Pod Insights Bankless ROLLUP: 5th Week of April (ETH All Time High, Eminem NFT, Tesla Sells BTC, JP Morgan Crypto Fund) About this episode Download the crypto meta to your brain in this weekly show.
5th Week of April, 2021
------
π SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/
ποΈ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/
π CLAIM YOUR BADGE: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/-guide-2-using-the-bankless-badge
------
BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS:
π° GEMINI | FIAT & CRYPTO EXCHANGE
https://bankless.cc/go-gemini
π BALANCER | EXCHANGE & POOL ASSETS
https://bankless.cc/balancer
π» AAVE | LEND & BORROW ASSETS
https://bankless.cc/aave
π¦ UNISWAP | DECENTRALIZED FUNDING
http://bankless.cc/uniswap
------
π£ DHARMA | From Dollars to DeFi in a Tap!
https://bankless.cc/dharma
------
Topics Covered:
0:00 Intro
3:55 MARKETS
4:05 BTC Price
4:25 ETH Price
ETH Market Cap
https://decrypt.co/69493/ethereum-flips-paypal-top-25-global-assets-market-cap?utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=feed&utm_source=flipboard https://decrypt.co/69493/ethereum-flips-paypal-top-25-global-assets-market-cap?utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=feed&utm_source=flipboard
ETH/BTC
https://ratiogang.com/
12:40 DeFi Action
14:45 RELEASES
16:00 Aave Liquidity Mining
https://cointelegraph.com/news/lending-giant-aave-set-to-launch-liquidity-mining-program? https://cointelegraph.com/news/lending-giant-aave-set-to-launch-liquidity-mining-program
19:40 Stocks Live on Kwenta - FAANGT
https://blog.kwenta.io/stocks-are-now-live-on-kwenta/
22:06 Nexus Protocol Cover
https://medium.com/nexus-mutual/nexus-is-growing-protocol-cover-is-live-56752446ec57
23:25 Yearn Quarterly Report - Analystβs Dream
https://github.com/yearn/yearn-pm/blob/master/financials/reports/2021Q1-yearn-quarterly-report.pdf
26:00 Balancer Labs & Gnosis
https://medium.com/balancer-protocol/the-crypto-cinematic-universe-crossover-event-of-the-summer-balancer-gnosis-protocol-bgp-638568aa0385
CowSwap DEX
https://twitter.com/MEVprotection/status/1387392829731770375
28:30 NEWS
28:40 EIP-1559 July 14th
https://twitter.com/sassal0x/status/1385624541586608132?s=20
30:05 EU 2 Year Digital Bond
https://www.coindesk.com/european-investment-bank-issues-121m-digital-notes-using-ethereum
31:21 Tether & Coinbase Pro
https://twitter.com/coinbasepro/status/1385359434411556868?s=21
33:35 Metamask 5 Million Users
https://consensys.net/blog/metamask/metamask-surpasses-5-million-monthly-active-users/
$400k per day in revenue
https://twitter.com/tomhschmidt/status/1387680567492104192
36:42 Why Gas is Cheaper
https://twitter.com/sassal0x/status/1386180278817759235
37:47 Ethereum on CNN
https://www.reddit.com/gallery/n0fjfd
39:40 Eminem & Nifty Gateway
https://niftygateway.com/collections/eminemopens
40:58 Satoshi Disappeared
https://www.forbes.com/sites/peterizzo/2021/04/26/10-years-ago-today-bitcoin-creator-satoshi-nakamoto-sent-his-final-message/?sh=66bd26dc10dd
43:05 Tesla Sells 18% BTC
https://www.theblockcrypto.com/linked/102899/q1-earnings-show-tesla-sold-off-272m-of-its-btc-purchase
Tesla Makes Money
https://www.wsj.com/articles/tesla-makes-more-money-trading-bitcoin-than-selling-cars-11619517615
46:09 JP Morgan Bitcoin Fund
https://www.coindesk.com/jpmorgan-to-let-clients-invest-in-bitcoin-fund-for-first-time-sources
47:06 Nexon allocates $100M for BTC
https://www.theblockcrypto.com/linked/103058/game-maker-nexon-100-million-bitcoin
49:30 Visa Moving Into Crypto in a βVery Big Wayβ
https://www.theblockcrypto.com/linked/103048/visa-ceo-crypto-earnings-call-comments
50:30 PayPal CEO Bullish Crypto
https://time.com/5957001/paypal-cryptocurrencty-bitcoin-dan-schulman/
51:42 PayPal on Coinbase
https://www.theblockcrypto.com/linked/103311/coinbase-paypal-us-users-buy-crypto
53:00 TAKES
54:30 Collateralize your ETH and Borrow Against It
https://twitter.com/trustlessstate/status/1385710606750162946?s=21
1:01:02 Retail SquishChaos - ETH $30k to $150k
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Z1cc7ZnVC_qk8X_veELrsiftOVXcN06P/view
1:03:48 Crypto Fund Two Prime
https://twoprime.io/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Two-Prime-Inst-Ethereum-Investment-sunday-1.pdf
1:04:17 JP Morgan Report
https://twitter.com/santiagoroel/status/1387417522777956354
1:05:23 ETH supply has no floor
https://twitter.com/TrustlessState/status/1387627204369031170?s=20
1:07:04 $50M Stolen on BSC Uniswap Clone
https://twitter.com/RyanSAdams/status/1387427596682645508?s=20
1:10:54 What David is excited about
1:13:13 What Ryan is excited about
1:15:10 MEME of the Week
https://twitter.com/BanklessHQ/status/1387526059197976582?s=20
Bonus Meme
https://twitter.com/EthereumMemes/status/1386033457894203393?s=20
1:17:30 Closing & Disclaimers
-----
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
Transcript 13,892 words Β· 2 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the showβs known hosts β they are not voice-verified.
0:06 Ryan Sean Adams? Bankless Nation, it is the fifth week of April and this is your weekly roll up. David, you ready to roll them up?
0:14 David Hoffman? Let's do it, Ryan. It's another fantastic week in the world of crypto. And so we are going to inject all of that fantasticness right into your brain on this Bankless weekly roll up.
0:25 Ryan Sean Adams? So the agenda, as always, is market releases, news takes what we're both excited about, and then we end with the meme of the week. Might have a special runner up bonus meme this week, so stick around to the end for that. David, we've got this going on every Friday morning, so folks can enjoy this with their morning coffee, either on YouTube, so you get to see the visuals that accompany the roll up, or on the podcast, however you prefer to consume content, we've got it for you. Before we get into the roll up, David, we've got some announcements. Dude, we are giving away one ETH today.
1:00 David Hoffman? A whole Ether?
1:01 Ryan Sean Adams? For real.
1:01 David Hoffman? What?
1:02 Ryan Sean Adams? Yeah.
1:02 David Hoffman? Why would we do such a thing?
1:05 Ryan Sean Adams? This is not like Vitalik, like fake Vitalik on Twitter, offering to give you one ETH. This is actually Bankless giving you one ETH if you are a Bankless badge holder. And not everyone gets this, I should say. This is a raffle.
1:19 David Hoffman? Only one winner. Only one ETH is being given away to one lucky raffle winner, who by default has a Bankless badge and submitted their Bankless badge to the raffle so that they could get entered to win that one Ether. We're only giving away one.
1:33 Ryan Sean Adams? Much, much better explanation, David. So what is the value of one ETH as we speak, David? I know you've got your chart up.
1:41 David Hoffman? Yeah, the value of one ETH is exactly $2,726.91. And so that is how much money we are giving away. One Ether, really. One ETH is one ETH.
1:53 Ryan Sean Adams? One ETH is one ETH.
1:54 David Hoffman? And it's going to a Bankless badge holder.
1:56 Ryan Sean Adams? Yep, so we're doing this because we want people who are premium members who have the ability to claim their badge, to claim their bankless badge. Once again, if you're a premium member and you subscribe before April 1st, you should have an email in your inbox with a way to mint your badge. Make sure you do that, enter the raffle. If you subscribe during the month of April, you will get your badge on May 1st. So that is actually tomorrow from the time people read this. So April, bachelors, the minting is happening on Saturday. David, we should also talk about Dharma. Dharma is doing big things in this space. What are they doing?
2:33 David Hoffman? Dharma is onboarding all of the retail people that we think are coming into the realm of specifically Ethereum rather than just crypto. I think Dharma will be onboarding all of those groups of people. And I think retail season is pretty close. And I actually think retail season begins right after Ether finally slows down, if it ever does slow down, because then some of that value will rotate into DeFi tokens. And we all know retail loves to speculate on tokens, specifically DeFi tokens. And Dharma is that one tap access between your bank account and DeFi tokens on Uniswap. So you can immediately go from shitcoin dollars in your bank account to a capital asset appreciating DeFi tokens on Ethereum.
3:17 David Hoffman? The fastest bridge between your bank account and Ethereum.
3:21 Ryan Sean Adams? Dollars to DeFi in one tap. I was looking at the interest rates for my Wells Fargo savings account, David. 0.01% in a savings account in Wells Fargo.
3:30 David Hoffman? Just say zero, just say zero, Wells Fargo.
3:32 Ryan Sean Adams? No, it's not zero, and it's not negative yet. It's 0.01%. And here's Dharma through wiren offering 12% right now. This gets updated every day. It was like 16% the other day. It's 12% now, it'll be 14%. Always double digits in DeFi. I'm running out of reasons to keep my Wells Fargo account open other than having to pay like utility bills and that sort of thing, David. All right, man, well, let's get to it. Should we start with markets? What's going on in the markets this week? Maybe let's start with Bitcoin as we usually do.
