ROLLUP: Uniswap vs. SEC | Eigenlayer Mainnet | Blackrock BUIDL Fund | $TNSR Solana Airdrop

Bankless Friday Weekly Rollup 2nd Week of April, 2024 ------ ➡️ Apply to the Cartesi Grants Program here: https://bankless.cc/Cartesi ------ 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24 https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2 ⁠ 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle 🏙️ CONSENSUS | SAVE 20% WITH CODE BANKLESS https://go.coindesk.com/4cBztCA 🏠 CASA | SECURE YOUR GENERATIONAL WEALTH https://bankless.cc/Casa 🔗CELO | CEL2 COMING SOON https://bankless.cc/Celo 🗣️TOKU | CRYPTO EMPLOYMENT SOLUTION https://bankless.cc/toku ------ TIMESTAMPS & RESOURCES 0:00 Intro 5:50 MARKET https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2024/04/11/grayscale-bitcoin-etf-sees-record-lowest-daily-outflow-of-18m https://cryptohayes.substack.com/p/heatwave https://www.growthepie.xyz/fundamentals/daily-active-addresses 13:40 Revenue from Base at $40million https://twitter.com/davidomaraX/status/1777998689874628885 15:00 4 weeks later, EIP-4844 is still a game-changer https://twitter.com/liamihorne/status/1777689828848525607 16:20 Movers of the Week https://www.bankless.com/toncoins-epic-rise 21:30 Bitcoin Ordinals taking top 10 NFT positions https://twitter.com/ercwl/status/1777550883082875095 https://imgur.com/UnLO0F2 22:40 Inflation hotter than expected in march - 3.8% up from 3.2% in Feb https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/10/business/cpi-inflation-fed.html 25:30 Gloomy news from ETH ETF frontier https://twitter.com/NateGeraci/status/1777386609760936183 https://twitter.com/NateGeraci/status/1777768937943445568 https://polymarket.com/event/ethereum-spot-etf-approved-by?tid=171284490744 https://twitter.com/dunleavy89/status/1777751802118631594 https://twitter.com/jconorgrogan/status/1777016899567604095 34:04 Uniswap received an enforcement notice from the SEC https://x.com/Uniswap/status/1778127813138071904 https://twitter.com/haydenzadams/status/1778126466984575166 https://x.com/Uniswap/status/1778127815642075219 https://twitter.com/lex_node/status/1778167441903722768 https://twitter.com/ammori/status/1778128325996675577 https://x.com/iampaulgrewal/status/1778149863072670169 https://x.com/iampaulgrewal/status/1776292735063888374 https://twitter.com/jchervinsky/status/1778141231190552784 https://twitter.com/jchervinsky/status/1778455631277572241 47:58 EigenLayer and EigenDA are going to mainet! https://twitter.com/eigenlayer/status/1777757913718899074 https://twitter.com/sreeramkannan/status/1777791230556119183 https://x.com/TrustlessState/status/1778463830219092476 https://x.com/ayyyeandy/status/1778439191010873835 1:00:40 Solana Tensor’s Airdrop https://twitter.com/TensorFdn/status/1777350377895043537 https://x.com/TensorFdn/status/1775193013230489721 1:02:25 Bankless Airdrop Hunter https://www.bankless.com/airdrop-hunter 1:03:25 Circle Announces USDC Smart Contract for Transfers by BlackRock’s BUIDL Fund Investors https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240411966052/en/Circle-Announces-USDC-Smart-Contract-for-Transfers-by-BlackRock’s-BUIDL-Fund-Investors https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1778430676984897970 https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1778421743977173290 https://dune.com/steakhouse/tokenized-securities 1:09:10 Raises and BVC Investments MonadLabs raised $225M! https://twitter.com/monad_xyz/status/1777687376136982767 1:17:38 Bankless is hiring! https://www.bankless.com/jobs 1:18:00 MEME of the Week Nic vs David! 🥊 https://x.com/TrustlessState/status/1775883303268081891 https://x.com/TrustlessState/status/1774176205190709489 https://x.com/nic__carter/status/1774070020873535536 ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures ⁠

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

• 0:00David Hoffman?

  Uniswap in the left corner versus Gary Gensler in the right corner. Let's go showdown of the century. We're going to talk about all these details of why Gary Gensler thinks he's able to step into the ring against Hayden Adams.

• 0:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bankless Nation, it is the second week of April and it is time for the Bankless Weekly Roll-Up. David, I was out last week. What did I miss, man?

• 0:24David Hoffman?

  Uh, you know, not too much. A couple SEC court cases, a couple airdrops, a couple main nets, you know, just an average week in crypto.

• 0:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  You know what? I feel like with the lawsuit that's just happened, we're going to get into with Gary Gensler and SEC suing Uniswap, it feels like Gary got stronger while I was out. And I'm wondering, like, when you go out-

• 0:43David Hoffman?

  Stronger or just like more audacious?

• 0:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  Audacious. Yeah, I don't know if he's actually stronger, but he thinks he is in his head. So it's weird that when I go out, when I miss a roll-up, he gets stronger. But when you miss a roll-up, you're out there like slaying horror cruxes. I don't know what you're doing, man. You're on mountains. I'm at the beach and he gets stronger and then you just do something else. So I think in order to win this lawsuit against Gary Gensler, we got to send you to another mountaintop.

• 1:08David Hoffman?

  Yeah, it sounds like I'm going on vacation and you're staying here, buddy. You must stay. You must produce podcasts.

• 1:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh my god. Did you catch the eclipse, by the way? There was another thing that is off-topic that happened this week.

• 1:18David Hoffman?

  In New York, yeah, which was 91% coverage. Then I come back to like my friends and be like, "Yeah, that was kind of lame." And then I got sent this like XKCD comic of like the coolness, like, levels of the eclipse as a function of how close you are to the path of totality.

• 1:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, you gotta be right there.

• 1:36David Hoffman?

  And like, it's either 100% covered or nothing. Yeah, it's not cool to be like 95% covered. It's like, yeah, so, but yeah, regardless, everyone went to their rooftops and like looked at the sun. It was like slightly darker. It was slightly cooler. Yeah, what about you? You were in the path of totality, yeah, right?

• 1:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  No, I was like, I was like 95%. So I caught that, but I didn't get the full effect. And actually, I regret that. I regret that now. I regret missing that. I'm so fomo.

• 2:00David Hoffman?

  I actually had tickets to this one event in Austin that was going to be like 200 people, but I didn't get flights. I didn't look at flights until like two weeks before. And I didn't realize how much, how big of a deal it was. And when I looked at flights like two weeks before the eclipse, it was like $3,000. And I'm like, "Why? I can't do that." And plus, there was a Dick Butts on Ice event here in New York, which I just had to go to.

• 2:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, of course, because that's like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, right?

• 2:26David Hoffman?

  It truly was. It truly was.

• 2:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, I'm glad you made that one. I just now, you know, the way I rationalize it to myself is well, well, what if I show up at the place? Like, my family lives in Southern Ontario, so what if I show up in Southern Ontario? It's always cloudy there. What if it's cloudy? They'll have gone all that way and it's, I won't see it, but anyway, regrets, regrets. I have no regrets about this bull cycle, though, David, that we're in right now. I'm pretty excited about it. What are we covering this week?

• 2:50David Hoffman?

  Uniswap Labs versus the SEC. Let's go!

• 2:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's going down.

• 2:56David Hoffman?

  Hayden Adams, another Adams, versus Gary Gensler. Probably the biggest throwdown that I think the crypto industry will ever see. I'm just looking forward to Hayden just like absolutely wiping the floor with the SEC. Like, that's the only logical conclusion of this, right?

• 3:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  By the way, Adams versus Gensler isn't the only matchup. We're going to talk about a matchup. My co-host, David Hoffman, is actually boxing someone in crypto.

• 3:20David Hoffman?

  Yeah, not in the SEC, somebody else in crypto.

• 3:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  True story. Yeah, wait till the end. Also, Eigenlayer, the main net is here. That's a big freaking deal. It's mostly here. We'll talk about what's here, what's still to come. What else we got?

• 3:34David Hoffman?

  BlackRock Buidl Fund now has a direct pipeline to USDC. Bankless Nation who listened to that episode with Securitize got the alpha first. What does this mean for this new tokenized treasury product? What does it mean to have a direct pipeline to USDC? And also, another week, another token drop, this time on Solana. It's always a good week in crypto, especially when prices are going up, which they were kind of going up a little bit this week, which we're going to talk.

• 3:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Are we bored of token drops yet? I mean, are we bored of getting free money, like hundreds of millions of dollars? And I feel like it's just like, oh, it's another token drop.

• 4:06David Hoffman?

  It's boring for all the people who didn't get the token drop, but like, if you got that token drop, like, say what you will about the points meta. Like, token drops are doing their job of becoming more precise and more directed towards people's respective communities. So, like, people who are getting the token drop are extremely excited because they committed, you know, the time, cost of their money, and their capital to that project, and so they're very excited. Did I receive the token drop? No, because it's on Solana. Oh, actually, maybe I did, actually, now that I think about it.

• 4:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  You don't know.

• 4:36David Hoffman?

  Because I...

• 4:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Check your bankless claim.

• 4:38David Hoffman?

  I bought my Mad Lad on Tensor, so maybe I got the token drop. I don't know.

• 4:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  See, that's what I mean. You're not even motivated enough to check at this point. You're just like all the free money coming in.

• 4:47David Hoffman?

  I think I might have lost that wallet. Anyways, we're going to get into all of these conversations and more, but first we're going to talk to Cartezzi, our friends and sponsors over at Cartezzi, who's building the first modular execution layer as a layer two or layer three on Ethereum for using a Linux runtime, which helps you produce real world computing environments for Web3 devs. That was kind of a mouthful. Basically, imagine running Doom as a layer two with on-chain state. Just think about like all the things you can do with Linux, which is like literally endless with all of the decades of rich code libraries and open source tooling around the Linux ecosystem.

• 5:25David Hoffman?

  And now put that on to a runtime as a layer two or layer three on Ethereum. So Cartezzi, they're giving away money. That is a call to action. You can get a grant from Cartezzi for developing inside of the Cartezzi ecosystem. And also there's an open source bug hunting initiative. So click the link in the show notes to getting started with Cartezzi today.

• 5:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is one of those build to earn models too. You gotta build something in order to earn that grant.

• 5:50David Hoffman?

  Build to earn. I think that's just called work.

• 5:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay. We discovered that a long time ago, I guess. Let's talk about markets today, David. So tell me about Bitcoin on the week. What are we looking at?

• 6:00David Hoffman?

