Is Crypto Dead? Fed Crashes Markets. Bored Ape Land Mint. Hop Airdrop. Solana Down.

1st Week of May, 2022 ------ 📣 OPOLIS | Sign Up to Get 1000 $WORK and 1000 $BANK https://bankless.cc/Opolis ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/ 🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/ ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALED ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum ❎ ACROSS | BRIDGE TO LAYER 2 https://bankless.cc/Across 🏦 ALTO IRA | TAX-FREE CRYPTO https://bankless.cc/AltoIRA 👻 AAVE V3 | LEND & BORROW CRYPTO https://bankless.cc/aave ⚡️ MAKER DAO | THE DAI STABLECOIN https://bankless.cc/MakerDAO 🦁 BRAVE | THE BROWSER NATIVE WALLET https://bankless.cc/Brave ------ Topics Covered: 0:00 Intro 4:00 MARKETS 4:20 BTC Price 5:10 ETH Price 6:31 ETH BTC Ratio 7:30 Crypto Market Cap 7:50 THE FED https://twitter.com/NorthmanTrader/status/1520048451660226561?s=20&t=WsDzeddLzDPlD__LhyLbbA 13:15 Ethereum’s Q1 Results https://twitter.com/banklesshq/status/1520140178878353410 16:05 Global Metrics https://dune.com/hildobby/Ethereum-Overview 17:08 OP Stimpak https://twitter.com/optimismPBC/status/1521577143364427777?s=20&t=OPbZKxvvbYFZRDvMbp4wXg 19:30 NFTs Booming https://decrypt.co/99226/nfts-dead-opensea-daily-trading-record-476m-ethereum 22:15 RELEASES 23:00 Lido Centralization https://scorecard.lido.fi/ 26:12 ENS Constitution https://constitution.ens.domains/ 27:12 Etherscan Heatmap https://twitter.com/etherscan/status/1521813183346151424 27:45 RAISES 28:00 Pangea https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-05-04/crypto-wunderkinds-secure-85-million-to-start-own-hedge-fund 28:48 Syndicate https://twitter.com/SyndicateDAO/status/1521483151406600192 30:12 JOBS https://pallet.xyz/list/bankless/jobs 30:00 NEWS 32:35 Hop Airdrop https://twitter.com/HopProtocol/status/1520055351931985921 34:35 Bored Ape Mint Fiasco https://coinmetrics.substack.com/p/state-of-the-network-issue-153 40:30 Fork Optimism https://twitter.com/FUCORY/status/1520849858793402368 42:20 10k ENS Club https://twitter.com/10kclubofficial/status/1520903265164091402 45:50 Starbucks NFTs https://techcrunch.com/2022/05/04/starbucks-to-launch-nfts-this-year-offering-access-to-unique-experiences-and-benefits/ 47:20 SOLANA GOES DOWN https://twitter.com/solanastatus/status/1520508697100926977 49:20 Censorship Worries https://twitter.com/nixxholas/status/1520509031751684096 51:23 Broken Record https://twitter.com/TrustlessState/status/1521657185654116353?s=20&t=cgCZ5KCih_sZluVjKLjFfA 54:20 OTHER NEWS 54:39 Waren Buffet BTC https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/warren-buffett-charlie-munger-bitcoin-crypto-cryptocurrency-investing-berkshire-hathaway-2022-4 56:30 PoolTogether Lawsuit https://www.wsj.com/articles/crypto-savings-lawsuit-puts-principles-of-defi-to-the-test-11642069806 1:02:06 TRIBE Exploit https://decrypt.co/99103/fei-protocol-offers-10m-bounty-after-80m-rari-capital-exploit 1:05:00 COMMUNITY QUESTIONS https://twitter.com/wongisrite/status/1522054783200243712 1:06:54 Layer 2 Solutions https://twitter.com/locopatron1/status/1522057520721801217?s=20&t=cgCZ5KCih_sZluVjKLjFfA 1:08:48 Sharding or Movie? https://twitter.com/sharath_darsha/status/1522060962500554753?s=20&t=cgCZ5KCih_sZluVjKLjFfA 1:10:00 TAKES 1:10:28 Parasitic Layer 2s https://twitter.com/ryansadams/status/1521503349773946882 1:13:06 Bad Take https://twitter.com/pgaffney/status/1522038187782254593 1:16:28 What David’s Excited About 1:18:47 What Ryan’s Excited About 1:20:05 MEME of the Week https://twitter.com/BanklessHQ/status/1521908752756080642?s=20&t=cgCZ5KCih_sZluVjKLjFfA ----- 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://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/bankless-disclosures

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

• 0:00David Hoffman?

  Red alert, this is an attack on DeFi. I know I'm laughing, but it's also not funny. They're coming for DeFi.

• 0:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bankless Nation is the first week of May and it's Friday morning. So what time is it, David?

• 0:12David Hoffman?

  It's the Friday Bankless Weekly Roll-Up Time, Ryan, where we cover it. The entire week of news in crypto, which is always an ambitious endeavor, yet we persevere nonetheless. Ryan, what happened this week?

• 0:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Look, man, so much happened this week. Oh, first of all, David, by the way, I'm excited to see you at Permissionless in person. That's coming up really soon. So we're gonna meet in person for the first time. We'll talk about that later.

• 0:32David Hoffman?

  Allegedly.

• 0:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  Allegedly.

• 0:34David Hoffman?

  I am a real person, okay? I don't know where these rumors came from.

• 0:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  But what are we gonna talk about this week? First, we gotta start with the Fed watch. All right, Jerome Powell packed his biggest punch yet, a largest interest rate hike since the year 2000. That had an impact on markets. We'll cover that in the markets section. What else we got, David?

• 0:50David Hoffman?

  Yeah, speaking of impact on markets, the gas wars this week were absolutely insane. The Bored Ape Virtual Land Sale created $166 million of transaction fees, burned an absolute ton of ETH. There's a bunch of fiascos and a bunch of drama with that, leading to a brand-new ape chain? Question mark?

• 1:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, I don't know if that's a good idea. We'll have to talk about that. Also, Solana went down again. I don't know if this is the fourth, the fifth time, the sixth time. Should they convert to banker hours at this point, David?

• 1:20David Hoffman?

  Down for working hours only?

• 1:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, just no Saturday and Sunday hours? We'll talk about that, too. What else we got?

• 1:26David Hoffman?

  A troll is suing Pool Together for a quarter billion dollars, which is ridiculous. They put $10 into Pool Together and then immediately filed a class-action lawsuit against Pool Together. This person doing this has very strong connections to, you guessed it, Elizabeth Warren. So this is a red alert. This is an attack on DeFi. I know I'm laughing, but it's also not funny. They're coming for DeFi. So we all need to get up to speed with what the hell is going on with the attack on Pool Together.

• 1:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, man, I've lost some money in DeFi. Maybe there's some lawsuits I could drop. We can talk about that. But we also have a new airdrop that's coming. I hope you're ready for this. We're not gonna reveal what it is, but be sure to listen to this episode to find out more. What else should they do? David.

• 2:10David Hoffman?

  Oh, they gotta just like, subscribe, rate and review, Ryan. If you're watching on YouTube, you gotta click that button so you can go and subscribe. This comes out every Friday and it's the most high-energy way to recap the news in crypto, also the most entertaining. But also, if you are listening to this on the podcast, please rate and review the Bankless Podcast, the number one podcast in crypto, you know it. We want to make sure that we get to the mainstream and we need those reviews to get that done.

• 2:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  Look at David hyping us up, man. But you know, this is a lot of fun. I enjoy doing this every Friday. This, this happens every Friday, guys. So come back for the next Friday and subscribe so you don't miss it.

• 2:43David Hoffman?

  Fridays happen every week.

• 2:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  Fridays do happen every week. That means we're recording a lot, David. You know what else we're doing? We're doing a lot of experiments in Web 3. We have this theme on Bankless where you can join crypto and become a self-sovereign employee. You can work for a bunch of DAOs. There's massive opportunities to be sort of a self-sovereign worker, an independent contractor in this new economy. But the thing you're gonna need, if you move your cushy, move from your cushy corporate job, is health insurance. You need some benefits. You need someone to manage payroll. Opus does all of that for you in a box. This is a way to pay yourself in crypto. They handle health insurance, they handle dental, they handle medical, they handle all of it. And they'll even pay your payroll

• 3:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  in crypto. So you can start receiving your, your salary in crypto from a DAO. So if you are a DAO employee or want to work for DAOs in the future, you gotta investigate this. This can onboard you into crypto. David, there's some benefits here when people sign up, right? Some deadlines and benefits. What are those?

• 3:44David Hoffman?

  Oh, Web 3 always has benefits, Ryan. If you sign up with Opus before May 25, 2022, that is this month, that's the end of this month, you get 1,000 work tokens, the native token of Opus, and 1,000 bank tokens when you sign up and you get your first paycheck paid by Opus. Basically, it's a collective. It's a big collective, a DAO for getting good healthcare rates, basically de-risking the process of becoming a self-sovereign worker in Web 3. That's why we love Opus. It's a DAO that services other DAOs.

• 4:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  Guys, you can go check that out. The link in the show notes, it's bankless.cc/opolis. Make sure you get that capital O in there. All right, David, let's get to the markets, man. What are the markets telling us about Bitcoin this week?

• 4:24David Hoffman?

  They were almost happy, Ryan, but now they're sad. We started the week at $39,700, trying to keep our head above that $40,000 level, which we definitely love, and we just never got there. We are currently down to $36,300. Oh, wow, it's dumping as we speak. So it was down 6.5% when I wrote this, but it looks like we're down to something like 7% or 8%, down 8% on the week so far.

• 4:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's funny, people thought we were out of the woods. Look, after the Powell speech, you could see that on the charts, right? So the kind of Powell speech around here on Wednesday, and markets were up. After Powell talked, we'll talk about what he said in our Fed Watch, but then, a day later, bam!

• 5:03David Hoffman?

  Oof.

• 5:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  We got wrecked. There's a big red candle down.

• 5:08David Hoffman?

  We tried to be bullish, but we just couldn't do it.

• 5:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  Same thing happened with ETH. What's the story on Ether this week?

• 5:13David Hoffman?

  Yeah, Ether started the week at $2,940. Again, $40,000 is to Bitcoin as $3,000 is to ETH. We tried to climb above $3,000, we couldn't do it. We were, when I wrote these numbers down, it was $2,760. We are now down to $2,720. So that's about like down 8% on the week. Big sad face. We are setting all-time lows on the week as we record right now, so sad face.

• 5:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it's funny. It's like, we thought we were out of the woods, happy times, after Fed, market goes up, and what this looks like to me, I don't know what it looks like to you, David, is just whale games. The games whales play during crab season, when the market doesn't know which direction to go in, and suddenly we have a massive dumpage right here.

• 5:59David Hoffman?

  You know what's happening, Ryan? We don't have any links in here, but people are getting liquidated this morning, like, because they...

• 6:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  On margin?

• 6:06David Hoffman?