4:04 David Hoffman? Yeah, Bitcoin having a rough time, coming down from Bitcoin's new all-time high of somewhere around 63,000, I think. And it has come all the way down to 52,840. So Bitcoin in a slump of a week in the last seven days.
4:24 Ryan Sean Adams? This is not the case for Ether though. What's happening in Ethereum world?
4:28 David Hoffman? Ether is having all-time high week. Every single day has been a new all-time high for the past five days, I think. Yeah, four or five days. All-time high season. And it was really Ether is stealing the whole entire show, in the whole entire crypto markets in this last week, which I'm very excited about.
4:49 Ryan Sean Adams? We are above 2,700 as we record this. Who knows what it'll be by the time you listen, but that is definitely all-time high. And like, like fairly high above all-time high. What was our previous all-time high? Looks like-
5:02 David Hoffman? On the 22nd, yeah, April 22nd, we hit $2,612 and we hit, I think the official all-time high, which we set just a couple hours ago, is literally $2,800. Zeros at the end. And so, current all-time high, 2,800.
5:20 Ryan Sean Adams? One way to look at Ether, of course, is its per-unit price. The other way is to look at its market cap. And this is super interesting. Ethereum now has a market cap of around 320 billion. That's billion with a B, which places it above PayPal.
5:37 David Hoffman? Finally.
5:37 Ryan Sean Adams? Ethereum, the network, yeah, has finally flippant PayPal in terms of the value of Ethereum versus the value of PayPal. It's just rising up the global asset charts as we speak fairly quickly, too.
5:52 David Hoffman? Yeah. And of course, the next thing that we are looking at, I've been looking at a lot this week, is specifically the ETH/BTC ratio. And so what we are looking at is a weekly chart. So every single candle is one week, and it goes all the way back to 2016. And we can see these violent spikes in the 2017 mania, where Ether went as high as .15 Ether per Bitcoin. And then the bear market came, and we got all the way down to as low as like 0.018 or something Ether per BTC, very, very low. And right now, we are currently at 0.5 Ether per BTC. And we have not been this high in Bitcoin terms since 2018. And really-
6:38 David Hoffman? There is only a very small amount of time in Ethereum's history where Ether has been as this high in Bitcoin terms. There's only been perhaps three or four months in total time where Ethereum has been valued higher on a unit basis versus Bitcoin. So we are kind of going back into uncharted waters. I don't really consider Ether has really ever charted these waters in the first place. Ether hasn't spent this much time above these levels in Bitcoin terms, really all that much. And so we are kind of going back into price discovery in Bitcoin terms, which is meaningfully different than going into price discovery in dollar terms. And so a lot of the traders are focusing on this, on this specific graph.
7:19 Ryan Sean Adams? They say it's just going up, right?
7:21 David Hoffman? They say, yeah. They're looking for a similarly as violent move Ether versus Bitcoin as they saw in 2017. And so where does the ETH BTC ratio go from here? Let's find out. I'm happy to find out.
7:38 Ryan Sean Adams? Not a trader, like personally, more of a holder, but this is very interesting to observe. And I'm always curious about the fundamentals that, or even the narratives that might be driving this shift, because this is a pretty massive shift. Hasn't happened since 2017, 2018. I think we're going to get into some of that during the takes. But one take that we have right now while we're discussing markets is whenever this ratio flips in this direction, at least the last time it does, we're back to a question of when is the flipping going to happen? The flipping, of course, I guess the term was invented in 2017 to describe the moment in time which Ether as an asset exceeds Bitcoin as an asset in terms of total market cap. There
8:21 Ryan Sean Adams? are other flipping metrics, right? But most of which, these like transaction volume settlement, Ethereum has already flipped Bitcoin on that. But this looks like we're 32% of the way to flipping on ratiogang.com, which is just like a really, really awesome website to like chart the progress of Ether versus Bitcoin.
8:45 David Hoffman? The other website that we've used in the past is flipping dot watch for those that are more familiar with that website. But the reason why we're bringing this up today again is because of ether significant ether outperformance versus Bitcoin. Again, that we have not seen since 2018 and it's also has injected itself into public consciousness, not just in the Ethereum, deep Ethereum crew like me and Ryan and Anthony and Eric and anti-pro and DC. We've been talking about the flipping since forever. Evan, Ryan, you said the flipping got coined in 2017. Evan Van Ness was tweeting about the flipping before Ethereum was even alive. So some people have been convicted that Ethereum will eventually flip in Bitcoin at some point in time.
9:28 David Hoffman? And again, only time can tell, but traders and and non Ethereum folk are getting on board with the potential flipping. And there was a fantastic podcast out of uncommon core with Hazu with this very famous crypto trader Kobe, who's been around for three plus cycles, like massive veteran, very much agnostic. But as a trader, he believes that the Ethereum fundamentals have the power to flip in Bitcoin. Bitcoiners will obviously call this blasphemous and say that this is just impossible. But the ultrasound money thesis, I think, is Ethereum literally designing a way for it to pump itself into the number one spot.
10:10 David Hoffman? And I think if we go, if you go back to the to the ETH BTC chart, I think that that rocket off the point three level that we've seen in just the last three to four weeks, I think that's the ultrasound money pump, Ryan. I think that's what that is.
10:23 Ryan Sean Adams? You do, and you think that's the beginning. So how much of a believer are you in the flipping then David? Are you like 100%? Wow, I like, I wouldn't call myself 100%. I think it's like 90%. Inevitable. And I also don't know for sure whether it's going to happen in this cycle. So I would wait the probability at 90% in it kind of a multi-cycle. But still, I do think that this is going to happen. And I haven't seen Ether show such, I guess, strength relative to Bitcoin since 2017. So what's also interesting here, David, is that if you were to make the Ether market cap equal to the Bitcoin market cap,
11:07 Ryan Sean Adams? we would have a Ether price of $8,500 right now. That is the point at which, at these prices, Ether flippens Bitcoin, at least at the Bitcoin price right now.
11:19 David Hoffman? Yeah, if Bitcoin stays the same, then Ether needs to be $8,500 and then we flip in BTC. I think Bitcoin will be higher priced by the time that Ether flippens Bitcoin, which means that the Ether price will be, of course, even more higher. So, cool.
11:35 Ryan Sean Adams? If you're 100%, are you like, certain that it happens this cycle?
11:40 David Hoffman? No, definitely not. Definitely not.
11:42 Ryan Sean Adams? You're not, you're not certain it happens this cycle?
11:43 David Hoffman? Well, also, the last weekly roll up, we talked about how this cycle's moving forward is perhaps not really going to be a thing anymore. And so, moving forward, maybe cycles aren't really even the correct measure of time. I'm, I'm, I'm ready to see Ether flipping Bitcoin this cycle. I think this cycle definitely has the potential to, especially with how we are, there's going to be more in this weekly roll up about this subject matter. But institutions are more resonant, I think, or more find easier resonance with Ether as an asset than Bitcoin as an asset, for many, many different reasons. And, and it's really, I think, going to be institutional big money that really determines the future of this industry. When there's so
12:25 David Hoffman? much money that's not in crypto that is coming into crypto, where that money goes determines where, what, what assets are going to appreciate the most. And I, I think there's a very compelling case that is Ether, that is where a lot of this money lands.
12:40 Ryan Sean Adams? We'll talk about that soon. Let's, let's peek over at DeFi land. So total locked value in DeFi, 65 billion or so. That's, that's also up on the week, partially due to ETH appreciation, but also due to pickup in, in DeFi in general. It's just sucking in.
12:59 Ryan Sean Adams? Locked value.
13:00 David Hoffman? Same old story. That has been the story every single week. Ether's price going up and more DeFi apps are locking up more Ether. And so locked in, uh, value locked in, in DeFi is outpacing Ether appreciation. So that's pretty cool.
13:13 Ryan Sean Adams? Yep. Let's talk about DeFi as an asset class. So the way we track this on the weekly roll up is through the DeFi Pulse Index. Up on the week, DeFi has appreciated in value, DeFi tokens have anyway, on the week. But, um, so it 535 or so, I think that's up from.
13:33 David Hoffman? And it was $500 last week and so we're up $35.
13:37 Ryan Sean Adams? Yeah, but, um, the ETH, the DPI to ETH ratio, that is going down, down, down.
13:43 David Hoffman? Straight line down, straight line down. Uh, we dipped below the 0.19 level. It, the ETH DPI level tried, it looked like it, it tried to hold point two, but it just, it did not hold it. And so ETH DPI continuing to bleed versus Ether. But, but with the more money inside of Ether, the asset, when market cap of Ether go, uh, when the market cap of Ether grows, to me, that is just like sidelined capital, ready to flow into DeFi tokens. Ether first, DeFi tokens later. And so while we are seeing this slow bleed of DeFi tokens versus Ether, I think there's a, uh, and I said this on the last weekly roll up as well, like there's room for like the, the DeFi tokens to absolutely explode.
14:26 David Hoffman? Um, when Ether finally takes a breather, DeFi tokens can take their turn. And when DeFi tokens take their turn, I think it's going to be a, a quick move.
14:34 Ryan Sean Adams? DeFi summer V2?
14:36 David Hoffman? DeFi summer V2, literally summer's around the corner.
14:40 Ryan Sean Adams? All right, David, we're going to get to releases after this, but before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this roll up possible.
14:47 David Hoffman? Balancer is DeFi's most powerful automated market maker. Typical AMMs just have two tokens inside of one liquidity pool, which can lead to fractured liquidity across the many pairs in DeFi. With Balancer, you can access the full power of multiple tokens inside of one single AMM, which unlocks an entirely new playing field of possibility. This makes Balancer an awesome building block for so many different use cases. Balancer pools. can make asset indexes, but instead of paying fees to portfolio managers, Bouncer lets you collect fees from traders who use your portfolio for liquidity. Additionally, Bouncer smart pools can be programmed to have properties that change according to predetermined rules, such as changing the swap fee based on market conditions, or even liquidity bootstrapping pools, which can help you launch and distribute your token with day one liquidity.
