ROLLUP: 5th Week of December

🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: http://bankless.substack.com/ ✊ STARTING GUIDE BANKLESS: https://bit.ly/37Q17uI ❤️ JOIN PRIVATE DISCORD: https://bit.ly/2UVI10O 🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/ 👕 BUY BANKLESS TEE: https://merch.banklesshq.com/ ----- GO BANKLESS WITH THESE SPONSOR TOOLS: ⭐️LEDGER - BEST HARDWARE WALLET TO SECURE YOUR CRYPTO https://bankless.cc/ledger 🚀 ZERION - INVEST IN DEFI FROM ONE PLACE https://bankless.cc/zerion 💳 MONOLITH - GET THE HOLY GRAIL OF BANKLESS VISA CARDS https://bankless.cc/monolith 🤖YEARN - YIELD-SEEKING MONEY ROBOT THAT FARMS DEFI FOR YOU http://bankless.cc/yearn ------ ROLLUP: 5th Week of December MARKET BTC Price - Almost 29k! ETH Price - Just hit 750! - 50% away from ATH price Blow off tops coming?? We are very far away from the 20 week MA! TVL in DeFi - Up from 14B to 14.4B DPI - Up from $108 to $117 2.2M ETH in ETH 2, $1.65B Futures value Coinbase at $50B https://ftx.com/trade/CBSE/USD ____ RELEASES 1INCH token released https://1inch-exchange.medium.com/1inch-token-is-released-e69ad69cf3ee Haseeb’s take on Stablecoins https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/fighting-to-be-stable-the-evolution-of-stablecoins-aca81fb432f9 DeFi events of the year graphic https://www.theblockcrypto.com/linked/89271/here-are-some-of-the-biggest-defi-events-in-2020 Opyn V2 https://medium.com/opyn/opyn-v2-is-live-11347240b46e YAM rebasing DISABLED https://twitter.com/YamFinance/status/1343966274095902720 YAM released Degenerative Finance on UMA https://medium.com/yam-finance/degenerative-finance-ugas-explained-458bedbc2f17 - YAM acting as a good DAO! Primitive is Live on Mainnet https://primitivefinance.medium.com/primitive-is-live-on-mainnet-2261c5b098c5 ____ NEWS New SEC Chairman appointed: Elad Roisman https://u.today/breaking-new-pro-crypto-sec-chairman-appointed “Known as one of the most crypto-friendly SEC commissioners. A vocal supporter! The fact that Roisman is at the helm of the SEC also significantly boosts the chances of a Bitcoin-tied exchange-traded fund (ETF) being approved in the coming years. Mnuchin wants onchain KYC for all ETH wallets that have stablecoins in them https://twitter.com/jchervinsky/status/1341864829171228676?s=20 Comment window period open on the FinCEN proposal to extend KYC to non-custodial wallets https://twitter.com/jchervinsky/status/1341847200209530883?s=20 Etoro IPO rumors https://cointelegraph.com/news/crypto-friendly-trading-firm-etoro-rumored-to-be-prepping-for-2021-ipo Coinbase Delists XRP https://twitter.com/coinbase/status/1343685626001039360?s=20 Also Binance US https://twitter.com/binanceus/status/1344372892205608961?s=21 Also Bittrex https://twitter.com/BittrexExchange/status/1344056304617177089 Also trading desks https://www.theblockcrypto.com/linked/89083/jump-trading-galaxy-xrp-market-making ____ Cover Protocol Exploit https://coverprotocol.medium.com/12-28-post-mortem-34c5f9f718d4 https://twitter.com/CoverProtocol/status/1343581331448586245 https://etherscan.io/tx/0xc2fd5094c1e108f83222a86bd46b35fc0da35616385d681964b22003643f982e ____ TAKES Uniswap means you can't be delisted (sorry XRP) https://twitter.com/RyanSAdams/status/1343740028766347265?s=20 DC https://twitter.com/iamDCinvestor/status/1344138701757153281?s=20 Can’t delist on Uniswap https://twitter.com/RyanSAdams/status/1343740028766347265?s=20 Ethereum is the TAM https://twitter.com/panekkkk/status/1343269535919562753?s=20 Ethereum doesn’t marginalize https://twitter.com/evabeylin/status/1341793825962958848?s=20 Degens are funding Open Source https://www.coindesk.com/defi-degens-funding-next-wave-open-source Ethereum is the last bastion for Yield https://twitter.com/TrustlessState/status/1344378165414617088?s=20 ------ Don't stop at the video! Subscribe to the Bankless newsletter program http://bankless.substack.com/ Visit the official Bankless website for resources http://banklesshq.com/ Follow Bankless on Twitter https://twitter.com/BanklessHQ Follow Ryan on Twitter https://twitter.com/ryansadams Follow David on Twitter https://twitter.com/TrustlessState ----- 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 we may add links in this channel to products we use. We may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. We'll always disclose when this is the case

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

• 0:07David Hoffman?

  If you are looking for the front page of DeFi, look no further than zerion.io. Zerion is your home base for managing your DeFi portfolios. Zerion offers a central place for you to engage with all of the DeFi protocols and assets that you engage with on a daily basis, but all in one central spot. Here you can see I've loaded up a wallet and Zerion is giving me the portfolio performance of all the assets in this wallet over time, as well as a breakdown of all the assets that I own, as well as all of my transaction history that I've ever done in an easy to view fashion. Zerion also lets you invest right into DeFi's best yielding financial opportunities right from their homepage.

