Bankless x UpOnly Therapy Stream

After one of the worst weeks in crypto history, Ryan and David join forces with Ledger and Cobie from Up Only to bring the industry some much needed catharsis. The four chop it up about how big of a deal this really is, how we’re going to move forward as an industry, and general advice to get through this. Hang in there, anon. We’re in this together. ------ 📣 Earnifi | Check For Your Unclaimed Airdrops, POAPs, & NFTs https://bankless.cc/earnifi ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/?utm_source=banklessshowsyt 🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/ ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum ❎ ACROSS | BRIDGE TO LAYER 2 https://bankless.cc/Across 🦁 BRAVE | THE BROWSER NATIVE WALLET https://bankless.cc/Brave 💠 NEXO | CRYPTO FINANCIAL HUB https://bankless.cc/Nexo 🔐 LEDGER | NANO HARDWARE WALLETS https://bankless.cc/Ledger ⚡️FUEL | THE MODULAR EXECUTION LAYER https://bankless.cc/Fuelpod ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. 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?

  No.

• 0:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Do we start David?

• 0:01David Hoffman?

  Oh yeah, we're live brother.

• 0:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, what's up guys? What's up?

• 0:04David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 0:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wow, Bankless after, after dark.

• 0:07David Hoffman?

  Yeah, without Kobe, just with Ledger. What's up Ledger?

• 0:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, he's still in the shower. He's coming, right?

• 0:11David Hoffman?

  Yeah, allegedly, yeah.

• 0:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, he's just showering.

• 0:14David Hoffman?

  Unless we're gonna get two rug pulls in one day.

• 0:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  I've heard he's, uh, he's finalizing the next Up Only sponsorship, so he's busy. Dealing that deal.

• 0:23Speaker 02

  He's buying FTX right now.

• 0:26David Hoffman?

  For one dollar. We can all buy FTX. That's no longer a problem.

• 0:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wait, it's only a dollar?

• 0:33David Hoffman?

  It's only a dollar.

• 0:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  Why are we so stressed out over a dollar? I don't understand.

• 0:38David Hoffman?

  Because you're buying a six-

• 0:39Speaker 02

  You also might have to pay million, billions of dollars to make everyone whole, um, to pay their debt.

• 0:47Speaker 02

  Listen, on our stream, we got a corner on the bottom left and maybe Kobe will be there, maybe Justin Sun will be there. Maybe another special guest will be there. I don't know.

• 0:56David Hoffman?

  I think if Justin Sun gets there before Kobe, Justin Sun gets to come back another time after that.

• 1:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Um, Justin Sun, have you guys seen this? I'll share my screen for people who don't know. He, he just announced that he is planning to bail us out.

• 1:13David Hoffman?

  Oh, you just rugged, you just rugged Up Only.

• 1:15Speaker 02

  You rugged my stream.

• 1:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, did I really? I can't share.

• 1:19Speaker 02

  You can't share.

• 1:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  I'm sorry.

• 1:21Speaker 02

  I didn't plan for that. Uh.

• 1:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  Uh, rug, can you restart it?

• 1:25David Hoffman?

  We have two different form factors of live streams, uh, coming together right now.

• 1:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh man, sorry.

• 1:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, don't, just tell the audience, they're smart. They're smart, smart audience.

• 1:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  Go, go subscribe to Up Only right now. What should we tell them?

• 1:39Speaker 02

  Uh, uponly.tv.

• 1:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Up Only.

• 1:42Speaker 02

  No, that's not right. Go to Twitch. Go to twitch.tv slash uponlytv, something like that. Who cares?

• 1:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Best podcast in crypto. What are you drinking David?

• 1:54David Hoffman?

  Uh, oh, I am drinking a Naked and Famous with a habanero in it, uh, because like I said, while we were getting the stream ready to go, uh, Sam Bankman-Fried made himself very famous, but he's been swimming naked this entire time. That is my drink. What are you drinking, Ledger?

• 2:11Speaker 02

  Uh, sorry, I was DMing Justin's on the video link.

• 2:15David Hoffman?

  I'm stuck in the waiting room.

• 2:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wait, is he really? Is he really coming in?

• 2:18Speaker 02

  Uh, here's I need more people on Twitter.

• 2:20David Hoffman?

  Here's Kobe.

• 2:21Speaker 02

  I need more people on Twitter to pressure him. Kobe is

• 2:23David Hoffman?

  What's up, Kobe?

• 2:24Speaker 02

  Hey, what's up? screwing up my scenes.

• 2:27David Hoffman?

  Coming in, coming in fashionably late.

• 2:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  How you doing?

• 2:30Speaker 03

  David, you've upgraded your background. Is it a green screen?

• 2:32David Hoffman?

  Uh, no, this is, uh, Brooklyn, not a green screen.

• 2:35Speaker 02

  It's Brooklyn.

• 2:37David Hoffman?

  Last time you saw me, I was in San Diego.

• 2:40Speaker 03

  Nice.

• 2:40David Hoffman?

  How you doing, Kobe?

• 2:41Speaker 03

  It's cozy.

• 2:41David Hoffman?

  It's very cozy.

• 2:42Speaker 03

  It's cozy and nice.

• 2:43David Hoffman?

  Yes.

• 2:44Speaker 03

  Are we already live?

• 2:45David Hoffman?

  Yeah, we are. Oh, we are live, brother. Yeah.

• 2:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, we're live on both channels and you already messed up my stuff.

• 2:52David Hoffman?

  Look, when two, when two streaming platforms come together, bad things happen.

• 2:56Speaker 02

  Well.

• 2:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, it wouldn't be enough on any screen, stream if you didn't spend half your time like fucking

• 3:02Speaker 02

  Already doing it?

• 3:05Speaker 03

  No, sorry. I was like, I like literally just woke up, so.

• 3:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, good morning.

• 3:10David Hoffman?

  Good morning.

• 3:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  Where, where, where did you leave things when you, uh, went to, went to sleep?

• 3:15Speaker 02

  Like, where was it? What do you know?

• 3:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Uh, yeah.

• 3:19Speaker 03

  Uh, oh, yeah, shit. I haven't even looked at like what's happened since. Um, well, Binance had walked away.

• 3:26David Hoffman?

  Yep.

• 3:27Speaker 03

  Um, and like Sam still hadn't said anything. Suzie had just tweeted the like, I tried sad face thing.

• 3:35David Hoffman?

  Yeah, that's about it. I think the only thing that's come after that is like people have concluded that there's something like a six to seven billion dollar hole in FTX's balance sheet. I don't think we've

• 3:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wait, I thought we were up to like eight to 10.

• 3:48David Hoffman?

  Do we know?

• 3:49Speaker 03

  Wall Street Journal said it was about eight, right? It was like, uh, could be as large as eight.

• 3:53David Hoffman?

  Could be as large as eight.

• 3:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  How did that happen?

• 3:55David Hoffman?

  That is a big hole.

• 3:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Eight billion dollar hole in your balance sheet?

• 4:01Speaker 03

  I mean, I, I don't know. If you're asking me how to lose money in crypto, I can tell you.

• 4:07Speaker 03

  Um, and I mean, it seems like they just did fucked up stuff with customer deposits, right? Like they just either loaned them out or directionally traded them or like used them for their own personal.

• 4:24Speaker 03

  Reasons.

• 4:25David Hoffman?

  Do you think it was all Alameda? Because imagine, okay, Alameda should have blown up along with A16 or 300 capital and the rest of them. But they got, they got, yeah, let's not invoke A16C right now. But, but they didn't because FTX gave them a big ass buffer. They didn't give them like a multi-billion dollar buffer. So like, would have FTX still have gone under without Alameda? Because I feel like that answer is almost yes.

• 4:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm on, I mean, I don't have, I, the only thing I can think of is plausible, but I have to admit that I just like constantly reveal myself as naive in these things. Because like, maybe they just gave them eight billion dollars, dude. Like, we don't, they could have just done that. They could have gone, oh, it'll be fine. They'll make it back. They're really great traders. But they could have also had like

• 5:17Speaker 03

  imagine if they got like a Bitcoin or Ethereum denominated hole, when the prices were much lower. So let's say they had a missing, like 100,000 ETH hole or something, but Ethereum was worth like $300 at the time. And they were like, okay, cool, we can plug this hole, no drama. And then suddenly Ethereum's worth $5,000. And in order to try and cover the hole, they've done stuff wrong and made it worse, perhaps. I can maybe buy that.

• 5:52David Hoffman?

  But that means that they've, they've been in trouble for like 18 plus months now.

• 5:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, but it's so, well, that's the thing, right? Like, how, like, how did SBF get himself in this situation? Right? Like, was, was this, is this kind of a, a person who's a con man from the beginning? Did he, do you think he began with this end game in mind? Or do you think he's like, a lot of people who, who kind of go down this path where, you know, it's a shortcut here, to shortcut here, and gradually he kind of slips into the position that he's found himself in, in, in early November? Like, is he purely nefarious con man? Or is this, I, I, I can't think he accidentally stumbled into like losing eight billion dollars, but is there an element to that?

• 6:41Speaker 03

  I mean, man, I don't know. I

• 6:46Speaker 03

  I don't know. Like, I watched the Theranos documentary thing recently, and it seemed like she started with good intentions, and then things just like slipped away. And then at some point, she like turned and was like, I gotta keep, I've got to be evil in order to like, keep this like rolling.

• 7:00David Hoffman?

  She was faced with a fork, and then she chose the evil path. Yeah.

• 7:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, I, I, I just don't, like, it's, it's impossible to know. The, like, some people were telling me all this stuff had happened really recently. So, Alameda had a big problem in like, September. Um, and you, I don't know if you saw that, there was a tweet that said, like, Sam, he was saying, we're just moving, we're rotating some wallets. And there was like, the eight billion dollars of FTT moved, um, at the end of September. And he tweeted, oh, don't worry about it. We're just rotating some wallets. But, um, this was the point when, um, a bunch of the, um, collateral was like, um, borrowed against perhaps.

• 7:44David Hoffman?

  Mm hmm.

• 7:44Speaker 03

  Um,

• 7:47Speaker 03

  and in which case it's like, you know, they were fine until really recently, and then almost instantly blew up. But I don't know. I, I, I find it easier to suspect that like,

• 7:59David Hoffman?

  It's gotta be too stern.

• 7:59Speaker 03

  It was, it was fucked for a while. And then like, the tide going out reveals that it was fucked. Like, if it's fucked for a while, and you try and like, fix it, but like, make it worse. And then the tide goes out, and you're just not in control of that. Maybe, maybe that makes sense. Um, but, I mean, who fucking knows, dude?

• 8:21David Hoffman?

  I,

• 8:21Speaker 03

  what, second, third biggest exchange?

• 8:23Speaker 02

  There's another element here that I'm confused to buy, which is now they're talking about the FTX hole alone. So is lending money to Alameda part of the FTX hole, or is that the Alameda hole? Like, who, you know what I mean? Because if it's eight billion, not even counting money they lent to Alameda, like they did other, that's even dumber.

• 8:44David Hoffman?

  Right. That's what I was saying. That's what I was saying. It's not just Alameda. They would have gone under regardless of Alameda.

• 8:49Speaker 02

  Yeah. If it was not just that counter, what, what counterparty, or what did they do with the money?

• 8:55David Hoffman?

  Well, they bought, they bailed out half of the industry when there was blood on the streets during, during.

• 9:00Speaker 02

  That was, that was a $250 million line of credit. Yeah.

• 9:04David Hoffman?

  Weren't they, weren't they buying a lot of things?

• 9:06Speaker 02

  But it doesn't add up. It doesn't add up. You can't even, you can't get a billion dollars worth out of that. So if you're at eight billion, then what the hell happened?

• 9:16Speaker 02

  When you're making 10 million a day or more, whatever, or whatever Kobe did the napkin math on based on trading fees. It doesn't make any sense. Like, and if that's the case, then there's got to be some like really serious fraud.

• 9:27Speaker 03

  Maybe it was just really simple and they went, right, okay, so we make, you know, low mid eight figures a day. If we borrow a billion dollars of customer deposits to YOLO into, you know, like his personal Robin Hood stake or something. We're gonna buy Robin Hood. It's good for like alignment of our companies, whatever. It actually only takes FTX, however many days, like three or four months to re-earn that money. So like, what's the problem there? And you do it once and you like, cool, it works. We're now whole again. We actually just managed to accelerate our business because we use those customers deposits to achieve our business goals. And now those customers deposits are replenished.

• 10:12Speaker 03

  Maybe you do that a few times, trying to be like efficient with your, all the money that's available to you.

• 10:20Speaker 03

  And suddenly, like you've done it one too many times and the tide goes out and there's a bank run and like, you know, like there was literally a gigantic bank run for this to even be like properly discovered. So they could have operated much closer to

• 10:40Speaker 03

  insolvent, like the insolvency line where they just don't have deposits left.

• 10:46Speaker 03

  If this didn't happen, it could have gone on for years and maybe they could have even ended up whole without us knowing, but probably not given.

• 10:53Speaker 02

  But on top of that, they've been raising like crazy for the last year. They raised a ton of money at super high valuation. So they also lost that money too.

• 11:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was like, what, two billion in the last year?

• 11:06Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, raised their actual capital raise was two billion.

• 11:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 11:11Speaker 02

  I didn't realize it was that high. I think that's right. I think that's right.

• 11:15Speaker 03

  Was it? Memory.

• 11:17Speaker 02

  I think they've raised billions of dollars collectively. Well, they, the one raise was like the meme raise that was 420 million, 69,000 or something stupid. Right. But the.

• 11:31Speaker 02

  I don't know what the cumulative was. Don't know what they spent the money on.

• 11:36David Hoffman?

  At least BlockFi in a sports stadium. You can get, you can probably get to a billing.

• 11:42Speaker 02

  Again, BlockFi is a line of credit, right? Like, it wasn't, it was an option.

• 11:46David Hoffman?

  Alright.

• 11:47Speaker 02

  The stadium is paid annually and it's probably eight figures at most.

• 11:54David Hoffman?

  A lot, a lot of the chat is speculating.

• 11:55Speaker 03

  TSM?

• 11:57Speaker 02

  They did do a big thing with TSM. Yep, only podcast sponsorship wasn't that expensive.

• 12:06Speaker 02

  Uh, I, like, I don't understand where it went.

• 12:10David Hoffman?

  I don't understand.

• 12:11Speaker 02

  Apparently has 660 million of personal, uh, credit that he was filing bankruptcy for. Was that accurate? I don't even know what's real.

• 12:18Speaker 03

  Was that, was that real?

• 12:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  I heard that was fake news.

• 12:21Speaker 02

  Was that fake?

• 12:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, I thought that was someone impersonating tier 10k or whatever it's called.

• 12:24Speaker 02

  Okay, so that was the tier 13 fake one?

• 12:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. What, what, what about the other, um, you know, character in this, in this whole thing, uh, CZ? I mean, do you think he masterminded this from the very beginning? You think he was planning this? Was this like downfall of my competitor, like pure Machiavellian art of war shit? Where he's just like, um, trying to knock out SBF, trying to acquire the assets for cheap? And then like, maybe now it just got out of hand. Like, it went too far. I mean, cause I, I can't think that this feels good for Binance, which is certainly terrible for the industry. I don't know how far this sets us back. Like, I don't know, back to 2019, 2018, 2017?

• 13:12David Hoffman?

  I think, I think the, the question is like, did CZ know the FTT weakness in, in FTX and also Alameda? Did they know when that he started tweeting because?

• 13:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, and what was his plan?

• 13:26David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 13:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like, did he want this to happen?

• 13:28Speaker 02

  I don't think he, I mean.

• 13:29David Hoffman?

  I don't think he wanted this to happen.

• 13:30Speaker 02

  He thought he was poking, he thought he was poking a vulnerable bear and he was poking a scarecrow that was rotten.

• 13:35David Hoffman?

  Right. I think that's right. I think that's right.