15:30 David Hoffman? At Bankless, we used a liquidity bootstrapping pool to sell our BAP t-shirts to much success. Bouncer V2 brings powerful new features that makes your money work even harder for you. In V2, idle tokens are capable of generating yield in DeFi without sacrificing liquidity in the pool. To top things off, Bouncer is reimbursing all gas costs with BAV rewards, meaning that all your gas costs are returned to your wallet with the Bouncer Governance Token. Bouncer's mission is to become the primary source of liquidity in DeFi, providing the most flexible and powerful platform for asset management and decentralized exchange. Dive into the Bouncer pools at pools.bouncer exchange.
16:05 Ryan Sean Adams? MetaMask is your go-to wallet for the Bankless journey. If you're going Bankless, you need MetaMask, period. Browser and mobile, get them both. This is your tool to unlock the world of DeFi. Here's my favorite part: now you can swap tokens directly in MetaMask with a single swipe. This has got to be the easiest way to trade Ethereum tokens. Choose a token you own, a token to exchange it with, and get your quotes. If you like what you see, you hit swap. That's it. What makes swaps so useful is what happens behind the scenes. It compares DEXs, aggregators, and market makers to find you the best price with the lowest network fees and the least slippage. This means you can swap a wider range of tokens, and swaps can even automatically split up your trade to give you access to better liquidity.
16:50 Ryan Sean Adams? You don't even have to think about it. Try it out. Download MetaMask for desktop or mobile now at metamask.io and start swapping.
17:00 Ryan Sean Adams? Alright guys, we are back with the hot releases on the week. The first is this, lending giant AVE set to launch liquidity mining program. That is the headline. First of all, lending giant AVE? That's awesome. It's crazy to me that, you know, a year and a half ago, two years ago, AVE had basically nothing, hundreds of thousands in total locked value. And now it's being called a lending giant. This is how quickly stuff moves. But what is AVE launching with their liquidity mining program, David?
17:31 David Hoffman? Yeah, so almost a year ago, Compound launched the Comp liquidity mining, where you can deposit assets into Compound and receive Comp tokens for those deposits. You can also borrow assets from Compound and also receive Comp token for borrowing assets. And, you know, better late than never, but AVE finally did the same thing. And so if you deposit assets into AVE, and if you are borrowing assets from AVE, you receive an extra little bonus in AVE tokens. And so this is a live for AVE on the L1. But not included in this announcement, but still live and worth mentioning is that there's also liquidity mining rewards on the AVE's implementation on Matic.
18:12 David Hoffman? And so AVE Carbon copied itself, deployed it on Matic and on Polygon, excuse me, and is now giving out Matic rewards for people doing the same borrowing and lending activity on the Polygon sidechain. And that's actually an activity that I am doing. And so I am earning Matic tokens by borrowing and lending on AVE on Polygon L2. And let me tell you, the gas fees on Matic are just an absolute treat. Transactions go through instantly and they cost me basically nothing. And so it is a nice
18:43 Ryan Sean Adams? And how are those interest rates, David?
18:44 David Hoffman? And the interest rates are also fantastic.
18:48 Ryan Sean Adams? Good place to be then.
18:49 David Hoffman? Yeah, it's a good place to be. That's my alpha league for this week. I wasn't going to say that, but I have a hard time keeping the alpha for myself.
18:55 Ryan Sean Adams? You know what's crazy is AVE has grown so large without actually a liquidity mining program to this point in time. I mean, Compound has had the advantage of incenting liquidity and incenting locked value since the beginning of DeFi summer. AVE hasn't had this the entire time. It's grown as large as they do. The question is, what happens now that they actually have a liquidity incentive program? Are they going to grow even faster? I mean, it seems like that's the case.
19:22 David Hoffman? Yep, I would imagine so. I mean, I also have some assets in AVE on the Base Train, and the AVE trickle is pretty, it's a trickle. It's not a flood of AVE on Polygon. It's closer to something like a flood of Matic tokens. I'll say that.
19:40 Ryan Sean Adams? There's your Alpha League, guys. All right. Stocks are live on Quanta as well. So Quanta, of course, is an exchange put together by the Synthetix Protocol.
19:50 David Hoffman? Also sponsored by Bankless. Thank you, Quanta and Synthetix.
19:53 Ryan Sean Adams? Thank you. Thanks, guys. Also, they are, now you have the ability to trade stocks. So synthetic versions of traditional stocks, like they picked, of course, the most memified stocks: Tesla, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Facebook, Google. You can do this in a permissionless, unstoppable way. Pretty cool. Have you tried this yet, David?
20:15 David Hoffman? No, no, I have not, because I just don't really care about equities. But synthetic equities on Ethereum is closer to stuff that I care about. And as soon as I think there's more composability with some of these assets, I think they could be extremely compelling. I think Coin is undervalued. That's a separate conversation. Coin has dumped, I think, 11 days, nine out of the 11 days it's been live on the market. And so, you know, I would go and buy that if I had a normal brokerage, but I don't. But I do have an Ethereum account, and I could, in theory, go buy synthetic coin, Coinbase. And so, perhaps, perhaps.
20:50 Ryan Sean Adams? Yeah, absolutely. I think what hasn't seemed to happen yet is DeFi having its GameStop, you know, GME moment, Wall Street Bets moment, where all of the folks who are blocked from traditional brokerages come over and see unstoppable, permissionless, synthetic versions of these same assets in DeFi. I wonder if Quanta could be the start of something like that.
21:14 David Hoffman? Yeah, that's exactly right. And that's the same conversation that we had when we were going through the whole GameStop debacle. It's like, hey, you guys now understand the value of decentralization. Perhaps you're warming up to crypto. Come to us and come and be in our world. And then when we talk to these people who are in the Wall Street Bets community, it's like, okay, cool. How do I buy? How do I ape into GME? Like, oh, you can't. We don't have that. But we have these other DeFi tokens. And like, well, what the fuck is a DeFi token? Like, now this conversation is a lot easier. Also, in the 2018, 2019 bear market, there was just perpetual conversations about like, you know, one day, you'll be able to own, you know, Apple on Ethereum. One day, you'll be able to own Tesla.
21:53 Ryan Sean Adams? It seems so sci-fi at the time.
21:55 David Hoffman? So crazy sci-fi, so far away, and today it's here.
21:58 Ryan Sean Adams? Yeah, it's crazy. All right. So GME folks, Wall Street Bets folks, if you're listening, drop your Robinhood account, come over to Quanta, see what DeFi is like. All right, let's talk Nexus Mutual. So we've had Hugh Karp on the Bankless Podcast a couple of times, well, at least once. And then he's also written some fantastic articles for us. He, of course, is one of the founders behind Nexus Mutual. And Nexus Mutual is growing. They provide smart contract insurance. So that if you are using DeFi and something goes wrong, you can take out insurance against a smart contract hack. It looks like they're growing, David. In which ways are they growing?
22:35 David Hoffman? Yeah, they are offering more cover opportunities for different types of smart contracts risk. So more contracts around the crypto space, specifically not on Ethereum, is now being offered by Nexus. And I think that's really the cool thing here is, not only is Nexus Mutual offering protection for smart contract risk on Ethereum, they are also offering smart contract risk for things on Binance Smart Chain, which means that you can buy cover for your DGEN activities on Binance Smart Chain on Ethereum. And so Ethereum is protecting other things that are not itself in the crypto world, which I think is cool.
23:13 Ryan Sean Adams? David, I bet some of that contract insurance is going to be used on the Binance Smart Chain. There's a lot of, there's a lot of interesting activity, more in the take section, I think, in Binance World hacks and that sort of thing. Let's get to this. Wyrn released their quarterly report. So this is their Q1 2021 earnings report. And you know what I'm struck by? This is really like an analyst's dream, David. Like, this is, um, this is basically all of the reporting that you might find in typical quarterly publicly traded company financial statements. And this is being produced by a decentralized autonomous organization,
23:55 Ryan Sean Adams? or maybe Joel Menegra might call this a digital autonomous organization. And they're throwing up some pretty fantastic numbers. So we have, you know, a table here that shows that Q1 EBITDA, so that's earnings before interest tax depreciation, so, you know, financial term.
24:12 David Hoffman? TradFi metric.
24:12 Ryan Sean Adams? 4.8 million. Yeah, TradFi metric, 4.8 million. Just, what's interesting to me is, like, these truly are capital assets. It reminds me of our, our conversation with our friend Matt from Bitwise. He was talking about, hey, look, DeFi assets are not like the cryptocurrency assets of the past, like Bitcoin or even Ether, because they have cash flows associated with them. So we could treat them like capital assets. And Wall Street absolutely understands capital assets. So here's a report for a crypto-native DeFi capital asset that you can analyze just like a stock. Pretty fantastic.
24:53 David Hoffman? Yeah, I'm perpetually, like, perplexed by the Yarn team, because they have this kind of like, we don't need to be taken seriously attitude. We'll have like waifus and, and like anime, and that'll be our brand. And then meanwhile, they're also producing like this fantastic in-depth, you know, TradFi-ready reports and quarterly reports. And they don't even have to do this. They're just doing it voluntarily, probably as a marketing tool to, to illustrate their Investability as a DeFi app. The other cool thing is that they published this on GitHub. And so they didn't publish this on.
25:31 Ryan Sean Adams? Great point.
25:31 David Hoffman? I don't know where else you would publish these things, but they're publishing it on.
25:34 Ryan Sean Adams? SEC. You file it with the SEC.