  3% up this week, which I would call, you know, flatty up, flattish up. Started the week $68,000, ending the week at $70,000. Actually, it's a little bit more up than I thought, maybe at 4%. So keeping its nose, its eyeballs right above that $70,000 mark.

• 6:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's not bad. I'm feeling great above 70K. Give me a quick Bitcoin ETF update, if you will. This headline here, "Grayscale Bitcoin ETF Sees Record Lowest Daily Outflow of 18 Million." This is kind of like a one-time event, isn't it, for the grayscale Bitcoin ETF to have sort of all of its outflows leaked out into, I don't know, where does it go? Tell me, why is this significant?

• 6:41David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so the outflows of grayscale, the grayscale ETF are like the brakes on the Bitcoin price, whereas the inflows to all the other Bitcoin ETFs are the gas. And right now, like, gas and brakes have been in this war with each other. And right now, yesterday, April 11th, this is when, that's actually today, grayscale Bitcoin ETF sees record lowest daily outflows of 18 million. So only $18 million of pressure is being put on the brakes. Granted, like, the approval and initial, like, opening of the doors of the floodgates into the Bitcoin ETFs is also kind of like a one-time event. So it's not like that. That also kind of teeters off. But the thing is, is like, we kind of are expecting the brakes to teeter off way sooner than the gas, because the gas has, we've got a lot of, there's a lot

• 7:26David Hoffman?

  of gas in the tank. And so as we see the lowering of the outflows out of grayscale, we see a release of the pressure on the brakes. So hopefully, when this continues to approach zero, we will see liftoff.

• 7:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  So why are people outflowing? Is it basically, it's been less liquid previously, now it's much more liquid, and they've been locked up for a while, and grayscale fees are a lot higher than the other ETFs. And so that's why there's outflow in grayscale?

• 7:54David Hoffman?

  All of the above. All of the above. Yeah. So people were buying the GBTC discount back when, like, you know, you could buy discounted Bitcoin at 15% on the bet that, like, eventually grayscale will turn into an ETF. And now it is. Like you said, grayscale fees are 2.5% versus other ETFs at, you know, 0.2%, 0.3%. And so, like, why are people just paying those fees? Well, because also, some people are sitting on, like, you know, a mountain of capital gains. And so selling, selling to avoid those fees actually encourages a larger fee, which is capital gains tax.

• 8:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  That was a good bet, a year ago, by the way, when Bitcoin was trading in grayscale off, like, you know, 20, 25% nap. I'll note, because we're going to talk about ETH price right now, it's about that with Ether, right? Yeah. So there is a grayscale Ether Trust, if you call it, it's called Ether E. You can buy that in your 401k account right now, and it's trading at a 25% discount. Discount to premium.

• 8:51David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 8:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  So that will come in line on the actual ETH price as soon as an Ethereum ETF is approved.

• 8:59David Hoffman?

  Which you would assume the ETH price would also be much higher once the ETF is approved. So you get 25% off of a higher price later is the idea.

• 9:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  It seems like a great.

• 9:10David Hoffman?

  It's a good bet.

• 9:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  Deal. Like it's, we don't know whether it's going to happen this year or next year, but we are pretty confident it's going to happen. So why not just lock in that 25% discount? Anyway.

• 9:18David Hoffman?

  What was it? Was your timeframe not two years? Like it's going to happen within two years.

• 9:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right. It's a good, it's a good deal on some ETH, I think. Anyway, where are we at on the ETH price this week?

• 9:28David Hoffman?

  ETH price up about a hundred dollars, sort of the week at 3,400 dollars, up about four-ish percent to 3,500 dollars. Really having its ratio with Bitcoin, that pay, the point 05 number really be defended. We fell down below point 05, but it came right back up. Eric Wall, did you notice, Ryan, maybe while you were out, maybe you didn't see this. Eric Wall made this tweet saying if the ETH BTC ratio drops below like point 0495 or something, I'll shave my head. And then it drops down below it and he goes and shaves his head.

• 9:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wait, why?

• 10:00David Hoffman?

  No one was telling him to do that. He just tweeted it out and then he was like, oh, well, it fell down below. Guess I have to go shave my head now. And he went and shaved his head. And like Eric, it's not like he had short hair to begin with. He had like long, luscious locks.

• 10:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  No, it's fantastic hair.

• 10:18David Hoffman?

  He had fantastic hair and now it's gone.

• 10:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's a loss for all of us.

• 10:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  I don't know if that's a net gain. Well, but I, I don't, um, was he trying to like prove something? I know he's more of a Bitcoiner than Ethereum, but he doesn't hate Ethereum.

• 10:31David Hoffman?

  This was one of his tweets in, um, it was one of his new year tweets is like, here's my like 20 predictions for 2024. And he says like the ETH BTC ratio will not fall below like this particular line. And then the line was like point 095 or something.

• 10:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  You gotta, that's why you gotta be careful with your predictions, your New Year's resolutions and your predictions here.

• 10:49David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 10:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  Where are we at on the total market cap?

• 10:52David Hoffman?

  Market cap, kind of unchanged over the last three weeks, point, 2.7, still about the same. We are just like hovering right below last cycle's all time highs.

• 11:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Do you read this post from Arthur Hayes?

• 11:03David Hoffman?

  I did not, tell me about it.

• 11:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  Notorious crypto trader. The TLDR is, he's actually short-term bearish on April, so it's not going to be up-reel. He's like bearish on crypto.

• 11:13David Hoffman?

  Specifically on the month of April?

• 11:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, that's what Arthur, I mean, he's a trader, right? So he can be bearish on these timelines. He gets more bullish after April, May.

• 11:23David Hoffman?

  Okay.

• 11:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  But he is selling, he's actively been selling in April because-

• 11:26David Hoffman?

  What's his rationale?

• 11:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, the happening occurs at a time when dollar liquidity is tighter than usual. There's some, like, he goes through this entire post, there's some reasons that dollar liquidity is kind of getting tighter in the month of April. You know, the BTFD, is that what it's called?

• 11:43David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 11:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 11:45David Hoffman?

  Bank term fund deposit program or something, which is over.

• 11:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's over, he thinks that'll affect it, kind of a liquidity suction in April. But, so he took, I took full profit on these positions, Mew, Sol and NMTs, basically like selling his meme coins and such. Not that Sol's a meme coin, I didn't mean to imply that, but he says that. I'm selling my meme coins.

• 12:06David Hoffman?

  He says Sol is a meme coin?

• 12:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  No, I said, I'm not implying that. I'm not implying that.

• 12:12David Hoffman?

  Yeah, careful what you say about Sol these days, people will come after you.

• 12:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Let's do an L2 update, I'm really excited about L2s these days. This is brought to you by our friends over at Mantle, which is a new and up and coming L2. You know what, I shouldn't say they're up and coming because they're already established, they're crushing it.

• 12:30David Hoffman?

  They're an incumbent at this point. Oh wow, we broke through $40 billion in Layer 2s, hell yeah, $43 billion. We were, we've been at like $39 billion, we're like the last three weeks trying to get our heads about 40, $43 billion, nice drop, nice drop, nice drop.

• 12:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's a lot.

• 12:44David Hoffman?

  That's a lot, that's a lot, that's more money than I have, yeah.

• 12:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. Okay, so what are the other stats? I mean, should we look at active addresses today?

• 12:53David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 12:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  Something we don't usually look at.

• 12:55David Hoffman?

  Yeah, active addresses, they're up across the board. So Base at 1.5 million new active addresses as of this year. That's up 300% in the last month. Arbstrom at 1.4 million active addresses, that's up 120% in the last 30 days. ZK Sync Era, 1.2 million active addresses, 20% up in 30 days. And then Optimism Mainnet at 650,000 addresses, that's up 85% in 30 days. So like Layer 2 Summer, remember, we've been talking about Layer 2 Summer since, what, 2021? 2022?

• 13:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  Have we?

• 13:27David Hoffman?

  Well, it's 24 in 2024.

• 13:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's here.

• 13:29David Hoffman?

  And it's finally here.

• 13:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  We, I mean, we had to wait for an actual like bull cycle, I think.

• 13:35David Hoffman?

  Yeah, surprise.

• 13:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  And some big protocol upgrades, which we'll get to in a second. But one thing I want to call attention to here is as a result of this traction, there's real economic value being created, in particular, in this case, on Coinbase. So Coinbase releases its quarterly earnings, it's a publicly traded company, so they do that. So, and you can also see this on chain, Coinbase's total revenue from Base, the Layer 2 that it recently launched, has now surpassed $40 million and is starting, look at this chart, it's starting to go parabolic.

• 14:05David Hoffman?

  That is, there is some healthy area under the curve there.

• 14:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  So what I love about Coinbase being public is everybody on Wall Street gets to see this. All the analysts get to start tracking a Layer 2 as a product, unit line, as a source of revenue for this exciting growth stock. And everybody else will catch on as well.

• 14:26David Hoffman?

  I don't know about that leap. They're gonna look at that line item in the PM and I'll be like, what the hell is that?

• 14:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  Just ignore it. It's just a bubble.

• 14:33David Hoffman?

  I don't know how to categorize that.

• 14:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's all meme coins.

• 14:35David Hoffman?

  Put that under the miscellaneous category.

• 14:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, but still, I mean, that's, that's substantial. 40 billion net new revenue for a Layer 2.

• 14:43David Hoffman?

  40 million.

• 14:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  40 million, yes. And also, what I would say is, what a great deal. Like, on Ethereum, they, they don't pay much in terms of transaction fees to Ethereum. They get to take home.

• 14:53David Hoffman?

  They pay very little. They're, they're taking home, it's like a 99% profit margin.

• 14:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  Pretty good deal here. David, give us an update on BlobSpace, please.

• 15:02David Hoffman?

  BlobSpace. Okay, so four weeks later, blobs are now coming up on four weeks old. The median gas fee on Layer 2s is now 10 times lower, from above 50 cents to about 3 cents. Blobs have met Layer 2 demand despite inscriptions, which means that Layer 2s aren't actually competing over BlobSpace with other Layer 2s. And actually, no one's truly competing for BlobSpace right now. Even though people are still putting their JPGs into inscription space, it seems to be there's enough room to go around for now. Optimism Collective profits at record high. That's pretty obvious. That $40 million going into Coinbase, 15%. I don't know, actually, whether that $40 million was calculated before

• 15:44David Hoffman?

  or after Optimism Collective took its 15% tax into the collective, its fee. But Base, Zora, Mode Network, and then actually Optimism Mainnet, these are all part of the Optimism Collective, right? So they're all paying 15% into this collective that is supposed to be like shared resources for all of them. And then, of course, Layer 2 setting all-time high record, five times the amount of demand from the start of this year. Hell, yeah.