• 13:38Speaker 03

  I think, yeah, I think he wanted to like, like, um, put them in line. Like be like luck, look what we can do to the sentiment around your exchange. Like remember who's the boss type thing.

• 13:49David Hoffman?

  Big time.

• 13:50Speaker 03

  And then accidentally exposed.

• 13:55David Hoffman?

  A hollow shell.

• 13:56Speaker 03

  A gigantic hole.

• 13:57David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 13:57Speaker 03

  But like if he did actually mastermind this, like that's kind of crazy. That's like one of the most insane. Like business chess moves that I guess I'll get to see in real time in my life.

• 14:13Speaker 03

  But like.

• 14:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  Maybe that's the thing. Maybe we never get to know.

• 14:16David Hoffman?

  I don't think we.

• 14:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  So we always have to, we always wonder. So we always live in fear of CZ.

• 14:21Speaker 02

  Oh, I don't know about CZ's side of it, but in terms of, we'll, we'll know a lot about the FTX side of it.

• 14:26David Hoffman?

  Oh, big time.

• 14:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, yeah.

• 14:28Speaker 02

  The, uh, but yeah, the CZ side, that's, that's up to CZ and BitBoy.

• 14:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Someone should tweet at BitBoy, get him to come on.

• 14:39David Hoffman?

  Oh, God.

• 14:40Speaker 02

  I really don't like that guy.

• 14:43Speaker 02

  I mean, I really didn't like our guest yesterday either, so.

• 14:46David Hoffman?

  Kobe, you've never directly interfaced with BitBoy, right?

• 14:49Speaker 03

  Um, I spoke to him for the first time ever. Um, do you remember when the lawsuit was happening with Atosi?

• 14:56David Hoffman?

  Yeah, uh huh.

• 14:57Speaker 03

  So when he was suing Atosi and then I offered to fund Atosi.

• 15:01David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 15:02Speaker 03

  Atosi's defense. Um, I emailed BitBoy then while that was ongoing before he's like officially pulled out saying like,

• 15:12Speaker 03

  just want you to know Atosi's in hospital right now. His wife's due date is like literally today. So like all this is happening at the time his child is being born. Um, like I will fund him unlimited to take that stress away.

• 15:29Speaker 03

  And like, here is why, um, like, I don't think that you should do this. And then he sent me a very thoughtful response. And then we've emailed a couple of times since, maybe like two or three emails exchanged. The latest one, he just asked me like what I thought of the token promotion business model in general. Like, is it even redeemable? And I sent him like, um, a short essay about like how I think the token promotion business model is just like only, the only people that want the token promoters, the token promotions from YouTubers are people that want the price to go up in the short term. Like you never see like, are they going, we need to go to like.

• 16:12Speaker 03

  Like ban crypto banter and get a like a token ad. Instead, they just built something that worked and um. Um, yes, I sent him like a small like thing like here's what I think on it. And then he made a video, which was him basically reading out the email. As though it was his own words.

• 16:31Speaker 03

  Which was, um, yeah, I mean, I thought it was pretty good that he did it and said like, this stuff is bad, even though he did that stuff in the past and it ended up to all that stuff, but um.

• 16:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, other than that, I've spoken to him maybe three times.

• 16:43David Hoffman?

  Okay, well, that's more than us.

• 16:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I mean, we did spend a.

• 16:47Speaker 03

  Didn't you have a full conversation with him for hours?

• 16:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, we had, we had like an hour with him.

• 16:50David Hoffman?

  Other than that, yeah, we, yeah, yeah. We had one email and then we had the show with him. Yeah.

• 16:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  I feel like I, I feel like I kind of understand him a lot more after that. Like, I understand like what he is doing in the space. And like what his motivations are.

• 17:06Speaker 02

  What is it?

• 17:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  Um, I think, I think BitBoy really likes attention.

• 17:11Speaker 03

  Quick, yeah, yeah.

• 17:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like, but I think that that um motivates him in a way that um. Yeah, I don't know, maybe money motivates other people.

• 17:22Speaker 02

  He has a background in like internet marketing, which I kind of makes sense. And I feel like he was like, oh, this crypto thing, I can do internet marketing via viral videos. Here. And then the ethical consequences of what the hell he was doing came up way, way later. And he was probably too far gone in terms of what type of monetization strategies existed. So I kind of understand how he got there, but I don't understand him per se, other than I see what you're saying about from an attention perspective, but.

• 17:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  I don't know. I mean.

• 17:53Speaker 02

  I can't, I can't connect with it, man. There's no, he could, he, you should be able to look at those deals and recognize there's, there's no winner. With what he was doing with like the token promotions of like, you know, shit jam token, you know, like it just doesn't.

• 18:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  Do you know, it's like, um, he, um, yeah, like, like, I agree with that. I, I think at the end of the day, I walked away from that and thinking that like, oh, I mean, BitBoy is just kind of like a. A regular guy, like he's not a devil, he's not an angel, he's just kind of a, he's just a regular guy. And one of his comments when we were talking to him was like, I just started creating content that my audience wanted.

• 18:33David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 18:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  And they wanted to hear about the latest like shitcoin that was gonna moon overnight. And so that's what I gave them. And so he was like, what's the harm in that? I, there's demand for a product and I serve it up. And like, our point is just like, yeah, but there's a difference between what people want and like what people need. And these are noobs and you have like a responsibility if you have a platform of your size.

• 19:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  I don't know, I'm hopeful he's getting some of that. He seemed kind of like, actually, he came on the episode and he was very, um.

• 19:07David Hoffman?

  He's a different person.

• 19:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Contrite, like chastened, like I, I thought we were gonna be in the, in the octagon with like, you know, WWF wrestler and we weren't, he just came on and he was, I mean, he apologized at one point.

• 19:21David Hoffman?

  Dude, okay, so the most interesting thing, Ryan, is like our chat right now is we have like 50% people who are like, Bit Boy was right, he called out FTX, Bit Boy's awesome. And then the other half of the chat is like, Bit Boy's a clown, don't ever talk to him again, why can't you guys talk about something else?

• 19:37Speaker 02

  He posted a video today where he was just like, zero remorse for the victims in all this.

• 19:44David Hoffman?

  Was this the one in his bathroom? He's like in a bathroom or something?

• 19:48Speaker 02

  He's like wearing his Gucci suit or bathroom or something.

• 19:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, that's it.

• 19:51Speaker 02

  But he was, it's one thing to say like, I told you so, this guy was a scammer, I knew it, I had proof. That's fine. But he claimed this like euphoric level victory. And there are no winners here.

• 20:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 20:07Speaker 02

  Bit Boy is not a winner here. CZ is not a winner here. CZ acknowledges that. I don't know what CZ actually feels, but his public stance on it was at least like fair and, and, and reasoned. And Bit Boy's emotions took over. The guy cannot control his emotions and he cannot recognize the fact that they're victims. Based on these outcomes, the outcomes from his promotions. Oh, I swam down like the easiest, fastest lane with the strongest current that I could to make money. I didn't do anything wrong. It's like, okay, that's the same reason that Martin Scurely pisses me off. The dude

• 20:46Speaker 02

  who's like selling pills for 750 a pop because he could. It doesn't make it right. There's an ethical way to do business and there's an unethical way to do business. And that's your choice that you have to live with as an individual. And swimming down the easy lane for max profits is, in my opinion, not, not a worthy choice.

• 21:07David Hoffman?

  The theme of 2022, perhaps, or at least all of those people who do that get insolvent.

• 21:12Speaker 03

  I don't, I don't think he went into token promotion business to like maliciously steal from a lot of people. But I think when you're making a lot of money, doing a business model, that's probably not great for your users. It's easy to not acknowledge that while the going's good. And maybe even lie to yourself and say like, actually, everyone's winning. The market's going up. Everyone's kind of winning. Yeah, there's some losers. But we do good due diligence and we disclose and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So like, you know, whatever. The only comical, the only like really comical part of this for me is that like, if instead of having FTX as a sponsor for up only, we just shield loads of shit coins and done like token promotions, a different fucking token every episode,

• 21:56Speaker 03

  we'd look better now than we currently do.

• 22:00Speaker 02

  I mean, you never know, right? True enough. We look like shit right now. I'm not trying to say we don't. But here's what's crazy is like, so you guys have had like one sponsor consistently. Bankless has had like many, like we have multiple sponsor slots, right?

• 22:13David Hoffman?

  A few handfuls, yeah.

• 22:14Speaker 02

  And like, I'm just like saying to David, like, we do our best to select our sponsor and like our sponsors. And we clearly, we do not, I mean, we turn a ton of sponsors away or like, we're shady, like you're shady, you can't, we can't support that. But like just law of numbers in crypto. I mean, you never know. And it doesn't have to be a crypto exchange hack. It could be just like

• 22:37David Hoffman?

  Anything.

• 22:37Speaker 02

  Somebody wrote some sloppy

• 22:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  Smart contract code. There was like a bridge that was flawed. There was some kind of multi SIG that, you know, was a, an attack vector that we didn't realize. North Korea freaking attacked. Like, who knows what could happen? And that is, um, it's just a lot of responsibility.

• 22:56David Hoffman?

  Well, it's the same thing. It's like, why the hell are we in this industry in the first place? We're in this industry because it's an industry about money. Uh, so all sponsors are downstream of something of that nature. Uh, so there's, there's no way out of that risk, no matter what.

• 23:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  Guys, the chat's blowing up about, um.

• 23:13David Hoffman?

  Yeah, we, we know SBF retweeted Justin Sun. We know that that's true.

• 23:17Speaker 02

  I've DM'd Justin.

• 23:19Speaker 03

  The tweet, though. Is he saying we're figuring out a way to make Tron, whatever the rest of them are, blah, blah, blah, holders whole? Or is he saying they're putting together a solution to create

• 23:35Speaker 03

  all of FTX, um, relief, basically? Because he says, first time I announced, I'm going to stand behind all Tron token holders, Tron, BTT, JST, Sun, HT, holders on FTX. We are putting together a solution forward with FTX to initiate a pathway forward. So like.

• 23:53David Hoffman?

  I don't know why.

• 23:54Speaker 03

  Is he just saying like, we're figuring out with them how to make our own bags good?

• 23:59David Hoffman?

  I don't know why SBF would retweet that if it was just about Tron and TRX. It only makes sense under the context that Tron and Justin Sun is helping FTX.

• 24:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  Does it? I don't even know anymore with SBF, man.

• 24:14David Hoffman?

  Uh, I don't, I don't think Sam's got control of his Twitter account anymore.

• 24:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Ah.

• 24:19David Hoffman?

  I think that is, that is in the hands of crisis management team. Yeah.

• 24:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  Crisis management.

• 24:24Speaker 02

  Do y'all think Sam had an emergency escape hatch plan?

• 24:30David Hoffman?

  My question is, is SPF on the run, just like everyone else of 2022? It would be on theme.

• 24:38Speaker 02

  My wife thinks this industry is fricking nuts.

• 24:40David Hoffman?

  So does mine, Ledger. Like, she was just talking about this. So she's like, is it dead this time? Yeah. How are you guys' wives lately?

• 24:49Speaker 02

  My wife thinks it's weird enough that y'all call me Ledger and that they call someone named Jordan Kobe. And like, she's like, what? Who? Who? And why do y'all do that? And then now I'm like, well, this guy is on the run and he came on a podcast and this guy you definitely know. My wife works in the medical field and she hates Scarlett. And she's like, and I was, she watched the show for the first time ever to see that clip.

• 25:14Speaker 02

  And yeah, it's like, it's mayhem. I ran into people, "How you doing today?" And I'm like,

• 25:22Speaker 02

  "I'm all right." My industry blew up a little bit over the last 72 hours.

• 25:26David Hoffman?

  It was a little bit.

• 25:27Speaker 02

  I got totally rugged in terms of what I thought was true and what was actually true.

• 25:33David Hoffman?

  Look, it's embarrassing.

• 25:35Speaker 02

  It is. It's insane. Like, we live in absolute la la land of total insanity where the stakes are billions of dollars that very few people can comprehend, even the people within the industry, apparently. Even the people that are supposed to be the leaders are fricking morons. Like, taking extraordinary risks, the same risks that Gainesy takes, you know?

• 25:59Speaker 02

  Gainesy's smarter than them. Like, I would put Kobe in charge of crypto, like, just capital C crypto country. Kobe can be in charge. And he's just a degenerate gambler that's been doing it since 2013 and survived. It's like this survival bias, survivorship bias. So he's damn good at it. He's lived through all this. And I'm like, put the guy in charge. Like, at least I don't think he's gonna rug everything and steal it all.

• 26:22Speaker 03

  I find insane, I don't know if you read the multi-coin investor letter, but they said they had access to the FTX Q2 balance sheet information as part of their ongoing due diligence.

• 26:36Speaker 03

  And they still lost, like, what, 20% of assets, like, assets under management on the exchange? So like,

• 26:45Speaker 03

  Can they not read a balance sheet or was the balance sheet wrong? Like, was it like fictional?

• 26:50Speaker 02

  Doctored.

• 26:51David Hoffman?

  I think not reading a balance sheet is definitely something to be considered. That's definitely a possibility.

• 26:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, maybe, right? But if you then write in your investor letter, we did the due diligence, we looked at like the Q2 books. And then investors go look at the Q2 books and there's a gigantic hole. It's not gonna look great.

• 27:10Speaker 03

  But it makes me wonder, like, were they giving incorrect books or did the problem happen afterwards? Did the books actually look fine in Q2?

• 27:19David Hoffman?

  The books?

• 27:19Speaker 03

  I don't know. And if you can have like in a proper insider information and do like insider due diligence on FTX books and still get rugged by FTX.

• 27:33Speaker 03

  I mean, that's kind of crazy.

• 27:34Speaker 02

  I'm trying to find that.

• 27:35Speaker 03

  Said, Kobe, did you see that Sam said he'd come on up only? Yeah, this was on November 7th. He said he'd come on up only.

• 27:41David Hoffman?

  Forever ago. Well, that was that was before, uh, basically FTX went to zero. I think he was he was interested in talking to CZ because he was real, real interested in bending the knees before he actually, you know, was exposed naked.

• 27:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, he was saying he'd come on up only, you know, he's willing to talk, saying basically, we're not even acknowledging these rumors anymore. Back to business from the FTX account. And it was all a sham in the background. He's trying to raise $6 billion to cover the hole.

• 28:10David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 28:11Speaker 03

  Yeah. And then like he said to us, we got planning to a group chat with him after he said he'd come on.

• 28:18Speaker 03

  And he was like, yeah, cool. We'll do it today on November 7th, maybe November, uh, on November 7th or 8th. And then we were like, great, cool. Do it this time. I'll like wake up on time.

• 28:32Speaker 03

  And then we like get to it and it's like, oh, we're actually gonna have to push it back. And then was like the radio silence.

• 28:38David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 28:38Speaker 03

  It's like they write down to the line. They were just like. Like lying about it. I'm like, oh yeah, we're just, it's gonna be fine. It's gonna be fine. I'll go do a podcast and say how everything's fine.

• 28:47David Hoffman?

  Well, that's on theme with 2022. Like everyone is like that up until the moment where everyone realizes that. You all have to like show confidence until the very last moment.

• 28:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, but to your, to your point, Kobe, like, so, um, I, I just looked at the day, um, like a few hours ago. Cause I couldn't believe it, but it was only 11 days ago that Voorhees and SBF had this debate. And SBF was lecturing the crypto industry on regulation.

• 29:19David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 29:19Speaker 03

  He did a speech in Congress or in, I don't know, where you go sit in the wooden bit. And all those people that work in the government and like they're in like a circle and you'll sat there. That bit, he did that. Um, and he did a speech about how like the financial crisis couldn't have happened because they were like borrowing and like, you know, re-borrowing and blah, blah, blah, blah. Whereas everything on FTX is like, that couldn't happen on FTX. And that was last year, literally in Congress. Like he just went and sat there and either A lied to Congress about, um, all the shit. Or all the problems happened afterwards. Um, and maybe,

• 30:00Speaker 03

  maybe it's just like me being naive again and being like, why would you go sit in Congress and like intentionally tell lies to like your government?