25:36 David Hoffman? Oh, yeah, yeah. No, no need for that. Just post it on GitHub, which it was pretty cool. And so, you know, you're always just pioneering and doing a good job. And, and this is actually the second quarterly report that they've ever released. And so this is now becoming a theme.
25:51 Ryan Sean Adams? I think they don't take themselves seriously, but they definitely take their financials seriously, which is massively impressive. They take profit seriously. They take yield seriously. That's what you want in a protocol. Let's talk about this. There's a Balancer Labs and Gnosis team up. They're coming out with some really interesting products. One sort of a beta alpha version of that is live that we can also talk about. But what is this new Balancer Gnosis Protocol partnership combining?
26:18 David Hoffman? Yeah, so this is something that I think it's going to take a while for me to digest. This is, I think, some really clever, deep engineering that kind of goes over my non-technical head. But they have into in collaboration, they've released this thing called Cow Swap, which is a new decentralized exchange, which I think operates with similar properties that we are used to, as you would see from Uniswap. But the backend architecture is a little different. And so I think there is some sort of off-chain relayer mechanism that we might pull from 0x that helps with gas fees and also mitigating minor extractable value. And so the gas fees, in theory, I think are very low.
27:01 David Hoffman? And you pay for that gas fees instead of with Ether, but you pay for it as part of your sale for your token. So it comes out of what you receive back. But also there is this immunity that it has, or this mitigation against minor extractable value. Don't I don't yet understand the mechanism behind this. I think this is something that it's going to take a while for the DeFi ecosystem to digest. But the magnitude of Gnosis Balancer collaboration should not be understated. And that's really kind of the takeaway here is that composable DeFi apps are doing composable things, making brand new products that could not have been built without that teamwork. And so always nice to see teamwork in DeFi.
27:40 Ryan Sean Adams? I think the through line here is it's kind of the best of both worlds. So the Gnosis Protocol very much is about back batch auction style trades and not an automated market maker. And so they're doing that, I think, as part of Cow Swap. But if the batch auction doesn't work, then basically the trades get matched against a balancer pool or even a Uniswap pool. So the overflow, you know, just goes there. So you get kind of an all in one best of both worlds hybrid type experience. So this is just like an alpha version. But yeah, I think the through line is it's a it's a blend of money protocols. It's almost a synthesis of these things coming together to make an even better system. And David, should we get to the news?
28:21 David Hoffman? No, because I want to say that the cow branding was actually the cow comes from coincidence of wants. And so the cow theme was not just like arbitrarily picked. However, it is literally cow themed.
28:34 Ryan Sean Adams? Yes, because this is crypto. But coincidence of wants is also the theme and is also a crypto concept. David, let's get to the news. We got to start with EIP 1559 because we have a date. What is the date?
28:47 David Hoffman? July 14th. July 14th. Is this set in stone? Or is this tentative?
28:52 Ryan Sean Adams? It's still tentative, but it's
28:54 David Hoffman? I guess everything is tentative until the day of.
28:57 Ryan Sean Adams? Yeah. And you know, when we had, when we had Justin Drake on, his prediction was July 14th, but things could happen. This could slip to August, possibly September at the latest, but it feels pretty
29:10 David Hoffman? Secure.
29:12 Ryan Sean Adams? Pretty secure.
29:12 David Hoffman? I'm gonna go with a greater than 50% chance that it's July 14th.
29:16 Ryan Sean Adams? So what are you gonna be doing July 14th then?
29:18 David Hoffman? Probably doing a stream, probably with you. What do you mean?
29:21 Ryan Sean Adams? Celebrated?
29:22 David Hoffman? Yeah.
29:22 Ryan Sean Adams? We're definitely celebrating. So notification on that day, David. We're gonna be celebrating the first burning event of ETH and EIP 1559.
29:31 David Hoffman? Goosebumps. Just gave you goosebumps, sir.
29:33 Ryan Sean Adams? Crazy, right? All right. Well, that's coming as we said it was. Get up to speed on our ultrasound money episode, particularly the one this week with Justin Drake. If you haven't listened to that, we go through the the models of ultrasound money, including how much ETH is expected to be burnt and its implications on issuance. Really in-depth episode there.
29:51 David Hoffman? We've done three episodes with Justin Drake. And so if you have not watched three bankless episodes with Justin Drake, you are behind.
29:58 Ryan Sean Adams? You really should because this stuff is going to hit hard and fast in crypto and people are just starting to wrap their heads around it. All right, this is another one. Banks starting to wrap their heads around Ethereum, maybe. This is the European Investment Bank issuing a two year digital bond on Ethereum through a number of European banks, Goldman, Santander, among them, of course. So this is David using Ethereum as a settlement layer for analog banking bonds, not using private blockchains, not using internal ledgers, but actually using the Ethereum network for some of this asset settlement. Pretty crazy that banks are now getting on board as well.
30:42 David Hoffman? Yeah, so Ethereum is being used as a credibly neutral asset settlement layer through the internet? Oh, weird. It's weird that that's how it's being used. It's as if it's been used as advertised. Weird.
30:55 Ryan Sean Adams? Yeah, I mean, the banks are going to have to come aboard this whole movement. It looks like they're still kind of dabbling in it. Like, this is a big event because of the banks and the names listed. It's a two-year digital bond, but it's not like they have moved their entire business operations and bond issuance operations to Ethereum yet. So this is a step in that direction. I still feel like we're in the prototype alpha phase of all of this, but it's happening, man.
31:20 David Hoffman? Yep.
31:22 Ryan Sean Adams? David, this next one surprised me a bit. I don't know if you were surprised, but Coinbase Pro is launching Tether. So they're going to be supporting not only USDC as a stable coin, but they're also going to be supporting Tether for some of their exchange pairs.
31:37 David Hoffman? Yeah, really interesting design choice here because USDC, Coinbase has stake in USDC. If USDC grows, Coinbase has exposure to that. And so, you know, USDT, Tether, is kind of a competitor of Coinbase's interests. Now, there is insane demand for USDT, especially from the eastern hemisphere of the world. And so like profit maxi, I guess if you accept tether, then we can start generating fees based off of that. But it's an interesting choice because tether is kind of like this black box that at least USDC is a little bit more transparent. But I guess, you know, at the end of the day, tether finally kind of broke through its stigma of being a black box.
32:18 David Hoffman? It's now that it's Lindy is powerful. It's now being accepted as Coinbase. So
32:23 Ryan Sean Adams? They've started releasing audits.
32:24 David Hoffman? Right. Started releasing audits and so kind of getting folded folded into into the fold, if you will.
32:31 Ryan Sean Adams? Yeah, it surprised me because I didn't think that USDC that Coinbase thought it needed tether, right? So again, probably the the profit maximalist, of course, you support more exchange pairs than you can charge. You can get additional revenue through trading fees and that's good for your bottom line. But it had always felt up to this point that Coinbase was instead trying to propagate USDC and sort of downplay marginalize tether. So this is definitely a big change. I guess it's fine. Like, I guess it's a good thing, right? Um, people should have the ability. Yeah, people should have the ability to trade and use whatever stablecoin asset that they want. You could certainly do that in DeFi. So why not on Coinbase as well?
33:11 David Hoffman? Yeah. The other thing I don't get though, is that going from USDC to USDT is trivially easy with applications like Curve. And so if you want, if you have USDT, but you want to be on Coinbase, it's actually pretty trivial just to get USDC. And so I think that there's more to this story and I think perhaps the story is unfolding and we'll find out more as as things goes along.
33:33 Ryan Sean Adams? We will monitor how that develops. Here's something else that was a surprise to me. MetaMask now surpassing a 5 million monthly active users.
33:42 David Hoffman? Not long after becoming a bankless sponsor.
33:45 Ryan Sean Adams? Coincidence?
33:46 David Hoffman? Coincidence?
33:48 Ryan Sean Adams? We have the best sponsors. We really do. And, you know, we're just fortunate to to be in the space early and to get these fantastic sponsors like. But MetaMask, this is not. This is a measure that Web2 is very familiar with. They very much like, you know, monthly active users, daily active users. And now here's MetaMask, basically the wallet for DeFi, the primary DeFi wallet that people are using today. And it's rocketing past 5 million monthly active users. David, if you remember, in the Coinbase SEC reports, they were doing like 6 million or so monthly active users. So MetaMask now in the ballpark of Coinbase as far as active users. That's pretty insane growth.
34:32 David Hoffman? That is pretty insane. And look at that subtitle. It says, "In the past six months, MetaMask has grown 5X and is now used by more than 5 million users every month." Which means six months ago, it was only 1 million. So we've on-boarded 4 million people. That's in the last six months. That's absolutely insane. If we wanted to get a little bit more accurate, it's probably actually 5 million devices. I at least have two of those. I have two devices with two MetaMasks, but I'm a DeFi power user, right? So the average person probably only has one.
35:02 Ryan Sean Adams? And the thing that also divides that is some MetaMask usage might be from a large capital pool that represents an entire company or an entire DAO. So that could be like multiple people as part of that. Again, like a MetaMask account, like an ETH address can represent, is kind of like a bank account. So it can represent more than one individual as well. The revenue here is pretty crazy behind this too. So if you sort of add this up as Tim Schmidt does on Twitter, MetaMask is now making 400K per day in fees, which is pretty incredible, given it has for so long felt like a public good of Ethereum and of crypto that didn't have a revenue generating mechanism.
35:46 Ryan Sean Adams? Well, they turned it on and now it's crushing it in terms of revenue.
35:51 David Hoffman? Yeah, this is a great example of a project that was birthed out of, you know, Joe Lubin consensus and Dan Finley and all that hard work and gave something of incredible value for free to the community. And it got adopted based off of The commitments to Ethereum and to Ethereum users who needed to use Ethereum. And it just got, because it was free, it got adopted. And then they introduced the MetaMask swap feature, which is, of course, MetaMask is still free. It's just the swap feature, MetaMask charges a small fee on. And because MetaMask proliferated itself into the Ethereum ecosystem, that swap feature has become insanely lucrative for them. And so absolutely well deserved.
