  He's a crypto guy.

• 1:08:19David Hoffman?

  I said, I said, he needs to be better.

• 1:08:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  When you left, David, I said he was our, like our number one guest, like on our wish list for the longest time. Anyway.

• 1:08:28David Hoffman?

  Yeah, you, Elon for the views would be the number one guest. Yuval Noah Harari for the content.

• 1:08:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:08:37David Hoffman?

  The other big one. Oh, and also Ray Dalio.

• 1:08:39Speaker 02

  Well, I think, I mean, I'm, I'm looking forward to hearing all three of them. I think, I think it would be, you know, it'd be great to, great to hear those guys on the show before too long. So if any of, if any of those guys are watching, you guys have to get on Bankless. ASAP because we

• 1:08:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's right.

• 1:08:54David Hoffman?

  Let's make a reference to that.

• 1:08:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  I agree with that. Into reality. Good.

• 1:08:58Speaker 02

  Um, well, guys, I've taken up a lot of your time already. I'm sure you, I'm sure you've got a lot more things to do, but um, thank you so much. This was, this was great. I've got, I've got like a list of about a dozen other questions to ask you, but it'll have to wait until another time. But um, this has been fantastic. You guys do amazing work. I love listening to you. Anyone watching, if you're not subscribed to Bankless, you're missing out. We will leave links uh, below in the description uh, where you can follow um, Ryan and David. And yeah, guys, thank you so much. I hope, I hope this was fun and um, I hope we can, I hope we can catch up again soon.

• 1:09:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  It was an absolute blast. David, can we say that Guy is our favorite crypto YouTuber? Are we able to say that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, he's mine. Hundred percent. There you go. Hundred percent. There you go, Guy. Thank you for everything you do. We certainly appreciate it.

• 1:09:44Speaker 02

  Um, but guys, thank you. Yes, thank you so much. That was, that was amazing. Really enjoyed it. And um, yeah, just keep doing, keep doing what you're doing.

• 1:09:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  Will do. You will. Thanks. Listen. Bye, Guy.