• 16:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. I mean, it's no accident that all of these metrics are up. Most activity is up because we just got a big BlobSpace stimulus in terms of reduction costs here. Very cool. David, what's going on with the top 10? It's been a while since we looked at this. And there's a new asset that has entered the top 10 cryptocurrencies by market cap, which I don't recall seeing since like, it reminds me of 2017 and 2018.

• 16:37David Hoffman?

  It's kind of like a throwback, right?

• 16:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  Ton. It's the Telegram blockchain, and they have just surpassed, they're number 10 now in terms of total market cap, worth, you know, total, fully diluted, 36 billion, fully diluted. This is a Telegram chain, is it not?

• 16:54David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so Ton is a token Telegram Open Network. You said $36 billion, $37 billion fully diluted, but with an actually market cap of $25 billion, which like in this world of like high F D V, low float tokens, this is not one of them. Like two thirds of the, these tokens are out on the open market and it's commanding a $25 billion market cap. Okay, so there's some backstory here that probably newer crypto entrants probably aren't familiar with. Telegram did an ICO, one of the, I think one of the biggest ICOs in 2017. It was like top three ICOs to do a token for their app. And maybe for listeners who aren't familiar, Telegram is like a messaging app that is like the backbone of a lot of crypto meta.

• 17:38David Hoffman?

  Like every project, every founder is on Telegram, every V C is on Telegram, there are Telegram groups, there's just like, it's like the alternative to Discord that's a little bit more universal. Everyone across the world all uses Telegram. It's like WhatsApp. It's just like WhatsApp, but for some reason in crypto, we use Telegram. They did this ICO, 2017, one of the largest ICOs. They got sued. They got sued by the S E C for doing an unregistered security sale.

• 18:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  I forgot about that.

• 18:05David Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that like really put a, just a damper in the whole project. And I kind of thought it was disappearing, like many of the ICOs.

• 18:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  Just a zombie chain.

• 18:15David Hoffman?

  A zombie chain, yeah. Just did their ICO, like pocketed the cash.

• 18:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  EOS.

• 18:20David Hoffman?

  Ships, ships something and then called it good. Yeah, just like EOS did, yeah. And then it turns out there's this Telegram Foundation, which is meaningfully differentiated. I think this is like actually true, not just like decentralization theater, from the Telegram app, app leadership. And they are making Telegram the blockchain. And I think if like, I don't know because I'm in America, but like if you're not in America, there's like a Telegram wallet and it's like now kind of becoming like you would classify this as an ETH killer, I guess, actually just because like they're, they're putting a wallet into their app and they're putting like DeFi and tokens on it. And honestly, like Telegram has a literal bajillion users. And so it's actually kind of makes sense.

• 19:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's catching a bid.

• 19:03David Hoffman?

  It's catching a bid.

• 19:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Based on all this, yeah.

• 19:05David Hoffman?

  Yes. And so it has entered the top 10 crypto market cap, top 10 tokens, which like is a kind of a hard place to enter.

• 19:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's pretty impressive. I, you know, I'm not sure how much there is there because I haven't really spent any time on it. I don't know very much about the ecosystem, but it's ahead of Cardano at this point, an avalanche.

• 19:21David Hoffman?

  Well, well.

• 19:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  Look at that. Those are darlings of the last cycle. So we'll see how these top 10 change as we continue here.

• 19:30David Hoffman?

  Well, let's do like a quick snapshot of the top 10 Bitcoin number one. Of course, yeah, like a review of the top 10 because like whenever

• 19:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  You start with Bitcoin? Yeah, it's Bitcoin still.

• 19:39David Hoffman?

  Bitcoin is his number one, meaningfully number one.

• 19:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's always been number one ever since I got here. It's been number one.

• 19:44David Hoffman?

  Number one Bitcoin, two Ethereum, three Tether, four Binance Train, five Solana, six XRP, seven Lido Staked Ether, eight USDC, nine Dogecoin, 10 Toncoin. How do you feel just about like the state of the top 10 right now?

• 19:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Um, not super surprising. I mean, BNB and Solana continue to battle it out, which is interesting. XRP just, God knows, man. I, they have the, uh, diehard fans.

• 20:10David Hoffman?

  So sticky.

• 20:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  I have no idea. They've always been here. I just kind of like skip it, gloss over it. Still in the top 10, actually impressive at this point. Yeah. And then Dogecoin, having a meme in the top 10 is interesting. I mean, there's staying power to meme coins isn't there at least. You know, high Lindy type meme coins, they're not going away. Um, yeah, pretty, pretty interesting.

• 20:31David Hoffman?

  I would be very happy to see Dogecoin flip XRP. I'm, I'm totally unbothered by a meme coin being in the top 10. Dogecoin just, it feels like very honest. It's, uh, they're like meme coins are real. There's something to be learned about meme coins. So I don't mind it being in the top 10. Uh, XRP can just get the hell out of there. That's the, that's the one that really bugs me in this like top 10. It's like XRP just can like, it can.

• 20:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  Doesn't bother me anymore. Nothing bothers me, David. I'm, I'm.

• 20:57David Hoffman?

  Well, cause like, it's always been a conversation about like here, the top 10 is like 90% of the crypto market cap. So it's a little bit reflective of like what the industry is. Uh, it's been growing in quality ever since, like ever since I've gotten into like the top 10. Used to be a complete joke.

• 21:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bitcoin Diamond.

• 21:12David Hoffman?

  Now there's, yeah, Bitcoin Diamond. Yeah. Uh, now there's only one joke in the top 10 and that's XRP.

• 21:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wow. All the XRP fans of Bankless just immediately deleted this podcast from their player.

• 21:24David Hoffman?

  How many of those do you think we have left?

• 21:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Let's talk about this. Another top 10. So we're looking at NFTs. Breaking Bitcoin Ordinals now have two collections amongst the top three NFTs by market cap in the world. Wow. What are these collections here? I didn't even recognize them because I'm not a Bitcoin NFT enjoyer.

• 21:43David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so this is actually not true anymore. This was a blip in time. So right now the top NFTs are CryptoPunks by market cap. So that's 1.4 billion. Runestones, which is a Bitcoin Ordinals project at 700 million, followed by Bored Apes Yacht Club, not dead yet, at 430.

• 22:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  But Runestones is number two.

• 22:02David Hoffman?

  Runestones is number two.

• 22:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  And that's a Bitcoin NFT project.

• 22:05David Hoffman?

  It's a Bitcoin NFT project, yeah.

• 22:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  My God, I would not have thought that that could be the case going into this cycle. Not at all.

• 22:12David Hoffman?

  Yeah, not done yet, though. So like Bored Apes are number three, Pudgy Penguins, number four, Node Monkeys are number five, also Bitcoin Ordinals, Bitcoin Puppets, also Bitcoin Ordinals, is number six, followed by Mad Lads on Solana for number seven, followed by Maladies, followed by Chromie Squiggles, which was like the original, are like generative art, art blocks.

• 22:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 22:34David Hoffman?

  So yeah, like Bitcoin Ordinals aggressively entering the top NFT projects.

• 22:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  Let's talk about TradFi for a minute. There's a big metric that came out, which was inflation this week. I'm gonna give you some stats. So it was hotter than expected in the month of March. So we are up to almost 4% David, inflation.

• 22:55David Hoffman?

  Up to almost 4%. So we're below 4%, we're at 3.8.

• 22:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  3.8. We were 3.2 in February. This is hotter than people thought. So surprisingly stubborn inflation was a term that was thrown around.

• 23:07David Hoffman?

  Is that why markets kind of like weren't happy this week?

• 23:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. And by the way, the 3.8%, it's 3.5% if you include food and fuel prices, which are a bit more volatile, but 3.8% if you don't, which is kind of like another important metric. An analyst said this, "It's problematic for the Fed. I don't see how they can justify a June cut with this strong inflation data." And yeah, so.

• 23:29David Hoffman?

  So I guess the real question is like, what's the trend though? Because like if the trend is like, you know, still downwards.

• 23:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  Please go down. Do you want to talk trends, though? Look at this. I do, I do. This is, this is also from the Arthur Hayes article. He got it from Jim Bianco, Bianco Research. This is yearly federal spending as a percentage of nominal GDP. So I'm changing tracks. Spending as a result of nominal GDP. What does that mean? Okay, so I'm changing tracks now. I'm not talking about inflation. I'm talking about debasement, debasement and issuance, issuance of the dollar, essentially. Okay, so, or actually not issuance of the dollar. This is, sorry, this is federal spending. So this is fiscal policy. You know how we're moving into, you know, modern monetary theory where kind of like fiscal takes charge of like more spending and that's why deficits grow and that's why like the dollar inflates and we're printing money this way.

• 24:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  As a percentage of GDP, America's GDP, right? Which is a nice metric, like a relative metric. So look at from 1970s to all the way to 2008, we spike up and then there's COVID. Look at this spike. In COVID, we got up to March, you know, 2021, we got up to 33% of our GDP we were actually spending and from a federal government perspective. And now we're back down. And so like, the problem with all of this, David, is we are spending like it's a wartime. Yeah, I'm not much of a TA guy, but that chart is bullish.

• 25:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  I would buy that chart. He would buy this chart, right? And the question is, how do you, how do you buy this chart? It's probably by selling your dollars and selling your T-bills. Buying things that are inflation and debasement hedges. Yeah, debasement hedges. Anyway, that's, that's, that's the long-term reality here. So whether inflation heats up or whether it cools down, I mean, you got to deal with all of this debasement at some point, don't you?

• 25:27David Hoffman?

  Indeed, indeed.

• 25:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  There was also some bad news, I think, while I was out and I got caught up with it, about Ethereum ETFs. So probability continues to tick down that we only get one in May.

• 25:38David Hoffman?

  We only get bad news about Ethereum ETFs. That's the only flavor of that news comes in.

• 25:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's a heated asset right now. Yeah, what's this from Nate?

• 25:47David Hoffman?

  Nate, who is General TradFi ETF Market Commentator, says several ETF issuers have met with the SEC regarding the spot Ether ETF. But according to Barron's, which is like this financial media agency, quote, "Those discussions have largely been one-sided without the agency giving companies critical feedback needed to finalize their products," with, of course, the May 23 deadline approaching very quickly. So people are kind of like starting to like throw in the towels, like, yeah, that like low percentage of the ETF is like quickly approaching zero. Polymarket, however, has it coming in at 21%.

• 26:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  21% by June 30.

• 26:26David Hoffman?