• 0:49David Hoffman?

  Zerion also makes it super easy to access interest in DeFi using applications like Compound and Aave in the background. And you can also exchange your assets using the Zerion app, using an exchange aggregator in the background to make sure that you always get the best rates. You can even use the Zerion mobile wallet to add your MetaMask or Argent or another Ethereum address right into your mobile wallet. So you can see your portfolio and engage in DeFi on the go. Here I just loaded up my Argent wallet and now I'm going to load up my MetaMask as well. And Zerion will do the same thing. It will add all of my assets and wallets together, all in one space, and give me a portfolio summary of what's going on. Adding wallets is trivially easy. If you already have a MetaMask, you can get it right into the Zerion app

• 1:33David Hoffman?

  and it can sync with your desktop app as well. And the best part is you can also buy Ether right into the app itself. Use the Invest tab to look at all the things that you have invested in, as well as other opportunities. And coming soon to the Zerion app is the ability to buy and sell your assets straight from your mobile device as well. So download the app. It works on iOS and Android. Go to zerion.io, plug in your wallets and get a historical report of your portfolio over time, as well as a comprehensive breakdown of all the assets that you own and how much yield they're generating for you. We're also brought to you by Monolith. Monolith is your cool new DeFi account, your DeFi savings account, your DeFi checking account.

• 2:15David Hoffman?

  Except the cool thing about the Monolith DeFi account is that it gets software updates, right? You actually get to increase the usefulness of this over time. So here are some of the features. Monolith is a smart contract wallet with a lot of the features that you would expect if you've come to know DeFi and what it is. You can, you can add money to it. You can put that money to work in Compound and accessing yield. But you can, and you can also swap through Uniswap. What was cool with Monolith is that they will send you a very sexy Monolith Visa card that connects to your smart Monolith smart contract wallet on Ethereum. So it's a really awesome tool to live a bankless life with a savings account that gets software updates. So this is something that you're never going to find out in the real world,

• 2:59David Hoffman?

  but you can still do real world things with, you know, real money and like buy your groceries. So that's just fantastic. Coming soon to Monolith, actually already here to Monolith is now you can buy, die and get it sent to your wallet directly, right? So it's also being an on-ramp. So you don't have to go through your centralized exchange like Coinbase or Gemini or wherever. You can just go straight from your bank account, right into your Monolith checking account, smart contract wallet. So check them out at monolith.xyz.

• 3:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  David, it's the fifth week of December. What are we doing today?

• 3:31David Hoffman?

  We are rolling it up. The crypto industry moves so fast. So we are rolling up the last week of December, the last week of the year and injecting it right into your brain. So you can stay up to speed with this crazy world of crypto.

• 3:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  Happy Thursday morning, everyone. This usually comes at you on Friday, but we are releasing Thursday due to the holidays. We release it on both YouTube and the podcast, so catch it in both places. David, how's your Christmas, man?

• 3:57David Hoffman?

  Absolutely fantastic, well complimented by the number go up of crypto prices, which is definitely going to be a topic of today's roll up as well.

• 4:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  Did you see what I'm drinking from?

• 4:06David Hoffman?

  Oh, I did not. Show it to me, show it to me.

• 4:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is my wife's gift to me. This is a coffee cup gift.

• 4:12David Hoffman?

  All right, for the listeners on the podcast, it is two tokens. One's Bitcoin and one's Ethereum and Ethereum is, is running saying, keep up, old man. And Bitcoin's got a cane.

• 4:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  I love it. She thinks this crypto stuff is weird, but she got me an Ethereum maximalist coffee cup and that cracks me up, dude. All right, markets, let's get right to it. You alluded to it, David, but Bitcoin price go up. Let's take a look at the charts.

• 4:36David Hoffman?

  Yeah, Bitcoin is flirting with $29,000 at the time of recording. That is obviously an all time high for Bitcoin. I would not be surprised if by the time this is getting into your ears Bitcoin has pierced 29,000. Ether is moving above $750, it's currently at $754 at the time of recording. That is really, really just very high prices, very high prices. Ether at $750 is just above the 50% mark from its previous all time high.

• 5:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  So it feels like it's gone up so much, David. Like, so Bitcoin is obviously well past its all time highs, only 10% or more past its all time high, but Ether is still down 50% from its all time highs, what you're telling me?

• 5:24David Hoffman?

  Yeah, and I don't really ascribe too much weight to all time high prices because they, these cryptos didn't spend much time there previously, but yeah, like we still have a long way to go to breach the all time high for Ether price.

• 5:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  That is hilarious, but both are going up, not quite in lockstep. I think Bitcoin is a little bit ahead, but Ether has had some very good days over the past week as well. What's happening in DeFi land with total locked value?

• 5:50David Hoffman?

  Yeah, we are up from $14 billion to $14.4 billion, still ranging in that 14 to $15 billion range. The DPI token, the index token for DeFi is up from $108 to $116.5.

• 6:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Do you think we are, you know, in for a blow off the top at some point here? It just can't keep going week over week with these like, you know, 20%, 30% gains?