• 30:13Speaker 03

  If you just knew they were false. It must've happened later on, but man.

• 30:18David Hoffman?

  We, we, we saw the same thing with, uh, oh, I just uploaded, uh, that sound just went straight to the stream. We just saw the same thing with, uh, 3O's capital where they were like, um, uh, super confident and trying to, trying to talk about how like, oh, a few more liquidations than up only. Uh, and then that was them, right? And so it's just an insane amount of projection that they have to produce. That they have to give because they have to give confidence, right? We saw this with, with Alameda, the CEO saying like, oh yeah, we'll buy all the FTT tokens at $22. You have to produce confidence. Uh, and so it was just like an insane amount of projection that's like required. Because that's like one of the last bits of ammo that they have left to shoot.

• 31:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 31:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  I'm, uh, I'm reading this, uh, this multi coin, um, this, this multi coin letter. So how down bad is multi coin right now? They, so they had-

• 31:15Speaker 02

  Uh, it was like, what, 10% of assets under management were affected.

• 31:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  Were on FTX.

• 31:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, but then you gotta think about Solana stake, the FTX stake, the Sol coins, like the, the general thesis was like Sam coins, right?

• 31:28Speaker 02

  I, well, I saw the, I saw the actual letter, but then the block post is basically the exact same thing as the letter, like the block, the, the one on the, on the block is accurate. Uh, so it should say what the added stuff is, but in terms of percentage of everything, I wouldn't call them wrecked, but like their stake in Solana, I mean, they haven't sold enough of it for that to not be wrecked is down tremendously.

• 31:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Is it crazy to you guys? Like I, you know, all of the crypto gods of 2021. I mean, I, I think of like the, the main ones, like it was, it was Suzu, Kyle Davies's three hours capital, right? And then it was like, uh, Do Kwan, right? And like, uh, definitely Kyle Samani, multi coin, like fun of the year.

• 32:12Speaker 03

  Danny Sesta.

• 32:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  Danny Sesta, oh god. That was earlier this year that he fell, but yeah, he was a, he was a god in 2021. Um, but even people like Andre Tronier, right? I mean, he's still kind of active and Phantom, all of these things.

• 32:27Speaker 02

  He had a sponsor up all in now too.

• 32:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, really?

• 32:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  Take it. And then, and then, and then the last one kind of standing was SBF. And, um, I mean, where are they now? Like, are there any gods from 2021 still standing?

• 32:46Speaker 03

  Justin Sun.

• 32:48David Hoffman?

  No, he, no, he was a god before god. He was a god, an asterisk before 2021.

• 32:52Speaker 03

  He's one of the old gods and the new gods are all there.

• 32:53David Hoffman?

  Yeah, the new gods are dead. New gods are dead.

• 32:56Speaker 03

  The new gods are dead. When did Bybit start?

• 32:59David Hoffman?

  Hmm.

• 33:00Speaker 03

  2019? Bybit just kind of like casually chilling, running a fucking exchange with no KYC, just like staying out of the news cycles.

• 33:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  I don't even know, like, what is Bybit? I don't even know what that is.

• 33:13Speaker 03

  It's just like FTX, except it's like yellow instead of blue.

• 33:17Speaker 02

  And it's just no, not like registered anywhere, no, no identity checks, no ML KYC, no.

• 33:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bro, don't.

• 33:24Speaker 03

  I think it was like.

• 33:27Speaker 03

  I think you could do like two, two hundred grand, two hundred grand a day if you have KYC or something. Um, I don't know. I didn't use it because it seemed like kind of dodgy. And then, um, they did a bunch of, uh, like token launches with like, you know, like the moon call. Um, they helped him launch a token called caster, um, which like launched and was like all time high was on day one. And it's just a straight line downwards ever since. Like it's never made. It's just like, actually just like a, a graph of a straight line downwards. Um, but like, you know what, like, trying to like, figure out what the worst thing an exchange has done.

• 34:07Speaker 03

  If that's the worst shit they've done, maybe they're all right. Maybe they're one of the better ones. I, I, I do wonder if, um, like, where do you go now, right? Like FTX at least had the best user experience, in my opinion, from like the, um, website and app point of view, not from the like, you don't have any real money there point of view, that user experience is very bad. Um, but.

• 34:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's, that's the problem.

• 34:32Speaker 03

  Binance, I find really confusing. Um, Coinbase, um, is like really slow and, um, like.

• 34:41David Hoffman?

  I appreciate Coinbase at this point. Like at this point, for some reason, I feel like some sort of like patriotism about Coinbase.

• 34:48Speaker 03

  Well, I've, also they have been trying to do cool stuff recently in the last like, I guess, year, like, more so. I think they lost their way a little bit, twenty twenty, twenty twenty one.

• 34:59Speaker 02

  They kept raising their fees on the platform where everyone else was lowering them and like, they were not feeding the product that was good for traders, which was Coinbase Pro. Um, they just were doing things that weren't connected to the community.

• 35:13David Hoffman?

  My critique on Coinbase is they hired a ton of normies to run a crypto business because they had to, because they had to scale so goddamn fast. And they weren't, there weren't enough crypto natives to hire and they needed to hire faster than they could find crypto natives. So they hired a bunch of normies and. Like you, you can't make normies care about crypto. So you can't make normies care about their jobs. So they had a

• 35:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  I get that piece, but, but how come, how come FTX moved so quickly, quickly on things?

• 35:39David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 35:40Speaker 02

  I was attracted

• 35:41Speaker 03

  Oh, because they were spending all customer deposits.

• 35:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  They had a bigger budget.

• 35:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:47Speaker 02

  I was, I was attracted to platforms and this is why I liked Blockfolio when they reached out and wanted to figure out a way to work with them. We got rugged on that, like Blockfolio became FTX app, became FTX. So we, we really didn't opt in to FTX. It just became impossible to say, what is the FTX app even? But nevertheless, um.

• 36:07Speaker 03

  Yeah. The hilarious thing is we're actually sponsored by FTX US. That's our real contract. So

• 36:12Speaker 02

  Our real contract is Blockfolio Inc.

• 36:14David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 36:15Speaker 03

  Which is

• 36:15David Hoffman?

  That's right.

• 36:17Speaker 02

  I believe so.

• 36:18Speaker 03

  It's owned by FTX US apparently.

• 36:20Speaker 02

  I don't know. I'll, I'll ask Brett.

• 36:23Speaker 03

  Who knows?

• 36:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  Up only did not rug anyone. FTX US is completely solvent.

• 36:29Speaker 02

  But, right?

• 36:31Speaker 03

  Is it?

• 36:32David Hoffman?

  And if any future Bankless sponsors rugs Bankless, we're also not responsible.

• 36:38Speaker 02

  Yeah. I guess my point though was

• 36:40Speaker 03

  Back now?

• 36:41Speaker 02

  The reason, I know for real. Ed, come back. Uh, so the, the, the thing that I liked about it was I could tell a normal person in my life, like, how do you DCA into crypto? Right? And recommend this way that's not got crazy fees when you're trying to do it. Um, that gives you a reasonable way to swap in and out of majors, doesn't have every shitcoin, uh, available right away, is not 100x leverage. I asked Sam and CZ the time we did one versus, I mean, what a stream.

• 37:15Speaker 02

  I had technical issues naturally, but like just in, in the concept of that, and I like, my biggest question for them is why is your default leverage 20x is bullshit? Like that is wrong.

• 37:26Speaker 03

  I think it was 100x then.

• 37:28Speaker 02

  I think it was default was 20x and both of them were like, it shouldn't be. And yet there it was. And I don't want to tell a regular person to go to this platform where that's the default, that's on by default. You're at this tremendous risk and I liked the like simplicity of connect your bank to an app. Get it easily, have a Robin Hood-like experience, if you will, where the money goes in. You do, and Robin Hood, not that they do it well, like they can buy weekly options without being accredited. Uh, but it's just, it's just insane. Like make this stuff simpler for just onboarding people to products that aren't gonna make you destitute from your bad gambling habits.

• 38:10Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah, I think that's why I, I, where I think Coinbase lost their way a bit around their IPO was that they seemed to start making decisions that were based on the share price rather than decisions based on like the previous Coinbase ethos. Um, and I think maybe they've gone back to it a bit now, like they've like launched some tokens for the first time. They've launched like Coinbase East, which is like a wrapped staked ETH, um, like ERC20, which is I think the first token they've ever launched. Um, and they did like DeFi, DeFi front ends all within Coinbase, right? So you can interact with any DeFi app with.

• 38:49Speaker 02

  That's some, that's some real innovation. The MPC wallet, multi-party computation. That's some really cool shit that I think a lot of people don't appreciate.

• 38:55Speaker 03

  Yeah. Um, but, um, for a little while in the middle of last year, or maybe even this year, they were just like releasing like bottom of the barrel shit coins that you wouldn't even find on Binance, right? Like really, really, really like liquid terrible.

• 39:13Speaker 02

  Here's the third thing that Coinbase Ventures backed, uh, that doesn't exist anywhere else, but here it is, a liquid market on Coinbase. Here's a token you've never heard of before.

• 39:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, I mean, it's hard because like, um, we need a fiat on-ramp, like we need a crypto exchange, a crypto bank in order to actually like start doing this. I think, I think like one thing that's obviously, I don't know, we've learned this a number of times this year, but it's just not leaving your funds on an exchange.

• 39:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right?

• 39:46Speaker 02

  To actually go bankless.

• 39:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, to actually, and that's, look, that's a, that's a thing that, um, I mean, I know we learned like about Gox a long time ago, but it's just like 2022 has just been, that's been hammered into this generation's head. Like all of the things that have happened, we know not to leave our funds on an exchange, right? Um, we have to have learned that. But but well, but that's the other thing is I do think that, you know, crypto hasn't done a good enough job making user experience easy. So I still can't tell a norm back to your comment of like Ledger a normie getting into crypto. You can't be like freaking like, and here's a wallet. And here's, you know, buy this hardware wallet, you know, 24 words. And if you remember them,

• 40:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  if you forget them, you're dead. You lose all of your money. Like, the user experience just hasn't really caught up. And so it hasn't got

• 40:42David Hoffman?

  For me, it's gotten worse.

• 40:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  For like MetaMask and Ledger.

• 40:44David Hoffman?

  MetaMask Chrome, those MetaMask Chrome Ledger converse combo has been rugging me for like a year in a row now.

• 40:50Speaker 02

  You know who, you know, the wallet that impresses me continuously, small, scrappy, maybe good, maybe not. But from a user experience perspective is Rainbow Wallet.

• 41:00David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 41:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 41:01David Hoffman?

  I'm talking with Mike Mordemis next week.

• 41:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, you need, like, look, you need to be able to, and it may not be everybody's preferred thing, but you back up your wallet to like an iCloud type service or something. And you, you've do the face thing for your authentication. And like you're, you're rocking and you're rolling. Maybe that's your hot wallet. Maybe you have another way that's more secure, whatever, whatever. Like, but you need it as easy as some of your mobile apps, but you have the self custody component still involved. And I just think they make things easy. It gets hard at times. And then you're like having to import your Rainbow Wallet to MetaMask and, you know, so that you can do a transaction with the same knots, cancel the transaction, blah, blah, blah. But it's, we need more apps that are trying that, right? That are really trying to be consumer level.

• 41:49Speaker 03

  The deep irony is if you stored your coins on FTX, you lost them, not your keys, not your coins. If you stored them in a hot wallet, you got your Bored Ape stolen by someone sending you a link on Discord. If you bought a hardware wallet, they leaked your address to the entire internet. So now people can come steal your hardware wallet and beat you up. Like, well, there is no good path. The best path is to just stick everything on Binance and go, yeah, whatever. They're the biggest exchange. If they go down, it's all dead anyway. So. I there really wasn't like a good thing and like didn't both hardware wallets have data breaches? Or something went wrong with both?

• 42:34Speaker 02

  I went treasure too. This is this is where the Horcrux method becomes mandatory. What's the?

• 42:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 42:41David Hoffman?

  You just spray and spray and pray your assets across a number of different.

• 42:45Speaker 02

  Oh, like centralized.

• 42:47David Hoffman?

  Oh, yeah. Put it, put it in Coinbase, put it on your ledger.

• 42:50Speaker 02

  Seven souls, seven places. Did you not read the books? Come on, man.

• 42:55Speaker 02

  You put a lightning bolt on your head and you're like every kid at the movie theater.

• 43:07David Hoffman?

  Ryan, were you ever Harry Potter for your, for Halloween?

• 43:09Speaker 02

  Uh, I was never Harry Potter for Halloween.

• 43:11David Hoffman?

  You'd make, yeah.

• 43:12Speaker 02

  Missed up.

• 43:13David Hoffman?

  I'm sad.

• 43:14Speaker 02

  Another glasses, um.

• 43:16David Hoffman?

  I'm sad that Ledger made a joke before I realized it, yeah.

• 43:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, Ledger, you've become bit boy.

• 43:22Speaker 02

  I'm bullying.

• 43:23Speaker 03

  Nice glasses, bro. Nice glasses, Harry Potter.

• 43:30Speaker 02

  Oh, man. He did apologize for that. Thanks, thanks.

• 43:33David Hoffman?

  Well, we kind of made him.

• 43:37Speaker 02

  That was the whole purpose of that.

• 43:41David Hoffman?

  If I come to Bankless and say sorry.

• 43:44Speaker 03

  Maybe it's Kraken. Maybe Kraken's like the last, um, the last hope. Like, they always just seem to be in the background chilling, trying to do the right thing. They have like, like the only massive exchange with proof, proof of reserves.

• 43:56Speaker 03

  Like Merkel tree cryptographic proof of, proof of reserves. Um, they seem like generally very misaligned. I know, um, Jay Powell just left. Um, I see, uh, remains like an advisor or something, but, um, you know, they seem decent.

• 44:11Speaker 02

  I mean, that's just like, uh, Kraken, Gemini, Binance, Coinbase.

• 44:17David Hoffman?

  Okay, coin.

• 44:19Speaker 02

  Oh, I don't even know. It gets, it gets off of my.

• 44:23David Hoffman?

  Too, too far off the Donald list of the long tail.

• 44:25Speaker 02

  Are we worried about the Winkleville, the like, and their, their travel, traveling band?

• 44:31David Hoffman?

  I don't, I haven't seen their band playing in a while.

• 44:35Speaker 03

  But they, well, you seen it, you've seen it once though.

• 44:38David Hoffman?

  On Instagram, yeah, I didn't actually see it. Yeah, which is, they're in New York.

• 44:44Speaker 02

  It's why I grew the beard.

• 44:45David Hoffman?

  It's me, I'm bankless, love you guys.

• 44:50Speaker 02

  Mosh pitting.

• 44:51Speaker 03

  Listen, at least if they're going to like play gigs for like college kids, at least they're not in DC lying to Congress.

• 45:02David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 45:03Speaker 03

  Creating an even larger enemy. Okay. The thing is, right? If,

• 45:10Speaker 03

  if you had like a decent actor go to DC and try and mediate things, I'm sure that is a better strategy than like fucking nothing, right? No one in the industry talks to them and we all just try and hide.

• 45:21David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 45:21Speaker 03

  Surely,

• 45:23Speaker 03

  a good actor who is being sensible and fighting for the right type of like stuff that the industry needs is a good thing. But the worst possible outcome is that the person doing it, taking photos with them, like taking photos of this head of the CFTC and like members of Congress and all this shit, then turns out to be running a Ponzi scheme exchange. Now they all go, this guy made me look stupid at my job.

• 45:52David Hoffman?

  It's the worst.

• 45:52Speaker 03

  So we must crush him in return. We can't look, they like, we, we accepted money from him. We can't look like we can corrupt. We now need to like retaliate severely.

• 46:01David Hoffman?

  Yep.

• 46:02Speaker 03

  Surely that's significantly worse than just doing nothing.

• 46:06David Hoffman?

  I mean, guys, he gives, he donated seventy million dollars to political campaigns.