  By June 30. By June 30. Yeah, but like it's basically May or nothing. Like, once the May deadline passes, that's going to go to zero. So there's $91,000 betting on a 80% chance of getting denied.

• 26:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I think it's denied, unfortunately.

• 26:42David Hoffman?

  Okay, so ready for conspiracy theory?

• 26:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  You have another one? Is that one you haven't?

• 26:46David Hoffman?

  I got one every single week, brother.

• 26:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I'm ready. Tell me.

• 26:50David Hoffman?

  Okay, so the market's already priced in the ETF denial.

• 26:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, of course.

• 26:56David Hoffman?

  And so, once the denial, this isn't, I'm not completely standing by this, but like this is a, the market, the ETH price goes up.

• 27:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, I choose to believe. A big question, like, for that to happen, though, is what part of the cycle are we in? I know we just recorded an episode with Raul Paul. That's, he gives his estimate for where we are in the cycle. You know, are we in spring, summer, fall, winter, that sort of thing? But I think a great comparison is if we compare it to the previous three cycles that we've had, you know?

• 27:26David Hoffman?

  I like, I love this, actually.

• 27:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  2011, 2015, in terms of the number of days elapsed, you know, these cycles are all about, you know, say 1,000 to 1,400 days or so, right? And we are just over, we're about 500 days into the current cycle, the fourth bull market cycle, if you will. And so if this plays out the way the other previous three cycles have, then we have roughly one year to the cycle top. But like the top, that would be summertime, right? All time highs, no, sorry, like all time highs of this cycle.

• 28:04David Hoffman?

  Of the cycle, yeah.

• 28:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  And then another subsequent year to the bear market. So another like year where you spend in fall season, where it's kind of like up and down, up and down, and get some recoveries. So about two years, but one year to the top, if it plays out like the other cycles, you believe this?

• 28:23David Hoffman?

  If it plays out like the other cycles. Okay, so just really for the podcast listeners who can't view these charts, you basically have three, well, four lines that are overlaid each other. And really the first one of like the 2009 to 2011, that one doesn't count because that was just was insane, like such an outlier.

• 28:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 28:42David Hoffman?

  Bitcoin, it's Bitcoin going up infinity percentage.

• 28:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, sure.

• 28:46David Hoffman?

  Okay, so like we have 2011, 2015 and 2018 as the years that we are comparing this 2022 to 2024 bull market in. And then every single year of previous bull markets gets more muted and more prolonged than the previous.

• 29:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 29:02David Hoffman?

  So, so it goes up, it goes up less, but it also lasts longer in time, generally speaking. This, this one is, everyone is going to start, start talking about how this time is different. And they're going to give you like evidence that you are totally going to be compelled by, like the ETFs, it's totally prolonging this bull market. It's making it, it's going to be a super cycle because of the ETFs.

• 29:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  People are saying this, they're saying super cycle again?

• 29:26David Hoffman?

  I'm predicting that this, well, people are saying that this time is, this time is different because of the ETFs, that we have like a larger, like fundamental shift in capital flows. We are people have like using their 401K. We're just passively buying Bitcoin without thinking about it. So that is totally changing the game. And honestly, like, I'm compelled by that argument. But at the same time, I'm also equally compelled by like, what must go up comes down. So any amount of reflexivity up will be met with reflexivity down, which is why I want, and I think everyone wants, this bull market to be as prolonged as possible. And so the less like crazy we can go up, the longer we can have good times. Yeah.

• 30:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, that's what we want. I mean, the question is what's gonna happen? My, the base case here, and again, I, I like the idea of being dumber this cycle. Just going to, it's just going to play out how the other three cycles did. Somewhere in that range, right? Might go up a little higher, might last a little longer, it might be a little shorter. But it's going to go up, and we probably have about a year, a year and a half, maybe two years. And that's gonna, we're gonna repeat again. I think that's the base case. And yeah, I'm not trying to overthink this one. The fractal, it's just a fractal. It just happens every single time this way.

• 30:41David Hoffman?

  If you, if you do think it's gonna happen, like, there's like this window of time, call it like, that starts in like 400 days and ends in 800 days. And if you sell at any point in that window and just hold, you'll end up being happy.

• 30:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. Yeah, I agree. Well, I'm happy already, David. Are you happy?

• 31:01David Hoffman?

  I'm happy. I'm always happy.

• 31:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's been a good market so far. What do we got coming up?

• 31:05David Hoffman?

  Coming up next, I can layer now live on the Ethereum mainnet with its first AVS. What to do now? What comes next? We're gonna talk all about that and all the details. What does it mean to I can layer to be live? And Uniswap in the left corner versus Gary Gensler in the right corner. Let's go showdown of the century. We're gonna talk about all these details of why Gary Gensler thinks he's able to step into the ring against Hayden Adams. But first, a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible, especially Kraken, our preferred exchange for crypto in 2024. If you do not have an account with Kraken, consider clicking the link in the show notes, getting started with Kraken today.

• 31:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  They are also fighting the SEC.

• 31:42David Hoffman?

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• 34:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Big freaking deal here. Uniswap just received a enforcement notice from the SEC. This is called a Wells notice, which is the SEC telling Uniswap, "We are bringing you to court. Get ready." What are the details here? What actually happened?

• 34:23David Hoffman?

  So we still need some more details about like, why, what's motivating the SEC? Like, why they are saying they are taking the Uniswap Labs company, the software company, to court? So there's three different vectors of speculation here. There is operating an illegal exchange, like Uniswap, the protocol, which like seems dubious, because like completely decentralized, permissionless protocol.

• 34:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's what they said about Coinbase, though, right?

• 34:47David Hoffman?

  Yeah, same thing that they said about Coinbase, right? Like, but like, at least Coinbase is a centralized exchange, right? Same thing with like Kraken, same thing with all the other like exchanges. This one's different, because it's for all the reasons that we talked about on Bankless. It's, you know, on chains, smart contracts, totally permissionless.

• 35:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  Could be that, though.

• 35:03David Hoffman?

  Could be that. I guess it could be that. There's the Uniswap wallet, which the Uniswap Labs company actually does produce. And then there's the uni-token itself. So like speculation is like, it's one of these three things, maybe it's a handful of them, maybe it's all of them. What we do know, though, that because the SEC is not FinCEN, it's nothing to do with AML and KYC, which is because that's out of scope for the SEC. So it's highly likely that it's one of these three things. We're still kind of waiting to hear about exactly what the details are, but that's what we know of to this day.

• 35:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  David, I think this is a big deal, because...

• 35:36David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I think this is great. I'm stoked.

• 35:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  You're stoked? You're excited about it? You gotta tell me why you're excited. Like, first of all, I'm just like deeply disappointed in the US and the SEC and Gary Gensler, because this is not them picking on an exchange or the centralized order book, right? This is them picking on crypto's and DeFi's flagship protocol that has done things incredibly well to decentralize all of the things that need to be decentralized. This is them... Pushing a message to all of DeFi and saying, "We don't want this. The SEC does not want this here in the US, in America." Like, this is the first targeted attack on DeFi that I've seen.

• 36:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  And it's no mistake that they're picking the largest, like, our poster child protocol in order to place this attack. So that's why it's a big deal and pretty disappointing for like that. Like, they're going this far. Now, it's just like, this feels like a new type of attack.

• 36:41David Hoffman?

  And for all of those reasons, those are the same exact reasons why I'm stoked. Hayden Adams, when he tweeted out about this, he goes, "I'm not surprised, just annoyed, disappointed like you, Ryan, and ready to fight." So like, Uniswap Labs, you know, they have a chief legal officer. They knew that this was a possibility. They're ready to fight. And I would much rather have Hayden Adams and Uniswap Labs, a beloved protocol, who decentralized and did things right and is literally the hardest nut to crack for the SEC to go to court with the SEC. They are literally our best people to send.

• 37:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wow, that's a good point.

• 37:22David Hoffman?

  And Gary Gensler chose them to go after them. And so like, they're gonna set the example. Yes, they're like, they're going after the champion, Hayden Adams. Like, they're gonna get absolutely worked. And then we're going to be able to take that victory and like parade it around DeFi. And like, look, guys, like, Uniswap is like leading the example here. They are the vanguard for us. I think this is a slam dunk. It's just gonna sadly, unfortunately, take a lot of time.

• 37:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  Hayden Adams goes on, "I'm confident that the products we offer are legal and that our work is on the right side of history. But it's been clear for a while that rather than working to create clear and informed rules, the SEC has decided to focus on attacking longtime good actors like Uniswap and Coinbase, all the while letting bad actors like FTX slip by."

• 38:11David Hoffman?

  Like imagine in a world where Gary Gensler and the SEC found some like shady, low market cap, like shitcoin copy, carbon copy fork of Uniswap that was actually led by a scammer. And then they took them to court and then they sued them and then they paraded them. It's like, this is what DeFi is.

• 38:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  That would have been a way better strategy for Gensler.

• 38:31David Hoffman?

  That would have been a way better strategy.

• 38:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  He's really messing up here.

• 38:33David Hoffman?

  Yeah. And so like, so Jake Shavinsky's take in my episode with him recently was that the SEC is determining what is regulation of the crypto industry by taking everyone to court and losing, like as part of their strategy to determine what regulation is. Like if you are not going to court and losing, then you are not trying hard enough to regulate crypto. So they're taking our best people to court. Maybe they win, maybe they lose, probably going to lose. And then they will say like, well, look, we tried to regulate them. They won in court and that's where the line is drawn.

• 39:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  You know what I'm excited about actually? Now that you reframe it like that, you're giving me some more hope here, David. It's like the entire world, this could go to the, and Hayden said this, this could go to the Supreme Court, actually, at some point in time.

• 39:16David Hoffman?

  I hope it does. Sorry Hayden, it has to be someone. It's gonna be you. But like, thank you.

• 39:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, like that, that means the entire world is going to hear this narrative. And let's talk about the narrative. Fast forward to today, Hayden says, "The Uniswap protocol has processed over 2 trillion in volume, 2 trillion. Many thousands of teams and developers have forked our code and built on top of it. We built an entirely new financial infrastructure that is transparent, fair, secure, and accessible, powering an entire industry. The team did all this from the US in their offices in New York City."

• 39:51David Hoffman?

  Proudly.

• 39:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, proudly, US-based entrepreneur founder. "People often ask me why we stay in the US and my answer is simple. I believe that blockchain is incredibly powerful technology like the internet. It's here to stay. So someone needs to figure this out and might as well be us. And when you build technology that improves people's lives, you don't need to hide." Mm-hmm. David, everyone's going to hear that story.

• 40:13David Hoffman?

  Yep.