36:36 David Hoffman? Tip of the hat to the MetaMask team. And also, congrats to Joe.
36:41 Ryan Sean Adams? Absolutely. Congrats to Consensus. David, gas fees are down. People might have noticed that, at least on Ethereum. Can you explain why?
36:49 David Hoffman? Yeah, for a number of different reasons. We got this double whammy of both increasing the block size from 12.5 million to 15 million, which is a 20% increase. And so per unit time, Ethereum can take 20% more transaction activity. Meanwhile, we had Flashbots go live. And so MEV gas wars are actually bypassing the mempool and have it happening off-chain. Meanwhile, Layer 2s are here. Like I said, I've been playing around with the Polygon Aave implementation, which means all of my transactional activity is not actually going to the main chain very often. It's actually, I've only made three transactions between the main chain and Polygon. Meanwhile, on Polygon, I've made like 40 transactions. And so only out of those 40 transactions, only three actually touched the L1.
37:35 David Hoffman? And perhaps, perhaps more reasons as well. But I think those are, those are the really the three big ones is. We also saw DYDX volume absolutely exploding. And so L2s are definitely taking off.
37:48 Ryan Sean Adams? David, let's switch over to, well, before we switch over to NFTs, let's talk about this, David. Ethereum is starting to hit the mainstream in small ways. Right now, we're going to talk about more about that. But here's kind of a symbol of that. This is Ethereum. It's being projected on CNN under the, like, right above the headline, "The Future of Finance." One of the first times I've seen an image like this on CNN. It has the Ethereum Ether ticker price going up. Of course, green had a great week, 7% up. What does this mean? Does this mean that Ethereum is finally escaping into the mainstream narrative or starting to?
38:30 David Hoffman? Yeah, so this is an interview with Joseph Lubin, so it's obviously Ethereum themed. But you know, when when price goes up, it grabs headlines. And so if the fundamentals of Ethereum, if the price finally catches up with fundamentals, then that will be headline grabbing. The other interesting thing about this is that the other headline, the other title here is that we see is crypto group signs up to climate accord. They're talking about consensus. Consensus joins plan to make industry run on renewables by 2025. And a number of weekly rollups ago, we talked about how the headwinds coming for proof of work blockchains are going to be extremely strong. And we're already seeing that fight being fought. And Ethereum doesn't have to fight that fight because we're transferring to proof of stake.
39:13 David Hoffman? When Bitcoiners, when they're presented with like, but Bitcoin is environmentally unfriendly, they have to get into the trenches and they have to fight that fight. When Ethereum has to fight that fight, we just say, oh yeah, we're transitioning to proof of stake and proof of stake is the most green thing that we can do. And so it's very much a different solution. Rather than fighting, it's just like, oh yeah, we have a solution and we committed to this a long time ago. And so that's also making its way into the mainstream narrative.
39:37 Ryan Sean Adams? Exactly. These are the narratives that are escaping into mainstream. Pretty crazy. All right. David, Eminem, Marshall Mathers, he is getting in the NFT game. What's going on here?
39:47 David Hoffman? Welcome, Slim Shady, minting NFTs on Nifty Gateway. And so this, this was an interesting way to cap supply where there was an open market where you could purchase these things for a fixed price and anyone could purchase these things for a fixed price. And then the timer ended and then no more can be minted and no more can be bought. And so it looks like there were three things, three NFTs that were made. One sold for 675 units, one sold for 940 units, and the third sold for 753 units. And now there shall be no more than those. So if you got your hands on one of those, congrats. And if you didn't get your hands on one of those, you have to go to somebody that already has one in order to buy one.
40:27 David Hoffman? These NFTs are like these little Eminem action figures in with Eminem just being dressed up in different ways. And so I think it's pretty cool. But you know, congrats, congrats to Eminem. Welcome to the world of NFTs.
40:39 Ryan Sean Adams? Do you think he knows he's actually deploying this? Like he's doing this on Ethereum? Do you think he has any notion of that?
40:45 David Hoffman? Probably less so. I think there's a representative taking care of this for him.
40:50 Ryan Sean Adams? It feels very much though like NFTs at least have reached mainstream. So he probably knows the term NFT at least. All right, David, let's get to Bitcoin news. 10 years ago, Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto sent his final message and then he disappeared. This was the 10th anniversary of Satoshi's disappearance. What is the significance of this?
41:12 David Hoffman? Yeah, this is always going to be a subject of just crypto and Bitcoin lore because people have dissected Satoshi and his person and personality and his messages to the nth degree, and I don't think that that is stopping. And so this is kind of a very ceremonious time, I think, in the Bitcoin realm where they really pay homage to Satoshi and really do their best to interpret like quote unquote, this sacred text of Satoshi that he left on the internet. What did Satoshi mean by this? What is your interpretation of that? And it's been 10 years since the founder of this whole entire industry that we got his last message. And so Satoshi has been gone for 10 years now. And so that's something I think that deserves respect.
41:55 Ryan Sean Adams? It feels less like you're talking about an industry and more like you're talking about a religion and like the founder of religion, the way you just described it. It's like, is that what this is?
42:08 David Hoffman? I think so.
42:09 Ryan Sean Adams? I mean, what do you think about Satoshi leaving? Was that the best thing that could happen to Bitcoin? Or do you think that was like the wrong move? Do you think he should have stuck around longer to see, to answer some questions about Bitcoin, whether it's scalability or long-term issuance policy or something else?
42:28 David Hoffman? No, I think he wanted Bitcoin to be in the hands of the people as soon as possible. And Bitcoin's design itself is much less hands-on than what we are familiar with on Ethereum. I think the opportunity for Satoshi to leave should be taken as soon as possible. And I think that's more or less what he did. If Bitcoin needed to innovate in other ways, I think Satoshi said that, thought to leave that to the people.
42:56 Ryan Sean Adams? Definitely a legendary figure and you know, every, every year Bitcoiners are going to celebrate this and I think crypto is going to, to take notice. Um, let's talk about Tesla. So Tesla has recently purchased some Bitcoin that made news. This week they sold 18% of the Bitcoin that they purchased. So they sold off 272 million. I think they made like a hundred million dollars in profit, which David surprisingly represented a decent portion of their quarterly profit. So that was like a fourth or something of their quarterly profit actually came from a trade. It's funny to me that companies like Tesla, MicroStrategy, others are now acting as
43:37 Ryan Sean Adams? almost like crypto traders. Uh, they're, they're, they're definitely keeping like a fund aspect alive and whereas MicroStrategy is kind of just bought and hold, Tesla is actually trading some of this stuff.
43:48 David Hoffman? I don't think it's actually them trading. And so this actually, that conversation uh, got, was very, very big in Bitcoin Twitter uh, this last week. And so some Bitcoiners feel very betrayed that, you know, not Satoshi, Elon would sell Bitcoin.
44:03 Ryan Sean Adams? Another religious figure.
44:04 David Hoffman? Another religious figure. How dare Elon sell Bitcoin? Why, he, why he's just, all he's doing is buying Bitcoin and then pumping it and then selling it. Is this just another pump and dump that Elon is doing? I don't think that's what's going on. I think there's a much more intent, intentful and purposeful move going on by Tesla. Um, I heard an analysis that it was actually a investor, a protective move where Tesla needed to make sure that they could both buy and sell Bitcoin quickly and easily without with, with ample liquidity. Uh, and I'm not privy to that, to those conversations, but there was some sort of
44:42 David Hoffman? like, uh, it was a defensive move to protect against any sort of uh, Tesla like legal issues. Uh, so the fall, I'm sorry, I can't articulate more of a coherent answer to this. I heard about this from uh, NLW's podcast, The Breakdown, where he did a pretty good analyst, uh, job analyzing this. And so, uh, the, the TLDR is that like, there's perhaps some sort of compliance or risk that Tesla took on by buying Bitcoin and they needed to quell that issue by also selling a little bit and prove that, you know, this Bitcoin is liquid, they can, they can easily access the value in it and uh, and things of this nature.
45:20 Ryan Sean Adams? Well, I mean, the big story is, look, it's only 18%. They still have over a billion dollars worth of Bitcoin on their balance sheet. And you know, the fact that they're, I guess, buying and selling probably to me means they're, they're more likely to buy more assets in the future. So yeah, it's a, I, you know, I don't see it as a betrayal. I mean, maybe, maybe if they sold the entirety of it, like, that would be a different story in three months. But at the end of the day, it's only 18%. That would be a pump and dump. And if Elon was going to pump and dump something, it would definitely be Doge, not Bitcoin.
45:53 David Hoffman? Currently doing that.
45:56 Ryan Sean Adams? Maybe he's doing that personally. I don't know if he's, who knows how much Doge Elon has. Does he have any? Does he own any?
46:04 David Hoffman? I doubt he has any. I doubt, I wouldn't know.
46:06 Ryan Sean Adams? You don't think so?
46:07 David Hoffman? I don't think so.
46:08 Ryan Sean Adams? We'll never know. All right. JP Morgan, to let clients invest in a Bitcoin fund for the first time. More Bitcoin news. JP Morgan always tends to get in on these things when they're hot during the bull runs and then forgets about crypto during the bear runs. And here they are, coming back to crypto, giving access to a Bitcoin fund for their large, wealthy clients. Any thoughts on this?
46:31 David Hoffman? Yeah. And if we do think that the time of cycles is over and crypto is mainstream now, that means that perhaps Bitcoin off, Bitcoin offerings from JP Morgan is also mainstream and also not going away.