• 6:17David Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah. And I mean, that is the symptom of a bull market. I feel like the bull market happens when dips don't happen and number continues to go up. However, I'm not a trader, but I do listen to traders and traders are very, very focused on. The 20 week moving average, especially with Bitcoin, because in bull markets, even with bullish attitudes, we always retest the 20 week moving average. I don't have those figures off the top of my head, but I do know that if we had a retracement back to the 20 week moving average, which happens all the time in bull markets, that would be a very, very steep drop. That would be like Ether going down to, I think, like $450 and Bitcoin going down to like, almost like $15,000, like less, almost half of what Bitcoin's price is.

• 7:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, wait, wait. So what you're saying is like, we could, we could be in for a really steep drop, right, David? Yet still be in the bull market?

• 7:10David Hoffman?

  Yes, yes, that's exactly right. What I'm, what I'm saying is we are really, really overextended. And I'm still bullish. I'm not selling. I'm not usually a seller, but I'm, I'm, I'm precariously noticing how far away we are from the 20 week moving average. Things have moved really far, really fast. I'm still bullish, but I'm really cautious.

• 7:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Also, the market did have a lot of catch up to do from 2018, 2019, particularly the price of ETH. So it's not surprising that we're seeing these numbers, but we will see what happens in the weeks ahead. I'm pretty confident we're going to end 2021 up, though. We will, we will see what happens. There's also, David, 2.2 million ETH now locked in a staking contract in ETH 2. That's like $1.65 billion, something close to that. How crazy is that?

• 7:57David Hoffman?

  Yeah, that's pretty cool. And people are bullish on ETH 2, and this is just really good. People are, are becoming woke to the yield on ETH returns. People love Bitcoin for their constrained asset, supply asset, and Ether is that same thing, but with yield. And so constrained supply, but yield is something that is really interesting to investors. And that's why we are seeing the ETH 2 deposit contract, receiving a bunch of ETH.

• 8:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  While we're talking about the market, we should talk about the future Coinbase IPO. The FTX futures options market has a Coinbase sort of derivative synthetic going and it's trading at over, it's valuing the Coinbase at over $50 billion. If Coinbase gets listed, not IPO, in the $50 billion range, how bullish is that for crypto in 2021?

• 8:50David Hoffman?

  Yeah, this is going to be a really awesome story to follow. Coinbase will be the first vehicle on, on public exchanges that offers you like pure exposure to the cryptocurrency industry, right? Like MicroStrategy with, it's like backdoor Bitcoin ETF still has like this software business in the front, right? It's still something else. Coinbase is actually selling shovels to the crypto industry investors like that. I think that $50 billion valuation is only going to go up as crypto prices go up as well. As the crypto mania works into the mainstream, works into legacy markets, I think a lot of that is going to be reflected in the Coinbase IPO price.

• 9:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think it'll be really well timed for Brian Armstrong and you mentioned sort of, you know, fintech in the front, but DeFi in the back. That's, that's the crypto mullet, as we call it, the DeFi mullet. Coinbase is definitely in that space. It looks institutional on the front side of things, but it is playing around these crypto and DeFi protocols, which is good and bullish for the space, I think. All right, that's market. David, let's talk about releases. I think the big release this week was the one inch token. So everyone got airdropped who used one inch. I think you had to use it like four times in the, in the past three months or at least one time before September 15th. They got airdropped one inch tokens. Tell us about this.

• 10:11David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so this is just like uni, except one inch is a little bit more niche. It's a little bit harder to use. It's a little bit clunkier UI because that is because it's a DEX aggregator, right? So it's a centralized service aggregating a bunch of different prices from a bunch of different exchanges and then giving you the best price in return, right? And so they airdropped you a token. I'm not too Privy on the details of the token, it is some sort of governance token. But if you qualified for the token, you got something like 1,080 one-inch tokens, which was worth roughly $2,500. So roughly double the uni swap airdrop. And I think the reason why it was it was so much more in dollar terms is because so so many fewer people had used one inch first uni swap.

• 10:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it's it's pretty. It's a pretty phenomenal airdrop, though. But like, like, one thing it tends to incent, I think, is is for DeFi users to create all sorts of different wallets, right? Like, people see an airdrop like that, and they're going to go out for, you know, get ready for the next ones, create all of these different wallets so that they can look like they are a separate user and get more more tokens. So it's a it's a strange incentive as far as that goes, although.

• 11:18David Hoffman?

  So that's actually why one inch did differential rewards if you used it before September 15th. September 15th was the date that uni swap token was released. And so if you wanted to game that, you wouldn't have known that that was a game to play before September 15th. So that's why they did that differential reward.

• 11:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  Did you get any one inch tokens, David?

• 11:37David Hoffman?

  I got some one inch tokens, yes.

• 11:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  What? What did you do with your?

• 11:40David Hoffman?

  Which is funny, because I literally made I have literally made one trade on one.

• 11:45David Hoffman?

  I was the minimum entry, right? I dumped it for ETH.

• 11:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  You dumped it for ETH. Okay, well, you know, I got some one inch tokens, too. I did the same thing. Part of the reason why is like, fully diluted valuation of one inch at the time when it was airdropped is like, something of $4 billion.

• 12:00David Hoffman?