• 40:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  From Uniswap and Hayden Adams. And like, who hasn't used Uniswap and been like, this is incredible.

• 40:19David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 40:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is like the Google of finance, essentially. I just click here and I swap and I'm done.

• 40:27David Hoffman?

  He ended this tweet with a huge mic drop. He says, "The SEC's mission is protecting investors, maintaining fair and orderly and efficient markets and facilitating capital formation. This is a noble mission," Hayden says. "I would argue Uniswap does a far better job of this today than the SEC." I would love to hear these arguments be made on the record, in court, in front of the entire world.

• 40:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  Way better than FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried and the world hearing that story. Let's hear this story in a court system. Sorry Hayden.

• 41:00David Hoffman?

  Hayden is a smart, sharp dude who is not afraid to bite back when he needs to. And Gary Gensler is just leaning forward, giving him his face for a right hook.

• 41:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  He's also the person I at least expect to be in this kind of situation. He's kind of like, he said it, an introverted engineer, just kind of like heads down building, but maybe that makes him perfect for this.

• 41:21David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 41:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is Uniswap Labs tweeting, "Despite SEC rhetoric that most tokens are securities, the reality is that tokens are just a digital file format." Let's talk about what we're actually doing here in trying to regulate and call securities. You can't regulate JPGs and GIFs. Gary Gensler, the SEC, doesn't have a mandate over open source software. They're not regulators of GitHub's on the internet. This is a digital file format that we're actually talking about. Anyway, what do some of the legal minds think about this?

• 41:54David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so Gabe Shapiro, who is a lawyer over in the Delphi world, he tweets out, and this is why some people are perhaps considering this might be about the uni token. "My opinion," Gabe says, "don't overthink the Uniswap case. Probably the SEC will win on securities issues with uni token and lose on Uniswap, the AMM being a securities exchange. Of course, we'll have to see all the facts and circumstances. I have no insider knowledge, just my hunch on current info." I would actually kind of call that a big loss if it was about the uni token, and then the uni token was deemed a security. I would definitely call that an L.

• 42:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  That would definitely be an L. This is another take from a crypto lawyer. "Today's Wells notice against Uniswap is disappointing." But it's not unexpected from the SEC. It's another abuse on power. Unsurprising from an SEC that last month, a federal judge ruled committed a quote, "gross abuse of power by lying in court about a crypto project."

• 42:51David Hoffman?

  This is the chief legal officer of Uniswap, not just a lawyer.

• 42:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, really? Oh, wow. Okay.

• 42:55David Hoffman?

  This isn't the dude. Who is bald?

• 42:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bald is bullish. Bald is bullish. Good job, Eric Womby. That's why he did it, huh? He's trying to get more bullish. What's Paul Gray will say, who's also under, like, he is Coinbase's chief legal officer and obviously fighting the SEC right now.

• 43:14David Hoffman?

  Yeah, okay. So about the three things that the SEC might be taking Uniswap to court on, the actual exchange itself, the uni token, and then the Uniswap wallet. We already know that the Coinbase wallet, that case that the SEC was trying to take against Coinbase.

• 43:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Thrown out.

• 43:31David Hoffman?

  That part was thrown out. And so like, that part feels super secure because a court already threw it out. So like, you know, preemptive checkmark on like the wallet side of things. We also know that secondary transactions are cleared from being security sales. We know this from the XRP case when Ripple and the SEC, when SEC tried to take Ripple and lost versus Ripple. And so we already know that like, any sort of secondary transactions on the Uniswap AMM does not make a token a security. You can try and go argue that a token is security, but just being on Uniswap, the exchange, does not make them securities. So like, two of the three big things is already have like preemptive checkmarks in them because we already have court cases that have produced clarity where the SEC has not.

• 44:14David Hoffman?

  Leaving the uni token as like, kind of the one that we don't have.

• 44:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  Which would still be a huge loss.

• 44:20David Hoffman?

  Which, if they won, but they would also still have to like, make the argument that they would win. And like, the, you, again, like, the way that the Uniswap token has entered the world and the lab's relationship with the token and the, all of that stuff is like, the best that has ever been done in terms of like, buttoned up compliance.

• 44:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's one of our best ones, I think.

• 44:39David Hoffman?

  It's our best ones. And so like, again, it's our, they're picking on our star fighter. Like, I choose to box the champion. Like, you don't do that.

• 44:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Maybe, like, all these losses that Paul Gray was pointing out, maybe the SEC just likes taking Ls in court, man.

• 44:52David Hoffman?

  Well, see, that's what Jake Shavinsky said. It's like, if you aren't taking crypto to court and losing, you're not trying hard enough.

• 44:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, the SEC is trying really hard because they're losing a lot. This is Jake again. I don't know who needs to hear this, but the SEC is a financial markets regulator, not the open source software police. I think they need to hear that, Jake. He's got a summary of the vibes here, in case you were down in the dumps about this. He says, "A good thing that crypto as an industry is not a group that scares easily. Here are five reasons to stand strong in the face of the SEC's threats. Number one, as a reminder, the SEC doesn't make the law. Congress does that, okay? So they can take people to court, they don't make the law. Number two, they're taking Ls in courts. Many courts are rejecting the SEC's approach. Number three, the industry is going on the offense. That's happening right now. I'm getting fired up just talking about this.

• 45:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  Number four, new SEC leadership could change everything. Gary Gensler is not Emperor King. He won't be there forever. Number five, the industry keeps innovating. We are continuing to build out here. So those are reasons to be optimistic here, David.

• 45:56David Hoffman?

  Yeah, and even with the strategy that the SEC needs to take people to court and lose in order for the Democrats to be satisfied with SEC performance, eventually the courts also catch up to that. They catch wind of other SEC cases.

• 46:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  They read the news. They listen to the Bankless Podcast.

• 46:14David Hoffman?

  Yeah, that's right. And so when they see these, like, yeah, I don't think you've had the time to listen to the Jake Shavinsky episode. It came out this morning. But there is this one court case that the SEC, not Gary Gensler, but the SEC lawyer, lied through his teeth to the judge, and then the judge called them out on that fact.

• 46:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes.

• 46:34David Hoffman?

  And so you can only do this so many times before the court, like, "Sir, SEC, your reputation precedes you. You're going to take the L here." And the Ls just come faster and faster and faster.

• 46:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, you have switched me to be a bit more optimistic about this because I think you're right on that this is a great case to bring in front of courts. And it's kind of our prizefighter. I will say one thing, though, David, that's kind of bad in the interim. While this all gets figured out, again, it could take years. This is bad for US crypto developers and founders.

• 47:06David Hoffman?

  Totally.

• 47:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, because what startup is going to build a crypto company in the US after this? When you have the resources of a Uniswap, that's one thing. And Uniswap wouldn't have had this like a few years ago. Now they've kind of quote unquote "made it" so they can defend themselves. But for a startup founder, you're thinking about doing a crypto project, there's no way you're going to do it in the US. Who loses from that? US founders, US entrepreneurs, US citizens, the US economy, the US jobs market. And like, that's kind of painful and it's going to set the US back. I think that gets fixed through regulatory arbitrage. Other companies will welcome these entrepreneurs and welcome these builders and it'll all be fine. At some point in time, the US will change its policy, change its mind, hopefully not being dragged kicking and screaming.

• 47:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  But in interim, it's just a complete cell phone and particularly for the founders that are trying to build in the US.

• 47:58David Hoffman?

  Speaking of founders building in the United States, Eigenlayer and EigenDA are currently on mainnet.

• 48:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 48:04David Hoffman?

  So shifting gears here a little bit. So after a successful testnet and passing $13 billion in TVL, Eigenlayer has turned on some of its switches, not all of them. So like, like the Eigenlayer brand, the Eigenlayer cautiousness, they are slowly rolling out their mainnet. So some things have been turned on, other things are still to be turned on. So what are the things that have been turned on? Resakers can now delegate their ETH, their restaked ETH to their operator of choice. Operators, what are operators? These are the people who run AVSs. Operators can now register with Eigenlayer and opt in to run AVSs. And then AVSs themselves can now register with the protocol, starting with EigenDA, which has already done this, which is now online.

• 48:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  Remind people what an AVS is too, David.

• 48:51David Hoffman?

  An AVS, actively validated service. It's basically an Eigen app. Think software as a service plus cryptoeconomic security of ETH. So you are just a software normal SaaS business, but you can add trust into your service offering by integrating with Eigenlayer as an AVS. So it's an Eigen app.

• 49:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  One of the biggest apps to launch as well is this homegrown application, a data availability application called EigenDA. And that has also launched this week? What are the details behind EigenDA?

• 49:23David Hoffman?

  Yes, well, in order for Eigenlayer to launch, at least one AVS needs to be online, or else what does it even mean to launch? Eigenlayer, EigenDA is the only incubated, self-incubated AVS out of the Eigenlayer team. It actually just makes perfect sense as like, A, Eigenlayer needs to like, kind of dog food its own project, EigenDA is the most proximate, like, it's the best AVS to really get this whole system started.

• 49:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  All Ethereum rollups need DA, basically, really cheap DA, so why not do it here?

• 49:54David Hoffman?

  Yeah, and also specifically, there is like, a very close relationship between the concept of DA and coordination, and Srinam just loves coordination. Eigenlayer is like this big coordination app, if you really like, want to zoom out and get kind of like, cosmic about it. And so, EigenDA is now online, which now, many of the rollups who have been like, positioning to consume EigenDA are now consuming EigenDA, like, projects like Mantle, many, many, many others. And so, that is the big news. There are things that are not online right now. So, in protocol, payments from AVS to operators, which is like, everyone is, why is everyone excited about Eigenlayer? Because it gets yield. Yield is not turned on.

• 50:34David Hoffman?

  Payments, like, paying for the AVS services, not yet turned on, that'll be coming soon. And also slashing. And so, there is actually really no notion of like, slashing in EigenDA, but like, slashing is a very core primitive of the Eigenlayer system. So, to really have like, all cylinders of the Eigenlayer app, the Eigenlayer system running, you need these two things to get turned on, and then also many, many more AVSs. 10 AVSs are currently on the Hulski testnet, and so, like, they're all trying to get online as soon as possible here. So, there's a lot, there's like, there's gonna be like, a series of these announcements of like, even more about the Eigenlayer system is online, but this is very much the big one. We are now through the first big hurdle.

• 51:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  No word on a token yet, of course, not publicly.

• 51:20David Hoffman?

  Of course not.