• 46:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  Of customer deposits.

• 46:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, of customer deposits.

• 46:15David Hoffman?

  It may be more than that.

• 46:16Speaker 02

  You know, Ryan, Ryan, who apparently was left in the dark in all this, Ryan Salam, or however you pronounce it.

• 46:22David Hoffman?

  Selkis, are you talking about?

• 46:23Speaker 02

  No, no, no, no, number two at FTX. Be like, just think of Sam, think of the absolute opposite, and that's Ryan. Uh, he was, he was.

• 46:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wait, wait is the opposite of a Sam? Yeah, so. I can't, I don't have a mental.

• 46:38Speaker 02

  He eats, he eats red meat. I once saw him getting, I once saw him, saw him getting an IV as a hangover cure.

• 46:46Speaker 02

  In Miami, like a, like frat boy type of guy.

• 46:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay.

• 46:49Speaker 02

  All right. Apparently he was left in the dark in all this, but he was profiled as well as Sam because his spouse is running, ran for Congress. I don't know if she won or not. But he donated like $25 million to Republican causes. He was like a top five Republican donor. While Sam was a number two or whatever Democratic donor. They're both from FTX. They both like, whether Ryan, I don't, it doesn't appear that Ryan is, it really seems like a very small number of people at FTX were aware of this. Like I've had employees reach out to me, be like, I'm in the dark. They're helping me with support tickets for people trying to get money off FTX US.

• 47:27Speaker 02

  It's crazy, but Ryan was also a large contributor to Republican causes. They were some of the biggest players in this world of politicians giving money on both sides. It's, it's not good.

• 47:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right. Let me, let me ask you guys like a crazy like Joe Rogan type of question here. It's like, what are the chances that?

• 47:47Speaker 03

  He'd do a Joe Rogan voice.

• 47:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I can't do a Joe Rogan voice.

• 47:50Speaker 02

  David, do you have a Joe Rogan voice?

• 47:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  What are the chances that this like SBF was a plant? I mean, all of this, to your point, Kobe seemed like so scripted. All right. Like. This whole industry is scripted. We're all in a simulation. Where, where did he come from? I mean, he rises from nowhere. 2018, 2019 builds. He did come from nowhere. The fastest growing exchange in the world. How? How did he go from zero to what? Like $22 billion? How did that happen? How did he infiltrate DC and become like the spokesperson for crypto and DeFi, right? And now, after he's earned the trust of all the politicians, the whole thing turns out to be smoke and mirrors.

• 48:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right? Like industry wrecked. Like I, I don't know what happens in the wake of this. Is there like any chance in your, in your minds that there's something? Something to it.

• 48:51Speaker 03

  The only thing that adds credibility to it is his parents are like deeply.

• 48:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right. Deep state.

• 48:55Speaker 03

  Like mega lawyers.

• 48:58Speaker 02

  He turbo wrote them.

• 48:59David Hoffman?

  His parents.

• 49:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, and like his mom like created like some like get out to vote coalition or some shit. Um, which means his mom's Hillary Clinton and.

• 49:12Speaker 03

  You know, like I, I, I think it's like probably not true, but I thought that it was probably not true that they were insolvent, so.

• 49:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  What is reality anymore?

• 49:24David Hoffman?

  The chat is convinced he's CIA, so.

• 49:27Speaker 03

  I think it's much more likely that he had a really fast growing exchange. Okay, okay, okay, okay. Maybe it's this. He had an exchange, it was really fast growing, totally by like a mix of like luck and aggression, like, you know, if you're willing to trade customer deposits, maybe you're willing to be a bit more aggressive on stuff that other people aren't and like that sort of insanity or psychopathy translates into like business success. At some point he fucked up and had this hole in the balance sheet, but like you can't tell your parents, can you? They'll be so disappointed that their son fucked up really badly. So his like political elite parents are going like, you should go to Congress and you should talk, you should donate to these guys, you should donate to these guys.

• 50:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, they were telling him never getting crypto in the first place.

• 50:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, like, yes, mom, yes, dad, I'll definitely do that. And like in the back of his mind, it's like, fuck, I like. All he wants to do is make his parents proud. You just can't tell them that he's got, and that's why it snowballed out of control. Cause he was, he has mommy issues.

• 50:27David Hoffman?

  How old do you think SPF is? It's possible.

• 50:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  How old? He's under thirty, right?

• 50:33Speaker 03

  But twenty nine. He must be about thirty.

• 50:35David Hoffman?

  He's exactly thirty years old. He's born in March nineteen ninety two.

• 50:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  Um, how old is Vitalik?

• 50:40David Hoffman?

  Twenty eight?

• 50:44Speaker 03

  Did you see the tweet that Vitalik posted? It made me so sad. So he like, um, replied to someone about like SPF's net worth plummeting to like.

• 50:53David Hoffman?

  One billion dollars.

• 50:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, and Vitalik replied and just said, that is much more than, that is still much more than I have. And that was the only words of the tweet. And I was like.

• 51:03David Hoffman?

  His net worth plummet ninety-five percent to a billion dollars, one billion dollars. This is SPF.

• 51:11Speaker 02

  I don't really know what effective altruism means, but I feel like Vitalik and bodies that much more.

• 51:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, I can tell you what effective altruism means. I read the book. I read the book when I was in university or maybe after university, when in my early twenties or something. And parts of it are like extremely enticing and I could understand the attraction to the book, right? Because it tells you stories about

• 51:36Speaker 03

  certain charity initiatives throughout history that were basically completely ineffective. And it gives us the example of something called the Water Wheel, which was apparently in the Bush administration era, this huge

• 51:53Speaker 03

  popular initiative to like help

• 51:56Speaker 03

  like poor countries in parts of Africa have access to clean water. And they went and they removed loads of these hand pumps, these water hand pumps, and they put these like like these big wheels that you push around in.

• 52:10Speaker 03

  But it turned out if you pushed the wheel constantly for twenty-four hours, you got about eighteen hours worth of water. Because this wheel was like completely ineffective and like, like they hated using this wheel. It was like demoralizing and degrading. It was like a playground item to push around. But all of the, like, I think it was the first lady was like all in on this initiative, going and like taking photos with these water wheels, saying, look, we're saving. We're saving the poor countries. Like a merry-go-round, yes, someone in China said, we're saving the poor countries. But in practice, they were just burning money, making things worse and not helping.

• 52:49Speaker 03

  And that was an example of like ineffective altruism where people get excited by how, by the cause of like. I'm going to look so great solving this problem that like is emotional. And another example is like plastic in the ocean where it's everyone's favorite topic. So there's so much money being poured into it that it becomes like used ineffectively. And the most effective like reduction of suffering was really unsexy stuff like deworming of children. In like parts of the world where like if you dewormed kids, uh, like, like there was a 50% increase in people classing, uh, passing. School and then that uh, policy paid for itself within.

• 53:35Speaker 03

  Three years because the tax dollars from the people that would go into the workforce from this initiative would then pay itself off. And there's this book that like kind of says, so you should focus on like impact with. With doing good, you shouldn't focus on what feels good. You should focus on like actual reduction of suffering. But the book, the, the book gets a little bit strange in that Will Askel, the guy who writes it. Uses this like logic to go into the argument that actually. Therefore, the best way you can reduce suffering is to go work at Goldman Sachs, steal everyone's money. And use that money in the most effective ways for reducing human suffering.

• 54:18Speaker 03

  Because if you go work at charity, you're doing a small man, whereas if you steal or if you acquire multi billions and then use them really effectively. You're actually reducing human suffering by a lot more with your life, with your like, um, with your time.

• 54:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  Because you're good at making money in Wall Street.

• 54:36Speaker 03

  Exactly. You make money and then you use that really effectively is.

• 54:39David Hoffman?

  The book has a chapter on not blowing up in the process.

• 54:43Speaker 03

  And yeah, and like, that is, that's exactly what, that's the playbook. SBF read this book and ignored all the bits about like human suffering and was like, okay. Got to make 30 billion dollars.

• 54:55Speaker 03

  To reduce human suffering by stealing everyone's money. Great. Let's go. But genuinely, it's, it's, it's quite a good book.

• 55:06David Hoffman?

  I always, I always thought the, the whole effective altruism was like guillotine insurance. It's like, oh yeah, you just liquidated all of the industry, but you have this banner of effective altruism.

• 55:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  You're talking about, you're talking about for SBF specifically.

• 55:19David Hoffman?

  For SBF.

• 55:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, yeah, you're not talking about like, I like, for me, like, effective altruism, like, conceptually, I'm, I'm like a big fan. I mean, that makes sense.

• 55:27David Hoffman?

  Well, it got SBF on the Sam Harris podcast.

• 55:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, deworming, like, yeah, well, yeah.

• 55:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, I refuse, I refuse to

• 55:38Speaker 02

  accept that process doesn't matter, right? Like, I think process-

• 55:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like, how you make the money, do you mean?

• 55:44Speaker 02

  Yes. I think process matters. If you say, like, there's a, like, biblical reference of you give someone a dollar and what do they do with it? You give someone a hundred dollars or a thousand dollars, what do they do with it? Shekels or something, but you know what I'm saying? Like, what you do with the dollar is going to reflect what you're going to do with a thousand of them or a million of them. And if you say, like, I will do good work, just give me lots and lots of money in whatever way is possible. And then I'll do good with it. You, you need to do good along the way. You need to show that you can be responsible with the resources that you've been entrusted with along the way

• 56:28Speaker 02

  to then be entrusted with the resources when they're larger. I refuse to believe that just get it all while it's hot in whatever way possible and then do good later. You just won't.

• 56:39David Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, I like that a lot, yeah.

• 56:43Speaker 03

  I do agree, I do agree that it is like, he sort of, I think he read this book called Doing Good Better and then sort of used it as a shield, as like, I can't be evil because look at what I'm doing on the other side. And like, took the like, most perverted, just like, the most perverted way you can read the book and go, okay, that makes me a good person, that justifies the stuff I'm doing because that book says it's the, like, best way to reduce human suffering or whatever.

• 57:14Speaker 03

  I reckon, uh, the dude that wrote that book's in complete shambles. He's like, his life, a life's work, it's like been made a mockery of.

• 57:22David Hoffman?

  I mean, SBF- Specifically because of SBF?

• 57:25Speaker 03

  He was his personal advisor for a bit.

• 57:27David Hoffman?

  Oh, I did not know that.

• 57:29Speaker 03

  The guy that wrote the book.

• 57:29David Hoffman?

  I did not know that.

• 57:30Speaker 03

  You know, the dude that was texting Elon on his behalf was the dude who wrote the book.

• 57:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  So like SBF was a poster child for the effective altruism movement.

• 57:41Speaker 02

  That's what every article was about. That's like the whole PR strategy was effective altruism.

• 57:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  And I mean, I know.

• 57:46Speaker 03

  Anything that was like actually decent in that book is just like wrecked now by association, I think.

• 57:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  David was, you were always skeptical. And I used to be like, all right, like, I used to be like, but like, he hasn't said he'd do it right now. He's still in kind of the phase, Kobe, you were talking about earlier, where he's like, like at Goldman Sachs, making all the money. Right. And I'm like, David, you can't, you can't call him out on not giving it away yet. Cause it's always been a strategy to make the most money possible and then to give it away later.

• 58:14David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 58:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  You're always.

• 58:15David Hoffman?

  Super convenient like process to go back to, to, to Ledger's point is like, yeah, you, you need to do good with $1 and then do good with $10 and then do good with $100.

• 58:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  Cause you get, you get to pre mine all the glory.

• 58:26David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 58:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  And all the PR.

• 58:27David Hoffman?

  So that when we were talking about this on the weekly roll up, I was like, yeah, I also plan to commit to not give away 99.9% of my wealth. Like, I will also do that.

• 58:38Speaker 03

  I mean, like 10 seconds before I die, here you transfer.

• 58:43Speaker 03

  But Jack, Jack from Twitter kind of did this. Like I didn't, he didn't, didn't laugh about it in advance.

• 58:49David Hoffman?

  Did he actually did it? He actually, he actually did that?

• 58:52Speaker 03

  Well, you don't, don't you remember it was a couple of years ago, he transferred like half of his wealth into an entity that would.

• 58:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, yeah.

• 58:58Speaker 03

  Like grants away and he picked the causes and there's like a API that you can, or an RSS feed or something you can pull. And if you go look at it, just every few days, he's like, we gave two, $2 million here, we gave $2 million here. And like, they're all, they all look great.

• 59:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is the Cardano.

• 59:15Speaker 03

  Laugh about it all the time and put it on posters around.

• 59:17Speaker 02

  This is the Cardano problem, right? Like Jack just did it. It was news for a day and then it was done. The Cardano thing is like, yeah, we're gonna have smart contracts. We're gonna have smart contracts. We're gonna have smart, gonna have smart contracts. And then it's like so disappointing if and when they ever occur. But you talked about it all that time. You implanted it in your minds versus the person that just does it. It's forgotten. Like, you said that. I had to be reminded that Jack was just actually altruistic.

• 59:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  You're right. It's kind of the way it should be. By the way, speaking of Charles, you know, he popped up in my timeline earlier today.

• 59:53David Hoffman?

  So sorry.

• 59:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, he said this, this is his comments on things, just on some twid, some thread criticizing SBF. And somebody tweets out and he says, at least you found the real villain before you can give Charles Hoskins and credit for being an actual good billionaire, calling Charles an actual good billionaire. And Charles jumps in. It's really amazing the level of bile and criticism that I've gotten throughout the years. Been almost 10 years, waiting on the great Charles Hoskins and criminal scandal. But please tell me all about Laura's new book. You know, for Charles, it's always, it's always about Charles, I think.

• 1:00:28David Hoffman?

  Always about Charles.

• 1:00:29Speaker 03

  I don't, no one expected a Charles criminal scandal, did they?

• 1:00:33David Hoffman?

  No, because that would mean that he would actually do something.

• 1:00:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, I mean, he does things, David. They had a great booth.

• 1:00:41Speaker 03

  Apparently there's an official statement from Huobi that they will help TRX holders on FTX with one to one. Can anyone find this?

• 1:00:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  One to one?

• 1:00:51David Hoffman?

  One to one.

• 1:00:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  So that means if you migrate.

• 1:00:53Speaker 03

  For TRX holders, apparently, from this.

• 1:00:57David Hoffman?

  Oh, thank God the TRX holders get bailed out. Fantastic.

• 1:01:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wait, wait, wait. TRX holders?

• 1:01:02David Hoffman?

  Tron holders? Isn't that?

• 1:01:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  If you have TRX on SBF, all right, sorry, on FTX.

• 1:01:08David Hoffman?

  SBF, FTX.

• 1:01:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  Everything's a fucking abbreviation.

• 1:01:11David Hoffman?

  RSA.

• 1:01:15Speaker 03

  I can't see any official statement about it, but.

• 1:01:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  Is that the thing? Is that the thing that Justin Sun was excited about?

• 1:01:24Speaker 03

  Oh, my God. Have you seen the picture of Justin Sun's face photoshopped onto Superman saving a baby?

• 1:01:34Speaker 03

  That was posted by the Huobi exchange in response to Justin.

• 1:01:37David Hoffman?

  Justin created it.

• 1:01:39Speaker 03

  Justin, Justin's own exchange was, he was like, put my face on.

• 1:01:46Speaker 03

  And the baby, well, it's not a baby, it's like a toddler or something, but the toddler looks really uncomfortable.

• 1:01:51Speaker 02

  You gotta admit, in terms of interviews we've done, we've never given, we've never given somebody so much direct heat. And they just roll with it. And he's like.

• 1:02:01David Hoffman?

  Justin Sun?

• 1:02:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:02:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  You guys have talked to Justin Sun?

• 1:02:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, he was amazing.

• 1:02:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, he was incredible on the show. Kobe was like, he was confronting him about sleeping with someone's wife or something like that. Justin's like, how did you know about this?