  Five billion, yeah.

• 12:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right? Doesn't make sense from a from a valuation perspective to me. So of course, I think a lot of those one inch tokens ended up in the reserve currency of DeFi, which is ETH. Not a big surprise. David, let's talk about this. Haseeb, our friend Haseeb, had a fantastic easy venture capitalist, spent on the Backless Podcast before. He had a really good take on stable coins and regulations. I think this image maybe sums it up. Did you read this article?

• 12:26David Hoffman?

  I have not read it. It is in my queue.

• 12:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, well, it's a really interesting article and Hasseberly talks about an evolution of stablecoins, but he talks about the first pure crypto era before stablecoins, where you just had Bitcoin and Ether. And then he talks about the second stage, which is roughly, you know, 2017 or so, the age of Tether, and that's kind of the age that we're in right now. He predicts that regulators are going to crack down on these Tether-type coins, and what we'll get is sort of a regulatory age of stablecoins, where we might get things like Libra and USDC and these things take control. But eventually, he thinks regulators will clamp down even hard on the regulated stablecoins,

• 13:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  and eventually, we will enter a reign of the decentralized stablecoins. So, you know, protocols like DAI will make a comeback, and maybe new decentralized algorithmic-type stablecoins will take shape and form that are outside of the grasp of regulators. Super interesting set of predictions, I think very timely, given all of the stablecoin-type murmurings and regulation we have heard about recently. Any takes there?

• 13:35David Hoffman?

  Yeah, it's interesting to see all of the coming regulation around crypto-dollar stablecoins coming, and also these experiments going on. If you've been paying attention to this world of decentralized stablecoins, you know about the dynamic set dollar, empty set dollar, RAI, and a few other ones. There's a few other ones I'm missing as well. But there are a bunch of experiments going on with how to generate a new form of decentralized, trustless, stablecoins. People are pointing at DAI and saying that there's a lot of USDC backing DAI, and if the prediction that USDC is going to become heavily regulated, that impacts DAI, which means we need more options in our trustless stablecoins than

• 14:16David Hoffman?

  just DAI. And there are many, many experiments coming to fill that void. I think that will be a very cool story to follow in 2021.

• 14:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, totally agree. I think this is a good model for how stablecoins could evolve. So keep your eyes on that. That's Haseeb's thesis. We'll include a link to that in the show notes. The Block put together a timeline of DeFi events that happened this year. Anything pop out for you, David? Like, anything worth highlighting? Man, this year's been such a blur for me. Like, so much happened. But why don't you pick out a few of the highlights here?

• 14:50David Hoffman?

  Yeah, this is just like, as somebody who's been living and breathing crypto, especially in 2020, this was just like a trip through the past of 2020, which both seems to have flown by and also taken forever somehow at the same time. I don't really have any special takes here. It's worth just going and checking out the graphic. This has a graphic to view if you guys like visuals rather than text. And so it's definitely worth to check out. It will also be in the show notes.

• 15:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  Just a recap of last year, really. It talks about the Uniswap drop. It talks about DeFi summer. It talks about Aave, all of these things that happened that were sort of a blur from the year that was crypto in 2020. David, another protocol launched, Open, which is a DeFi options protocol. They just launched their V2. Any takes on this?

• 15:36David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I think another important story of 2021 is trustless, decentralized, protocolized options on Ethereum. We're seeing a race for this as we speak right now. The race is already hot. Open is not the only team going after that. There's also Hedjic. Andre also released something as well. We'll see if that turns into anything real. 2021 decentralized, trustless options on Ethereum. It's totally gonna happen.

• 16:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Here's another one that launched just last week called Primitive. I haven't had a chance to explore that, but that's yet another that we're talking about. Going back to maybe a story from 2020 as well. Yeah, the original food token, the food token that started it all, started, of course, with an Apple Fourth type rebasing mechanism. If you're familiar with what that is, you know, it's a little bit of a gimmick, but it's kind of a way to, I guess, make the appearance of a token like YAM, to make it appear like it tracks a dollar. It doesn't really supply fluctuates, but they just turned their rebasing feature off. So YAM, of course, became a food token, which became a, which became a DAO.

• 16:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  I don't know. If you don't know what I'm talking about, David, maybe you could explain this a little bit better. There's a lot of history here.

• 16:51David Hoffman?

  Yeah. So Ampleforth created rebasing and then YAM took that rebasing mechanism and turned it into a way to add value to the treasury. And then YAM turned into a DAO. YAM is a governance token with a rebasing mechanism built in. And I think the governors of YAM just decided that they just had it with the whole rebasing thing. They were tired of like the supply of YAMs that they own keep on changing, right? And like, that was annoying and it's difficult to operate with. And, and at the end of the day, I think like they, they thought that the rebasing mechanism wasn't really adding much value back to the YAM ecosystem. So they just decided to ax it. And I think what's really cool about this is the collective governance decisions around something like YAMs to make a coherent decision with each other, saying, yeah, we don't want this anymore. Let's like, let's do something new.

• 17:37David Hoffman?

  And so like YAM started as this rebasing mechanism that generated a treasury. And now it's turning into something else, which means that like what YAMs really is, is completely decided in the social layer, right? It's completely a governed protocol and it's up to the governors to figure out how to make YAM more valuable. And they're clearly ready to cut off anything or add anything to make that happen.