• 51:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  First, we go mainnet, and then, then maybe something else later. I think what's really interesting to me here is how EigenDA is gonna compete against Celestia, right? And how all that's going to maybe compete against, you know, BlobSpace? Reportedly, EigenDA is like 5X, has 5X the throughput capacity of Celestia even. And I'm sure Celestia will upgrade, I'm sure that will change, but it'll be a race for that. And some pretty big layer twos are set up to use EigenDA. So Mega ETH, that's like one that's coming on the scene, Movement, Conduit, these are rollups as a service, Caldera, all of these. So some early traction for sure. I also like Sri Ram's framing of this, you know, he thinks like abstractly, almost philosophically about these things.

• 52:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  And his take in general on the stack that we are building in crypto, at least from the Ethereum perspective is Ethereum is the verifiable internet, rollup is the verifiable web server, AVS is the verifiable software as a service, SaaS, and Eigenlayer is the verifiable cloud. And then he goes through, kind of like some more details what that means.

• 52:25David Hoffman?

  Hot, hot, hot.

• 52:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it's a pretty good take, I think.

• 52:28David Hoffman?

  Yeah, there was just like a big like celebration in the crypto space because like Eigenlayer has already like produced its own ecosystem of like startups. Like every AVS is a startup, operators are leveraging this. So there's a lot of people like hooking into the Eigenlayer ecosystem. So there's like a one just big grand celebration. It was like, hey, Eigenlayer team, congrats for launching. And they're like, there's this like meta that emerged of just like people would retweet the Eigenlayer announcement tweet with their like selfie with Sri Ram. So I just put it into a collage.

• 52:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh my god.

• 52:58David Hoffman?

  And I just put it all together. There were so many, dude.

• 53:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Sri Ram selfies.

• 53:01David Hoffman?

  It turned into this meme of just like, number one, congrats to the Eigenlayer team for launching on mainnet. Number two, here's my selfie with Sri Ram.

• 53:11David Hoffman?

  And so I just took a screenshot of every single one and just put it into a single picture.

• 53:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  He's such a friendly guy.

• 53:16David Hoffman?

  One of the most beloved founders I've ever seen in the crypto space.

• 53:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I really, I really enjoy Sri Ram. I think one thing that's interesting about this, David, I'm gonna see, we'll see how this emerges. It's kind of like the ETH holder alignment behind Eigenlayer, okay? So if you were an ETH holder, just like economically, rationally, what's good for my bags type of question? Then what's good for your bags is rollups using Ethereum.

• 53:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  For a blob space essentially and using Ethereum as a DA layer, right? That's good for your bags. It's not good for your bags if rollups start using Celestia DA, because that's not Ethereum. But it is good for your bags. It is good for ETH price or fundamentals if they use EigenDA. And I'm wondering how sticky that magnet will be in crypto at all. Like, you could see the ETH community and ETH holders at least pushing EigenDA over Celestia because it's more economically aligned. It's in their incentives to do so. Did I just say some like dirty words like on the show today? I mean, that's just an incentive that's at play, right?

• 54:21David Hoffman?

  You said some tribal words, which I don't think either of us have ever avoided prior to this. I did do an episode with Nick White yesterday about Celestia. And like Celestia has a project really, really interesting. However, as a fan of Ethereum alignment, I do like, also super interesting.

• 54:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  As an ETH bag holder.

• 54:39David Hoffman?

  As an ETH bag holder, yeah.

• 54:42David Hoffman?

  Well, there are just fundamentally different properties about Celestia versus EigenDA. Where like EigenDA, Celestia is a blockchain, EigenDA not a blockchain. So has the luxury of just truly optimizing for an absolute magnitude of capacity. Where Celestia has like consensus and like sovereignty and some like other things that it is interested in. Yeah, which makes it, which like makes these things like materially divergent, right? Like, there could be a world of like Eigenlayer rollups that are just completely independent from Ethereum rollups. And so it makes sense that Ethereum rollups would opt for EigenDA just because it's close to the heart, right? And it's like closer, closer to the nexus.

• 55:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  What's this, what's this tweet you included in our last year?

• 55:22David Hoffman?

  Yes, okay, so this is actually kind of like moving on to a new subject. But if the new subject is an AVS. And so this is Omni Network, which is an AVS inside of the Eigenlayer ecosystem. And this is one of like the big predictions I've been making about Eigenlayer. And my strategy this bull market, which is not to speculate in meme coins, because I don't got that kind of time and I'm like actually just bad at it.

• 55:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  You want to speculate on restaking, don't you?

• 55:45David Hoffman?

  I want to, I want to speculate on restaking. That's right, that's right. And so the Omni Network, which is an AVS on top of Eigenlayer. Which provides just interoperability and defragmentation of the Ethereum rollups based by providing economic security between between rollups is dropping 13.3% of their total allocation going to Eigenlayer restakers. 13.3% This is an airdrop. It's not just points? This is an actual airdrop of a real token, not just points. 10% going to Beacon chain solo stakers, 7.7% going to Maladies and 5.7% going to Pudgy Penguin. So giving away like

• 56:25David Hoffman?

  an aggressive amount of the tokens, 13.3% of that is going to Eigenlayer restakers. And so like the idea, the whole thesis behind the Eigenlayer like point farm, which is like you farm the Eigenlayer token, you farm the LRT that you're using to farm the Eigenlayer token, and then in the background, you have these like, like plethora of AVSs that are all going to airdrop to the restakers, of which this is one, I think the first one that's actually happened and is now happening. So And all you have to do is stake your eith. Stake it again. Double staking.

• 57:02David Hoffman?

  Resaking, not double staking. Why didn't double staking catch on? What do we have coming up? Coming up next, Solana's NFT platform Tensor also drops their token, probably one of the more hyped token drops in a while, newly announced Circle partnership with BlackRock. Why, that's a big deal. I'm excited about that. Yeah, and Monad shatters records with the largest raise in crypto this cycle. Ethereum killer, maybe? Or Ethereum Execution Client? Maybe both. Executor or Execution Client? Executor or Execution Client? Stay tuned to find out. But first, we're going to talk about all these sponsors that make this show possible, especially Mantle. Mantle, the Layer 2 that is actually building EigenDA in collaboration with Eigenlayer itself. Before it was cool.

• 57:47David Hoffman?

  Before it was cool. So shout out Mantle. Let's go hear from them right now. Mantle, formerly known as BitDow, is the first DAO-led Web3 ecosystem, all built on top of Mantle's first core product, the Mantle Network, a brand-new, high-performance Ethereum Layer 2 built using the OP But uses Eigenlayer's data availability solution instead of the expensive Ethereum Layer 1. Not only does this reduce Mantle Network's gas fees by 80%, but it also reduces gas fee volatility, providing a more stable foundation for Mantle's applications. The Mantle Treasury is one of the biggest DAO-owned treasuries, which is seeding an ecosystem of projects from all around the Web3 space for Mantle. Mantle already has sub-communities from around Web3 on-boarded, like Game7 for Web3 gaming and Bybit for TVL and liquidity and on-ramps.

• 58:31David Hoffman?

  So if you want to build on the Mantle network, Mantle is offering a grants program that provides milestone-based funding to promising projects that help expand, secure, and decentralize Mantle. If you want to get started working with the first DAO-led Layer 2 ecosystem, check out Mantle at mantle.xyz and follow them on Twitter at @zeroxmantle. Welcome to Consensus 2024. Consensus is one of the biggest hubs for all things crypto, blockchain, and Web3. This May, Consensus is celebrating 10 years of decentralizing the future. Going to Consensus means being in good company, with over 15,000 attendees from over 100 countries. You have the opportunity to learn directly from the architects and advocates representing Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, along with the teams from popular Layer 2s like Mantle, Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, and others. Well, Consensus is more than just discussions and presentations.

• 59:16David Hoffman?

  Badge holders get access to witness 10 professional karate combat fights and one unprofessional one between myself and Nick Carter. For the visionaries, Pitch Fest is your spotlight, presenting a stage for the most promising early-stage Web3 companies. And for the devs, the Hackathon offers a unique chance to build your next project or take your existing project to the next level.

• 59:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  Immerse yourself in hundreds of side events and hacker houses scattered around Austin.

• 59:38David Hoffman?

  Register for Consensus 2024 today and save 20% with code BANKLESS. Cello is the mobile-first, EVM-compatible, carbon-negative blockchain built for the real world, driving real-world use cases like mobile payments and mobile DeFi. And with Opera MiniPay as one of the fastest-growing Web3 wallets, Cello is seeing a meteoric rise with over 300 million transactions and 1.5 million monthly active addresses. And now, Cello is looking to come home to Ethereum as a Layer 2. Optimism, Polygon, Matter Labs, and Arbitrum have all thrown their hats in the ring for the Cello Layer 2 to build upon their stacks. Why the competition? The Cello Layer 2 will bring Huge advantages like a decentralized sequencer, off-chain data availability secured by Ethereum validators, and one-block finality. What does that all mean for you? With Cello Layer 2, gas fees will stay low,

• 1:00:22David Hoffman?

  and you can even pay for gas natively using ERC 20 tokens, sending crypto to phone numbers across wallets using social connect. But Cello is a community governed protocol. This means that Cello needs you to weigh in and make your voice heard. Join the conversation in the Cello forums. Follow Cello on Twitter and visit cello.org to shape the future of Ethereum. Tensor Token, T N S R, just dropped. NFT trading infrastructure. I would kind of call Tensor part of the big three of Solana. I don't know if anyone else calls this the big three, but like Tensor, the NFT platform, and Juber, the exchange, and then Gito, the execution client. Yeah, and so this was the last of the big three tokens to get dropped into the Solana ecosystem. Holders of the Tensor Token benefit from fee discounts when transacting on Tensor.

• 1:01:07David Hoffman?

  So utility for the token, which is bearish, because fundamentals are bearish. This is part of Season 3. So participants of Season 1, 2, and 3 received treasury boxes with their tokens. Those treasury boxes are now available to be opened. So the prices hopped around from $1.8 to $1.6 with a max supply of a billion. That puts Tensor as a 1.6 fully diluted billion market cap. We've got another unicorn airdrop. Unicorn airdrop. Current market cap around 200 million because the circulating supply is 12.5%. So still pretty early in the distribution. So 55% of the token goes to community, which is like great. Well done, well done, well done. 27% to core contributors. I'm assuming that's the team itself.

• 1:01:52David Hoffman?

  9% investors and advisors, and then 9% for future fundraising and development. So just like miscellaneous. You have 180 days to claim. I actually don't know what the criteria is. If I got this token dropped, that's hilarious. And they are starting Season 4. So Season 4 has begun. I bet that's where that remaining 9% is going. You know, I think the best alpha for this cycle is I have never seen airdrops fall this thick and this large. We just got another unicorn airdrop this week, okay? And so if you are- We really need to raise the threshold. Of what it means to me to be a unicorn.