46:42 Ryan Sean Adams? I love that in every JP Morgan article on crypto, they always quote his 2017, you know, calling, if you're stupid enough to buy it, this is what he said in 2017, you'll pay the price for it one day. They always.
46:56 David Hoffman? Somebody paid the price, Jamie Dimon.
46:58 Ryan Sean Adams? Yeah, Jamie Dimon, he was notorious for calling Bitcoin a dangerous fraud in 2017. Now here he is, opening up a Bitcoin fund himself. All right, David, let's get to the next company news. I feel like most of this Bitcoin news is, is publicly traded companies actually doing something with Bitcoin. This is NEXON, which is a game maker in Japan, actually a really large company, one of Japan's largest companies. They are 30 billion in market cap. So MicroStrategy, for reference, is about a 6 billion. Dollar market cap company. So Nexon is 5X larger than MicroStrategy and they just allocated
47:37 Ryan Sean Adams? a small portion of their treasury, but a rather large purchase, 100 million into buying Bitcoin. What's the theme here?
47:45 David Hoffman? Yeah, 100 million is not a small number. That puts them, I think, at number nine or number 10 of world's largest owners of Bitcoin. And so congratulations. That's cool. We're continuing to see publicly traded companies and just treasuries of all sizes allocate towards Bitcoin. So, cool.
48:06 Ryan Sean Adams? Yeah, you know, the Blockworks group had a fantastic thread on this newsletter on this and they're, what they were expressing is basically like many of these CFOs and CEOs and publicly traded companies are going to do this very trade because they're not interested in buying bonds these days and they're not interested in buying sovereign bonds from governments because bonds are rewardless risk, as they put it, as Nexon put it in their financial report. Even junk bonds carry higher risk and were formerly known as high yield have become a source of rewardless
48:45 Ryan Sean Adams? risk. So this is kind of late-stage fiat credit cycle stuff where interest rates on bonds are really low, but they're sort of rewardless. Like, why buy a bond? So what do you do with all of the cash on your balance sheet? Well, you start to buy non-sovereign assets. You start to buy assets like Bitcoin, maybe Ether in the future too, but for now it's mainly Bitcoin. So this is yet another company signing up for this arbitrage. Just, Michael Saylor was one of the first, but many are coming to the same conclusion he has.
49:18 David Hoffman? Yeah, and in stark contrast to rewardless risk, Bitcoin has done a fantastic job rewarding people who have taken risks on Bitcoin, especially Michael Saylor.
49:29 Ryan Sean Adams? Yeah, absolutely. All right, Visa CEO says payments giant is moving into crypto in a very big way. So we have moved into regulation and traditional finance section of our news. Visa keeps saying they've got something really big coming. You have to believe that they actually have something really big in crypto coming.
49:51 David Hoffman? Yeah.
49:52 Ryan Sean Adams? Any thoughts on what that might be, David?
49:53 David Hoffman? I can't, I can only imagine it would be using public permissionless blockchains to help improve their product. We already saw them starting to settle USDC payments between some of the big crypto banks. And if they are planning on moving in more into crypto in bigger and better ways than that, I literally have no idea what it could be, but I'm excited for it.
50:14 Ryan Sean Adams? Stablecoin-ish, maybe, um, maybe their own stablecoin, maybe they adopt USDC. I'm not sure where this could lead, but they keep talking about it. So something is definitely coming. Um, David, let's, while we're on the subject of fintech and, and Visa making statements like this, so is PayPal. Crypto, this is the CEO of PayPal, Dan Schluman, cryptocurrency is the real deal, he says in this article in Time, and super apps are coming. Not sure what he means by super apps, haven't read this full article, but cryptocurrency is the real deal. They weren't saying this in 2017. This is completely new. This is
50:53 Ryan Sean Adams? DeFi mullet stuff where you've got fintech now supporting DeFi rails and cryptocurrency rails. Maybe PayPal's doing something big in this space, too? What do you think?
51:05 David Hoffman? Yeah, good timing on PayPal talking about how awesome crypto is right after Ethereum flipped into PayPal and market cap. You know, if you can't beat them, just join them in that case. And there's definitely a lot of resonance with PayPal and digital assets at large, because PayPal, before it was PayPal, tried to be some sort of, you know, premature, a little bit too soon, you know, early.
51:26 Ryan Sean Adams? Internet money.
51:26 David Hoffman? Internet money, right? Like, it tried to do that and couldn't really do it because of all the ways that centralization fails. But there's definitely resonance between this company and digital assets. And so I expect PayPal to really be a pioneer in this space.
51:40 Ryan Sean Adams? Almost returning to its roots. In other PayPal news, David, Coinbase is now allowing US users to buy crypto using PayPal. So it's not only an ACH transfer. If you have a PayPal account and you also have an account on Coinbase, then you could just purchase your crypto assets on Coinbase with PayPal. So some more cozying up of fintech to the crypto industry here.
52:03 David Hoffman? Yeah, which is also interesting because last week Venmo rolled out crypto assets. And so you can also buy Bitcoin and Ether and other crypto assets using PayPal. And so I wonder how deep this partnership goes. Is this even a partnership? When I buy Ether on Venmo, where is that Ether actually coming from? Are they tapping into Coinbase to be their exchange? I don't know. I think some more details about this would be nice.
52:30 Ryan Sean Adams? All right, David, we're going to get to takes in just a minute. But before we do, let's thank the sponsors that made this episode possible.
52:37 David Hoffman? Bankless is proud to be supported by Uniswap. Uniswap is a new paradigm in asset exchange infrastructure. Instead of a cumbersome order book system where trades are matched with other humans, Uniswap is an autonomous piece of software on Ethereum, which is what Ryan and I call a money robot. No human counterparties or centralized intermediaries, just autonomous code on Ethereum. Input the token you want to sell and receive the token you want to buy. Something brand new in the Uniswap ecosystem is the Uniswap Grants Program is now accepting applications for grants. We have been saying this for a while and we'll say it again. DAOs have money and they are in need of labor. If you think that you have something to contribute to the Uniswap DAO, apply for a grant to Uniswap.
53:21 David Hoffman? Just look at the size of the Uniswap treasury. It's almost $3 billion. This mountain of capital is looking for labor. Do you have something of value to contribute to the Uniswap DAO? No matter how big or small your idea is, you can apply for a UniGrant at unigrants.org and help steer Uniswap in the direction that you think it should go. That's exactly what we did to get Uniswap to be a sponsor for Bankless and you can do the same for your project. Thank you, Uniswap, for sponsoring Bankless. Gemini is the world's most trusted cryptocurrency exchange. I've been a customer of Gemini since I first got into crypto in 2017 and it's been my main exchange of choice to make my crypto buys and sells. Gemini is available in all 50 states and in over 50 countries worldwide.
54:05 David Hoffman? And on Gemini, there are markets for over 30 various different crypto assets, including many of the hot DeFi tokens. And it's one of the few exchanges that has Liquid die markets Gemini just launched their earn program where you can earn up to 7.4% interest on 26 various crypto assets if you're tired of paying fees in DeFi or you don't want to worry about DeFi exploits but you still want to earn interest on your crypto assets Gemini earn is the product for you another product I'm stoked to get my hands on is the Gemini crypto back credit card which gives you 3% cash back on all of your purchases but paid to you in your preferred crypto asset when I get my Gemini credit card I'm going to make sure that I get my cash back in ETH so whenever I buy something I get a little bit of ETH bonus back to me at
54:50 David Hoffman? the same time you can open up a free account in under three minutes at Gemini.com/goBanklist and if you trade more than a hundred dollars within the first 30 days after signup you'll be gifted a free $15 Bitcoin bonus check them out at Gemini.com/goBanklist
55:07 Ryan Sean Adams? all right David it's time for the hot takes of the week let's start with the hot take that you had it seems like you're part of never sell gang what what are you talking about in this tweet
55:16 David Hoffman? yeah never ever sell your ETH at least I'm not recommending that but it is an option to you to take if you so choose it and so what I say in this tweet is that you could collateralize your ether and just borrow against it and because ether is ultrasound money while the US dollar is perpetually devalued by the money printer having ultrasound money as collateral and having your debt denominated in something that is perpetually being devalued is an advantageous position to have and so you also don't have to pay taxes because you're not selling your ether you're just collateralizing it and so you collateralize your ether and perhaps we can even talk about our ether Rocket Pool ether which is staked ether so you can have upsides of staking
56:00 David Hoffman? collateralize our ether borrow dollars against that meanwhile your ether appreciates and you also get more of it because it's in our ether form staked ether form meanwhile you borrow against it send that debt to send that borrowed dollars to your bank account ball out call it a life and then hopefully if everything goes according to plan this is where the risk comes in there's no ever free lunch your debt in theory just melts away because the dollar is being printed meanwhile your ether is appreciated because it's ultrasound money and so that is an option that I think could if you manage your risk appropriately and you don't get out over your ski tips you could be in the hashtag never sell gang
56:41 Ryan Sean Adams? So I'm adding two more hashtags to this. Hashtag not financial advice, hashtag not tax advice.
56:46 David Hoffman? Hashtag in theory. Hashtag hypothetical.
56:51 Ryan Sean Adams? Yeah, so Never Sell Gang, we even ran an article about this on Monday about many people who are just, rather than selling their Ether, they just plan to stake it and use it as a productive asset. So there are many ways to be kind of Never Sell Gang if that's what you choose to do. It's also a viable path to create a sell plan and just have price targets and sell as you go up. What you're talking about here, David, I think it meshes well with the Alchemix, yeah, Alchemix episode that we did earlier this week, which was another way to sort of take out future yield against collateral that you already had. I would like to remind people, though, of one thing.