• 18:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it's, it's kind of a cool story. I think we'll be excited to see how this evolves because now that they have this capital pool, you, you talked about the YAM ecosystem, they're actually launching products on the YAM ecosystem. So these are like DeFi products. One is called Degenerative Finance. They also have like an insurance product called Umbrella. I've been monitoring this a little bit. They're also taking a part of their treasury and like investing it. So they, they, they invested in the, the DPI, the DeFi index as well. So they're, they're taking this treasury, they're making it more valuable. This is kind of what any capital pool will do, any, any kind of like, I guess, corporation in the real world might do. And it's a, it's a very interesting, I think, model for what a decentralized autonomous or-

• 18:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  Organization, uh, capital pool on Ethereum might do in the future. David, I think that's, that's what we have time for as far as releases. We should jump to the news. I think one big news item of the week is in, I guess, the good gov section. We've got a new SEC chairman who has been appointed. So bye bye, Jay Clayton.

• 19:04David Hoffman?

  Bye, Jay Clayton.

• 19:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  He's been around for, for most of my tenure in crypto, always kind of the, like the face of the SEC about to pounce on crypto. Now there is a, uh, according to reports, I don't know much about this, this gentleman, the new SEC chair. But apparently he's very crow, uh, pro crypto and he takes here.

• 19:25David Hoffman?

  Yeah, um, nothing, no, no takes here. It's interesting to see a new SEC chairman getting people that are pro crypto in regulatory bodies is really, really important and really, really good. And this is a really important regulatory body to have a pro crypto person inside.

• 19:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  We say pro crypto. It's interesting that SEC at the same time is of course launching a, a pretty massive lawsuit investigation, et cetera, against Ripple, against XRP. So.

• 19:50David Hoffman?

  Hey, that's pro crypto. XRP isn't crypto.

• 19:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's what I would say, right?

• 19:55David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 19:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  You know, um, so they're, they're, they're going to be pro crypto, hopefully, but, um, you know, m- maybe not pro all of the, the centralized shenanigans that are, you know, happen in the crypto space.

• 20:08David Hoffman?

  Keep crypto, crypto.

• 20:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  In the bad gov, uh, category though, we've got, uh, Mnuchin and, uh, Jake Trivinsky, um, published this. This was kind of over the holidays. So I was looking at it a little bit, but apparently FinCEN, the working group under Mnuchin has issued another statement. This time calling for on-chain KYC, basically to any crypto wallet, any ETH wallet, any unhosted wallet, as they, they, they would call it, that have stable coins in them. So of course, on-chain KYC at the Ethereum address level is not possible. It's not part of the Ethereum protocol, but Mnuchin wants it to be.

• 20:44David Hoffman?

  Well, they could, they could submit an EIP if you really wanted to. I, I would, I would invite, uh, Mnuchin to submit an EIP. To add that and maybe we will consider it.

• 20:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, what's what's very interesting here is not only the the lack of feasibility and technical feasibility, right? Like, they seem to think that Ethereum accounts, Ethereum addresses are are similar to to banks. And that because the banking layer has an AML KYC function, that a protocol like Ethereum would have a KYC function. But of course, that is not built into the underlying protocol of Ethereum and never will be. Because the social layer will reject it. Well, this is, I think, partially concerning, because this is what many of the kind of big bankers like Mnuchin really want for this space.

• 21:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  At the same time, Jake says it's not enforceable at this point in time, but it but it just shows where their their head is on this.

• 21:42David Hoffman?

  Yeah, if you get down to it and you go into the nth degree, what Mnuchin is asking for is to have private keys, have KYC data embedded in them somehow. Not possible, not possible. And what's concerning to me is that they are trying to get rules passed, which, again, aren't possible, because they're using frameworks from the legacy world to try and make rules about a new world that they don't understand. So they're not even bothering to like, ask, is this even possible before they write a rule? It's fucking crazy.

• 22:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it is. And here's what you need to do, guys. So we had this conversation with, again, Jake Trivinsky last last week on State of the Nation. But there is a FinCEN proposed rule out there that is not quite as severe as what we just said, but requires requires exchanges essentially to implement AML KYC type function for any unhosted address. If you're withdrawing from a Coinbase or something like that, they would have to identify you. There's this comment period that has just opened up. We talked about it with with Jake. And what we need you to do, what you should do, is submit your comment. You don't even have to be a US citizen to do this. Jake has a great thread on how to construct a good comment. It shouldn't be insulting, it should be fact based. I submitted mine on Monday.

• 22:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  It was very, very much basically framing framing the the issue as the US would be left behind. If it didn't embrace DeFi on behalf of kind of a crypto investor, crypto entrepreneur is kind of my take. So submit your comment. This is, this is how we use our voice to take action in the traditional crusty old legacy nation state. It still is important that we do that so that we don't get regulatory requirements that are bad and, and set the space back and, and try to stymie the space.

• 23:29David Hoffman?

  Yep, agreed.

• 23:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, eToro IPO rumors. So do you know much about eToro, David?

• 23:36David Hoffman?

  Yeah, they're, they're an exchange like Coinbase. They have a couple of extra features, like a social trader feature that they have pioneered. I think the big story is, is that Coinbase is not going to be the only crypto IPO of 2021, if this rumor is true. And that makes me ask the question, what other IPOs are going on behind the scenes?