  On margin, even though we were at these prices on May 1st, and so people ape into a leveraged position like yesterday.

• 6:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, yeah.

• 6:15David Hoffman?

  And then got liquidated today.

• 6:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  Of course. Yeah, they were. They got bullish after the Fed news and the market responded very favorably to that. And now they're paying for that the very next day and getting liquidated. So it's going on. I can't believe people have positions like that. But what do we know? We don't trade. ETH Bitcoin, the ratio, what's that looking at?

• 6:34David Hoffman?

  Oddly looking good. It was up 1% this week. And so, pretty cool. It's actually trending in an upwards direction.

• 6:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  Do you ever look at this in Trading View? The technicals?

• 6:44David Hoffman?

  Yeah, that whole like meter thing. Yeah, it's basically a weather vane, dude. It just follows like, did it go up recently? Then it's a buy. Did it go down recently? Then it's a sell. It's a sentiment indication, not like a technical indication.

• 6:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's not what technicals are, though. Just sentiment indication? Is it more than that? Are the triangles more than that? Do they mean more than that to us?

• 7:01David Hoffman?

  And triangles are more than that. But like, in the same, we recorded a podcast with Jim O'Shaughnessy and we like, one of the big TLDRs is that narrative follows price. And so like, yeah, people are happy about their assets when they go up in price. Like, crazy thought.

• 7:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's a great episode, by the way. That's coming out Monday and has a whole bunch of tips that Jim relays to us that are super useful in crypto and how not to fall prey to the FUD and the FOMO and all the psychological traps we can fall into crypto. How about the total market cap of crypto? We up? We down?

• 7:33David Hoffman?

  We're down. If you go to that 24 hour tab, we started the week at $1.9 trillion. We are currently down to $1.77 trillion. So lost $130 billion in crypto market cap this last week.

• 7:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  We lost half in Elon. I think that's the measure. But let's talk about the Fed stuff because that is dictating some of the outcomes in the market, at least I think, right now. The Fed just raised rates by half a percentage point. So that's 0.5%. That's the biggest interest rate hike in two decades. The goal, of course, is to fight inflation. It's the largest since 2000, as I mentioned. It's the first time since 2006 that the Fed has increased rates in back-to-back meetings. Okay? So they did that. They also announced some guidance to the future. So it's not just happening in May, 50% of 50.5%.

• 8:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  increase in May, they're also planning another 5.5% increase in June and also in July. That's what Powell's guidance is saying. And then he provides a bit more guidance as well. But basically, they're doing some quantitative tightening. So that means you know that balance sheet that they racked up over COVID and like the last couple of decades.

• 8:48David Hoffman?

  Debt that they've accumulated since 2008.

• 8:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's about $9 trillion at this point. All right. So they are, they're reducing it by 50 billion a month. And they're planning to do that in June, in July, in August. So you know, that's a quarter of an Elon or so. They're going to reduce their budget by, and then September and going forward, they're going to get even more aggressive. And it's probably 100 billion a month, but.

• 9:11David Hoffman?

  You say nine trillion dollar debt?

• 9:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  Uh, yeah.

• 9:15David Hoffman?

  Is that what you said? And they're reducing it. They're trying to pay it back at $50 billion a month.

• 9:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, you gotta do those down payments. You gotta.

• 9:22David Hoffman?

  What does $50 billion do to the face of $9 trillion? You know how many months that'll take, Ryan? I just, I just did the math because I'm a math whiz. 180 months.

• 9:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay.

• 9:32David Hoffman?

  15 years.

• 9:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's doable.

• 9:33David Hoffman?

  15 years to pay back the debt.

• 9:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  Don't say it's not doable, David. It's doable.

• 9:38David Hoffman?

  I guess 15 years. I guess it's shorter than the most home mortgages.

• 9:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, well, Powell says, we don't want to do things too quickly. And that's part of the thing. Because a soft landing is the goal. So what he means by soft landing is basically like, we're not planning to do this until we totally, until we wreck the economy. We just want a soft landing. We're not trying to cause a recession here, guys. All right. He said, the strong economy can handle these rising rates right now and some of this quantitative tightening. And I guess we see if he's right. But what that also means to me, maybe the market responded with this is like, if there's indications of the R word recession and you know, some blood in the streets, then some of these plans could reverse. Maybe the market's anticipating that.

• 10:19David Hoffman?

  The story here is there is a needle to thread with can we fight inflation and also not cause a recession at the same time? And so that is the Fed's drop to thread that needle. Let's raise interest rates to fight inflation, but also let's raise interest rates not too much so that we cause the R word, the recession word. There's a bunch of debate. As to whether that hole in that needle even exists, Ryan. So like, we actually might just have to be chosen, choose one, like, what do we want? The recession or the inflation? It's like, you know, which, which nut do you want to be punched in? But, but basically, what's going on is like, you know, the Fed, the Fed is saying, hey, we're going to raise interest rates this many times throughout the future, future. And it's like, you know, to put this into a visual terms, it's just like, imagine it's like,

• 11:02David Hoffman?

  hey, we're going to punch the market in the stomach seven times.

• 11:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  I'm glad you went with the stomach because I was getting the visual there.

• 11:08David Hoffman?

  And then the market like braces for seven punches. And it does that by like selling off. That's what we saw through January through now. But then the Fed is like, oh, we've changed. We're actually going to punch you guys eight times. Or perhaps they say, oh, we're going to only punch you guys six times. And so like, the market can brace or unbrace based off of like, how many times the Fed is going to punch it.

• 11:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  And to be fair, like, we're calling these punches, but it's just like, I mean, they got us drunk first, right? Like, the market's totally like drunk. And like, here's a tweet, you wanted to talk about this. It says, party hardy, uh, party hardy, and then dot, dot, dot, hangover. And what we're looking at, well, why don't you explain what we're looking at here?

• 11:43David Hoffman?

  Yeah, this is the disposable personal income amount over the last, what, like 50, 60 years? And like, during the middle of COVID, you see this real personal disposable income.

• 11:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's like savings in the bank, right?

• 11:55David Hoffman?

  Yeah, just like personal saving, like how much cash you got, your slush fund, your personal slush fund.

• 11:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 12:00David Hoffman?

  And like, it was, it like jumped up like four times higher than it has ever been in the last like 50 years as a result of COVID because of the, the steamy checks, the, the unemployment income. And so that was like, what everyone was talking about, oh, they're roaring twenties, like everyone's partying, everyone's quitting. We got all this money. And then in 2022, when they start to fight that inflation, it goes in the complete opposite direction. So now people have less disposable personal income than they've ever had in the last 50 years as well. So it's just like whiplash. First we got a bunch of money, now everyone's poor. It is, it is scary.

• 12:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  This chart is scary.

• 12:38David Hoffman?

  Yeah, like tech stocks have erased all of their gains, like all of these, like, you know, Wall Street best traders and Dgen Robinhood traders, like, they don't have any money anymore. So like all the money's gone, all the money's gone. Oof.

• 12:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, and the money is evaporating it, you know, but before our eyes with inflation as well. This is the kind of volatility and something that you've said recently and we've said for a while at Bankless is like, hey, you know that volatility that you're trying to avoid in the crypto market? Well, it's coming for the real world. Here it is. Look at this whiplash, you know, positive 30%, 30%. Now we're negative 20% in the space of like just a couple of quarters. Let's stop talking about fiat though, David. I want to talk about some-

• 13:18David Hoffman?

  The new economy?

• 13:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, the new economy. The economy that is actually enjoyable to look at. We put out, Bankless put out Ethereum's Q1 results and what does this look like?

• 13:30David Hoffman?

  Bullish? Is that, is that the answer that you wanted from me?

• 13:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  I want more detail now.

• 13:34David Hoffman?

  We'll go into this. Yeah, hang on. All right. So Ethereum is a protocol, so it's not going to release its quarterly reports. So somebody has to do it on Ethereum's behalf. So we have volunteered, we put our lead analyst minds on the case and they produced a report, Ethereum Q1 results. You can review this on the newsletter, but here are four quick facts to cover what the state of the Ethereum economy is in the last quarter. 2.4 billion in transaction fees. That's up 86% year over year, plus 2.1 of that billion was burned in ETH. So $3 billion paid in tips to miners, $2.1 billion of Ether burned.

• 14:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  Can I just pause? I want to pause there after you're done. Sorry, David.

• 14:13David Hoffman?

  Yeah. Which created a 54% decrease in Ether issuance as a result of EIP 1559. So while the US dollar is inflating, the inflation rate of Ether got cut in half.

• 14:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  That is so cool. This is so cool. So what we're saying is like, if you, if you look at the US government, which is operating in a deficit, okay? The Ethereum economy, the Ethereum government brought in $2.4 billion in transaction fees. And then this ETH burned, that's essentially a dividend back to all the ETH holders. It's a freedom dividend, Andrew. It's a stimulus and ETH owners, ETH-

• 14:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like people who own ETH got $2.1 billion in value back. So we're going the complete opposite direction of fiat economy. There's no deficit, there's no $9 trillion deficit here. We're actually like giving the surplus back to ETH holders.

• 15:03David Hoffman?

  That's exactly right. Take us through the next one, because DeFi did some cool things. Talk about DeFi.

• 15:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, so there was also incredible growth in DeFi, as you'd imagine. So 2,700% increase in perpetuals volume, which is huge. 657% growth in spot volumes and also another doubling of stablecoin supplies. That's pretty impressive on its own. What's, can you tell us about the NFT ecosystem?

• 15:30David Hoffman?

  Yeah, of course, we can't not talk about NFT ecosystem because it's at some point the NFT ecosystem just broke all metrics. Like, what does it mean when trading volumes rise 19,000%? Like, I don't even know how to quantify that, but that's what happened to the NFT market. 19,000% increase year over year as $116 billion worth of NFTs traded in Q1. $116 billion in Q1, Ryan. Q1, that's just one quarter.

• 16:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  A crazy quarter. It's a bullish quarter. I certainly like looking at these numbers rather than Fed numbers. There's also a really cool chart here, David, that you uncovered. Can you talk about this?

• 16:09David Hoffman?

  Yeah, this is a brand new Dune Analytics dashboard, probably covering like the most global set of metrics about Ether and Ethereum at large. So, you know, it starts with the basic basics, like the price and the market cap. But then it gets into more granular stuff, like how many wallets there are to 105 million? How many total transactions there are? 1.56 billion. How many blocks have there been? 14.7 million. 50 million smart contracts created. And then you get to see some gas metrics, the price over time. So it's like the most global, universal, like satellite level view of just the state of the Ethereum economy. And the cool thing about this is that it's real time, like bank lists, the Q1, Q2 quarterly reports. Those are really useful to compare quarter over quarter.

• 16:49David Hoffman?

  But also this dashboard just compares granularly block by block by block for the complete state of the Ethereum economy. Never before have seen like metrics going into economies coming out of crypto right now.

• 17:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's awesome. I guess they did our job. We could just screenshot this. This should be recorded every quarter. In real time. Optimism doing some things too. What's up?