• 1:02:20Speaker 03

  No, no, there was this saga in, it was the May 2021 crash, where there was this rumor that they were trying to liquidate, someone was trying to liquidate Justin Sun on chain because he's slept with their wife. So it was like some crypto whale's wife had slept with Justin Sun or something. There's this rumor, it was like, obviously just like a meme rumor that someone come up with.

• 1:02:40Speaker 03

  But he came on and we like asked him about it quite early on in the show and he was just like laughing and was like, yeah, it's true. I can't tell you who.

• 1:02:50Speaker 02

  Wired had written, Wired had written this like 10,000 word article. Some journalist spent two months on this. And Justin Sun quote tweets it and it's like, lol.

• 1:03:05Speaker 02

  What is this guy? Like, he just, it's the full embrace of the stupidity of our space and he just makes billions.

• 1:03:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  Guys, I remember.

• 1:03:12Speaker 02

  Prince and Ethereum clone makes billions, keeps his billions.

• 1:03:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  In 2018, I thought like Justin Sun was like the peak scammer, like the worst scammer this industry. And now I'm looking at 2020.

• 1:03:24Speaker 02

  Scammer of this industry.

• 1:03:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. And I'm like, this guy, I mean, he seems like, like an angel.

• 1:03:29David Hoffman?

  No one, no one truly hates him.

• 1:03:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  And I, I think.

• 1:03:33Speaker 03

  Isn't that just because it was like, like, if like the time, the, the time since your transgression is long enough, people don't care, right? Like CZ was the biggest villain in crypto for such a long time in like, the depth of my day.

• 1:03:47Speaker 02

  It's the victimless crime.

• 1:03:48David Hoffman?

  Totally. Yeah. Well, CZ and then Justin Sun were working together, like kind of in the, in the back alley to do token promotion stuff on Binance, right? That's what I've heard.

• 1:03:58Speaker 03

  Well, Justin Sun, like the Tron white paper was like, parts of it was just copy pasted of the Ethereum white paper.

• 1:04:04David Hoffman?

  The IPFS side, yeah.

• 1:04:05Speaker 03

  Yeah. Um, and you know, like did an ICO, raised a billion dollars, or however many, however much.

• 1:04:14Speaker 03

  And then just chilled. But because like, he's now just chilling and having a nice time, people just go, oh, that was ages ago. He doesn't need to scammers anymore. And he's kind of entertaining.

• 1:04:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  He's like.

• 1:04:23David Hoffman?

  Well, he's, we, we've also completely redefined to a much worse degree what a scammer is. Like the scammers have gotten worse.

• 1:04:30Speaker 02

  They've got, they've gotten worse.

• 1:04:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:04:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, isn't, isn't, isn't Justin Sun like, he's like a huge, like whale, right? I mean, he's like a huge DeFi whale. He's like 5, 10x more of it than Vitalik.

• 1:04:41Speaker 02

  I still subscribe to his wallet. I'm gonna find it right now.

• 1:04:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, doesn't he, like, rumor is. Okay, wait, sorry, Ryan, how old do you think Justin Sun is? I'm looking at the Superman photo, he's looking pretty, pretty good, pretty young. I'm also gonna say, uh, 30.

• 1:04:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Are there you two? No, is he, is he 30? Yeah, 30. He's 32. 32. 32, he's the oldest one I've mentioned so far.

• 1:05:07Speaker 03

  Also, right, like, he, yeah, he did like a, he did an ICO for some chain, which is just an Ethereum clone, and is not super,

• 1:05:15Speaker 03

  like, not remarkably interesting to me personally.

• 1:05:18Speaker 02

  It's a copy paste, like, the white paper was copy paste, the chain was copy paste.

• 1:05:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  The whole thing.

• 1:05:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, but then, like, you know, they moved to proof of stake, and they did a bunch of stuff, and then their fees are always insanely low. He kept working on it this whole time, and now it's like the biggest chain for like Tether or something. It's like the biggest chain for like U S D payments. So they actually carved out a niche and created a bunch of values, and it's like, hmm, well, you know, if you build something of value, even if the beginnings of it were not incredibly honorable,

• 1:05:47Speaker 02

  People forget.

• 1:05:48Speaker 03

  is that actually a scam?

• 1:05:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, it kind of grew into legitimacy. He, uh, his DeFi, his main DeFi wallet, it only has like 250 million in it now, but it had like a billion plus, 2 billion, 3 billion, I don't know.

• 1:06:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  Doesn't, doesn't he have more ETH than Vitalik? Yes, he does.

• 1:06:05Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, he's, he's unbelievably wealthy.

• 1:06:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  More ETH than Vitalik.

• 1:06:08Speaker 02

  Multi billionaire.

• 1:06:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, because Vitalik only gives away money, he doesn't earn any more.

• 1:06:13Speaker 02

  Justin's a multi billionaire on chain.

• 1:06:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Except for pre-mined, pre-mined scam.

• 1:06:16Speaker 03

  Well, Justin's also, Justin's also quite good at trading, I don't know if you like followed his like, like, macro directional stuff, but he generally buys the bottom and sells close to the top. Like, he sold all of his Ethereum at like 4, 4, um, around this time last year.

• 1:06:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, that'd be nice.

• 1:06:36Speaker 02

  Follow his wallets, David, and when we talked.

• 1:06:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is, this bear market is the first time I've actually bought bottoms. Well, you don't know this is a bottom.

• 1:06:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:06:44David Hoffman?

  Yeah. I bought, I bought it eight, eight, seven, eight ninety seven. I feel pretty damn good about that.

• 1:06:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's not bad. So, um, yeah, Justin, Justin was, came on the show and he was talking about his DeFi movements and his location. He's like, oh, I was actually asleep when that was going on. It's like, well, you had a thousand dollar margin at risk because he was like farming crap left and right. It's like, yeah, that's when I hired somebody to actually make sure that I'm like managing stuff because before that he was just managing billions on like leveraged DeFi yield farms, YOLOing the crap out of the whole thing. So.

• 1:07:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  Fun fact, uh, Tron is now worth more than Solana.

• 1:07:24David Hoffman?

  That makes me sad.

• 1:07:25Speaker 03

  Really?

• 1:07:27David Hoffman?

  That makes me sad.

• 1:07:28Speaker 02

  Good deal for Solana? I mean, what's the price of Solana? I haven't looked at the price.

• 1:07:32David Hoffman?

  I have, I am now, uh, chill with Solana where previously I was less not.

• 1:07:39Speaker 03

  No, Tron's number sixteen, Solana's number thirteen.

• 1:07:42Speaker 02

  FTV or not?

• 1:07:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  I'm on a coin gecko. Sorry, guys. I'm, I'm boomer.

• 1:07:46Speaker 02

  Price of Solana has gone from, holy crap, in three and a half, four and a half hours, Solana's gone.

• 1:07:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Uh.

• 1:07:52Speaker 02

  Low of eleven forty-six to fifteen twelve.

• 1:07:56David Hoffman?

  Eleven?

• 1:07:58Speaker 02

  Eleven.

• 1:07:59David Hoffman?

  Where are you looking?

• 1:08:00Speaker 02

  I don't know. Let me see.

• 1:08:02Speaker 03

  It's kind of crazy that Tron and BNB are also basically the same thing.

• 1:08:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, I have to change all my trading stuff. They're all FTX.

• 1:08:09David Hoffman?

  There, it's literally fake, fake internet money over there.

• 1:08:13Speaker 02

  Screw you, Sam. Like, honestly, you gotta make me change my trading views.

• 1:08:17David Hoffman?

  Industry has to reconfigure itself.

• 1:08:20Speaker 02

  Uh, trading view, come on, make the indexes. We need more indexes.

• 1:08:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Uh, Solana gonna get hit harder? I think some unlocks coming.

• 1:08:30David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  On the Pike too.

• 1:08:31Speaker 02

  Uh, I don't know. Somebody came in and did like, they changed some delegator thing today.

• 1:08:35David Hoffman?

  Was it? Okay. So when, when three hours capital got liquidated, that was the bottom. Like it was the bottom within like twenty-four to forty-eight hours of that big news, like spreading throughout crypto Twitter and everyone, uh, being worried about contagion. Oh, contagion's coming, contagion's coming. Turns out, no, the bottom was right then and there. So like that's if we're going to repeat that, like I'm not a trader, but like my gut take is that the bottom of the prices is going to be happening the day of the worst news, which is FTX being insolvent. That's my quick take.

• 1:09:06Speaker 02

  Don't tell me you're not a trader. You I have I gotta go to our direct messages. Trustless.

• 1:09:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  Is he is he giving you trading?

• 1:09:13David Hoffman?

  I was I was I was good trading on the way up. It wasn't.

• 1:09:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  Just like on Tuesday, on Tuesday.

• 1:09:18Speaker 02

  One of my one of my most severe regrets because at the time I actually had a bunch of money on Binance US where Matic existed.

• 1:09:26David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 1:09:27Speaker 02

  And my DM, February 15th, 2021, I do not want to timestamp the price. All caps, Matic. And I was like, screw you.

• 1:09:37David Hoffman?

  It was at 20 cents at the moment, or I think even less.

• 1:09:39Speaker 02

  Eleven.

• 1:09:40David Hoffman?

  It was 11 cents.

• 1:09:41Speaker 02

  Stopped out at 10 cents or something. I was like, all right, David, let's roll, baby. Stop out at 10 cents, goes $2.

• 1:09:51Speaker 02

  I was mad. I was really mad at you.

• 1:09:53David Hoffman?

  Sorry, buddy.

• 1:09:55Speaker 02

  Anyway, I forget what I was trying to bring up there. Bring back pain.

• 1:10:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  David, you are a trader, man. You called the you called a Solana bottom, I think, on our Tuesday livestream. I can't remember what that was.

• 1:10:11David Hoffman?

  God, I did? That doesn't sound like me.

• 1:10:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, he did. Yeah, I just I I re listened to that part of the episode.

• 1:10:17David Hoffman?

  Good for me.

• 1:10:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  The problem was.

• 1:10:19Speaker 02

  It wasn't the bottom.

• 1:10:24Speaker 02

  Problem with Solana is that you still have all these like liquidity issues, people that can always fall back on what they have vesting in Solana to just get rid of it. And you have the $3, I'll buy all you want meme.

• 1:10:38David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 1:10:38Speaker 02

  Which is strong, right?

• 1:10:40David Hoffman?

  Very strong.

• 1:10:41Speaker 02

  It really those those things, they gotta be magnets, right?

• 1:10:47David Hoffman?

  Totally. And I think so. I think Solana is like very well positioned to be the ETH of last cycle because ETH of last cycle had all this ICO sell pressure, like at a mountain of ICO sell pressure, never never mind consensus and Joe Lubin. And that's Solana of this cycle where they have all of the insane investor lockups and just the dumpage from FTX and all the associated.

• 1:11:09Speaker 02

  $3 is exactly 99% off the top. No, that's gonna be juicy.

• 1:11:14Speaker 03

  In some ways, you've got to imagine that.

• 1:11:18Speaker 03

  The Solana founders feel very bittersweet about this FTX stuff because obviously they, you know, it's horrible for the industry and um it's like bad for them reputationally because Solana was kind of like the Sam coin, the Sam coin that enabled all other Sam coins. Um in a way, it was the uh like Sam was sort of the poster boy for Solana.

• 1:11:45David Hoffman?

  Yeah, the OG SIM coin.

• 1:11:46Speaker 03

  Well, at the same time, the removal of that narrative can only be good for Solana in the future, right?

• 1:11:54David Hoffman?

  Right, yeah.

• 1:11:55Speaker 02

  And it started a while back.

• 1:11:57Speaker 03

  If you're in three years and like you still have FTX looming over you as Sam looming over you as the like the biggest thing about your chain.

• 1:12:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:12:06Speaker 03

  This just like removes it as a problem for them. And sure, maybe there's a lot of FTX owned Solana that needs to get sold and maybe there's, you know, all that stuff and there's maybe ongoing um reputational damage, but at least it's like out of the way, it's behind you and you can move on and like Solana can do its own thing and like try and build its own sort of um future without being like cross pollinated with FTX and SBF stuff.

• 1:12:35David Hoffman?

  One of the biggest bits of fight of soul is the concentrated ownership by all the VCs. So if we can get it out of their hands, it's the same thing as like Ether back with all the ICO, concentrated ICO ownership.

• 1:12:46Speaker 02

  What what has what has more multiples upside with ETH like development mode than Solana? Especially if you get it three bucks, right? Three to thirty is a ten X. That's that's a thousand to ten thousand dollar ETH where we're gonna be like our eyeballs are gonna be bleeding, all four of us, if ETH goes to ten thousand. Like, we're just gonna be unbelievably euphoric.

• 1:13:14David Hoffman?

  So, okay, so.

• 1:13:15Speaker 02

  So that's Solana three to three, three to thirty is the same thing. So when you're looking at that relative pair, if you get three dollars, you just.

• 1:13:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  You just buckle in and you buy Solana at $3, right?

• 1:13:28David Hoffman?

  I don't, I don't. So when Ether capitulated down to $80, that was a $8 billion market cap for Ethereum. Solana right now is at a $5.5 billion market cap. It touched 5 earlier today. So we're already, like, if you want to compare these things, one cycle apart, like, we're already, Solana's almost like half of what Ether was last cycle. I'm not saying this is a potential.

• 1:13:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, ETH's highs of last cycle were much higher than Solana's highs of this cycle though, right? Like ETH, ETH last cycle went crazy because of the ICO stuff, but it was like very deeply used for something. And it was used for something for the first time. And like, maybe that thing was an illegal fundraising platform. But it was like, there's product market fit for smart contract chains here to do something. Whereas, like, the proving point for Solana is like, what, the price went up a lot? And like.

• 1:14:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, personally, like, for me, I've never been bullish on Solana, like, probably, you know, to my, like, you know, would have been nice to buy at 3. But there is a price at which I am bullish on Solana. But for me, it's not this. For me, it's closer to 3. It's not 15. It's closer to 3. Like, so right now, Solana, too, another way to look at it is it's off 94% from all time high, which is basically what ETH traced. Last, yeah, last cycle, right, down 94%. I still think it's got a ways to draw it before this is fully washed out.

• 1:15:05Speaker 02

  There's a big yellow box on my chart from 3 to 4, which was the high of September 2020.

• 1:15:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's basically the whole gap up from Sam coin fame.

• 1:15:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I mean, that I mean, that really propelled it. That was rocket fuel. And so we gotta go, we gotta go back. Something like that.

• 1:15:29David Hoffman?

  We have to go back.

• 1:15:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  We gotta go back before we can go forward.

• 1:15:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think it's the coin of last resort for too many people. Still, I think that's fair.

• 1:15:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  It is. I do agree, though, David, like, you know, it does have an ecosystem of builders, right? There is a real community there.

• 1:15:44Speaker 02

  That's network effects. Network effects, the most powerful thing in crypto. Bitcoins actually draining network effects right now. And ETH and Solana are building them. Solana is building them faster than ETH. ETH is the dominant, has the dominant network effects in the ecosystem.

• 1:16:01David Hoffman?

  Dude, Bitcoin Bitcoin community is divided once again.

• 1:16:05Speaker 02

  I don't know. Bitcoin's gonna Bitcoin's got big problems, man.

• 1:16:09David Hoffman?

  Bitcoin has got big problems, that's for sure.

• 1:16:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:16:12David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:13Speaker 03

  Man, we've all got big problems.

• 1:16:19David Hoffman?

  Okay, well, actually, you know, being in Ethereum DeFi for all of 2022 has felt like the world is just ripping apart around me. And me and all my little ETH friends are on this tiny little like oasis, like watching.

• 1:16:32Speaker 02

  You've been in Ethereum DeFi all.

• 1:16:34Speaker 03

  Oasis, an oasis. It went straight downwards for the previous, like, two and a half years.

• 1:16:39David Hoffman?

  Well, yeah, but everything else broke, Kobe, like, everything else.

• 1:16:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  You're talking about DeFi token price, which is.

• 1:16:45David Hoffman?