• 23:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, exactly. So eToro is rumored to possibly IPO. There's probably a list somewhere of other similar, like Ubico might be one, for instance. Other similar sized companies that might follow Coinbase's lead and IPO could be an interesting year in the public markets from that perspective. While we're talking about Coinbase, Coinbase was among the first to delist XRP, followed by Binance, followed by Bitrex, followed by trading desks everywhere. What's going on here, David?

• 24:26David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so this is bad for XRP. As a currency, XRP is designed to be extremely liquid and extremely available. And having it delisted from, you know, the biggest exchange in the United States and then from Binance US and also from Bitrex and then also from trading desks. I don't know how you achieve the goals of being an extremely liquid crypto assets without having any exchanges. That doesn't seem to make much sense. Also, the, the XRP asset price is like plummeting. It lost like 25% or something in the last week. So you also don't get liquidity when you're, when number go down. So not a good week for XRP.

• 25:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  And and so why are they all delisting, David, for folks that have kind of not followed things up to this point?

• 25:11David Hoffman?

  So the SEC last week came out and said that they are going after Ripple, the company, because XRP is an unregistered security. And there's also a bunch of extremely damning statements coming out of Ripple leadership, talking about just how to pump and dump the coin, basically. It has been basically the explicit strategy of Ripple to pump the coin, which I guess if you're trying to make an extremely liquid currency, that makes sense because you need number to go up to go to be liquid. But it's the way that they did it. And also there being a centralized issuer makes that, you know, not good, right? Information asymmetries between the buyers and sellers, and then just a bunch of ho ho stuff, just like nefarious activity that you just don't want to see happen. And yet they did it anyways.

• 25:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  I've got a hot take here that we'll get to in a little bit, but but remember this. Mass delistings of XRP are happening, and it seems like they're accelerating as well. There's also another sort of DeFi protocol hack. This is the cover protocol, which, as I understand it, David, is like an insurance DeFi protocol that's supposed to be protecting some of the the DeFi protocol assets. What was this hack? What happened for those that missed it?

• 26:21David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so this was an exploit in the cover token. There is a token that goes with cover and the attacker managed to do a an inflation bug mint, right? And so he, the or he or she just in minted something like four quadrillion or quintillion tokens, right? And so basically infinite and basically infinite. And so when you have basically infinite numbers of tokens, you can take those tokens to any AMM and then drain the AMMs. And so that what the attacker did is they minted basically an infinite number of tokens, took them to Uniswap, took them to Balancer, sold them into the AMMs to drain all of the other tokens on the other side, which would be Ether and and then I think also some stable coins.

• 27:03David Hoffman?

  And then what's really interesting as the as the tweet that you're showing, the attacker was able to drain 4,350 ETH. And then in a transaction, he sent it back to the covered deploy. Lawyer address, so he gave it back. So let it be known, he still did damage because the token price dropped, but he gave what was what he quote unquote stole, he gave that back. So people still have lost because you know, the the trust in the in the cover token, the the value of the cover token, you know, dropped. But at least that he gave the ether back. Interestingly, if you hit that click to see more button, Ryan, on the bottom left, you'll see a note from the attacker that says, oh, maybe, maybe I can't see him. It was in a different tweet. The attacker wrote,

• 27:47David Hoffman?

  next time, like, fix your stuff yourself idiots. It was like a kind of a funny, funny, but pretty mean note from the attacker saying, you know, fix your shit next time. So that's pretty funny. Sorry to anyone that got got burned by this. But hey, at least he sent the the ether back. Cover right now is figuring out how to redistribute the ether back to the people that lost money.

• 28:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's DeFi truly is the Wild West. This kind of stuff happens and it's it's so bizarre. So the hacker gave back $3.2 million. What thief do you know steals millions of dollars and same day turnaround anonymously like gives it back? This space is so strange from that perspective, like the unexpected tends to happen almost all of the time.

• 28:33David Hoffman?

  I think if you have these sorts of skills where you can, you know how to do this, you probably have a decent amount of money in the space. Those are very specialized skills. I bet you he didn't really need the money. And you know, maybe at the end of the day, like it's a what kind of hack this was, what is it was a black hat, but was it a gray hat? And because he gave the money back, I don't really know. He's willing to do some harm, but not all of the harm. Very interesting. Some people, some people just have a fun time playing with real people's money. And I guess they enjoy that.

• 29:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's why we call this guy as the frontier. There are risks out there. Be careful. This was a relatively newer DeFi protocol. And this kind of thing can happen to especially to newer protocols, but also even to more established protocols from time to time. So be careful out there, of course.

• 29:18David Hoffman?

  If you want to live a bankless life, you need to get a hardware wallet. There is no alternative for storing your crypto. In a self-sovereign fashion. That's why I have four ledgers that I use to manage my different crypto assets. Using the Ledger Live account as well. Ledger Live is like your home base for managing your Ethereum, DeFi, and crypto accounts. It does a really good job of aggregating all of your different Ethereum wallets. If you are the type of person that uses more than one. But you can also add other cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin or Cosmos or whatever your preferred blockchain is. And then it will display an aggregate portfolio of all your accounts at the main page.