• 17:10David Hoffman?

  Oh, we saw this comment from a long way off. You know, you remember the whole layer 222 summer, Ryan?

• 17:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's Oh, I remember.

• 17:16David Hoffman?

  Yeah, right. Yeah, it's it was always predicated on tokens because tokens create incentives and we need liquidity mining incentives, adoption incentives, and today, or this week, I mean, optimism has announced their stim pack, their stim pack program, along with one of their, you know, very famous, slightly indie hippie niche memes that I don't really get, but they always do these odd memes.

• 17:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's cute.

• 17:41David Hoffman?

  It's cute, but also I kind of don't get it, but I do get it at the same time. Anyways, for the listeners, it's a cat looking at a fish and this fish is the stim pack.

• 17:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's peekaboo, though. It's a surprise for the cat.

• 17:53David Hoffman?

  Oh, it is a surprise.

• 17:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 17:55David Hoffman?

  Oh, right. Okay.

• 17:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  To the community. The cat is the community in this picture. The fish is the liquidity mining you're gonna get.

• 18:02David Hoffman?

  Right. Right. Well, okay. So the OP token is not yet unlocked. People got their airdrop, but they have not been able to claim their airdrop. That happens in just a few weeks. There are 230 million OP tokens coming to liquidity mining incentives, just project growth incentives. For context, the optimism total supply is like 4.2 billion, so 230 million of that 4.2 billion supply going to incentivize project growth on optimism. Ryan, can you smell that?

• 18:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  The fish or the money?

• 18:32David Hoffman?

  Or layer 222.

• 18:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  I smell layer 222. In fact, look, man, we've released two episodes on this this week. It's called the trillion dollar opportunity in layer twos. I think that's what it's called. And it's a two parter and it's a must listen if you're interested in all of our thoughts on the opportunities ahead in layer 2, 22, 22, summer, summer of 20.

• 18:55David Hoffman?

  A lot of twos.

• 18:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, all of it.

• 18:58David Hoffman?

  I mean, most of the opportunities I think are pretty expect are expected like the just looking at the native tokens of the layer twos, the optimism token, the probably coming arbitrum token, then the tokens on layer twos, like the Lyra token, all these apps, and then also the liquidity mine, like all this stuff is known. But then part two of this whole series is something that I'm pretty sure 99% of listeners, 99.9% of listeners have not yet heard of. And the magnitude of this opportunity is equal to all the other opportunities on layer two. So don't fade that podcast.

• 19:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, listen to them both back to back. Okay, NFTs. All right. So DeFi seems a little dead these days, David. But what's propping up the Ethereum economy these days? It's NFTs. Again, people thought NFTs were dead. When will the JPGs go down in price? It's like, never is the answer. What's happening here? What are some metrics that are relevant?

• 19:48David Hoffman?

  Well, okay, so there's been 116 million transactions on on NFTs, which are absolutely crazy. OpenSea registered more than $476 million worth of MFT trades on one day. That was one day. That's half a billion dollars of volume on May 1st, as a result of the Other Side Project launch, which we will get into in just a little bit. The single previous day record for OpenSea was $323 million, set on August 29, 2021. So NFTs continue to break records. However, I will say that there is a lot of churn in NFTs. Volume does seem to be just kind of permanently leaving many projects and going into newer projects.

• 20:31David Hoffman?

  So there's always this like churn, this like rolling forward of the NFT ecosystem where volume seems to be going all time highs every single quarter. Like, it's going into new projects every single quarter. So like, it's not like DeFi tokens where like the same tokens are around quarter after quarter after quarter. There's always something new in the NFT world, because like

• 20:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  Everyone's always looking for the next new shiny thing.

• 20:50David Hoffman?

  Yeah, right, right.

• 20:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's, that's how it goes, guys. And we've got some more stuff to cover for you, including the ape gas fiasco. David just alluded to it. We're going to talk more about that. ENS markets are on fire as well. We're going to discuss why. And what's the last one? This is big, David.

• 21:07David Hoffman?

  I hope it comes out by the time I say this because if it doesn't, I'll be in trouble. But the hop drop, the hop drop is coming. It's a drop and we're going to hop about it and it's going to be fun. All right, guys, so all of those details are coming up in the second half of the show. We'll talk about the hop drop and other related things right after we get to some of these fantastic sponsors that help you go bankless. If you're trying to grow and preserve your crypto wealth, optimizing your taxes is just as lucrative as trying to find the next hidden gem. Alto IRA can help you invest in crypto in tax advantaged ways to help you preserve your hard earned money. Alto Crypto IRA lets you invest in more than 150 coins and tokens with all the same tax advantages of an IRA. They make it easy to fund your alternative IRA or crypto IRA via your 401k or by contributing directly from your bank account.

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• 22:35David Hoffman?

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• 23:19David Hoffman?

  which allows for many more markets to be launched with more exotic collateral types. And also efficiency mode, which allows for a higher loan to value ratios. And of course, portals, allowing users to port their AVE position across all of the networks that AVE operates on, like Polygon, Phantom, Avalanche, Arbitrum, Optimism, and Harmony. The beautiful thing about AVE is that it's completely open source, decentralized, and governed by its community, enabling a truly bankless future for us all. To get your first crypto collateralized loan, get started at AVE.com. That's A-A-B-E dot com. And also check out the AVE Protocol Governance forums to see what more than 100,000 DAO members are all robbing about at governance dot AVE dot com. All right, guys, we are back.

• 24:00David Hoffman?

  Newly released on the scene, Lido is doing an interesting scorecard for themselves. They are giving themselves a self-assessment, excuse me, a self-assessment on all the things that make Lido, Lido. So I just really like this because it's just transparency and making like the weaknesses of DAOs explicit. You can check this out at scorecard.lido.fi. And they just go through and give themselves a rating, a self-assessment on every single variable of every single metric that they need to work on. And so they have things like node distribution geographically around the world. They have things like governance that needs to be improvement, such as is there a robust set of Lido governance delegates? Is Lido governments have sufficient safeguards? Governance seems to be the weak one.

• 24:44David Hoffman?

  But I mean, I just like the explicitness and the intentionality that Lido is putting into giving themselves a rating on vectors that they need to improve on.

• 24:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, we really need Lido to become more decentralized or other staking pools to kind of pick up the slack. Rocket Pool is there, of course. They're more decentralized in a lot of ways than Lido, but they have not been able to accrue the massive amount of stake that Lido has. And so you see most of the issues on the scorecard, the decentralization scorecard are all governance related, involved with who can be a Lido validator and who cannot be, and how upgrades happen, this sort of thing. So yeah, you know, what gets measured gets managed. And look, they're naming it, so hopefully they get better. And this is super important because there's some debate in the Ethereum community about the The massive amount of stake that Lido has accrued like over time. And it's more decentralized than like, say, a Coinbase doing this. But still, there's a lot of centralization vectors and that could be.

• 25:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  That is not a good thing for Ethereum long term. It's also, David, it's early in the game, though. Like, we haven't even done the merge. You can't even withdraw your stake. So I expect a lot of things to play out. But hopefully, Lido goes in the path of making their protocol more decentralized over time.

• 25:52David Hoffman?

  Yeah, and overall, it's just giving a roadmap to other alternatives, other staking as a service. People saying, hey, like, if you're trying to do a staking as a service thing, like, here are the variables that you also need to work on. So I think I consider it just like a public good for the ecosystem, just touting out knowledge about the difficulties and what it needs to be targeted.

• 26:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I'm pretty happy. Let's see progress. What's next, David?

• 26:13David Hoffman?

  ENS Constitution. There is a constitution, a literal book for the ENS DAO, a set of binding rules that determine what governance actions are legitimate for the DAO to take. But this is instantiated in a book. So there's a

• 26:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like a physical book?

• 26:27David Hoffman?

  A physical book, yeah. You can, well, you can download the digital edition for free. But you can, you can buy a physical edition for about $115. But in addition to the physical book, there's also the special limited edition where you can bid using the ENS token on 25 numbered copies out of a total of 50. I would imagine the other 25 goes to, like, Core DAO members. But there's a physical copy, a physical constitution with special edition being bidded on sometime soon. It starts, it started, actually, it already started, it ends in five days. So like, you know, real world relics about our DAOs, which are kind of cool. If you are that into ENS, which you might be if you are in the 10K club, which we'll talk about in a second, you might be interested in buying one of these special editions of the ENS Constitution.

• 27:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's cool, very cool. What's this, David? We got a transaction heat map feature from EtherScan.

• 27:16David Hoffman?

  Yeah, this is just good data visualization. So right now, a new feature out of EtherScan is you can go into a specific contract or a specific address, and you can just look at the heat map for activity as in just how active is that contract? Has that contract been over the last year? The cool thing is, you can do this for every single contract. So you can just get a nice little visualization of the activity around

• 27:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  What am I looking at? Is this less, more, less, more what transactions for this particular contract?

• 27:42David Hoffman?

  Just like raw transaction number.

• 27:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  Ah, cool. That's cool. Yeah, EtherScan just continues to pump it out, pump out the features. Raise Time. Man, every week I feel like there's a new crypto fund that's raised some money. This is a crypto fund that is investing primarily in public tokens. The title of this article is Crypto Wonder Kids Secure $85 Million to Start Their Own Hedge Fund. Ryan Watkins is in on this. We've had him on the podcast before. He's a former analyst at Messari, definitely knows what he's doing. And there's a lot of big investors backing this particular fund. Who are they, David?

• 28:18David Hoffman?

  Oh, my God, there's so many. Brad Burnham from Union Square Ventures. We got Apollo Global Management co-founders Josh Harris, also Do Kwon, I think y'all know who he is, Alameda Research from out of SBF's camp, and also got MultiCoin Capital's Kyle Samani. So some big chats going into this fund.

• 28:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  What's cool about this is I do think that there's something to the thesis that the real opportunity is not private markets in crypto, it's actually undervalued public markets. And so I expect this fund and others to follow to see if that thesis plays out. Here's another one, Syndicate. They just got another $6 million in funding. What is Syndicate, David?

• 28:55David Hoffman?

  Syndicate is a new fund. It's $6 million. It's not all that much, but it's the structure of Syndicate that is more unique. It's kind of like a Y combinator, but for DeFi, but for DAOs. And it's trying to figure out how do we include as many people as possible compliantly and legally, which is the challenge, into the fund. And so they have raised, as a result of this, a total of $28 million in just this year. Again, a very robust name of contenders on this list. A16Z, Carda, Ledger, Circle Ventures, OpenSea, Uniswap Labs, Coinless, Polygon, YGG, PoolSuite, Sofmion, Outliers VC DAO, creators of Friends with Benefits, Rug Radio, Loot Project, Deadfellas, Nansen. Like, all of these people are part of Syndicate.