57:30 Ryan Sean Adams? So I saw some people take this strategy, David, when Maker was first launched in 2017 and 2018. Okay? Some of these were very bullish ETH, as you are, as I am right now. They took out Maker CDP loans. ETH was about $1,000 or so. They thought, no way it goes below $300. No way it goes below $200. David, we got to $80 in the price of ETH. ETH lost 95% of its value. So the risk that you were talking about towards the end is ETH is heavily volatile. You know, we may never see a 95% drop again, but it's possible. We could.
58:13 Ryan Sean Adams? I saw some people get liquidated in 2018 who were pursuing a similar strategy but just didn't leave enough room. So if you do this strategy, I'm sure you would agree that it's all about your liquidation number because you are adding some risk to this, you are adding some margin to this kind of thing if you choose to do it. Any thoughts on that?
58:37 David Hoffman? Yeah, very, very, very true as well. Anytime you are borrowing against your collateral, you have the risk of being liquidated. And even if you have a very, very, very low liquidation price, let's rewind back into December 2017. Maker Dow just went live Ether is $1,200 and you come in and you say I'm going to be super safe. I'm going to make my liquidation level $150. Eventually
59:00 Ryan Sean Adams? Super safe at the time.
59:01 David Hoffman? Seems super safe at the time and eventually Ether got down to that price. And if you didn't do anything between Ether being $1,200 and Ether being $150, you get liquidated and you are forcibly selling the bottom, right? You are forced to sell the bottom. And so, one way to manage this risk is that say, say same scenario. You collateralize your Ether, $150 liquidation price, Ether is $1,200, but then Ether gets cut to $600. And so you're still plenty safe and you have an opportunity to then unwind that leverage, sell some collateral before and maybe you go from $150 down to $75. And so you do sell some collateral, you are no longer in the never sell gang,
59:44 David Hoffman? but you are managing your risk appropriately. And if you did do that in that hypothetical scenario, you would have never had to sell your Ether at the low, low price of $150 because you adequately managed your risk on the way down. And like you said, Ryan, I don't really think we're ever going to see 90% drawdowns ever again. Crypto's mainstream, but that's speculation, so it's not guaranteed. But I think as, and similarly Maker Dow was the only credit facility to really offer this opportunity. Now in Ethereum, we have many, many, many more credit facilities. We have Aave and Compound, we have Liquidity, LUSD, and we also have Alchemix.
1:00:23 David Hoffman? And so we have more tools at our disposable, at our disposal to appropriately manage our risk and also still be able to really capture that juxtaposition, which is really the through line of this tweet originally. The through line of this tweet is that there's a massive juxtaposition between ultrasound money and US dollar, where it's advantageous to have ultrasound money as collateral, while also having dollar-denominated debt. Because the juxtaposition between those two assets couldn't be more clear. And there's different DeFi apps that allow you to tap into the power of that juxtaposition that could be in your favor if you adequately manage risk.
1:01:01 Ryan Sean Adams? Yep, absolutely. All right, let's get to the next take. I felt like this was reports week for Ether David. So yeah, it had been, I don't know, right, 2018, 2019, most 2020, 2020, almost no financial analysts wrote anything about Ether as an asset.
1:01:20 David Hoffman? No, we were, we were trying to do that.
1:01:22 Ryan Sean Adams? Like, we were trying to do that. Like, many, many reports came out about Ethereum as a smart contract network and the potential, these sorts of things. But no one ever zoned in on Ether as an asset. If they did, I remember reading some like bearish reports from financial analysts about how they were going to short ETH back, back in those days. But now we're getting reports on a weekly basis. Just last week, we got three. This is a, almost like a re, sort of an institutional report that was made by a, a retail amateur investor, which is incredibly comprehensive. This whole report is about 78 pages or so. We'll include it in the show notes
1:02:03 Ryan Sean Adams? from a guy named Squish Chaos. And he goes through basically a lot of the things that we've been saying about ultrasound money, about the demand drivers, about the, the catalysts of the triple halving. We talked about this on the last week's roll up, which is basically EIP 1559 and the merge that are coming up in the next nine to 12 months. And how this will cause a 90% reduction in issuance, talking about narrative adoption. And David, the price that this analyst is calling for is in the bear case, 30K ETH, 30 to 50K ETH. And in the speculative fever-like case, 150K ETH by January 2023.
1:02:47 Ryan Sean Adams? Like, more bullish than we've ever been on Bankless. So this first report blew my mind. I don't know if you were able to read any of it, but it was absolutely, it was well researched and well put together for sure.
1:03:01 David Hoffman? Yeah, the the number of different reports coming out is awesome, first off. And like you said, this is kind of a reiteration of some of the ultrasell money theses, proof of stake, merge, reduce issuance, burning issuance, blah, blah, blah. It's important to have many different reports articulating similar things from different angles, because you don't know what's going to catch on and what's not going to catch on. And sometimes people just need things to be articulated differently for them to really resonate with things. And so the fact that multiple reports are coming out about Ethereum, all talking about similar through lines, but in different roundabout ways, really it's catching, it's casting the widest net to really capture some of those, that investor mindset.
1:03:42 Ryan Sean Adams? Yeah, so that was a report by an amateur analyst, I would call them, that's actually very sophisticated. A report came out by a crypto fund called 2Prime, and this was targeted at institutional investors. We'll include the full, a link to the full report in our show notes, but here's a statement for you. "We believe that ETH has earned a place alongside Bitcoin as an institutional-grade investment, store of value, and treasury reserve asset alongside Bitcoin." Pretty crazy. That's the message getting out there to institutional investors from crypto funds. This last report was actually put together by, once again, our friends at JP Morgan. "Why is ETH outperforming?" is the title of the report.
1:04:27 Ryan Sean Adams? Here's a quote from it. "Bitcoin is more of a crypto commodity than currency, competes with gold as a store of value, while ETH is the backbone of the crypto-native economy." I wouldn't fully agree with all of that, but they got the last part right, which is ETH is the backbone of a fully crypto-native economy. So the narrative is seeping out through these reports at the retail level, at the institutional level, and even among bankers who are issuing these things.
1:04:56 David Hoffman? Yeah, the parallel here between the dollar being the backbone of the world because of how it is the petrodollar, right? If you want to access energy, gasoline, you need to be using dollars. That same metaphor is alive with Ether, where if you want to do stuff in DeFi, you need Ether, and Ether is the backbone of the crypto-native economy. That's basically saying Ether is the money for the internet.
1:05:21 Ryan Sean Adams? ETH is money leaking out. David, there's no floor for ETH supply. I heard you say this on our podcast with Justin Drake. I think there was a spur of the moment thing. What do you mean by this tweet?
1:05:33 David Hoffman? Right, so Bitcoiners and supply cap maximalists will often critique Ethereum as like, well, there's no supply cap to Ether, so why would it ever be a store of value? And while that's already not a very nuanced take, like correct, there is no supply cap to Ether, that doesn't mean that it's not extremely scarce. When we have EIP 1559 burning a bunch of Ether and the proof of stake system not issuing very much Ether, in the case of a deflationary Ether, there is in similar ways that there is no Ether supply cap, there is also no Ether supply floor. We could, in theory, burn all of the Ether. Just like in theory, there's an infinite number of Ether out there. In theory, there's also no
1:06:17 David Hoffman? floor to the Ether supply. So Justin Drake modeled out the case for Ether supply going as low as 100 million units when we are currently at 115 million. So what would it take to burn 15 million units to get the supply back down to 100 million? Go watch that modeling ultrasound money video that we just did with Justin Drake. But that, he put a timeframe on that of something like 15 to 20 years. 20 years plus, we could just go through the fake floor of 100 million, the round number floor and just keep on going. There is no Ether supply floor.
1:06:53 Ryan Sean Adams? Yeah, it makes sense. It's a counter narrative. David, I'm gonna give this a retweet. I like that one.
1:06:57 David Hoffman? Well, I haven't you already.
1:06:58 Ryan Sean Adams? Well done, sir. I'm just seeing it now, okay? Just seeing it now. David, let's get to this last take. This is about the Binance chain exploit. So there was an exploit, I believe, do you recall the name of the protocol that was actually exploited?
1:07:16 David Hoffman? Uh, no.
1:07:17 Ryan Sean Adams? Here it is, Uranium Finance.
1:07:20 David Hoffman? Oh.
1:07:20 Ryan Sean Adams? Almost like it's not important.
1:07:21 David Hoffman? Don't remember that one at all.
1:07:22 Ryan Sean Adams? Right, Uranium Finance. So, there are many things that are popping up on Binance Smart Chain these days. This, this one, um, report, uh, stole 50 million in users' fund. So, there's some sort of a backdoor or a way to access those funds. Uranium Finance stole the 50 million on Binance Smart Chain. What's interesting about this scenario, I think, David, is it, it sort of starts to test the limits of decentralization of the base layer. So, I kind of think of this, I kind of think of Binance Smart Chain as almost like a centralized casino. You could argue all of Finance is a casino, that Ethereum is a casino too. But Binance Chain is really a centralized casino.
1:08:05 Ryan Sean Adams? There is, um, a centralized operator. So, this was as if somebody, uh, you're the casino operator, you put yourself in the position of CZ. Someone stole money from your customers, uh, in your casino. Most of the money somewhere still in the building. So, you have the ability to go catch the people who did it and restore the funds. You're the casino owner. Do you freeze the stolen funds and return it to its rightful owners? Or do you do nothing? And here's the catch, right? You have been telling everyone that you don't have the power to freeze the stolen funds. That, that Binance Chain is decentralized, that it is DeFi, uh, and you've been pretending to, to not have this ability.