  No, no, no, no, I'm talking about just like the ether that I have in the apps that I have it in. It's like, yeah, the price is going down, but they're still functioning as designed. Meanwhile, Solana is halting. Meanwhile, FTX is insolvent. Meanwhile, Three Hours Capital like nuked everything. And so like, yeah, like, we're down bad in correlation with the market, but like, I still have my ether.

• 1:17:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  If you get David drunk enough.

• 1:17:11Speaker 02

  You're the only person I know that says ether.

• 1:17:14David Hoffman?

  I've been saying ether since day one. Yeah, but you are right. I am. I'm one of the few people that says that. Yeah.

• 1:17:19Speaker 02

  I say it too. It surprises me that ETH is down relative to BTC this week. Like it, it doesn't feel that way because just the relative price of Bitcoin's been dancing in the 15, 16 Ks. And ETH is over a thousand dollars. It just feels stronger, but it's actually down on the week.

• 1:17:35David Hoffman?

  I feel like if we were back in last cycle, uh, the, the fact that ETH BTC is performing so well is very indicative of Ethereum's strength. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 1:17:44Speaker 02

  ETH, ETH is down 76% uh, all time high. Bitcoin is down uh, 77%.

• 1:17:52David Hoffman?

  That is insane. I mean, it makes sense now because I, I believe in Ethereum's fundamentals, but like if you compared this to last cycle, that, that is unheard of.

• 1:18:02Speaker 02

  Kobe's in his mind drafting tweets from his Bitcoin maxi alt account.

• 1:18:08Speaker 02

  Are you still a believer in Kobe?

• 1:18:09Speaker 03

  Bitcoin maxi alt account for a while. I've got a hundred thousand followers now. It's my favorite thing to write on.

• 1:18:16Speaker 02

  Of course he did.

• 1:18:16Speaker 03

  I'm beloved, I'm beloved in my community.

• 1:18:18Speaker 02

  Somebody, Kobe, who was it? Who was it that did the tweet of like Kobe wakes up and picks up his mask for the day and puts it on? Like, it's the truest tweet I've ever seen of you.

• 1:18:29Speaker 03

  Yeah. For a little while I'd uh, um, like a lawyer account where I was commenting on the Johnny Depp, Amber Heard defamation lawsuit, just making stuff up. Got quite a lot of followers on that one as well.

• 1:18:42Speaker 02

  I mean, Twitter's an art.

• 1:18:44Speaker 03

  I don't know, man. Like I, I think, I think like this whole like, whoa, is Solana the good bet for next cycle is like, like, how's everything doing? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It's just decisions you don't need to make now. Like, you can think about it now if you're bored. Like, like, if you want to spend your time thinking about that stuff and make a plan for however long in the future. Like, fair enough, but I think just like reevaluate it when the time is right. Like, uh, I think it. In the last two, three years, the optimal strategy was like find a thing that's going up the most and chase it.

• 1:19:24Speaker 03

  Like, okay, so Matic seems to go up quite a lot. Solana seems to go up quite a lot. And then it just kept, it kept outperforming everything for the entire cycle and then it was over. And then there was some stuff that didn't go up very much and it underperformed and it underperformed the entire cycle. And like, you probably couldn't have guessed what they were three years prior to that. So just like wait and see, so much stuff can change between now and then.

• 1:19:47Speaker 03

  And, you know. Maybe we'll all be trading Aptos and Sui and stuff.

• 1:19:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  I heard they have, I heard they have a lot, had a, had a significant percentage of money on FTX.

• 1:20:01Speaker 03

  I think they both dis- they discredited that rumor, both labs.

• 1:20:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  There's a good rumor though. You probably started that.

• 1:20:09David Hoffman?

  Imagine just Kobe starting and ending rumors with his own ults.

• 1:20:14Speaker 03

  I made up a rumor that Caroline used to date Sam. As a joke.

• 1:20:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  He said that on a show.

• 1:20:22Speaker 03

  It spread like fucking wildfire and then someone said it in a group chat and I was like, no, let's not try and made it up. And then someone was like, no, it actually is true.

• 1:20:33Speaker 03

  And then it actually just turned out to actually be real.

• 1:20:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's amazing.

• 1:20:38David Hoffman?

  Jesus, Kobe just opens up Pandora's box and can't get the rumors back in.

• 1:20:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  How many, how many months of winter did SBF set us back? All of 2023. All of 2023. All of 2023. Well, I mean, months can be, I mean. More, more than 10? Yeah, it could be more than 12. You could.

• 1:21:01Speaker 03

  I think it's quite, I think it's probably several years.

• 1:21:03David Hoffman?

  Several, several years. You're talking 20, 24 months?

• 1:21:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  I'm, I'm asking specifically what SBF you think added to the crypto winter.

• 1:21:13David Hoffman?

  Added?

• 1:21:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:21:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  In addition. He added several years?

• 1:21:18Speaker 03

  Yeah. He, he was, he was the poster boy of.

• 1:21:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  Trad crypto.

• 1:21:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, like the DC crypto movement. Even if he wasn't like, you know, the person.

• 1:21:33Speaker 03

  Like pushing for that, he'd sort of become this like.

• 1:21:40Speaker 03

  He'll be the most recognizable crypto face to a lot of politicians, regulators, et cetera, I think. And he went and blatantly lied to their face, it seems, or told them,

• 1:21:59Speaker 03

  yeah, like told them something and then like had the same problems later and made the same mistakes later. Like, or just lied to their face. Let's go with the lie to their face, as he did to everyone else only days ago.

• 1:22:12Speaker 03

  But if he lied to their face,

• 1:22:17Speaker 03

  they won't welcome whoever else with open arms. They're not gonna go, oh, these people have like, you know, Good intentions. Good faith, this like discussions with us. They're just gonna say, like, their mindset for several years now, if it wasn't already, is gonna be, these people are just lying to us and trying to pull the wool over our eyes.

• 1:22:42Speaker 03

  And they're not gonna care about the distinction between like, a centralized exchange operating as a bank and, you know, a fully transparent, on-chain, self-custodied, you know, protocol. That gets exploited.

• 1:22:59Speaker 03

  They're just not gonna care about the difference. They're just gonna say like, that's all the same thing to me. That's crypto. And that is very bad. And the, like, the guy that donated hundreds of millions to us was also doing like the worst possible thing.

• 1:23:17Speaker 03

  Plus, if you think about

• 1:23:21Speaker 03

  the amount of people who will have lost money there, the amount of people that will have narrowly avoided losing money there, the amount of builders that will have treasuries there. So like, you know, how many projects are secretly dead now because they've lost everything and we don't know yet?

• 1:23:40Speaker 03

  How many industry participants will have had a relationship with Alameda and FTX that their business is now significantly wound down?

• 1:23:49Speaker 03

  They're not gonna fix that. All these people lose their jobs because their businesses go, they go out of business. And the progress you need in, you know, innovation or like building or whatever, gets significantly delayed because of, because of that.

• 1:24:12Speaker 03

  So trust is down, like actual progress in the industry is moved backwards and not just from like Mount Gox being like, it's kind of like you use the exchange, it feels like it's kind of broken and you know, it's like this like overseas thing. It's not like, you know, and then it's operating at the time of like Silk Road being the biggest like Bitcoin app. So like, it makes sense that that goes down. It's the Wild West.

• 1:24:42Speaker 03

  Sam was pretending not to be like the opposite of that. He was like, we are the people that are getting our shit together, trying to look, I guess, as coin-based looks, a little bit, but like cozying up maybe more to

• 1:24:56Speaker 03

  traditional power structures.

• 1:24:59Speaker 03

  So I think it's like a, well, probably smaller industry-wide impact than Mount Gox. Much worse timing and probably much worse knock-on effects. If like an exchange dies really early, it's like, you know, no one knows how to do custody yet. People don't know what's going on. If it dies like after, 10 years after Mount Gox went down, it's

• 1:25:24Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:25:26Speaker 03

  You know, I think that trust is harder to repair.

• 1:25:28Speaker 02

  It's bigger or smaller than if Tether itself fell.

• 1:25:31Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 1:25:32Speaker 02

  Don't say that.

• 1:25:33Speaker 03

  Oh, much smaller than

• 1:25:34Speaker 02

  Don't you say that.

• 1:25:37Speaker 03

  Yeah. And it depends how Tether would fall. Like if it came out that Tether had four billion unsecured to Alameda that they can't get back. And there's like, you know, a 5%, I don't know how much the market cap of Tether is, but let's say there's a 5% haircut on all Tether assets or something. Then I think that's not the end of the world. If it's like, you know, oh, Tether's backed by nothing, that like, that would obviously be like catastrophically large.

• 1:26:10Speaker 02

  Several years.

• 1:26:12Speaker 02

  I think it's several years. I have a couple of things to add, I guess.

• 1:26:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  You know, uh, if it's several years, guys, we're all gonna need new sponsors. We'll sponsor Up Only if Up Only sponsors Bankless. How about that?

• 1:26:24Speaker 03

  Bro, we can print free money that way.

• 1:26:28David Hoffman?

  That's circular economy, right, guys?

• 1:26:30Speaker 02

  I don't think that's how it works.

• 1:26:32David Hoffman?

  Well, I don't think a lot of this industry knows that, Ledger. Yeah. A lot of people don't know that.

• 1:26:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  Ledger, what do you, what do you add?

• 1:26:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, a couple of things that I think are just worth noting there is I think the VC market just went on major ice.

• 1:26:54Speaker 02

  You know, I run a, I co-run a startup. And, uh,

• 1:27:01David Hoffman?

  Plug the link.

• 1:27:03Speaker 02

  It's flip dot X Y Z.

• 1:27:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Flip, flip, flip.

• 1:27:06Speaker 03

  X Y Z.

• 1:27:06Speaker 02

  Thank God we have runway, right? But like, we don't have infinite runway. Nobody, almost nobody has infinite runway. Every single company with anywhere from whatever runway they have, three months to thirty-six months, I don't care what it is. They're thinking, how can we survive? And this is

• 1:27:30Speaker 02

  the, the, the, the willingness of the, of the VC market to go take risks at this point in that way is low. So you gotta figure a whole different dynamic. It's all the metrics that you used to think mattered, don't matter. It's new metrics. It's new baselines. It's new demands. This is not, not the startup market. This is, this is the money's market. The, the money, the liquidity is at a premium. And that is gonna impact projects, big and small.

• 1:28:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, the way you're way you're describing this, this is um order of magnet and this kind of was hitting me today of how much larger this is than anything we've seen this year. Um, this is bigger than Terra's capital.

• 1:28:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:28:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  In terms of legitimacy for the space.

• 1:28:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:28:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think.

• 1:28:26Speaker 02

  And those froze, those froze the space for months.

• 1:28:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. I mean, this is bigger than than Do Kwan's Elgo stablecoin. Uh. Well, in addition to.

• 1:28:37Speaker 03

  Ranking of criminals, Do Kwan actually probably comes at the bottom now. Like all he did was build something that made no sense.

• 1:28:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:43Speaker 03

  And I was extremely confident in it, right?

• 1:28:45Speaker 02

  Do Kwan was the happy idiot, right?

• 1:28:48Speaker 03

  Well, maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe, right? Maybe he was very aware it made no sense and was doing a lot for it in the background. Who knows? But like, like, it seems like SBS is by far the worst. And then three hours is probably next worst because it's somewhat similar to FTX, but without customer deposits.

• 1:29:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, SBF's going to jail, right? I mean, this is a thing that's going to happen.

• 1:29:08Speaker 03

  I mean, I hope so as well, but like, I don't know.

• 1:29:10Speaker 02

  He deserves.

• 1:29:11Speaker 03

  Political elite lawyer parents and donated a lot of money to politicians, so.

• 1:29:15David Hoffman?

  I think one of the reasons why this is so much worse is that it's the just the next one, like the one that's after um Terra Luna is going to be worse than Terra Luna. That was three hours capital. The one that's after three hours capital is going to be worse and it always stacks because it's just like another shot to the heart, like E2 Brutus, like you too, Sam. Uh, and so like, at this point, we were joking when we started the live stream today is like, it feels like the final season of the game of thrones of crypto blowups. But then my mind goes like, all right, what could be next? I don't see much more, but I don't think you know, can really know that until after the fact.

• 1:29:52Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, did you think FTX would blow up?

• 1:29:54David Hoffman?

  No, no.

• 1:29:55Speaker 03

  Climatic. Like if Ku Koin had gone down, I would have been like, oh, yeah, that makes sense to me.

• 1:30:00David Hoffman?

  But that's why like, who's left after FTX? This has to be the final season. It has to be the final blow up.

• 1:30:05Speaker 02

  We had Terra Luna, we had 3AC, we had Celsius, we had the.

• 1:30:09David Hoffman?

  Michael Saylor, Michael Saylor's not getting liquidated, right?

• 1:30:12Speaker 03

  Everyone keeps forgetting about them.

• 1:30:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, we had the the good actors of like block five, right? Like the the ones caught up, but significant. Now we have FTX, we don't know what the hell it is. We have the people that are the collateral damage of FTX, but FTX, in my opinion, was the climactic finish of the blowups.

• 1:30:29David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 1:30:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  If Vitalik turns out to be a scammer, then I'm just rage bringing the space. I'm out.

• 1:30:34David Hoffman?

  I'm going, I'm going to grad school.

• 1:30:36Speaker 02

  I mean, the chat's yelling sailor, like sailor.

• 1:30:38David Hoffman?

  I don't think sailor can get liquidated.

• 1:30:40Speaker 02

  It's a slow, it's a slow bleed finish. Like it's a multi-year, which could happen, right? Like a crypto winner, he can't service the loans.

• 1:30:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, but what about Tether? You were talking about Tether, legend. Do you think that's a?

• 1:30:50Speaker 02

  It's over. I mean.

• 1:30:52David Hoffman?

  Yeah, Tether's, Tether's Mount Gox level.

• 1:30:56Speaker 02

  I don't know. I think FTX was Mount Gox level.

• 1:31:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  FTX was Mount Gox. Well, but okay, here's, here's a tweet from, um, I mean, I wasn't here in the Mount Gox days. I came a little bit after, but, um, Dan McGarrett was, uh, he now works at, uh, Messari.

• 1:31:11Speaker 02

  He started Messari.

• 1:31:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  He started Messari with Selkis, a comp, uh, Mount Gox blow up. That was 6.5% of market cap, total crypto market cap. FTX blow up, 0.8% market cap, less than a percent.

• 1:31:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, but like you're talking total crypto market cap, right? Which the majority of is fake. Cause that includes like oxy and serum and the bags that Alameda have borrowed against. That's not real. Like, um, like it, that's what I, that's what I meant earlier when I said like, it's much smaller in terms of scale than Mount Gox. Like the DAO hack was like 30% of all Ethereum or something, right?

• 1:31:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:51Speaker 03

  Um, we don't have, we don't have shit on that scale anymore because funds are way more spread out, but the impact of this is going to be, I think, much bigger than like either the DAO hack or Mount Gox or the Bitfinex hack or.

• 1:32:07David Hoffman?

  Right. There's a lot of intangibles, like that's market cap is one thing, but legitimacy is, legitimacy sized is massive.

• 1:32:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  Is there, is there any silver lining here? Are you guys planning, why, why are you guys playing? Are you planning to stick around?

• 1:32:22Speaker 03

  Well, like, I've been doing this for 10 years, mate. It's like part of my identity. It's like a third of my life. What else am I gonna do?

• 1:32:27David Hoffman?

  A third? Just a third? Why so low?

• 1:32:30Speaker 03

  Well, because I'm old as fuck.

• 1:32:34David Hoffman?

  What's the other two thirds of your life, Kobe?

• 1:32:37Speaker 03

  Well, the first 10 years. I was a kid.

• 1:32:39David Hoffman?

  Oh, sorry. I thought you meant like one, one, I thought you were talking about, yeah, you spend one third of your daily time doing crypto. I'm like, you do two thirds of your time not crypto stuff?