• 29:57David Hoffman?

  One thing that Ledger is doing a really good job of is enabling all the money verbs that me and Ryan talked about with the Bankless Skill Cube. Enabled in the Ledger Live app. So right now in the Ledger Live app, you can buy, sell, lend, swap, and stake your crypto assets. Which is doing a really good job of fulfilling all of the money verbs in the Bankless Skill Cube. Something that's new to Ledger Live is Ledger Swap, where you can swap assets one for another directly inside the Ledger Live application. Ensuring trustlessness in your financial activity on Ethereum and on Bitcoin. If you want to learn more about what you can do with a ledger. Go to the blog post, "The Power of Ledger Live" on the Ledger website. Where they share some of the more advanced things that you can do with your ledger that you might not have known about.

• 30:41David Hoffman?

  There's a link in the show notes that will take you to the Ledger shop where you can get your preferred Ledger hardware wallets. I personally like the Ledger Nano X, but I also have both. They're both great options. When you own a ledger, you own your own assets in the way that they have been designed to be held. By the user and the user alone. So go get your ledger today to make sure that you are as self-sovereign as possible. The Bankless State of the Nations are brought to you by Wyarn. Wyarn is DeFi's first self-building, community-run project, which I just get really, really excited about. Wyarn is a system that seeks out yield in DeFi, and it does that in a number of different ways. A very aggressive way is with the vaults, where you can deposit your preferred asset of choice.

• 31:27David Hoffman?

  And different DeFi experts will come in and generate a strategy for what to do with your deposited token, right? And so it'll go find where. Ways to get yield in that deposited token in DeFi. For those who want to just earn yield on their stable coins, the earn system is for you, where you can deposit your preferred stablecoin and Y earn will go and figure out which money market on DeFi and DeFi is producing the best interest rate, whether it's DY, DX, it's Compound or AVE. It looks around DeFi to see where the yield is coming from and it directs stablecoins automatically. So you don't have to. Check them out at Y earn dot finance to get started and also check out the stats page to see what other people are doing as well.

• 32:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  David, let's get to some takes and I want to start with DC Investors 2021 predictions. Since we are beginning 2021, this is the time where everyone takes out their crystal ball and starts making predictions. I enjoyed DC Investors predictions on ETH. Should we go through some of these?

• 32:24David Hoffman?

  Let's do it.

• 32:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right. So what's the first, David?

• 32:27David Hoffman?

  Number one, institutions are coming and many will start to buy ETH. Why DC asks liquidity plus CME futures plus reflexivity as the number two asset. And then also the narrative, all the apps being built on Ethereum, therefore you might as well invest in ETH and then also the building of fiat on ramps and also flailing competitors, a bunch of different variables that are all contributing to why DC thinks that institutions will come and buy ETH in 2021.

• 32:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  What do you think? Agree, disagree?

• 32:59David Hoffman?

  Oh, do I even need to answer that question? Absolutely agree. That makes complete sense to me.

• 33:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  I do think ETH is an asset that has like two engines of growth, which is pretty unique. It can go the institutional engine of growth, the same way Bitcoin is growing with CME futures, right? It's not a commodity or it is a commodity in the US. And it can also, it also has the DeFi engine of growth. So I totally agree too. DC is right on there. Let's go to the second one.

• 33:26David Hoffman?

  Is really important and that's what makes ETH compelling.

• 33:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  Exactly. What's the second here?

• 33:32David Hoffman?

  DeFi will explode again, starting with a big surge in Q1 and again in Q3. So that's a very specific prediction from DC here. He says, "The emphasis will shift from food tokens to synthetic assets, financial contracts, and collateralized lending." Financial contracts, maybe he's alluding to the growth of options, as we were talking about earlier in this podcast. And I guess with synthetic assets, he's talking about things like synthetics and UMA, collateralized lending. We all know what that is. He says, "This will be fueled by centralized exchanges pooling customer funds to allow for small participants." Interesting, interesting. That is a take I have not yet heard before.

• 34:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, is that a little bit of Protocol Sync thesis, basically? Where, you know, crypto banks start building on top of these protocols and they become a user onboarding source for DeFi protocols. And I guess DC is saying that this is going to happen yet again in Q1, that's pretty soon, and also potentially in Q3. So, yeah, DeFi is going to have its day. Another DeFi summer, I suppose, is what he's saying here.

• 34:41David Hoffman?

  I'm down.

• 34:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right. Let's talk about this third one here. What is it?

• 34:46David Hoffman?

  L2 will make, it will take the main net by storm, heating up in earnest during Q3. DC getting really specific with the timeframes here. "These will be based on rollup technologies and will help Ethereum not only scale to more users, but also create far better UX and allow for new services altogether." I do agree with DC here. I think that the growth of quote unquote money Legos that we've seen in Ethereum so far is going to extend out to rollups. People are going to get really creative with how to make rollups interoperable and fluid and liquid with the main chain and other rollups. I think, I think the creativity that we see in DeFi is going to get extended into the L2 ecosystem, and that's definitely going to happen in 2021.