• 29:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  The cool thing about this is it's not actually a fund. It's a toolset that allows people to create decentralized investment clubs. They have like over a thousand different investment clubs that they've created on this fund. And so this is another $6 million to fund that infrastructure and that toolset. So more investment clubs coming to crypto, more democratization of finance, which is definitely what we need. Like, we need fewer, you have to own a million dollars or over in order to invest in this fund, and more like capital structures for the people. And hopefully DeFi brings that about. David, it's jobs time, but we also have a community question going into this. What's the question?

• 30:18David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so we are doing a new segment called Community Questions. They're going to go at the end, but because this particular question is relevant to jobs, we are raising that question up to the job section. And so Degenerati, I love the name, says, "Are there jobs in Web3 for people who don't have experience in Web2 or code?" And Degenerati, I think we got plenty of answers for you on the Bankless Jobs Board. The answer is yes, there definitely are.

• 30:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  I'm gonna go to that jobs board and show the positions. Maybe as we go through, we highlight them because it's time for us to tell you that you should be getting a job in crypto. Now's the time. Crypto companies, crypto projects, they are hiring hard right now, and you should investigate. You should be on their list. You can enroll in the collaborative, submit your resume. Also, I'm gonna read out a few samples of jobs that crypto companies are hiring for as David dances, and listen for the ones that are non-technical. The first is a marketing manager.

• 31:11David Hoffman?

  Non-technical.

• 31:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  Non-technical, non-technical. BP of engineering.

• 31:15David Hoffman?

  That one's technical.

• 31:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes, head of growth.

• 31:17David Hoffman?

  That was non-technical.

• 31:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  Lead community manager at CryptoScales. Senior product designer at Parcel. Kinda technical, not really though. Ethereum core developer, nevermind.

• 31:26David Hoffman?

  Extremely technical.

• 31:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, don't, sorry, that one's technical. Go Lang engineer, Starknet client, nevermind as well. Bankless newsletter editor. What's that, dude?

• 31:35David Hoffman?

  Non-technical, that's non-technical.

• 31:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Content manager at Tally.

• 31:39David Hoffman?

  That's non-technical.

• 31:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  Director of Developer Relations at Valist.

• 31:42David Hoffman?

  Uh, that might be a little technical.

• 31:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  A little bit, not really though. Solidity architect, Alu.

• 31:47David Hoffman?

  Yeah, that's definitely technical.

• 31:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  Marketing manager, Mesha.

• 31:49David Hoffman?

  Non-technical.

• 31:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  UX designer, Prometheus Research Labs.

• 31:52David Hoffman?

  Kind of mixed results.

• 31:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  And community manager at Degen Dogs Club.

• 31:56David Hoffman?

  Definitely non-technical, you just need to be sociable.

• 31:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  So as you can see, degenerati, there are a lot of opportunities for people who want non-technical career trajectories in crypto. In fact, I feel like that's a lot of the demand these days. That's where some of the, like, people need managers, people need, like, people's growth skills, marketing skills, community management skills.

• 32:14David Hoffman?

  Writing skills, writing skills, universal. Writing skills are universal.

• 32:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  Get a job in crypto, guys, like, even if you're non-technical, especially if you're non-technical. The Bankless Stop Board has those jobs for you, so go submit your resume, submit your profile, or take a look at one of those jobs. David, you ready to get to news, man?

• 32:31David Hoffman?

  Yeah, let's do it. Are we ready for it?

• 32:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, this one's big. Why don't you lead with it?

• 32:35David Hoffman?

  This is what I'm dubbing the HOP drop, HOP Protocol, one of my favorite bridging protocols. It allows you to be a bridge or across all the layer twos and back to the layer one. And they, a while ago, teased this loading bar, which is like, really, really close to finish. And also, I hit up the HOP team, that, there is no official HOP team, there's actually a really cool story behind HOP. They've never taken any venture capital, Ryan.

• 32:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Really?

• 33:00David Hoffman?

  Like, yeah, they've never taken any money.

• 33:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  You can do that? That's an option?

• 33:02David Hoffman?

  Yeah, they just started building out HOP Protocol, they put a team together, and they haven't, it's a little bit like ENS Dow, where they have not taken any outside investors. And so how they are releasing this token, they call it the fair, fair launch, where like Uniswap was the fair launch, right? Retroactive token, because no one saw it coming, no one even knew what the term retroactive token airdrop was, but now that's been gamed. And so HOP Protocol, they've been doing this fair, fair launch strategy, where they kind of just figure it out. They just give a, hey, you've done some work, here's some tokens, you, you've done a lot of work, here's a lot of tokens, and it looks like they are teasing, perhaps. But again, what I'm dubbing the HOP drop.

• 33:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, and perhaps they might be coming, perhaps, on the Bankless Podcast and YouTube channel, perhaps tomorrow?

• 33:48David Hoffman?

  Tomorrow for us, today for the listener.

• 33:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  Friday.

• 33:50David Hoffman?

  So 1:00 PM Pacific Time, 4:00 PM Eastern Time. At the very least, HOP will be launching the Dow, and so we're going to talk about that with Chris Winfrey from HOP Protocol. Yeah, so as we're expecting some announcements, probably by the time this podcast comes out, I hope it comes out. But anyway, stay tuned for that, for the. Livestream with Chris Winfrey of Hot Protocol.

• 34:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, we should say at the time of recording, it's unknown whether there is going to be an airdrop associated with this or not. But when people say DAO, they also generally mean token because how is a DAO governed by tokens? You guys put one and one together and join us at 1:00 PM Pacific time today to hear what they have to say and what some of the criteria for the DAO responsibility might be. David, what else we got to talk about?

• 34:37David Hoffman?

  Fiasco time?

• 34:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, fiasco time. So this happened this weekend. I was kind of monitoring it a little bit Twitter, but like, you know, and this one was hard to pull away from. Once you realize what happened, could you go through the Bored Ape Yacht Club mint fiasco, the crazy gas fees that people experienced this weekend, and all of the fallout that resulted?

• 34:56David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so listeners might remember, Yuga Labs released that deck a while ago, talking about their metaverse. They're going to build out a metaverse, complete with virtual real estate, virtual land. So we have come to that part of the deck. There was the Other Side, which actually I think is a cool name for Metaverse Land, Other Side. Metaverse Land NFT Mint was happening on Ethereum. And so this happened on Saturday. Saturday night, this Mint went live. It was the largest NFT Mint ever. And the demand for the Other Side land NFTs was so strong that it even crashed EtherScan. Very rarely will EtherScan ever go down, but they managed to get this done. The average

• 35:38David Hoffman?

  gas price, Ryan, was absolutely insane, like never before seen gas prices. Like I saw numbers up above like 3,000 for a very brief moment.

• 35:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  3,000 Gua?

• 35:49David Hoffman?

  Yeah, 3,000 Gua for the very, very peak. But even on the coin metrics chart you can see here, there's absolutely needle of a candle all the way up from like the typical gas fee that's been in the last few weeks of like 40 to 50, all the way up to 800, dwarfing all of DeFi summer. So that is pretty cool. 60,234 ETH were spent in gas fees, Ryan. That is absolutely insane. And in one, in just a few, like in an hour or so, this new contract, brand new contract, becomes number six in the all time high leaderboard for burned Ether. That's ahead of MetaMask. That's ahead of MetaMask. And so like just jumping up to the top.

• 36:32David Hoffman?

  Inside of 24 hours, 55,900 Ether was burned.

• 36:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is it right here?

• 36:38David Hoffman?

  This is it right here, yeah.

• 36:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's called other deed?

• 36:40David Hoffman?

  Other deed, that is it.

• 36:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  On the burn leaderboard, number one.

• 36:43David Hoffman?

  Absolutely crazy.

• 36:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's number one on the week, oh, it's number one in the last 30 days.

• 36:47David Hoffman?

  Yeah, and then it's number six.

• 36:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  All time, it's all time six taxpayer.

• 36:53David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 36:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  Thank you, Board Apes, for your contribution to Ethereum Public Goods funding security. That's a pretty big contribution.

• 37:01David Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 37:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's not necessarily a good thing, though, right?

• 37:03David Hoffman?

  It's not a good thing, because a lot of people weren't able to get their transactions through. This is what happens when Ethereum becomes super congested, is transactions fail. And so, what doesn't happen is Ethereum doesn't go down. We'll talk about that in a second. But yeah, a lot of people weren't able to get their transactions through. They spent thousands on gas, but they are reportedly being refunded by Yuga Labs, because Yuga Labs has basically infinite money.

• 37:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  And then people are going like, why? If only we could have known, like, how could this possibly happen?

• 37:33David Hoffman?

  Where did this come from? I'm blindsided by Ethereum's congestion issue.

• 37:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  Completely blindsided. There's no way we would have known that an NFT auction like this would have resulted in what we saw. And then, didn't Yuga Labs, I saw this tweet thread, they went through a long tweet, sort of apologizing to their community, what went right, what went wrong? And one of the tweets that Yuga Labs sent out was basically like, oh, Ethereum is not sustainable, it's not scalable for the apes. And so, we encourage the Board Apes Yacht Club DAO to start planning to migrate to its own chain. That's what they said. So they want to move off of Ethereum, this was floated out there anyway, and create an ape chain of some sort to handle this excess transaction, some sort of a side chain, let's call it.

• 38:21David Hoffman?

  Are you sure about a side chain? Other people were interpreting a brand new layer one.

• 38:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  A brand new, what's the difference, right? Is the question. It's a side chain until you can get other people to come on the thing with you, and then maybe it's a layer one. But you have to kind of earn the right to be a layer one, in my opinion. Andrew Steinwald had a take on this. What was his take on Yuga Labs' potential threat to migrate?

• 38:42David Hoffman?

  Yeah, he puts this into context. Dapper Labs, the creator of CryptoKitties, created their own chain flow because they broke Ether Ethereum back in 2017 with the CryptoKitties congestion. 2018, Axie Infinity tried to work on ETH, but transaction fees were too high, so they tried on Loom. That also didn't work. Loom Network is a is a deep cut of an old plasma chain that is no longer relevant. So that didn't work, so they launched Ron in the sidechain. Yuga Labs, now also saying Ethereum is broken, so they need a new chain. For the record, Ethereum is like five to 10 times more scalable than it was back in 2017. That's a little fun fact that we actually have way more scalability than we did back in the CryptoKitties days. You can talk to the MuteLX team, who minted a ton of on-chain NFTs. But then there is some pushback

• 39:26David Hoffman?

  on this whole thing, where Fubar, he's a famous crypto Twitter commentator, also a technical guy, he goes to Yuga Labs, saying to Yuga Labs, "You guys wrote a terribly unoptimized contract, unoptimized NFT contract, created a gas war, lied about Dutch auction mechanics to pump your own narrative, and then hid how many wallets were eligible to participate in the mint. Maybe get a solidity dev before you go trying to create Binance Smart Chain 2.0."

• 39:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wow!

• 39:51David Hoffman?

  Hot take, hot take.

• 39:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  That is a hot take, right? So basically, they shot themselves in the foot. They knew that this would happen, and they're not optimizing. And instead of kind of like saying, "Oh, we could have done things differently," they're kind of taking their ball and going to another chain.