• 1:02:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  Airdrop hunter is all I gotta say. So Tensor was in the

• 1:02:29David Hoffman?

  It's been on there for a long, long time.

• 1:02:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's been on there for a long time. This is a product that Bankless provides. You can go click the show, link in the show notes and get access to it. It's bankless.com slash airdrop hyphen hunter.

• 1:02:39David Hoffman?

  Or if you are just so advanced that you don't think that this product is for you, but you don't want to answer any of your annoying friends' questions about what they should be going to do, just send them here.

• 1:02:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, look at all these new ones, David. This is like new means it was added in the last couple of weeks. All these new airdrops to go hunt. And this is just huge ROI, time well spent. I'm actually surprised more people don't do this. I know only crypto people quote unquote know about it, but like on a, on a monthly basis, people are making like thousands of dollars.

• 1:03:07David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  At this point in the cycle. I'm not saying it's going to last forever because it won't, never does.

• 1:03:11David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 1:03:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  At this point in the cycle, huge ROI for going on airdrop hunts and it's fun too. You get to use these protocols.

• 1:03:18David Hoffman?

  Learning how to use a protocol and hunting for an airdrop is the same thing, which is actually how this product came to be.

• 1:03:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, should be when everything's aligned. David, you saw this. I know we predicted this because we talked about this on our episode, but we couldn't talk about it explicitly. Right? So Circle announces USDC smart contract for transfers by BlackRock's Biddle fund investors. Okay. What that means is Bankless folks will remember, we were talking about, we did an episode on this, we talked a few rollups ago about BlackRock releasing tokenized treasuries on chains. You can, you scroll on EtherScan, you can find out, like you can see the contract where they released this. Well, now Circle has partnered with BlackRock. And so investors with BlackRock treasuries can now hit a button, David, and convert those treasuries into USDC. It was a button.

• 1:04:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's a smart contract call. In fact, look, this is what it looks like. This is the code on EtherScan that shows the pipeline from BlackRock treasuries to stablecoins, what it looks like. So in goes US treasuries and out comes USDC. And I just want to remind folks, there's a lot of treasuries out there.

• 1:04:25David Hoffman?

  A lot.

• 1:04:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  And BlackRock has infinite supply access to them. And the US continues to make more. There's 27 trillion dollars worth of treasuries out there. And we have just started the tokenization process. And already, BlackRock is leading. See this? 300 million. It was still early days. But this, essentially, this is the bank's opening branches on Ethereum, as we've said before. And I think it's pretty bullish.

• 1:04:53David Hoffman?

  Smart contracts are the new bank branches? I love that.

• 1:04:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, so we got a $24 trillion pipeline from treasuries to stablecoins. I also actually think that this is a proto-central bank digital currency, actually.

• 1:05:07David Hoffman?

  Uh, sure. Yeah, except for like a CBDC is meant for payments and this is meant for like wealth.

• 1:05:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think the USDC part is the payment part, right? And then this is the connection to treasury. So this connects treasuries and the Fed directly to a stablecoin, USDC. So, stablecoins are going to happen in the US because BlackRock and the banks want them to happen. All right? And I think you'll never get a CBDC through in the US. What you will get are these private stablecoins. Did you know BlackRock owns a part of the equity of Circle? So Circle-

• 1:05:39David Hoffman?

  Oh, wait, no, I did not know that.

• 1:05:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  They do. They're owners of Circle. Circle's going to IPO this year, I would expect, sometime. I mean, that's not public yet, but there's a lot of rumors and speculation going on. Uh, and BlackRock owns a portion of Circle? This is essentially US banks bringing a private market, bank-driven, stablecoin, a private version of a central bank digital currency. The US is the answer to a central bank digital currency. This is how it's happening. And so I think we're seeing the early phases of the contours of what this will look like.

• 1:06:12David Hoffman?

  I'm willing to bet that BlackRock has ownership in Circle. I bet you they did some sort of deal, a part of this deal. So like making Biddle and USDC one-to-one convertible. Which like, just to really talk about the implications here. This makes Biddle a quality collateral asset.

• 1:06:31David Hoffman?

  Inside of like things like AVE or MakerDAO or like any sort of DeFi app. And so you can get the yield of treasuries, but you can use this token as collateral in DeFi. And why you might not have been able to do that without this USCC conversion is that you need a liquidity profile for AVE. If they are ever going to liquidate you, they need Bittl to be extremely liquid. Now Bittl is as liquid as USCC on Ethereum, which is like one of the most liquid assets on Ethereum after Ether. And so it's actually just kind of cool to have on-chain treasuries be like with a direct equivalent pipeline to USCC, which is a direct equivalent pipeline to like all of DeFi. And so like, there's like a lot of people saying

• 1:07:16David Hoffman?

  like, oh, BlackRock's coming into like the world of DeFi. The banks are coming. Why are we celebrating the banks coming in into the world of crypto? One of the big problems about like the old financial system is just the walled gardens, the silos, that is Wall Street, that like the average player cannot play in. And it's a gate, it's a gatekeeping and you can't, you can't, you can't go there. You're not, you're not elite enough. But in the Ethereum world, like we are all on the same platform. And so everyone gets A, gets to like check on everyone else. And everything is just like, everything's a lot closer. It's all, we're all on the same playing field.

• 1:07:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I don't really understand that take. I mean, people said like, cause I tweeted something like this out and people are saying, bankless, look, it's bankless. And they're cheering on the banks. Okay, this is, this is the banks coming to our crypto economic system and choosing our system as the base layer, the settlement layer, rather than Fedwire. This is a win for us. This is a Trojan horse for us. They're bringing their tokens on our chain, on our decentralized, open, permissionless network. And they're paying us gas fees in order to secure this network and make it stronger. And they're providing liquidity and they're helping to distribute more private keys and more hands. This is nothing in, from my perspective,

• 1:08:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  but a win for crypto. Now, we lose if they start to co-opt this chain and they start to take, like take away the Open permissionless decentralization properties, right? But that's what Ethereum has been built to withstand. And we're gonna have to withstand that anyway. So I see this as nothing. This doesn't preclude your ability to go hold DAI or Ethereum or like anything or be completely bankless if you want to be. It just gives you the choice. So I see it as a total win.

• 1:09:03David Hoffman?

  I mean, this is just us ripping out the guts of the old financial system and replacing it with better ones, the ones that we built from the bottom up.

• 1:09:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  David, big, big raise going on this week. The biggest of this cycle that we've seen, $225 million. That's not the valuation, that's the raise itself.

• 1:09:19David Hoffman?

  That's how much cash went into the bank.

• 1:09:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, in Monad. Okay, so what is Monad?

• 1:09:25David Hoffman?

  Monad is a bytecode equivalent EVM layer one. That is, they took everything out of the EVM refrigerator, reassembled it, made it better, and then put everything back in. So it's EVM bytecode equivalent. It's not like a little bit equivalent and it's not compatible. It is 100% equivalent to the Ethereum virtual machine, but it has a parallelized execution client. So it's a, it's a parallelized EVM. We all love parallelization these days with a parallelized database. Because if you have a parallelized execution, well, you also need parallelized input and output retrieval out of data. And so Monad has done the very hard thing of completely rebuilding the Ethereum virtual machine

• 1:10:10David Hoffman?

  because the network effects around the EVM are massive. But the EVM itself is like kind of broken. And even Vitalik would say this. And so they've done the very hard work of just like truly optimizing the EVM as a piece of software as well as possible.

• 1:10:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  So I think like, I guess to get a picture of this, picture Ethereum except it supports, you know, 10,000 transactions per second.

• 1:10:33David Hoffman?

  Yeah, Ethereum, Ethereum layer one that is like, you know, limitless in its constraints.

• 1:10:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes, and, and, and the existing smart contracts that work on Ethereum and all EVM chains will work on this. And they're not at me now yet, so they still have some work to do. But they're, they're getting closer and this raise gets them even closer. There's a lot of investors in this, basically everybody in crypto, including, by the way, like Bankless Ventures. And I think there's a question outstanding on this is, why doesn't Monad deploy as a layer two? Rather than they're deploying as a layer one. In fact, I saw, you know, title headlines, new ETH killer, right? All, you always get this, right? High TPS chain, it's EVM compatible. Is this the new ETH killer? And so I think a lot of Ethereum people are like, why not just do this as a layer two? Isn't that what layer twos are for?

• 1:11:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  I can't speak to the founder's intentions here. I know I've asked that question before, as have you. Kiony asked that question and I think we'll have him on the podcast when they get closer to mainnet. And we'll ask him the exact same question. But I do think that there is an economic incentive at play here that people should just like, maybe it's obvious, but people should know about. There's a token premium for big names, big name execution layers to be layer ones, alternative layer ones to Ethereum rather than layer twos. And what do I mean by that? Token price is higher if you deploy as a layer one. There's like, it's, I don't make the rules. I wish this wasn't the case many times, but that's kind of the narrative because you can take Ethereum's value.

• 1:12:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  And you basically say, well, X percent of that, you know, and it's a higher valuation. At least that seems to be the current view on the market that market participants are taking. If you're an alternative layer one, you can have a higher valuation than a layer two. Until that changes, I don't expect actors like Monad to become layer twos. Until that narrative shifts, until that meta shifts, it probably won't happen this cycle. If it does happen, it probably will happen during a bear cycle. But until you get that economic incentive shift, as much as people like me want these alternative layer ones to be layer twos. Anyway, because you benefit from the network effect and economic security of Ethereum, I don't think they become layer twos. What do you think of that?

• 1:12:54David Hoffman?

  I think that's right. I think the answer as to why Layer Ones catch such a strong premium has always been because if you are a Layer One, you are competing as money. Whether you think that you're competing as money, or you intend to compete as money, you are competing as money. All Layer Ones, it's been part of the bankless thesis. All Layer Ones are money, or attempts to be money. And so, they get the money premium. They get some sort of like tailwinds, because they are the money for their own ecosystem. The OP token, the arb token, they are not the monies of their respective networks. ETH is. So, Monad, as somebody like Keoni, very ambitious founder,

• 1:13:36David Hoffman?

  he's going for the whole thing. He's going for money, as making a Layer One. And so, whatever the Monad ticker is, whatever the Monad token is, is trying to be the money of the Monad ecosystem. And that's how you catch a very strong premium.

• 1:13:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  So, is this good for Ethereum, or bad for Ethereum?

• 1:13:53David Hoffman?