1:08:49 Ryan Sean Adams? So, now what do you do? You're caught in this like, you know, crosshairs of decision. So, I'm curious as to what Binance does. The, the article in question, uh, talks about the, um, the victims of the hack talking to the Binance security team about ways to remediate this. I'm very much wondering how it gets worked out. Maybe it gets worked out by, you know, Binance. Gives them some of their funds back from an insurance. Maybe CZ decides and Binance Chain decides to actually pursue the hackers and freeze their funds and restore the funds. But this is kind of the predicament that you're in when you actually have the ability
1:09:31 Ryan Sean Adams? as a chain operator to censor transactions, freeze funds, when it's actually a centralized system rather than a decentralized system. Any thoughts here?
1:09:41 David Hoffman? Yeah, and the predicament to me is you're kind of damned if you do, damned if you don't, right? Because if you do, if you do roll back the chain and restore funds, then those users are happy. But one of the reasons why DeFi is what it is today is because no one is coming to save poorly constructed DeFi applications. And so they need to be built right. And so there's less of an urgency for applications on Binance Smart Chain to really get things right if CZ does decide to just roll back the chain and give people their money back, which means DeFi on Binance Chain will always be like, you know, given protection by this all-powerful overseer. And they actually can't escape into their own responsibility and take responsibility
1:10:23 David Hoffman? for their own smart contractors themselves if they keep getting rescued by CZ. Or CZ does nothing, and that's costly in of itself. Like, well, then why do we even bother with this centralization? Like, what are we actually getting here?
1:10:37 Ryan Sean Adams? Yeah, and if he does nothing, maybe this time you might not be able to get away with that if the amounts are, say, 500 million. Or if you get a notice from the authorities requiring you to restore the funds. So, yeah, it's interesting to see all of this play out. David, let's move to what we are excited about this week. I'm gonna ask you first, what are you excited about, my friend?
1:11:00 David Hoffman? Well, the first, really quick, the first and foremost thing I'm excited about is Eric Connor increasing his price targets up from 2,500 to 15,590. And so, thank you, Eric Connor, for becoming more bullish. We finally got him, ladies and gentlemen, to rescind against his sins of being overly bearish, and now Eric Connor joins the clan of being ethballs.
1:11:28 David Hoffman? My eth maxi side is coming out a little bit too much today. But the other much more reasonable thing I'm really excited for is the podcast coming out on Monday, this coming Monday, out of the bankless podcast. And it is all about drawing the connections between the Renaissance of the 1400s and perhaps the crypto Renaissance that we have ahead of us. Making the claim that the crypto Renaissance ahead of us is equal to or larger than in magnitude the Renaissance that we experienced back in the 1400s in Italy. And the connections here are two very specific types of technologies, one communication and one financial. In the 1400s, we invented double entry bookkeeping and also the printing press.
1:12:11 David Hoffman? And that allowed for freedom of information and just fintech, really just more financial tooling. And that, those two things really created art, culture, churn of value, new ways to distribute wealth. And that really created the cultural Renaissance that we saw in the 1400s. And when we make the claim that we are about to see that same effect again, coming as a result of a crypto Renaissance moving forward. And it could be even bigger than the original Renaissance due to how things just move faster these days.
1:12:41 Ryan Sean Adams? Really cool podcast. Yeah, I can't wait to release that, man. It's, I can't wait to listen to it. Is it edited? I gotta listen to it.
1:12:47 David Hoffman? That's the, on the rest of my to do list today, I got it back from the editor this morning. And so I'm going to slap some music on there and then put it out. And we're going to have it for early release for the bankless listeners. And so if you are a paid bankless listener, you can go and listen to that right now.
1:13:01 Ryan Sean Adams? Awesome, man. That includes me, I hope, David.
1:13:06 David Hoffman? Are you not a paid user of Bankless, Ryan?
1:13:08 Ryan Sean Adams? I don't, I'm not.
1:13:10 David Hoffman? Not gonna make it.
1:13:11 Ryan Sean Adams? After all this time.
1:13:13 David Hoffman? All right, Ryan, what are you excited about?
1:13:15 Ryan Sean Adams? I'm excited about Bill Ford.
1:13:18 David Hoffman? Bill Ford, what a guy.
1:13:20 Ryan Sean Adams? Bill Ford is a 77-year-old guy. I don't know where he lives. I've seen him active on Crypto Twitter. He's an active member of the Bankless community. And you know what Bill Ford is doing? He's teaching himself DeFi, David. He's 77 years old. He's learning MetaMask. He's emailing us because he's trying to claim his badge. He was successfully able to claim his badge, and he is learning. He's asking fantastic questions. And he's tweeting at us all of the time. And it just kind of hit me, like, Bankless is a movement for everybody. DeFi is a movement for everybody. If Bill Ford, at 77 years old, can figure this out, like, what's your excuse?
1:14:05 Ryan Sean Adams? For not, like, spending some time and learning this? Anyone can learn crypto. If you're 10 years old, right, you could start pursuing a MetaMask account. If you're, like, a 77-year-old man, a 77-year-old woman, wherever you are in the world, you can start learning crypto. You just have to take the time and apply yourself. So, look, Bill Ford can do it. You can do it. Really excited to have a diverse community with us on the journey because this is a global movement for everybody.
1:14:38 David Hoffman? Yeah, nice job, Bill Ford. Much respect to you in getting into DeFi. It's not an easy task, even for the internet native people. And I wonder what it's like to be Bill Ford, who is a member of the silent generation, not the boomer generation, when you and I are just shitting on boomers left and right here. I wonder what he's like.
1:14:57 Ryan Sean Adams? No, we don't do that.
1:14:58 David Hoffman? Yeah, what it was, those boomers, David and Ryan is right. Those goddamn boomers.
1:15:03 Ryan Sean Adams? Elite boomers, David.
1:15:06 David Hoffman? Boomer elite, right. Boomer elite are the people that we don't like.
1:15:10 Ryan Sean Adams? Let's get to the meme of the week.
1:15:12 David Hoffman? Meme of the week.
1:15:13 Ryan Sean Adams? Bankless meme.
1:15:17 David Hoffman? You want to read this one out, Ryan?
1:15:18 Ryan Sean Adams? Yeah. It's just a picture of, you know, those chain pens at the banks they have. It's just a picture of a chained up pen that you might see at any retail bank that you enter. And it just says this, "This is how much the banks trust you." They can't even trust you with a pen. Just chain the pen up.
1:15:38 David Hoffman? Chain the pen up.
1:15:38 Ryan Sean Adams? That's it. That's the tweet. Full stop. That's the meme.
1:15:41 David Hoffman? Yeah, nice. This was a meme created by Ryan. Wow, 3,000 likes? Holy hell. Wow, nice job.
1:15:48 Ryan Sean Adams? Yeah.
1:15:48 David Hoffman? I retweeted this tweet and I said, "The banks would chain you up too if they could." And that was my contribution.
1:15:55 Ryan Sean Adams? Nicely done.
1:15:58 Ryan Sean Adams? All right, let's go to a runner-up meme because this is great too. David, you want to explain this one?
1:16:02 David Hoffman? Yeah, this is the Never Sell Gang. I mean for the Never Sell Gang. It is the Lord of the Rings. This is the Return of the King where they're doing a flashback to Elrond, the elf king, talking to, I can't remember his name, the human who's got the ring.
1:16:16 Ryan Sean Adams? Isildur.
1:16:17 David Hoffman? Isildur, right. And he's about to throw the ring into the fire and just banish evil from the land. And he goes, the elf guy goes, "Take some profits, sell it." And the guy goes, "No, no I won't." And of course, the ring he's holding is actually ether, the ether coin. And so refusing to take his profits and refusing to sell. However, if you are receiving life-changing money as a result of this crypto revolution, do consider taking that life-changing money and actually changing your life with it. You don't necessarily have to hold on to paper games.
1:16:51 Ryan Sean Adams? Wait, wait, wait, what happened to Never Sell Gang, David?
1:16:53 David Hoffman? It's not, Never Sell Gang is not for everyone. You need to, you need to understand that that may or may not be your life. You do not have to be in the Never Sell Gang. You can sell your ether. It's okay. I, however, am going to do my best to be in the Never Sell Gang.
1:17:10 Ryan Sean Adams? We are convex thinkers, right? As Vitalik would say, right? So you could, why not a blend approach? Just don't sell everything. Right. Maybe send a little, sell a little bit. Definitely don't sell everything. Yeah, don't sell everything. Eth is turning into a productive asset, global monetary asset before our eyes. As is Bitcoin, at least the, the global monetary aspect of it. David, this has been a roll up. We are in the fifth week of April. What a year it has been so far. Guys, of course, thank you for joining us on the bankless journey. None of what you heard was financial advice. None of it was tax advice. Bitcoin is risky, ETH is too, so is DeFi. You could lose what you put in. But this is the journey west and we're glad you're with us. Thanks for joining us on Bankless.
1:17:55 David Hoffman? Hey, we hope you enjoyed the video. If you did, head over to Bankless HQ right now to develop your crypto investing skills and learn how to free yourself from banks and gain your financial independence. We recommend joining our daily newsletter, podcasts and community as a Bankless premium subscriber to get the most out of your Bankless experience. You'll get access to our market analysis, our alpha leaks and exclusive content, and even the Bankless token for airdrops, raffles and unlocks. If you're interested in crypto, the Bankless community is where you want to be. Click the link in the description to become a Bankless premium subscriber today. Also, don't forget to subscribe to the channel for in-depth interviews with industry leaders,
1:18:36 David Hoffman? Ask Me Anythings and weekly rollups where we summarize the week in crypto and other fantastic content. Thanks everyone for watching and being on the journey as we build out the Bankless nation.
Previous AMA with Scoopy Trooples of Alchemix Next 63 - The Crypto Renaissance | Josh Rosenthal Page updated October 21, 2026 Β· transcript and summary are machine-generated