• 40:07David Hoffman?

  Yeah, they're saying Ethereum's unoptimized. And then Fubar is basically saying, "No, your guys' contracts were unoptimized."

• 40:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think there's some skepticism. Some people are like, "Well, was this all planned to begin with?" Because now you get to benefit potentially from the, "We've got a Layer 1 token pump that is so popular in the narrative right now if, you know, Ape coins become a Layer 1 coin as well."

• 40:29David Hoffman?

  But there is a path forward that I think it makes a ton of sense to me. This is somebody called Waykory, WaKory.ETH. This is what I would do if I'm Yuga Labs right now. I fork optimism, launch my own rollup, I make Apes one house and the ape coin the other house. This is alluding to Optimism's two-house governance structure. Later, I get atomic composability with the entire optimism ecosystem. This satisfies the need for the ape chain to have its own self-sovereign blockchain. Just fork optimism. They already have, this is a beautiful thing, Ryan. The optimism team is pioneering this whole two house governance model. One is NFT based and one is ERC 20 token based. The NFT is like this soulbound NFT for identifiable people. And the other one is the optimism token.

• 41:13David Hoffman?

  The apes already, they have demand for a brand new chain. That's their self-sovereign like control where they get to create their metaverse. They already have the NFTs, Ryan. They're the apes. And they already have the ape coin. It's the ape coin.

• 41:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's 100% the right.

• 41:26David Hoffman?

  All of these pieces are so perfect. This is, this is, this is, this is advice. This is actual advice to any of the Yuga Labs people that might be listening to this. This is the best path forward for you. And not, and also not to fade the atomic composability with the entire optimism and other EVM equivalent chain ecosystem, not to mention the Ethereum layer one itself.

• 41:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I think it's the game theoretic optimum. You know, because otherwise you're actually, you have to spend ape coins and inflation or something to pay for security. And in this model, you get security of Ethereum for free. So you're not really sacrificing anything from the migration. You stay completely composable and you maintain the security. Now, they might not benefit from the short term where an alt layer one pump though, David.

• 42:07David Hoffman?

  I don't know. There's a, there's a, we're a brand new sovereign blockchain layer two on Ethereum pump. That's, that's possible.

• 42:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I think, I think it's a pretty obvious choice, but we'll have to see what they do from here. David, there's another big story that's happening and that is ENS names. We talked about ENS a little bit earlier and we mentioned it on the roll up. Is people snapping up ENS names? What's happening here with the 10K ENS club?

• 42:33David Hoffman?

  Oh yeah, this story has just continued, Ryan. There have been 1 million ENS names total created and people are just bidding on all of these four digit ENS names. So they're calling it the 10K club, like, are you in the 10K club? You know how there are like usually NFT profile picture projects are like 10,000 of them? Well, the bottom 10,000 numbers of ENS, like one through 9999.

• 42:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like 0.ETH, 1.ETH, 2. ETH, all of these, right?

• 43:00David Hoffman?

  I don't actually think single digits or. Two digits are a viable ENS name. So I think it starts at 100.

• 43:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  Got it.

• 43:07David Hoffman?

  It might start at 000, I don't know, up for interpretation. But anyways, there's the 10,000 club, as in the people that have three-digit ENS names up to four-digit ENS names.

• 43:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wow.

• 43:16David Hoffman?

  So if you have like 1234 dot ETH, or remember last week, 555 dot ETH got sold for 55.5 ETH, of course. And so, yeah, if you have the four-digit ENS names, you're in the 10K club, and we're doing a livestream.

• 43:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wait, so what, so the 10K club itself, that this is not a DAO that's going out and purchasing all of these ENS? It's, it's basically a self-organized entity that just came together and is like, hey, we have a club now, and we're gonna let everyone in it who has from 0 to 999 dot ENS, dot ETH, basically. And you come on in, we'll build a treasury, we'll do some cool DAO stuff, but it's not, it's not a organization that started in advance, it's kind of more emergent DAO.

• 43:58David Hoffman?

  It's a bottom-up DAO rather than a top-down DAO.

• 44:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Out of a trend.

• 44:01David Hoffman?

  Hey, guys, like, wait, do you guys also own four-digit ENS names? I own a four-digit ENS name. Let's get into a Discord together.

• 44:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  Great, it's really fun, man.

• 44:10David Hoffman?

  Yeah, and so, well, there's also, there's, well, there's the 10K club, but there's also the 1K club, because there's for the people that only have four or three-letter ENS names.

• 44:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  1K club.

• 44:20David Hoffman?

  Yeah, 1K.

• 44:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Fun fact for you, David, you know turtles, there's only 500 turtles, tiny turtles in existence. So that's the 500 club.

• 44:27David Hoffman?

  Do not try and equate turtles.

• 44:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  I'm just saying, look, I'm just saying, that could be a club too, okay?

• 44:32David Hoffman?

  Get out of here, get out of here.

• 44:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  Don't discard the turtles.

• 44:34David Hoffman?

  Absolutely, get out of here. In addition to all of the, the 4Ks, I think the floor price for a 4K ENS name is something like 1.5 ETH. The five-digit club, the 10,000, 10,000? No, the 100,000 club has 98.5% minted, as in there are only 1.5% of the numbers up to 100,000 that are minted.

• 45:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  So there's still some numbers there to claim.

• 45:03David Hoffman?

  There's 1.5% left. Yeah. And as soon as they get, as soon as they get minted, you know what happens is that the floor price starts to rise because people want to get into at least, if they weren't able to get into the 1K club and they weren't able to get into the 10K club, well, then they can get into the 100,000 club.

• 45:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Still, there's the million club to come.

• 45:19David Hoffman?

  There is also some million.

• 45:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's no rush.

• 45:21David Hoffman?

  It keeps on going.

• 45:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh hilarious. It probably dilutes with each, each, each, each club that you become part of in that ring there, but.

• 45:30David Hoffman?

  We are, we are doing, before we move on, we are doing a live stream with two members of the 10K club community. Tonight, as in yesterday, for you Friday listeners, and so that is available on the YouTube as well.

• 45:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  And everyone is a Friday listener besides our editors, so that applies to all of you.

• 45:46David Hoffman?

  Yeah. So for the editors, we're live streaming, but you guys hardly know that.

• 45:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  Let's talk about this. Starbucks, they're getting in the NFT game, man. Corporate NFTs, they're a thing.

• 45:54David Hoffman?

  My favorite.

• 45:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  Budweiser doing this and such. What's Star, what's Starbucks doing though? Do they have a unique take or is it kind of same same?

• 46:00David Hoffman?

  It's, uh, let me, let me read it to you, Ryan, and you can tell me if this is unique or if this is the same same. Starbucks says, "We plan to start our first NFT collection, membership and community later this year, based on coffee, art and storytelling. It will come with a host of unique experiences and benefits worthy of a Genesis NFT collection from Starbucks." Okay. Unique or the same same?

• 46:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  You know what? Starbucks has never done this. I've never seen it done with coffee. We could have a utility NFT for coffee. Who knows? I guess, you know what? It's cool. Look, I don't want to disparage it. It's cool. Look, Starbucks, Starbucks is getting in the game. I think it starts to feel when you see too many of these experiments that are kind of cookie cutter and they're coming from corporate. It starts to feel a little, uh, you know, me too.

• 46:44David Hoffman?

  Innovation theater.

• 46:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  We're using NFTs too. Watch our stock price go up a little bit like that. So we'll see what they actually do. We should probably suspend judgment until we actually see what Starbucks is trying to pull off.

• 46:54David Hoffman?

  Too, too late. I already judged.

• 46:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, you did judge, but let's give them another chance is what I'm saying. Remember Budweiser, they're doing it well.

• 47:00David Hoffman?

  Budweiser started from the beginning very strong.

• 47:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 47:04David Hoffman?

  They have never tripped up.

• 47:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  See, we are, you can hear the NFT hipsters in us that are just like, you better do this right Starbucks or we're going to judge you hard. Speaking of not doing things right.

• 47:14David Hoffman?

  They already have shitty coffee, so why would we expect any different from their NFTs?

• 47:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  He's also a coffee hipster. Listen to this guy.

• 47:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Speaking of doing things right or maybe not doing it right, Solana, they went down.

• 47:25David Hoffman?

  Down bad like Solana.

• 47:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, Downbad, and this is not the first time. We've talked about it a few other times.

• 47:30David Hoffman?

  It's not the third time. It's like the fifth time.

• 47:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think so. I've lost track, but I think this bears some analysis or some conversation. Why don't you start by telling us what actually happened?

• 47:41David Hoffman?

  Yeah, there's a Solana status Twitter account, which that existence of that Twitter account, I feel like tells you everything you need to know. Anyways, block reduction on Solana mainnet has halted. There's been a quick side quest. There's some debate as whether the halted word is appropriate. Other people have said, just say, call it what it is. It crashed. Validator operators should prepare for a restart in MB validators' channel on Discord. So yeah, that's what happened. When was that? That was on April 30th in the evening time. Solana ended up going down for seven hours because of bots that were swarming an NFT project called Candy Machine. And so Solana Foundation calls it, in effect, a denial of service attack. But again, debate because people were, these were normal NFT minting

• 48:26David Hoffman?

  bots using the Solana blockchain more or less as designed. Like you have those bots on Ethereum too, but there were too many of them. And because Solana doesn't restrict its block size and it lets every transaction go through, they just got swarmed with capacity. And so it broke, it crashed, it went down.

• 48:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's the first part of the story. So Solana goes down due to NFT bot spam transactions, right? And so number one, we should say L1 blockchains are not supposed to go down. Like, let's just repeat that.

• 48:56David Hoffman?

  Number one job. They do not go down.

• 48:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  I understand people talk about, well, it's in, it's in beta, but it's like, I don't know how much-

• 49:02David Hoffman?

  It's billions of dollars.

• 49:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  A $20 billion beta?

• 49:04David Hoffman?

  No. As soon as you're a billion dollars or larger, you are not in beta.

• 49:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's what I think.

• 49:09David Hoffman?

  You have user savings on there.

• 49:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  So you have a layer one. But the other thing is, imagine if, if this was like a layer one that had all sorts of layer twos attached to it and settled on it, right? Then all of those layer twos would no longer be functional either. So you can't build on something that is not up all of the time. But that's not the only part of the story. And I think even the more alarming part of the story is not only did Solana go down, there's talk of censorship at the validator level. Which in my mind is even worse, David, but what are we looking at now with this tweet?

• 49:41David Hoffman?

  Yeah, in the effort to get the Solana chain back online, they were talking about blocking the contracts that the NFT bots were engaging with. So if they block the contracts, as in the validators say, hey, we don't answer to this contract, any transaction that is pinging this contract, we will not process, we will not honor. And so they hate, somebody says in the MB validators Discord on in Solana, they say, blocking Candy Machine V1 and V2 and the Magic Eden clone should be a last resort. Any other options? Somebody follows up saying, in my opinion, blocking them is perfectly fine for now. I'd rather have a network that is up without NFTs versus a network that is down. And then 10 green checkmarks in support of that. And then people spelling out in letters, yes, F the bots.