  Well, okay, all other Layer Ones are bad for all other Layer Ones, fundamentally. That's just like how it works. There's why, like, there is no such thing. Like, there's a lot of people who are like, "Oh, why can't we all get along?" I'm like, "Yeah, we can all grow the pie, but we can also take a larger share of the pie, too." Like, all the competition kind of boils down to that.

• 1:14:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  They all compete, you're saying?

• 1:14:11David Hoffman?

  They all compete. It is also extra competitive with Ethereum, because it's the EVM. But we've also seen other Layer Ones that are EVM-based, like Avalanche, like, I guess, compete with Ethereum, and I guess, take away value from Ethereum, but also contribute back to it, right? Developers, if you're developing on the EVM, you're helping Ethereum. I think of all EVM forks, of which there have been many, in the crypto halls of history, this is the one that I'm seeing actually produce real substantial value for the EVM ecosystem. So, like, Ethereum, or one of the many Ethereum forks, like Avalanche, Phantom, or whatever, could also benefit from the Monad VM, the parallelized EVM.

• 1:14:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Same with Layer Twos.

• 1:14:53David Hoffman?

  Same with Layer Twos, right? And this is a conversation I had with Ansgar not too long ago. It's like, "Actually, what would it take to like rip out the EVM on the Ethereum Layer One, and replace it with a better Ethereum..." EVM nuanced answer, of course, that episode is out for Bankless Premium subscribers. What Monad could do, and I think eventually the Monad EVM will be open source. I'm guessing it's going to be like a Uniswap kind of license where they release the code but under a business license. So it's like protected for like three to four years to give like actual Uniswap a head start and then other people can fork it for free later. I bet that's what's going to happen here with Monad. And so I bet you Ethereum layer twos will eventually use the

• 1:15:35David Hoffman?

  Monad EVM. The Monad virtual machine could actually become a Ethereum layer one execution client, because there is, like I said, there's a big difference between like bytecode equivalent Ethereum equivalents versus just being Ethereum EVM compatible. So like this could be an execution client for the Ethereum layer one alongside like Geth or Reth or all the other execution clients, which would be immensely beneficial.

• 1:16:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  I agree. I think people will see in this what sort of whatever their preconceptions maybe are, because there's multiple ways to view this. You could see this as, oh, VCs are funding a brand new EVM execution client for all of Ethereum. Isn't this amazing? All of Ethereum, the entire ecosystem benefits, including all of the layer twos and then potentially L1. Or you could view this as, oh, my God, it's a new Ethereum killer and it's like Ethereum, but it's like, you know, max TPS. Or you could say, this isn't really competitive with Ethereum. Ethereum is already credibly neutral. It's got the most distributed validator set. It's got all the infrastructure built on top of it. It's a settlement layer. These chains aren't really competing for that. They're competing on the execution layer. And so this Monad is

• 1:16:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  the Solana killer. It's going to go kill the other monolithic chains, essentially, right? There's all different ways you could view this. And I think, like, who knows? Maybe it's some of all of the above. I think one thing to watch, though, is for layer twos, parallelized layer twos that are coming. So this is, this is the first is an alternative layer one, but we're about to see projects like Mega ETH, which is like this similar type of ultra-fast, high TPS type of Employment, fully EVM compatible, only as a layer two. And then you also have Eclipse and Ellipsis and you have Movement, which are SVMs and like Movement Chains, and they're all deploying as layer twos.

• 1:17:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  And I wonder what pressures, what forces that they might bring to the table as well. So it's gonna be interesting.

• 1:17:36David Hoffman?

  I think that's a great snapshot. Yeah, totally.

• 1:17:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  Uh, we got some jobs this week, David. Bankless is hiring. What are we hiring for?

• 1:17:42David Hoffman?

  Number one, a podcast video editor slash media operation. So if you can work your way around Final Cut or Premiere and you know a thing or two about crypto and podcasting, we definitely want to talk to you. Come make our podcast better. Also a senior product designer and a growth marketer. So come join literally the most fun company in crypto. At least I have fun. I don't know about you, Ryan.

• 1:18:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  You are having fun here because we're about to get to it, ending this episode. You got some combat scheduled.

• 1:18:11David Hoffman?

  Oh.

• 1:18:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  What is going on here, David? So you told me about this a few weeks ago and you dropped it. You are about to do battle with somebody else. Is this like, first of all, this is karate combat, but it feels like more like boxing to me? I don't know my martial arts.

• 1:18:28David Hoffman?

  Technically, it is karate. So me and Nick Carter are karate combating each other at Austin, Texas.

• 1:18:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is a real thing.

• 1:18:39David Hoffman?

  This is a real thing. Same exact organization that hosted the BitBoy versus Light fight not too long ago. So like, it's called karate combat, so it's technically karate rules. It's basically kickboxing. So like, there's no like on the floor grappling.

• 1:18:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  You're not gonna choke each other out?

• 1:18:56David Hoffman?

  Yeah, you can't choke each other out, but like, you can punch and you can kick.

• 1:18:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wow.

• 1:19:00David Hoffman?

  Punch and kick. Yeah.

• 1:19:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Why are you doing this? Do you have beef with this Nick Carter guy? I mean, he's been on the podcast more than any other guest. Do you secretly hate this guy?

• 1:19:07David Hoffman?

  Other than Metallica, yeah. No, Nick's great. He's awesome. I love the guy.

• 1:19:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  What does he think of you? Does he share that sentiment? Is he...

• 1:19:14David Hoffman?

  I think so, yeah. Yeah, we're super amicable. We're great buds.

• 1:19:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Why are you fighting?

• 1:19:18David Hoffman?

  He hit me up and was like, hey, do you want to box at Consensus? And I was like, no, I don't want to box at Consensus. And then like, over the weekend, I was like, hmm, but what if I box Nick Carter at Consensus? And then for some reason on Monday, I was like, F it, let's do it.

• 1:19:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  I love this quote from Nick Carter. "David and I aren't claiming to be amazing fighters. The objective is to entertain and take on a new challenge, not to begin decorated fight careers."

• 1:19:43David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so this is both of us experiencing, just like, for some reason, like, this announcement just like brought out all of our haters being like, because Nick and I both have like a very strong amount of haters on crypto Twitter. Like, I've offended the Solana camp one too many times. Nick Carter has offended the Laser Eye Maxies one too many times. And so now it brings them all out. And like, all the haters like, "Oh, my God, I would love to box David Hoffman." And I'm like, "Well, I don't know who you are. No one does."

• 1:20:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  You're only going to box your friends, right?

• 1:20:13David Hoffman?

  I'm only going to box my friends. Yeah. It's like, kind of like a Mirror of Ares thing where like, if you actually want to like, cause harm to someone, you don't get to do it.

• 1:20:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. Well, so how are you training? How are you going to be ready for this?

• 1:20:26David Hoffman?

  I'm not disclosing that.

• 1:20:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  Put that on the premium feed. You gotta get Nick to subscribe to that. Hey, I'm Nick.

• 1:20:36David Hoffman?

  So this is May 30th in Austin, Texas. There's actually a poly market. Have you seen the poly market? Oh, can you play this video?

• 1:20:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, let me play this.

• 1:20:46Speaker 02

  Ethereum versus Bitcoin. Let's settle this. David Hoffman, I'm calling you out. Let's go. May 30th, Austin, Texas. I'll see you there. Free on YouTube. This guy's head off. There you go.

• 1:20:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:20:58Speaker 02

  There you go.

• 1:20:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Are you ready for this, David?

• 1:21:01Speaker 02

  I got nothing on you. That's what I'm talking about, man.

• 1:21:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Jeez, I mean, Nick is really training up for this.

• 1:21:11David Hoffman?

  His coach is pretty aggro, for sure.

• 1:21:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay.

• 1:21:14David Hoffman?

  I've never like, I've hung out with Nick Carter like a few times. We went rock climbing once. He's kind of tight. The muscles are kind of tight. It's not very loose.

• 1:21:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right. I sense a little hesitation in your voice, but what are the markets telling us?

• 1:21:28David Hoffman?

  So when the poly market opened up, it priced me as the winner by 60/30, a 2 to 1 odds for your boy, truly. That has now come down, so the margin is now 53 to 40.

• 1:21:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  In favor of you still?

• 1:21:42David Hoffman?

  In favor of me. Yeah, for some reason. And the poly market is saying I'm winning, which like, I was surprised. Wow, so far, right? Huh. So is there a call to action for the bankless nation? Should people get? Yeah, if you're if you're gonna go to consensus, come watch me and Nick Carter punch each other in the face. Oh, my God, that's almost enough to get me out of the house to go to a conference, David. Almost. Yeah, but it turns out you can you can watch it online. That's right. When he said YouTube, I'm like, sold. I can't wait. Good luck, though, in whatever you, you know, do. There is $39,000 betting on the poly market between Nick and. Oh, we should say, this is for a good cause, right? There's a 10K purse goes to where?

• 1:22:24David Hoffman?

  So whoever loses pays $10,000 to the respective ecosystem of the winners for open source development. And so if I lose, which I won't, $10,000 is going to go to Bitcoin Core, which it won't. And then if Nick loses, which he will, $10,000 will be going to Protocol Guild to fund Ethereum developers. Wow. And then there's also one more bet. So Nick Carter has a bet out with Justin Drake about the ETF approval. Oh, he's not gonna fight Drake. I was like, please, God, no, no, no, save that. Save that for me. Save that for the podcasters. And so if the ETH ETF gets denied in May, pretty soon here. Yeah. Which you will.

• 1:23:06David Hoffman?

  Then Justin Drake has to give up his tungsten cube to Nick Carter. And this is something that Nick Carter is doing with many people. He's like, collected like four or five people's tungsten cubes from winning bets with them. I don't think he's ever lost a bet with a tungsten cube. That's bad, David. Are you sure? Like Drake's gonna lose. He's gonna lose. So you gotta, I mean, because this is now set up to be a Bitcoin versus Ethereum thing. I just heard it. Yeah, this is this is how we're branding it. Yeah, Bitcoin versus Ethereum. But the loser of the bet has to also give a tungsten cube to the other. And if Nick loses the fight, which he will, I get Justin Drake's tungsten cube. Wow. And that specific one. The winner of this fight, of course, has to go fight someone from the Solana community, right? Is that how it works? There's zero people in the Solana community that I'm interested in fighting. Fight Anatoly. Disclosures.

• 1:23:51David Hoffman?

  I don't think either of him and I want that.

• 1:23:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  We gotta remind folks, of course, we are investors, we're not journalists, we don't do paid content. There's always a link to our disclosures in the show notes. You can find that at bankless.com/disclosures. And of course, crypto is risky, so is karate, boxing, whatever Dean's doing. 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. Thanks a lot.