• 1:32:51Speaker 03

  I mean, my entire life. Um, I don't know. I'm like, it, it, it feels to me a little bit like, um, like my mental model of the crypto industry goes back quite a long way, goes like moves backwards in time quite a long way. Cause I had like, I was always very paranoid and like skeptical of everything. And like every exchange is gonna die. Every coin's gonna go to zero. Um, like it's all fucked. Um, the only thing that is important is Bitcoin, right? Like Bitcoin is like this, like, um, almost pure, uh,

• 1:33:28Speaker 03

  thing that has not been like perverted by, um, market participants or whatever. Um, and then like Ethereum came along and then Ethereum was like a legal GoFundMe for 2017. Um, and I was like, don't know if that feels, um, super great either. Surely there can be something more important than just doing illegal fundraisers. And then DeFi started to kick off and I was like, okay, cool. This is the turning point for the industry. Like there's real stuff happening, um, here. Like people are building important products that are better than their centralized counterparties, right? Like it's actually a better product. Um,

• 1:34:08Speaker 03

  and then these like venues started popping up that had good user experiences for the first time and they felt like a safe, like product to use for the first time. And, um, like actual institutional money was in the space and like backing people that seemed to know what they were doing. And my mental model of the crypto industry switched to like, oh, it's grown up a little bit. Not a lot. It's still obviously completely stupid, but it, um, it's not the Wild West anymore. It's not all just like shambolic, um, nonsense and, um, like whack a mole exchange, uh, life. But turns out.

• 1:34:50Speaker 03

  It's exactly the same.

• 1:34:53Speaker 03

  In my, in my mind, it like, like, people are just like printing like fake money, borrowing against the fake, borrowing real money against fake money, stealing user deposits and the exchange dies, exactly the same as it did 10 years ago and periodically throughout those 10 years. Um, and the only real difference is now like, there are some things that are genuine products that are kind of cool. So I like try and focus on that stuff a lot more.

• 1:35:18Speaker 03

  To remain optimistic about that stuff, like building

• 1:35:25Speaker 03

  protocols and platforms where like that are sensor resistant, that allow self custody, um, allow you to like own your own stuff rather than having to rent it from um, a bank or a crypto bank or whatever.

• 1:35:42Speaker 03

  Stuff like that is getting built and it's important. Token prices of it all sucks, like the, some of the most important and useful things were the worst performers of the last few years. But um, those things are, are kind of cool, right? And like, someone will build or maybe already has built it if it's like D Y D X or G M X or all those other ones, like versions of F T X that don't require you to give your money to some dude.

• 1:36:13Speaker 03

  And um, like that stuff's important, I think, and that stuff uh, is, will remain interesting. And you just got to see how much of that happens because a bull market comes around, people forget about that stuff, people stake, take shortcuts again and um, and like, like focus on the money rather than like the point of everything.

• 1:36:37Speaker 03

  And like, every single bear market I've been through, uh, the, around this time, one year from the top or two years from the top. By the way, today's like basically exactly one, one year from the top on the dot. It's one year since Barry tweeted, it's going to be a big week and it was a big week, it was the top. But like a one year or two years from that, every single time.

• 1:36:59Speaker 03

  It feels like it's fucked. It feels like, okay, it's like there's no coming back from this one. Like it's, it's actually fucking over this time. It always feels like that. And you feel it like viscerally for a few months. Um, and then it washes out. Things go sideways for a while. The world doesn't explode and um, you can start to like, people can start to rebuild. Um. Yeah, who knows?

• 1:37:27David Hoffman?

  I, I think my, my take on, on that interpretation of uh, this last bull market is like, oh, we found some legitimacy in that. Oh, we've discovered DeFi. We discovered some real things that solve some real problems. Uh, and then the bull market started and then crypto started to like, return to its roots and return to what it was familiar with from previous bull cycles, which was like, fork and fair launch, launch a token, uh, and just get more, get more degenerate, right? And so we start with legitimacy at the very beginning of a bull market because that's what triggers the bull market in the first place. And then as the bull market goes on, like the collective IQ just goes lower and lower and lower until we back where we are back in like 2013, where we're just like forking Bitcoin 17 times.

• 1:38:12David Hoffman?

  Uh, and that's probably, maybe if you carry that forward, that's how like the next bull market will start. We'll, we'll build something real. Some new innovations will come. We'll build out, out through this bear market. Uh, and then we'll just like go back, we'll Benjamin Button it and just go backwards into just like 80 IQ food coins. Yeah. And that'll be the top.

• 1:38:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's 80 low or high IQ?

• 1:38:35David Hoffman?

  Probably high. For, for next cycle, it'll probably be still pretty high. Yeah.

• 1:38:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  Ledger, what about you? Are you gonna, you gonna stick around? You gonna take your advice, your wife's advice and like, I don't know. I don't know what she's telling you to do. If she's like. She's okay with me being in this space. Uh, I don't know if I'm okay with me being in this space. Really?

• 1:38:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like, has this been pretty like shaking for you?

• 1:39:02Speaker 02

  It's not just crypto, but what we consistently

• 1:39:05Speaker 03

  It's life, man.

• 1:39:06Speaker 02

  It's life. Like, everyone's an idiot.

• 1:39:11Speaker 02

  We need rational actors. There's no, where are the rational actors? I don't understand. How is there not an adult in the room? The adults get crowded out by the children and the children don't deserve the power, but they have the power. They're the populace. They're the irrational

• 1:39:37Speaker 02

  risk takers. They're the ones that don't deserve the keys, but they've end up capturing the power of the keys. And it pisses me off. Like, from a crypto perspective, I fell in love with the idea of a trustless and programmatic blockchain. Bitcoin took a while to connect for me, but Ethereum connected with me right away because it was trustless, at least in my naive eyes at the time, programmatic blockchain. And we saw that come to some real fruition with DeFi summer, and that changed everything for me to where I was starting to get dejected after a few years of your trading

• 1:40:19Speaker 02

  coins that are supposed to have decentralized concepts on centralized exchanges to you can actually do things on chain. And even NFTs really clicked with me in that regard of you're doing things on chain. You're taking control of the programmatic elements of a public blockchain. And I can see through the JPGs and into the the D the 721 represents and what that can become 10 years from now or 20 years from now. And those things excite me. And then the frickin monkey brains take over again and they throw shit all over the place and they make a mess. And then like, hopefully some adults clean it up when it's all done. And it's in the next bear and then their bags underperform

• 1:41:02Speaker 02

  all the dog shit that gets spread out over the next bull cycle. And it's like, it's depressing. So. Yeah, it's like a thankless job, not that I've participated well in it like I've been one of the monkeys. But it's it's a thankless job to like, express the reasons why you should be here. And people in the chat are talking about how Andreas is who they admire. He's not taken like, the full by the horns stance of profitability. He's taken the moral high road along the along the way. And very few of those really shine and last. The reward is in the the quick fix and hope you jump off the train.

• 1:41:47Speaker 02

  Right in time before it implodes in the next cycle. And we got to get past that stuff. We got to get to true value. And I haven't seen that and it pisses me off and I would like to see that. And we have, I don't think we've really seen it yet. And you know, this is only two cycles for me. It's a second cycle where it ends in some pretty tremendous disappointment, like the climactic finish of.

• 1:42:11Speaker 03

  Oh, bro, that's what always happens.

• 1:42:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, but who are these children and where are the where's the good stuff? We need the good stuff. I need, we need the real change, not the dog coins and not the JPGs and not the clone coins and scammers and the dickheads. And the criminals running off on the private planes like we need the builders and the change makers and they're not being rewarded or incentivized to be the good things and we need them to be able to show up, to be rewarded to show up. And we need them to take control and do something. And I I haven't seen that yet. That's disappointing.

• 1:42:49David Hoffman?

  Andrew, you don't have any, you don't have any kids, right?

• 1:42:51Speaker 02

  I have two kids.

• 1:42:52David Hoffman?

  You have two kids. Ryan here is.

• 1:42:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, they're both NFT founders.

• 1:42:59David Hoffman?

  Ryan, Ryan's got got three kids. Do you guys' kids, like the presence of your kids, like, impact how you think about the degeneracy in this industry?

• 1:43:07Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:43:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  If I mean, for me, it impacts how I think about like the future. Like I, I mean, the reason I'm like, the reason I'm in crypto is because um, I believe in what we're building.

• 1:43:21Speaker 03

  You want to do the maximum public good.

• 1:43:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, effective altruism.

• 1:43:27Speaker 03

  It was the poster of SBF. The reason I'm in crypto is to do the maximum public good.

• 1:43:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  Is that what he really says?

• 1:43:32Speaker 03

  There's like a poster that's like they put it up on the streets.

• 1:43:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  In San Francisco, yeah. I mean, but like, but this is the problem. It's the Alex Mashinsky saying, um, you can't trust the banks. Right? Like on a, on a T-shirt or the SBF saying, I want to do the maximum public good. I mean, this is the problem. So I've been asking, uh, you know, people lately have been in crypto for a while. It's like, just you're experiencing crypto. Has it made you more bullish on humanity or more jaded? Um, and the answer I consistently get back is like, yes. Yes. And I guess I feel that too. And this is definitely a moment where we're kind of in a, in a, in a trough, in a valley where I'm just, I'm like, like you guys, I'm feeling pretty jaded.

• 1:44:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  About what's going on, like, how did this is such a self inflicted wound? How did SBF and the so-called adults like screw this up so royally? I mean, this is like catastrophic failure. How did, how did we even get here? How did this happen? And it's greed, it's degeneracy, it's not being satisfied with being a, you know, multimillionaire and a billionaire. You have to be like $30 billion richest dude on the planet. It's that sort of thing that is dragging us down. And I think Ledger, you're right, like the right people aren't getting rewarded, right? SBF is still worth more than Vitalik Buterin?

• 1:45:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like what? How, like, how does that happen?

• 1:45:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  So yeah, it's, um, it's depressing sometimes. Maybe this is just kind of a low point. Maybe this, maybe this is a, the bottom signal. Right now, this entire episode.

• 1:45:18Speaker 02

  What's depressing is, is what is it a bottom signal of? The world? Like.

• 1:45:24Speaker 02

  Putin's being a dickhead. Trump is an idiot, like shouldn't exist. Like Biden's been in public office since 1971. Like, what is going on? Like, none of these people deserve to be there. Like, it's all ridiculous. The, the absolute frickin' apes are in charge. And they make no sense. And they've, there's like billions of real people who are eating the consequences of this.

• 1:45:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  Do you think this is what like the early internet, you know, fathers of the internet, you know? Yeah. Created the internet and you're like, we're going to give access to knowledge to the entire world. Right? I mean, just such a

• 1:46:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  utopia type of vision. And now fast forward and look, look, look at all the ways we're using the, the internet for negative. It's done untold good, but like, I mean, are we any smarter? Like than we were, you know, 30 years ago, 20 years ago? I mean, it, it just, it, it does feel like crypto is kind of repeating some of these mistakes. And um, yeah, I mean, I do get jaded when I look at that, when I look at things like FTX. Yet at the same time, guys, I mean, there are so many builders in this space and there's so many projects that are worthwhile. And I don't know, Kobe, you probably have the long-term perspective.

• 1:46:43Speaker 03

  When you say so many, you mean like 10, right?

• 1:46:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, honestly, right? Like there's Uniswap, there's AVE, there's, what else? Come on, help me, guys.

• 1:46:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think that's all of them.

• 1:47:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Or NATO cash? Oh, wait, can't touch that anymore.

• 1:47:03Speaker 03

  It's kind of a good point in a way, though, because like, and to tell this story, I'll have to do some, somewhat of a anecdotal tangent because I don't know how to explain things simply. I'm not very smart, but.

• 1:47:18Speaker 03

  Not long ago, I got into a lot of fight on Twitter about NFTs and I called them altcoins with pictures. And in defense of NFTs, a bunch of people point to like three or four artists that have built sustainable careers of selling like a one of one over time and their prices have gone up over time and they have genuine collectors and they're like. NFTs are not altcoins with pictures, it's not a scam, it's not all just like speculation casino, because look here at this like slice. This slice is interesting, pure, it doesn't have any of those things, it's everything that the NFT space is supposed to be. These are real artists who have managed to connect to an audience and monetize their work. And that's beautiful.

• 1:48:03Speaker 03

  It's not selling pictures of like bored apes for millions of dollars or whatever.

• 1:48:10Speaker 03

  And at the time, I was like, how can you just ignore? Everything else, right? You're looking at this 1% of the industry and going of your industry or hobby or whatever and going like. This thing, these things are great because look at this slice and I'm going to ignore everything else, just deny that information. And now I thought about it a little while afterwards and I was like, well, when I meet friends who are anti crypto or not into crypto and and and stuff.

• 1:48:41Speaker 03

  I wonder if that's what I sound like to them, because I'm kind of like, well.

• 1:48:46Speaker 03

  Bitcoin, Ethereum, look at Uniswap, look at like, ah, look at Maker Dow, you know. I like this stuff is really good, this stuff is like. You know, pure and like, you know what I mean? I sound exactly like that NFT guy and I'm not like ignoring

• 1:49:07Speaker 03

  like all the other stuff. I obviously see it and I know that it exists, but I do certainly attribute to it like. That is, that's not the important stuff, that's noise, that's like, you know, like, you know, that's not the industry and really. Maybe that's like 80% of the volume of the industry or something, maybe it's like a lot of the industry is propped up on that stuff and the like biggest players participate in that, like Binance has 80% market share or something and they did a, they released their own Ethereum copy paste clone, like, you know, like.

• 1:49:40Speaker 03

  The top 10 on CoinGecko is not the things that I think are like.

• 1:49:48Speaker 03

  Like people with good, good intentions, building something that's important. It's like weird stuff. Um, so I do wonder if we turn a massive blind eye to a lot of the stuff. Or just disregard it as noise because um, we see parts of the industry. That are important, but those parts of the industry are not the um. The parts that are like flourishing and growing. It's just, you can focus on them and go, these things are good. Um.

• 1:50:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, I don't know. I think that there's a lot of people that build a career on being um, like. Critical of everything in crypto, no matter what. They call everything um, a scam, a fraud, blah, blah, blah. Um, and find something bad to say about everything. And then there are people who build a career of being completely uncritically. Like favorable about everything in crypto. Um, saying everything's good. Um, you know, free markets, blah, blah, blah. And I wonder a little bit if.

• 1:50:50Speaker 03

  To people I sound a little bit like the latter rather than. The former, like I think there is like a, there's a healthy line somewhere in the middle of being like optimistically skeptical. Um. Uh, and it doesn't feel like that space is actually very popular.

• 1:51:07Speaker 03

  But I surround myself with people that like are in that space, but I don't think that it is actually a good representation of the industry perhaps. Um, so.

• 1:51:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, I, I, I think a lot of the disconnection about how. Other people see the industry, how we see the industry, and when these events happen, why it's disheartening is because it just. Reveals to you again, all of the parts of the industry that you like. Like you're just attributing as noise and unimportant. And actually, it's really important that they make the big, the most significant events. Of every year within our industry by fucking up something like catastrophically. Um, so.

• 1:51:49Speaker 03

  I don't know. I think maybe there's something to do with that, but also maybe like we just sort of kind of ignore it in real time. Like what can you do about it? What can you do?

• 1:52:00David Hoffman?

  Yeah. This is something I've battled with as well. I once argued this guy on stage about something. I can't remember his name, but I had to. It was one of those guys, Kobe, that you identified as people that build a brand off of just like shitting on crypto. And that's like what they do and they always come out when prices go down. And I started off this debate with my opening statements of like, there's always two people in the world of crypto. There's the crypto idealist who zoom forward 50 plus years into the future and talk about the future crypto utopia that crypto is going to bring and how great it is. And then there's the crypto skeptics who look at crypto as it is today and say like, oh, like, well, clearly the whole thing's a scam.

• 1:52:44David Hoffman?