• 50:23David Hoffman?

  But like Ryan, it's not like I'd rather have a network that is up without NFTs versus a network that is down. It's I'd rather have a network that is up with censorship versus a network that is down. That is the through line here. And that is, that is the thing that I personally do not agree with.

• 50:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's also a whole bunch of validators in a Discord channel shouldn't be able to, shouldn't have the ability to decide this. It's not like, this shouldn't even exist. This conversation shouldn't even be possible on a layer one that is censorship resistant. That's what we're saying. This is a tweet from the Magic Eden founder, I think maybe coming into Discord. What does this say, David?

• 51:01David Hoffman?

  Well, this is not the Magic Eden founder. This is a guy saying that the Magic Eden founder is begging Solana available validators to not block their contracts. And he goes, please do not block this contract. Please do not block this contract, right? Because this is this guy's business. Like he's got a business to run and it's on Solana. And like the Solana validators are like, no, we're gonna have to like shut down your business because it's clogging the network.

• 51:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  I'm a little bit worried we're a broken record on this. All right. Because so I don't, I just, I don't want people to get the impression that we're just like bankless is here. And we're just like arbitrarily bashing other chains. Okay. The reason we're talking about this is because decentralization is essential. Without decentralization, without censorship resistance properties, we don't even deserve.

• 51:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  To be, the whole industry doesn't even deserve to be worth over a billion dollars. It's accomplished nothing. We're databases. We're open databases. We are not a new social fabric that we can like create a money system on or create a new property rights system on. Effectively, everything that the crypto people have been talking about is a bunch of bullshit. Okay, that's why, that's why this is important to us. And it's not about Solana in particular. It's about, let's make sure at the base layer of our protocols, we are building decentralization such that corruption can't seep in, such that validators can't censor and block transactions. Because if we're doing that already at this early stage in the game,

• 52:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  then we're no better than the system we just left. You had a take on this too, David?

• 52:34David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I call this the dual problem of Solana. It goes down because its fees are too low to prevent spam attacks. And the other problem is that the Solana tokenomics are terrible because it's issuing 8.5 million dollars a day in securities spend while only generating $53,000 in fees per day. So like cross those two things. It can't keep itself online because it doesn't prevent transaction fees because their fees are so low, or excuse me, it doesn't prevent like spam attacks because the fees are too low. But the tokenomics are bad because it's inflating so much and it's not capturing any revenue. So, I mean, to me, the simple answer is you raise the fees to prevent the spam and then you, as a result of those fee, that fee capture, you stop issuing so many sole tokens. This, of course, is like the Ethereum game plan.

• 53:19David Hoffman?

  So like the critique here is like, oh, you just want Solana to be like Ethereum. Granted, Solana is being designed to do something that Ethereum is not. It's supposed to be this like, all like this instant messaging platform across the world. But like, in my mind, it's just like, that's not how blockchains work. It's just not what's going to be long-term sustainable. So this is my path for Solana to become a network that has good tokenomics that also doesn't go down.

• 53:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Look, and I recognize, I think the Solana community knows that they still need to fix things. And so there is the hope out there that they take a path that leads towards more decentralization while they're scaling this. And you maybe, maybe you kind of agree that the Solana network is in beta, and they need to take steps towards this. So I just very hopeful that the Solana community gets things together, and they figure this out, and they move it forward. But they're not going to be able to do that unless they have some better mechanism design here.

• 54:09David Hoffman?

  And the last take I'll say on this is, remember, we are here to have anti-nation-state level resistance. And so if your network trips over because like NFT minting bots killed it, like, that nation state can definitely kill it. Like, it can definitely go down.

• 54:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, the Fed, the Fed just has to go in that Discord channel and be like, yeah, stop right now, please.

• 54:27David Hoffman?

  Yeah, you guys, quit your shenanigans.

• 54:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, please, right now.

• 54:31David Hoffman?

  Right now, and then deactivates, or AML KYC, or anything else you'd like. Anyway, moving on. Warren Buffett still doesn't like Bitcoin, David. This is my shocked face.

• 54:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, let's read some of the quotes he said. So he and Charlie Munger, just this week, Buffett said he wouldn't pay $25 for all the Bitcoin in the world. Yes, he would, Buffett. Oh my. Why would you not do that?

• 54:57David Hoffman?

  Right. Yeah. It's like, it's like, he's virtue signaling, right? He's basically virtue signaling and say, hey, all the other boomer investors of the world, I wouldn't take Bitcoin for $25. He goes, in my life, Charlie Munger says, in my life, I try to avoid things that are evil, stupid, and make me look bad in comparison to somewhere else. And he says Bitcoin does all three. Question mark there, but then he follows up and saying, the billionaire investor explained that holding Bitcoin is stupid because he expects it to be worth $0 in time. Okay. Evil, because it undermines the integrity and stability of the US financial system. Yeah, statist, okay. And also makes the United States look foolish because China's ruling party was smart enough to ban it. See, my, these, in

• 55:40David Hoffman?

  my mind, all I call these all personal problems. As in, like, yeah, those are your problems, bro. Like Bitcoin's gonna add another block every 10 minutes regardless of your opinion on it.

• 55:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  You know, it really cracks me up when people like This talk about Bitcoin say it's stupid and it's going to zero.

• 55:55David Hoffman?

  It's stupid.

• 55:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  Also evil and it undermines the US financial system. Like you gotta pick one of those things. If it's stupid and it's going to zero, it's not going to undermine the US financial system, is it?

• 56:06David Hoffman?

  No.

• 56:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's just gonna go to zero. So you don't have to worry about it. So how come you're saying it's stupid and it's also undermining the US financial system? You gotta pick one, Charlie. Sorry, you can't be both.

• 56:16David Hoffman?

  Really good point.

• 56:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, well, moving on. Maybe Buffett, Munger, come on Bankless. I'm disgusted. They're fantastic investors in other areas, so I just don't understand this refusal to like dig deep in the space. But let's talk about this. This is, this is big, David.

• 56:34David Hoffman?

  This is bad.

• 56:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  Pull Together is involved in something. We alluded to this in the, in the intro today. Tell us what's going on with this troll that seems to be suing Pull Together.

• 56:43David Hoffman?

  Yeah, somebody who is connected intimately connected with Elizabeth Warren's campaign. I think a previous campaign like helper person came to Pull Together. They bought $10 worth of Pull Together tickets for Pull Together's no loss lottery, which they call a prize linked savings account, as in it's a savings account that you get a prize every now and then. And then as soon as they did that, they filed a class action lawsuit against Pull Together, saying that it operates in a regulatory legal gray area and that it's actually a lottery and that is not a legal thing to do. And so this, this class action lawsuit is suing Pull Together on behalf of every single Pull Together user that has ever deposited money into Pull Together.

• 57:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  I'm one of those.

• 57:25David Hoffman?

  You're one of those. So he is suing Pull Together on your behalf, Ryan. And so of the, I believe, the 144 million, $122 million that has collectively been, been put into Pull Together, they are suing, doing a class action lawsuit for 2X that amount. So they are suing Pull Together $244 million to make their users whole. The thing is, Pull Together is a no loss lottery. No one loses any money.

• 57:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  No one's lost anything.

• 57:51David Hoffman?

  The point. So no one lost anything, yet they are suing in a class action lawsuit Pull Together for a quarter billion dollars.

• 57:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is, this is embarrassing, David. They're picking like. The nicest protocol to do this to, right? Rather than go look at all of the other, like, all these degen protocols and like, people who've got shitty paths and maybe have run away with the money. This is freaking pooled together.

• 58:13David Hoffman?

  It's pooled together. Never lost anyone a dime. Responsible for onboarding, like, tens of thousands of people from, like, countries all across the globe. If there's any DeFi app that has on-boarded, like, third-world countries and, like, non-Western countries the most, it's pooled together.

• 58:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's a savings account, man. It's a savings account that boosts your savings. Like, why, why isn't this person who put, why doesn't this person put $10 in their Wells Fargo account and sue the US government for, like, losing 9% per year on their money, right? Like, I mean, pooled together is only upside. I don't know why they're picking on the nicest kid in the class to go do this to. Maybe it's because of sort of the lottery type of example. Maybe they feel like they have a stronger legal case.

• 58:57David Hoffman?

  Yes.

• 58:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's very clear to me that they are trying to make a, um, a statement to the entire DeFi industry. And they are trying to, to use the court systems, to troll the court systems into, like, I don't know, some sort of action that would further regulate, further constrain, further destroy the innovation of the DeFi ecosystem in, in the US. That's what the intent seems to be.

• 59:21David Hoffman?

  Yeah, and I think they're not, they, they don't really care about pooled together specifically. I think they are seeing pooled together as like a chink in the armor because of its association to being a lottery. And they're going after pooled together. And I think the, this strategy here is if they win something in court, they get to go in discovery mode. And so pooled together has to turn over all the communications, all the Discord messages. And then, like, all, you know, all those people, it's a DAO, so they work for other DAOs. And so the communications about, like, Uniswap comes out and Compound comes out. And so then they get information about those things. And it's, it's a, it's like a backdoor attack into the DeFi ecosystem using a legal exploit in the legal world. It's, it's insipid in both accounts. So absolutely F these people.

• 1:00:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's not, it's not even a lottery, right? Like, like, in the traditional, uh, usage of the word lottery, people put money at risk and they actually lose money.

• 1:00:11David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 1:00:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  No one's lost money here. They've only gained money here.

• 1:00:15David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 1:00:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  I don't even-

• 1:00:16David Hoffman?

  Or not, or nothing.

• 1:00:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, well.

• 1:00:18David Hoffman?

  Worst case scenario, you get your money back.

• 1:00:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  I hope, I hope in some way that the, the DeFi and crypto industry rallies around Pool Together. I don't know if there's a way to do that, but like, if this is a hill to die on, I mean, like, you picked the wrong protocol, guys. Like, I mean, there's, there's examples of shadowy protocols out there with like, some, you know, stuff that like, some shenanigans going on. Pool Together is not one of those.

• 1:00:43David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 1:00:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, so I don't know if there's a way to rally the DeFi community around this and push back, but like, we have to win at every level of government, or else, people who, I don't know, what is the vendetta against this? Is it coming from the banking industry?

• 1:00:58David Hoffman?

  I don't know. Well, I mean, a former technology lead for Elizabeth Warren's 2020 presidential campaign, Mr. Kent, is described in his lawsuit as someone who is gravely concerned at the prospect that cryptocurrency, which consumes voluminous amounts of electricity, could contribute to climate change besides enabling bad actors who circumvent financial sanctions. So Pool Together? What?

• 1:01:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's just, look at this. Voluminous amounts of electricity, contributing to climate change. I put $10 in Pool Together, and now you owe me like $150 million.

• 1:01:34David Hoffman?

  Insane.

• 1:01:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  Uh, yeah. Anyway, enough said there. Hopefully, it's just, you know, nothing comes of that, but I know protocols like Pool Together.

• 1:01:40David Hoffman?

  Well, Pool Together has spent a lot of money fighting these legal fees, so this is not just, this has been ongoing, this, this news broke, we actually covered this news months ago, Ryan. Like, person put $10 into Pool Together, now suing them over gas fees.

• 1:01:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, we saw the original complaint.

• 1:01:53David Hoffman?

  Yeah, that was like a quarter ago. This has been going on for Pool Together ever since then. So it's not like this is some brand new thing. Like, they have been fighting this, and like, they're finally just like going public about it.

• 1:02:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, moving on. Hopefully, things get better. We get a lot of work to do in the US. The Faye Protocol.

• 1:02:08David Hoffman?

  Things of, just, speaking of things not getting better.

• 1:02:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, this is not getting better. Okay, so there was an exploit, Rory Capital exploit. David, what happened here?

• 1:02:14David Hoffman?

  Yeah, there was a $80 million exploit in a, what's been described as a textbook re-entrancy bug. Somebody was able to bug the Rory side of the Faye Rory Dow for $80 million. As a result, there is a $10 million bounty on that $80 million on that capital exploit. I don't really know how to read the code, but there was a cool tweet that I saw that illustrated the illustrated the exploit. But again, these picture, the the person putting out this team says is a textbook re-entrancy exploit, whatever that means.

• 1:02:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  That is the type of exploit that I believe. Is that the one that got the Dow, David?

• 1:02:51David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  Is that the one also that got the parity wallet?

• 1:02:54David Hoffman?

  I don't know if re-entrancy attacks are like universally the same. It's probably just like the same pattern over and over and over again.

• 1:02:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's the smart contract code. There's a flaw in the actual smart contract code, which is different than an economic attack. Anyway, guys, we got more to cover. Coming up next, we're gonna do this new segment, Dave. It's gonna be a lot of fun. Questions from the nation. These are questions from roll-up listeners like you to David and I. We're gonna answer those questions. Of course, we got to get to the takes of the week. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible.

• 1:03:23David Hoffman?

  Arbitrum is an Ethereum layer two scaling solution that's going to completely change how we use DeFi and NFTs. Over 300 projects have already deployed to Arbitrum and the DeFi and NFT ecosystems are growing rapidly. Some of the coolest and newest NFT collections have chosen Arbitrum as their home, all the while DeFi protocols continue to see increased usage and liquidity. Using Arbitrum has never been easier, especially with the ability to deposit directly into Arbitrum through all the exchanges, including Binance, FTX, Quobi, and Crypto.com. Once inside, you'll notice Arbitrum increases Ethereum speed by orders of magnitude for a fraction of the cost of the average gas fee. If you're a developer who wants low gas fees and instant transactions for your users, visit arbitrum.io/developer to start building your DApp on Arbitrum. If you're a Dgen, many of your favorite DApps on Ethereum are already on Arbitrum, with many moving over every day. Go to

• 1:04:08David Hoffman?

  bridge.arbitrum.io now to start bridging over your ETH and other tokens in order to experience DeFi NFTs in the way it was always meant to be. Fast, cheap, secure, and friction-free. The Layer 2 era is upon us. Ethereum's Layer 2 ecosystem is growing every day, and we need bridges to be fast and efficient in order to live a Layer 2 life. ACROSS is the fastest, cheapest, and most secure cross-chain bridge. With ACROSS, you don't have to worry about the long wait times or high fees to get your assets to the chain of your choice. Assets are bridged and available for use almost instantaneously. ACROSS bridges are powered by UMA's Optimistic Oracle to securely transfer tokens from Layer 2 back to Ethereum. A token proposal is being deliberated as we speak in the ACROSS forum, where community members will decide on the token distribution.

• 1:04:52David Hoffman?

  You can have your part of ACROSS's story by joining the Discord and becoming a co-founder and helping to design the fair, fair launch of ACROSS. If you want to bridge your assets quickly and securely, go to across.to to bridge your assets between Ethereum, Optimism, Arbitrum, or Boba Networks.

• 1:05:10David Hoffman?

  MakerDAO is the OG DeFi protocol. The MakerDAO produces DAI, the industry's most battle-tested and resilient stablecoin. Using Maker, you don't need to sell your collateral if you need liquidity. Instead, you can spin up a Maker Vault and use your collateral to mint DAI directly. With Maker, the power to mint new money is in your hands. The Maker protocol is extremely hardened and operated by one of the most experienced DAOs in existence. They've been here since the beginning. They've seen it all, and so you can mint DAI with the assurance that your collateral is safe. Soon, Maker will be present on all chains and L2s, so minting DAI can take place on oasis.app, Zirion, Zapr, or any other DeFi protocol that you use. Follow Maker on Twitter, @makerDAO, and learn from the oldest and most resilient DAO in existence.

• 1:05:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, guys, we are back. We're starting with the questions of the week. This is maybe a recurring segment we're gonna do. And the call to action, guys, if you have a burning question in your mind after listening to the roll-up for David and I to answer, go follow @banklesshq. Once a week, it will ask you what question you have. You could drop your question in the thread, and we will pick maybe one of the most liked, our favorites, to answer. And we got a few questions teed up. What's the first one, David?

• 1:06:20David Hoffman?

  Yeah, first one comes from Michael Wong, good buddy Michael Wong, actually works at Bankless. His question is for you, Ryan. How tall are you?

• 1:06:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  I feel like this is a troll tweet, okay? Because there's some rumors going on. How about, you'll find out, David, when we meet in person. I think no one knows this, but I'll give you guys a hint. It's somewhere between 4'6" and 6'4".

• 1:06:41David Hoffman?

  I think it would be between those numbers, wouldn't it?

• 1:06:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  What else we got?

• 1:06:47David Hoffman?

  Well, I think that confirms that you are not a bot because you at least have legs.

• 1:06:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, definitely have legs, definitely.

• 1:06:52David Hoffman?

  Definitely have legs. All right, next question. I'm a huge fan of the podcast and both of you, thank you to truckin.eth for that. I have learned a ton about crypto in general from Bankless. My question is, why do you guys seem to only talk about optimism, Arbitrum and Polygon when discussing Layer 2s? Loopring seems to be trying to accomplish exactly what you guys are. They don't finish that sentence, but we get the gist. You want to start?

• 1:07:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I'll start. Loopring is fantastic. Loopring is great. We actually talked a lot about Loopring during the early days. I think we're fans, we love all of our children, all of our children being all of the L2 solutions that are truly decentralized out there, big fans of Arbitrum, big fans of Polygon, big fans of optimism, ZK Sync, Starkware, all of these things, Loopring included. It's just a matter of like time and attention of what we can focus on in a given week. We tend to focus on the ones that are gaining momentum and gaining more traction. So, you know, one proxy for this that we like to look at is on Layer 2 beat, you can see total locked value and growth of these Layer 2s over time. And we pick, you know, the most legitimate ones and the most high growth ones are the ones that we generally prioritize.

• 1:07:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  But all of them are fantastic. What would you say, David?

• 1:07:59David Hoffman?

  All right, I'll play devil's advocate, Ryan. I think the reason why Loopring hasn't had the adoption that other Layer 2s have had is just because it's not generalizable. ZK rollup, it does two main features. It's really good at payments and it's really good at swapping tokens. So like it's a good like currency exchange slash payments rollup. You can also do NFTs on it, but it doesn't have like the generalizability that something like an optimistic rollup has. And so that like constrictedness in use cases, I think, is why like Loopring has kind of lacked behind the rest of the Layer 2 ecosystem over the last year since we started covering it. But I mean, as soon as we see any meaningful adoption, we'll start talking about it. But just like, you know, got to go to where the attention is, got to go to where the news are and news is.

• 1:08:43David Hoffman?

  And I just don't see that much like use cases coming to Loopring that frequently.

• 1:08:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, absolutely. Here's the next question. I don't know if this is a, I don't know if this is a troll or what.

• 1:08:53David Hoffman?

  No, that's a good, maybe a little both. It's good. You want me to read it?

• 1:08:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  Which, yeah, you read it.

• 1:08:57David Hoffman?

  Which one will come first? Sharding on Ethereum or Ethereum the movie?

• 1:09:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, that's a legitimate question. Never mind. I take you back. This is not a troll question. So what do you think will come first? ETH sharding or ETH the movie? And we said ETH the movie was coming, what? Kami told us 2024, two years from now? Yeah. We're gonna get sharding sometime before 2024?

• 1:09:15David Hoffman?

  Yeah, well, it depends on when in 2024 the movie comes. But like, you know, both of these things could be delayed in tandem with each other. So this is actually a really tough question. Like, the timing on these things is actually kind of lining up. I do think sharding does happen in 2024.

• 1:09:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  You know what? This is a good question for the Dank sharding panel that we are doing. So this is a, look, that was totally unintentional. There's a, there's a panel. We're having Vitalik, we're having some, we're having Tim Baker, we're having some of the other Ethereum researchers.

• 1:09:46David Hoffman?

  Dank grad.

• 1:09:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  The Dank and Dank sharding is coming. This is like an earlier attempt to bring sharding to Ethereum, basically in the form of data sharding. And I think we're gonna want to talk about timelines, if we can, in that panel. Are we talking Dank sharding 2023 or 2024? We'll ask that question.

• 1:10:03David Hoffman?

  Of course, Tim Baker and the rest of the Ethereum researchers hate having dates press upon them, so we'll ask this question instead.

• 1:10:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's a way, that's a way, thank you, listener, for giving us this question. It's a much more low-key way to ask and not put them on the spot, but still put them on the spot.

• 1:10:19David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Sorry, Tim. I know what you're saying.

• 1:10:22David Hoffman?

  Takes of the week.

• 1:10:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  Takes of the week, David.

• 1:10:23David Hoffman?

  Takes of the week. This is, yeah, this is coming from you. You want me to read it to you?

• 1:10:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, read it to me, please.

• 1:10:28David Hoffman?

  Ryan Sean Adams says that Layer 2s are parasitic. He's being, he's being facetious here. Layer 2s are parasitic to the Ethereum economy, the same way that New York, California, Texas, and Florida are parasitic to the US economy. And then, of course, he follows up with, lol, no, they're not.