  The whole thing like through and through and through. And like, honestly, Kobe, I actually find that you actually fit that middle ground pretty damn well. Where you see you're here for all the right reasons, but like you can, you can call out a bunch of fucking noise when, when in the middle of a bull market, which a lot of people are willing to drink the Kool-Aid. When you, when you were talking about the whole like NFT industry where you're called it like all coins with JPEGs. And because it was super right, it was super right. And that, that was like, kind of the same reference I was going with like, oh yeah. As soon as we figure out crypto industry figures out this new primitive, we like regress back to our former selves and start to do what we're familiar with, which is trade altcoins.

• 1:53:23David Hoffman?

  But now they've got pictures associated with them. That's how, that's how I felt in Ethereum in 2017 with like the ICO movement. And I was like, oh yeah, Ethereum is full of ICOs. And I was like, but I'm, I'm seeing Ethereum as like, well, no, smart contracts. ICOs are just the thing today. Smart contracts are the future. But it takes like such a long conviction, a long-term like time horizon to be able to exist in that future state.

• 1:53:53David Hoffman?

  It's it's tough, man. And this is what we this is what we do as an industry is like we zoom forward 50 plus years. It's a super cycle. We're gonna teleport there. Like, oh, no, just kidding. Interest rates go up. Everybody needs to pay back their debts. All the monkey pictures that you paid a million dollars for are now worth nothing. I mean, it's it's that it's the inevitable, like laying the foundations of things that are real. And then and then we just speculate on top of new things. That this was what the the bull market was in the first half of 2021. It was a real foundational bull market. And in the second half of 2021, it was like game fi and like weird knockoff Fiverr NFTs.

• 1:54:38David Hoffman?

  But those same things will be back in greater numbers next cycle, and they'll be stronger. And then we'll just do this whole thing all over again.

• 1:54:48Speaker 02

  Man, you say super cycle type stuff. It's depressing to me.

• 1:54:52David Hoffman?

  God, we I don't know about you guys, but I mean, I I got duped by the super cycle meme for sure.

• 1:55:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, Kobe's been Kobe's been consistently. When I try to still be believe in something, Kobe like brings this healthy skepticism to my chats, like the very little time that we talk. That's not on the air, but even on the air.

• 1:55:18Speaker 02

  We really basically never talk, but it's not.

• 1:55:24Speaker 02

  But but when we do, it's often like him bringing this like skeptical lens to something that I'm OK with, right? Like that I trust inherently or something. I just realized when you talk about super cycle or whatever else or like meeting your heroes type of stuff. It's like my first cycle, I was really dumb. My second cycle, I was capable and stupid. That's now. And like, I feel like by the third cycle, maybe I'll be capable, but also like kind of paralyzed by skepticism.

• 1:55:52Speaker 03

  And listen, you guys are all talking very confidently about this promised next cycle.

• 1:55:56Speaker 02

  Well, I'm not saying when it'll be. I'll be more bald, more fat, whatever, like saggy or cheeks. I'll be like that Telegram AI version, the sticker of me when I'm like 75.

• 1:56:10Speaker 03

  I just I just want to note, this is the first time in history that people have been extremely confident that another cycle is promised to us.

• 1:56:16David Hoffman?

  I remember thinking that last cycle.

• 1:56:19Speaker 03

  You thought another one was guaranteed?

• 1:56:21David Hoffman?

  I, I, oh, no, I was thought like, oh, everyone's talking about the next cycle. Uh, is it really gonna happen then if everyone's talking about it? I remember thinking about that last time.

• 1:56:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  I, I'm a believer that it's, it's inevitable that we get another cycle, but I'm not gonna call a time on that for sure. But, but I like, and I could be wrong on that, like, I mean.

• 1:56:38Speaker 03

  What if it's in 20 years, will you like whip up the podcast again?

• 1:56:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  No, we'll be podcasting.

• 1:56:44David Hoffman?

  We'll be podcasting every step of the way.

• 1:56:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  My god, growing freaking old together, David, what? I mean.

• 1:56:53Speaker 02

  We're not old now.

• 1:56:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  Older.

• 1:56:56David Hoffman?

  I'm, I'm still in my twenties.

• 1:56:57Speaker 03

  How old is Gary V?

• 1:56:59Speaker 02

  He's old.

• 1:57:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Gary V is like mid forties.

• 1:57:01David Hoffman?

  Everyone gasped about to pull it up.

• 1:57:03Speaker 02

  Forty, forty-three.

• 1:57:05David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I was gonna say forty-four or whatever. I'll have to type in age.

• 1:57:09Speaker 02

  How, how are V friends?

• 1:57:09David Hoffman?

  Oh, wow, he is forty-six.

• 1:57:12Speaker 02

  Forty-six.

• 1:57:14Speaker 03

  The more, well, like with, with Gary V, he like, his streams and stuff. But I think maybe it was also because it was all about like, like cringey JPEGs and shit. So I was always like, I feel like this is what Ledger's gonna be like in like 10 years.

• 1:57:34Speaker 03

  I just watch him like, wow, this is the, this is the future for Ledger. This is the future, just like.

• 1:57:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  No way.

• 1:57:40Speaker 03

  Pushing fifty, been like, check out this rabbit I just minted, guys.

• 1:57:46Speaker 03

  We, like, that's what I see.

• 1:57:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  Gary V has some totally unreal energy, you know, let, let, yeah, he's got books. Yeah.

• 1:57:56Speaker 02

  And then like jab, jab, jab, right hook, like he wrote a whole book on this concept.

• 1:58:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Jab, jab, jab, right hook, that this is a book?

• 1:58:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think so.

• 1:58:04David Hoffman?

  I don't wanna read it.

• 1:58:05Speaker 02

  Gary, Gary V was like a web guy influencer way before NFTs. Are y'all not familiar with his previous works?

• 1:58:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  Uh, ish. He's been on the podcast.

• 1:58:15Speaker 02

  He was, he was, he was a full-on web guy. Well, I guess I was too, but.

• 1:58:21David Hoffman?

  Comment from the chat, Gary V dresses like a middle schooler, but I love him.

• 1:58:27Speaker 02

  I mean, he's the, he is the dude with the skateboard.

• 1:58:30David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:32Speaker 02

  I love kids.

• 1:58:33David Hoffman?

  How do you do the fellow kids?

• 1:58:37David Hoffman?

  All right, guys.

• 1:58:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  Guys, should we, uh, think about winding this down and, um, you have any parting words of wisdom? How about for people who just, um?

• 1:58:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Just feeling really bad right now. Do it. I mean, we just, we just told them they were gonna get multiple years of crypto winter.

• 1:58:54David Hoffman?

  Multiple years of bankless podcast is all I'm hearing.

• 1:58:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  We, we have a, I hope we have the stamina for this dude. Yeah. Just staking, right? We just stake ETH. It's, it's free money. Is that how that works?

• 1:59:07Speaker 03

  I mean, for most people, I mean, for most people, um, more years of crypto winter is probably better. I think for the majority of people listening, it will like, it would actually be the optimal strategy to have like five years or something. Um, it would be optimal for them. Probably not the people listening that have like a full net worth invested now. It probably sounds like quite bad. Um, but like, uh, if you get a longer time to, you know, um, DCA accumulate, um, figure out your positioning and stuff, um, with like a clear mind. I think that's probably,

• 1:59:49Speaker 03

  probably optimal. Like I had, um, a job, like full-time job for the entirety of the 2017 cycle, all the way through the bull market. I could have not had a job. I could have, you know, only done crypto and I kept a, a job and it allowed me to have like a very clear head about the whole thing or as clear as it, as clear as I could have had. Uh, whereas if I was all in doing it all the time, it would have been quite bad for me, I think. Um, and like the fundamental parts of the, uh, the mission and the, the purpose behind Bitcoin and Ethereum and, um, the very short list of stuff that, uh, I think like crosses the chasm of, of legitimacy.

• 2:00:34Speaker 03

  It is, is not like, that is not, to me, that's not been doubted by any of this stuff. And in fact, it's like,

• 2:00:44Speaker 03

  It's the opposite of that. It's like proven over and over again that like these centralized systems that require you to rent your own assets back from them um will not be um not always be honest with your money and you should not have to trust someone else just to like access a financial service or um uh you know, use use your own money, basically. Um. So that part of the my thesis for the the um importance of the like technology and you know um things that we have remains um true today um and that has sort of been like at least my guiding principle for ten years.

• 2:01:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, it might get really bad in the meanwhile, um but until that part, until that seems like it's no longer um important um.

• 2:01:41Speaker 03

  Like I I think that's the thing to focus on. Um. Maybe it was all speculo crypto tokens and like there was a hundred year bull run and interest rates went to zero and people invented Bitcoin because there was nowhere else to put your worthless dollars and we had a ten year super cycle of crypto coins right before economic policy regime change and it never recovers and never goes up ever again. But in that world, like what like A, what can you do and B, what else are you going to invest in anyway? So um I think just like, do you find the uh mission of having peer to peer, peer to peer sensor resistant technologies that allow you to uh the freedom to self custody your assets important?

• 2:02:27Speaker 03

  Um. And do you think that a centralized exchange blowing up, a hedge fund blowing up, a poorly designed Ponzi scheme mechanism or a different crypto bank blowing up in any way puts doubt on that thesis? For me, it it doesn't. I think that's important. Um. And I'll think about that. Um. But uh I don't know if you saw in chat, SBF's apparently playing League right now. What? He's he's like, because it shows you, he's he's the game, he's playing Kindred. Um.

• 2:02:58David Hoffman?

  On what platform does it say that he's playing that?

• 2:03:01Speaker 03

  Huh?

• 2:03:02David Hoffman?

  It's Gulf Stream.

• 2:03:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Blown off steam?

• 2:03:06Speaker 03

  Who knows?

• 2:03:06David Hoffman?

  Jesus.

• 2:03:07Speaker 03

  That's got to be a meme. Uh. If that's real, that is like.

• 2:03:10David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:12David Hoffman?

  What would you do after your multi-billion dollar head of fund blows up? Don't answer that.

• 2:03:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, um, I mean, that, that makes sense, Kobe. What about you, Ledger? David, what do you guys leave us? Chat, chat, chat was asking for some hope. Leave us with some hope earlier.

• 2:03:31Speaker 02

  I think Kobe hit on a point that's right, which is like the chain hasn't failed us, you know?

• 2:03:40Speaker 02

  The, the things that were the worst were the vulnerability points of human actors. Human, human failure, centralized entities that were, were

• 2:03:56Speaker 02

  unsatisfactory solutions, whether they're trying to meet regulatory criteria or subvert it. Either way, it was human failure over chain failure.

• 2:04:09Speaker 02

  There was app failure and there was, you know, hacks and stuff like that. But overall, the base layer with the chain showed lots of promise this cycle.

• 2:04:19Speaker 02

  Kobe mentioned about like, who can stomach it for another one? What I've recognized in myself and others is can I go in with conviction again in the same way? And if I can, and if I'm right, then the upside is huge. Right? Like you go in with conviction, a significant percentage of your net worth to, to do it again. And it actually works. The upside is not just life changing. The upside is insane. If you're wrong, there's this perpetual disappointment opportunity that could be really depressing. If you go in with that conviction, if you disappear, you might be all right.

• 2:05:00Speaker 02

  Have changed your life a bit and it was a fun ride, but then maybe you missed out on it, on being right. So you got to determine, why are you here? Are you here for this like financial freedom component? Are you here for something deeper? And can you stomach the outcome, no matter what the outcome is? And I think you have to decide for yourself, like whether you can stomach the potential outcome ranges, whether you want to participate in those and, and why are you actually here? And I, uh,

• 2:05:35Speaker 02

  My personal priority list is family first and then like function sec- second, right? Like I want the

• 2:05:44Speaker 02

  I want my, my family to be secure and then I want to build well. I want to be able to build and do and invest and talk, whatever the hell I'm given, whatever platform or opportunities I'm given. I want to do those reputably that I can look back upon and be proud of my effort. And I think that there is still an opportunity to do that within crypto. So I intend to do it.

• 2:06:14Speaker 02

  But if I feel like that's no longer possible, I just won't anymore. I don't, I don't think we have to give up on those things. Like this is super bottom signaling type of speech.

• 2:06:25Speaker 02

  But I think that we, uh, I think we still have an opportunity for good. I don't think it's a guarantee. I think there's a lot of work that needs to be done. I think a lot of people need to do work. We need to talk about the importance of the chain and the, um, like the Eric Voorhees argument versus the Sam argument, like the

• 2:06:49Speaker 02

  trust, trust in that which can be trustless. Don't trust in me because I'm, I can wear a suit, my shoe's untied.

• 2:07:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, we gotta get, we gotta get back to the basics and we gotta wear solid fundamentals and carry on.

• 2:07:09David Hoffman?

  Back to the basics.

• 2:07:12David Hoffman?

  David, you self conviction on the space? You buying? I, I think the main thing to think about is that, uh, during the 2017 to 2018 crash, we basically had nothing to stand on as an industry. We had, we had Bitcoin and we had this theoretical use case of Ethereum. That was about it. And then we built some stuff during the bear market that caused a bull market to happen later. Things like Uniswap, things like Ave, Synthetix, a few more governance tokens. Now we've got some DAO stuff, we've got some cool NFT stuff. And we've locked in some very real progress with some very real things that are moving the needle, even though that

• 2:07:53David Hoffman?

  there's like maybe 5% of the total crypto industry is that, the real stuff. And then the 95% is just like leverage of that real stuff in pursuit of financial gain. Again, that's just what crypto is going to be. But we've locked in 5% of really cool legitimate, like internet changing things. And that was an, you know, infinity level improvement from the bull market prior, going from like 0% to 5%. I think if we just play this out, like, we don't go from like 5% to 10%. Next time, we go from like 5% to 25%, or 5% to 50%, if I'm being optimistic. And so my bull case for like, if this is a five-year bear market,

• 2:08:37David Hoffman?

  and you need the conviction to just grit your teeth and dump your paycheck into crypto, because you want that generational wealth, it's not a linear improvement of legitimate things that crypto produces, it'll be an exponential improvement. And so we'll be able, I think the people that are here with conviction, that are doing good stuff and building real things, are going to only have more ammo than all of the scammers who get washed out every single year. And so like, the real people doing the real things will always have a stronger foothold than the scammers that come and just like, do the cool thing that happens every single bull market. And so I'm optimistic for next bull

• 2:09:18David Hoffman?

  cycle, that, and every bull cycle subsequent, that there's always a tilt, a slow, small tilt towards the legitimate builders, because we have the last year's, last cycle's bull market legitimacy to stand upon. And so that was, that's what makes me optimistic, is that, like, we'll, we just, it's just about learning lessons. So that's what I'm optimistic for.

• 2:09:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  I agree with that. Yeah. And I, I mean, I guess for me, I don't know everything about all the assets in the space, but I feel like this, these recent events have actually proven the use case of some of the core assets I have conviction on. I have some conviction on Bitcoin, but you know, mostly Ether, mostly some of these DeFi tools, that sort of thing. Ethereum, I mean, this kind of proves the use case, right? Like that we can't actually trust these centralized intermediaries. And I don't know, to me, Ethereum in particular has never looked stronger. Like, I would be happy to, as long as I have some income, the means to do it, buy triple-digit ETH all day.

• 2:10:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  And whether that takes one year, two years, three years, five years to come to fruition, I mean, like, is it, it's a totally different feeling to me than buying ETH in like 2018 or 2019, where we weren't sure about the roadmap, like, was proof of stake actually going to happen? Was Ethereum going to scale? Did it even have use cases besides the stupid ICO thing? And we're well past that now. So I don't have conviction on all of the assets in the space and all of the use cases, but some of the, the core ones, I have more conviction than ever. So I don't know how long this is going to take, but guys, this has been fun. Thanks for a little bit of catharsis this evening.

• 2:11:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Appreciate Up Only Bankless livestream. We'll do these more often, maybe not just on like calamitous days like this, maybe more routinely, but it's been really fun hanging out with you guys. Appreciate it.

• 2:11:26Speaker 02

  Cheers.

• 2:11:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  Guys. See you later. Go legit. Bye.