• 1:10:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  They're really not, David. And this is something we talked about in our episodes early in the week, the trillion dollar opportunity in Layer 2, which is this is a map of US states and they're all renamed in this map to countries with similar GDPs. And so like California is renamed UK because California and UK are the same size in terms of economy. Canada is the size of, Texas is the size of Canada, right? All of these states are massively contributing to what? To the United States GDP, all right? They're all secured by the United States federal government. They subscribe to the same security regime. They subscribe to the same protocol. That is a great analog for

• 1:11:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Layer 2s. All of the Layer 2s that we've been talking about, Loopring included, Optimism, Arbitrum, Loopring, Starkware, all of these things, if they are settling on the Ethereum network, then they are net accretive to the Ethereum economy. They are part of the Ethereum network, if you will. And people talking about like even last week, last weekend, they were talking about Ethereum transaction fees are so high, oh my God. And like, they are on main net, but broaden your view of what Ethereum transaction is. If you're doing an Ethereum transaction, if you're doing a transaction on Arbitrum or Optimism in the future, that is an Ethereum transaction. And that is 95% less in cost, right? The transaction that would have cost you $10 on Ethereum main net only costs you $1.50

• 1:12:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  on Arbitrum, right? And so that is all net accretive. I don't understand this idea that Layer 2s are going to be parasitic to Ether as an asset. They are absolutely not. And I think we have the full version of that case as to why in our episode, in our part one episode we dropped earlier this week.

• 1:12:27David Hoffman?

  Yeah, for Bankless listeners that are not on Twitter, this was part of a Twitter discourse in the last week was that I think it was largely coming from like the avalanche camp saying that Layer 2 tokens, which is now in the conversation because Optimism launched their token, they're saying, well, Layer 2s are just going to suck away all the transaction demand from the Layer 1. And we're like, yes, that's the point. But like the contrast is like AVAC subnets versus Ethereum Layer 2s, these are competing visions.

• 1:12:55David Hoffman?

  Some of the avalanche camp is like the layer twos will just be parasitic to Ethereum.

• 1:13:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  I definitely don't see it. You guys listen to those episodes and do your own due diligence and you get your take here. David, this was something that I tweaked you a little bit.

• 1:13:09David Hoffman?

  This one, this one, this one triggered me here. This is a conversation from some non crypto people about how blockchains are completely just like non useful for computing technologies. So the parent tweet says, every computer scientist should be able to see that cryptocurrencies are totally dysfunctional payment systems and that in quote blockchain technology, including smart contracts, misspelled, is a technological fraud. Will they please go say that out loud? And then somebody follows up saying Harvard computer science degree here, many decades of practical experience. There is no computing problem for which blockchain is anywhere near the best solution. And before we go to my tweet, I want to go to

• 1:13:49David Hoffman?

  Santi Siri's tweet who retweets this and says, oops, tease my tweet. Santi Siri, whoever had on layer zero, he goes, college dropout here, many decades, living under high inflation. Blockchains don't solve computing problems. They solve social, political and economic problems. Yes.

• 1:14:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's right.

• 1:14:09David Hoffman?

  It's not a computer, it's not a computation platform. It's a social platform. It's an economic platform. So like, you know, Mr. Harvard with your computer science degree, like you're not coming in here being an expert, bro. And so this is a tweet I followed up with.

• 1:14:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  But maybe he was right though, David. Before you get to your tweet, maybe he's right. There is no computing problem for which the block, that's what he said, computing problem. It's in the domain of computing problem. Maybe he's technically right.

• 1:14:34David Hoffman?

  He's technically right, but yeah, he just misses the forest for the trees.

• 1:14:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  What is the, what is the forest through the trees?

• 1:14:40David Hoffman?

  Right. And so I did the whole capital letters, uncapital letters. I was making a fun of it and go Harvard computer science degree here, decades of XP. I go, no amount of credentialism can help you understand blockchains. You learn about crypto by doing crypto things, not by sitting in an armchair. You know what happened next, Ryan?

• 1:14:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  What happened?

• 1:14:57David Hoffman?

  He blocked me.

• 1:14:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, look, man, your tweet was a little spicy. I understand. I think, look, I think that this is just the ivory tower, talking about like you coming down and saying like, I'm an expert. I have these credentials. I understand like.

• 1:15:11David Hoffman?

  Listen to me.

• 1:15:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes, and you know, this, this, this system that you guys are creating over here is completely invalid and haven't even spent the time to do the deep dive, due diligence, to actually come up with a well-informed critique. We see this all of the time. So I understand why, why you're tweaked. Do you have something against Harvard, though?

• 1:15:31David Hoffman?

  No, it's just like, oh, I've got a Harvard, I've got a Harvard degree. Like, the crypto industry is inherently anti-credentialess, just because like credentialists are like incumbent protections. And so like regulation, like credentialism, it's all just like trying to gatekeep away. And so like, you know, especially about blockchains, where there is no textbook, there is nothing. And so you can only learn about crypto by doing crypto things. You can't learn about crypto by like, reading about it.

• 1:15:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  I just always turn back and I'm like, okay, explain why this industry is worth $2 trillion. Explain why it survived every single time that you said it was a Ponzi scheme and it was going to zero, just like Charlie Munger. Explain what's happening here. Like, put, put them on the defensive and you don't usually get good answers. You usually get answers like, it's rat poison squared, or it's a complete scam, or it's tulips, it's a bubble. Love to hear from the great critiquers of crypto. They are few and far between. David, gotta ask you the question. What are you excited about this week, man?

• 1:16:31David Hoffman?

  Dude, I'm excited about the Layer Zero that I did with Carl Florsch. I've said it a bunch of times this week, but I'll say it for my last time. Carl Florsch, he was the guy that got me into the Ethereum space to begin with during just the mania of 2017, when I didn't know anything, I was a crypto novice. All these different blockchains existed, they were spinning up new ones, new tokens were a thing. I had no idea what was up, what was down, and how to interpret these things. And then I stumbled upon Carl Florsch's cryptoeconomics.study website, where he was walking through like complex, but also basic issues about blockchains and how blockchains work, like things like nonce's and hashes. And he just like taught me so much in this thing. And then, so as a result of that, it's like, oh, whatever that guy is saying, he's saying the right things.

• 1:17:15David Hoffman?

  Like, this guy gets it. He understands what's going on. And so Carl Florsch has been a personal hero of mine ever since. And I finally got him on Layer Zero. Ryan. And so we talked about what we use the metaphor of like if humanity is a decentralized school of fish, how do we steer the school of fish? So that's like the through line of the metaphor throughout the whole entire podcast. And this goes into the question of retroactive public goods funding and the MEV auctions on the optimism layer two. And it makes me super bullish on humanity, Ryan, because the public goods funding, we talked about this in the part two of our layer two podcast, which began for the like 50th time of this podcast.

• 1:17:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Listen to it.

• 1:17:53David Hoffman?

  Listen to the path towards a Star Trek future, Ryan, is actually known. Like, we actually have the steps to getting there. Like, first, we sell blocks on optimism, we send that money towards public goods funding, using the retroactive public goods funding mechanism, we build out public goods on optimism, we scale that out to Ethereum, we scale that out to the whole crypto industry, we scale that out to the whole world, a few question marks, and then all of a sudden, we have a Star Trek future. Like, this path is concrete, and it makes me really optimistic about the future. So if you have not listened to that podcast with Carl Flourish, I beg you to go listen to it, so you can see the path forward for an optimistic future as well.

• 1:18:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  It look, it's not just substance that Carl brings, it's also tone. If you can find me a more optimistic human being, a more genuine human being, like, you know, I've never, I've never seen one. Carl, it just exudes this enthusiasm, this optimism, this hope for the future that's pretty infectious. So.

• 1:18:47David Hoffman?

  All right, Ryan, you're up. What are you excited about?

• 1:18:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  Look, it just kind of hit me. We booked Mark Andreessen for the podcast, all right? He's coming on the podcast with Chris Dixon.

• 1:18:56David Hoffman?

  Andreessen.

• 1:18:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  And he doesn't do crypto podcasts.

• 1:18:58David Hoffman?

  And A16Z for listeners out there.

• 1:19:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's the guy who did the Netscape thing.

• 1:19:02David Hoffman?

  It's the Andreessen, the Andreessen.

• 1:19:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  He created the browser, you know, the thing that we're all using to like, do everything in our life, whether it's mobile or on the internet. It's like the portal into the internet. You know, he was there for that. He was there for like, all of Web1's development, all of Web2's development. Now, A16Z is doing big things in crypto and Web3. And I just can't believe that guy's coming to the podcast, dude. Like, I just, he's been a on my list of people I've wanted to talk to since forever, way before crypto, but like, We'd have no, no chance to bump into each other, rub elbows until now. And so I'm just, it just kind of hit me this week like, holy shit. Marc Andreessen is coming on the podcast. So that's happening. That's what I'm excited about.

• 1:19:46David Hoffman?

  Yeah, man, we were just getting like the wisdom of our technological elders getting on the podcast lately. He's also coming on with Chris Dixon, who was our most downloaded episode ever. So you know, it's going to be fire anyways. Plus you get the perspective of Marc Andreessen, Andreessen. Yeah, that's, that's pretty cool. That's going to be a hot episode.

• 1:20:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it's coming soon and in May. David, meme of the week.

• 1:20:06David Hoffman?

  Meme of the week.

• 1:20:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  Let's show it.

• 1:20:07David Hoffman?

  Before we do, how many days until permissionless, Ryan?

• 1:20:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  I don't know. I just, I've lost track of time.

• 1:20:12David Hoffman?

  About 12.

• 1:20:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  12 days?

• 1:20:14David Hoffman?

  12 days.

• 1:20:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's it till the first day of the conference?

• 1:20:17David Hoffman?

  I think that's right.

• 1:20:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh my God, man. That is, that is soon. I'm excited.

• 1:20:21David Hoffman?

  So here's the meme of the week. We brought on a new like memer person in, in Bankless. And so this is one of his memes. This is the, the, there's that, that cute gif of like the two toddlers running from super far away to hug each other. And it's me and Ryan.

• 1:20:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's awesome, man. I can't look, it's gonna be fun. We're gonna meet in person. I don't know where that's gonna happen. We haven't like arranged it or anything, but uh, it's, it's gonna be awesome, dude, to actually meet you in person.

• 1:20:43David Hoffman?

  In my physical human body, okay? Oh yeah? Oh yeah.

• 1:20:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:46David Hoffman?

  That's what they all said.

• 1:20:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  So here's the weird thing. It's like the artist drew my head backwards. I don't understand why.

• 1:20:52David Hoffman?

  Well, yeah, that's because no one knows what the back of your head looked like, dude.

• 1:20:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's what you said on Twitter.

• 1:20:56David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  But then I showed you what the back of my head looks like. This is exactly what it looks like.

• 1:21:00David Hoffman?

  If that's not what it looks like, I'm gonna be so disappointed. I've never seen you wear a gold chain before.

• 1:21:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  No, I put that on for the picture, you know, because I wanted to capture the whole.

• 1:21:09David Hoffman?

  It does, it does fit the mullet.

• 1:21:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  The whole moment, yeah. Yeah, this is my office there. You see that?

• 1:21:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  Meme of the week. Do we have a second meme of the week?

• 1:21:16David Hoffman?

  We do, we know, just that one.

• 1:21:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  Guys, that's it. It's roll up time. Thanks so much for hanging with us. As always, none of this has been financial advice. It's not haircut advice either. ETH is risky, Bitcoin is risky, so is DeFi. You could lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. Don't say we didn't warn you. We're glad you're with us on the Bankless journey. Thanks a lot.