• 35:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  To me, David, this has got to be the year rollups and layer two, Ethereum layer two really delivers, right? Because like it seems like every year, and it's not only Ethereum, but also Bitcoin, there's some bullishness on layer two, something, right? Like every year for Bitcoin, it's like this is the year of lightning. This, oh, next year, this is the year of lightning, oh, next year. But Ethereum, to be fair, has had some of the same things, right? Stage channels. You know, do you remember when Raiden was, was kind of all the rage? You just go to scale Ethereum. Then there was Plasma, and now the ZGeist is, is rollups. It feels like rollups have the most substance. We're seeing real world solutions start to be deployed, but we're not seeing the killer use, the killer app, the killer rollup, the killer

• 36:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  layer two at this point in time. Do you think this is a do or die year for Ethereum layer two?

• 36:14David Hoffman?

  Well, we all got, we all felt the pain of super high gas prices towards the end of DeFi, DeFi summer 2020, and that was definitely what incurred this rage into L2s and rollups as well. And I think the difference between like, you know, oh, it's different this time. This is the year of, you know, this scaling tech. Well, we never have had like prolonged demand for, for L2s as we've had recently. And we actually kind of lost it, right? DeFi summer ended and, and gas prices aren't, aren't, you know, low, but they're definitely not high. If the, if 2021 is like 2017, gas prices on Ethereum are going to absolutely dwarf what we saw back in DeFi summer 2020. And once again, that will generate the impetus

• 36:59David Hoffman?

  for getting people onto L2. And so I do think that this time is different.

• 37:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right. We will see if that prediction proves to be the case. Let's get to number four, David. What's this one?

• 37:09David Hoffman?

  ETH will establish its brand as a programmable store of value reinforced by DeFi's deposits and staking in ETH 2. This will, this will propel ETH on its inevitable journey to become the world's first programmable macro asset. And over five to 10 years, the implications will be staggering. Yeah, this is, this is the same drum we've been beating on the bankless program for a long time. DC is right there with us. People are going to come to understand Ether as a macro asset alongside Bitcoin. That's going to get people really excited.

• 37:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  Very good. All right. The last but not least, can you read out this one?

• 37:45David Hoffman?

  EIP 1559 will launch onto Ethereum 1X, introducing the world to what truly could be deflationary Ether. This reinforces Ether as a store of value, ending discussions around ETH as endless supply and start to have conversations around why proof-of-work hard caps are unworkable. Ooh, that last part is spicy.

• 38:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  Interesting. So EIP 1559, there's almost like two parts to this. Like, the first is that the feature will actually be delivered in 2021. And at some level, that depends on Ethereum development and ETH1 development. And Tim Baker, I hope you're listening, Tim. It's depended on you partially. So that's the first prediction. You think that that's gonna happen?

• 38:29David Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah, no, I think that's totally gonna happen. People have been murmuring about accelerating EIP 1559. I'm not a core dev, so don't cite me on that. I don't have any support, any authority in the matter. So that's just my speculation, but I do think it's coming in 2021.

• 38:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  The people who are close to it, who I've talked to, seem to think there's a good case for it happening in 2021, too. And the second part of DC's prediction here is that, once that happens, that will reinforce this narrative around ETH as a store value asset. And contrast it, you know, between something like Bitcoin and other proof-of-work, you know, fixed cap issuance schedules as well. What's your take there?

• 39:14David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I wrote an article in the Bankless newsletter a while ago called Bitcoin and Its Musical Chairs: Its Scarcity Game. Well, EIP 1559 and Bernie Ether really is a very salient, similar game for Ether, because Ether is being deleted, therefore chairs are being pulled away from the circle actively, rather than passively. Right? And so that becomes like a very understandable. Over time, Ether is burnt. So if you buy Ether now, you will have a greater percentage of the overall Ether because of Bernie Ether. That's an easy thing to understand.

• 39:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, those are DC's five predictions for 2021. I think pretty good. There's lots of predictions going around, but we picked DC's because they were particularly good and very concise. David, some other takes going around. Can I get to this XRP take?

• 40:02David Hoffman?

  Yeah, let's do it.

• 40:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right. So here's the thing, all the XRP listings, right? This is really what happens when your liquidity, your tokens liquidity is dependent on centralized crypto banks. As we said, this is, this is a hot take that I've talked about for a while, but I think because of this, ETH is more censorship resistant than Bitcoin, at least on this dimension, because all of Bitcoin's liquidity is very much based on crypto banks. It's based on essentially the side chains like a Coinbase or a Binance. It does not have a Uniswap on chain on Bitcoin. ETH does have Uniswap. That is what makes it more censorship resistant, at least on that dimension.

• 40:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think very much Bitcoiners discount the rule that DeFi can play in making their monetary system more censorship resistant, and that is definitely a strength of Ethereum's. That's my hot take, Dave. What did he say to that?

• 41:02David Hoffman?

  Yeah. So when you, when you consider liquidity, you can divide liquidity into trustless liquidity or trusted liquidity, right? And that's where Ethereum really excels. Ethereum offers trustless liquidity for its assets. Bitcoin, because it doesn't have smart contracts and because it gains scale and accessibility through the banking layer, also has zero trustless liquidity. And that's, that's kind of why we are really excited about Ethereum is because if you are in Uniswap, if you are on AMMs, if you're in Balancer, you have trustless liquidity. No one can rug pull that liquidity from you. If you are in a, an unregistered security on a crypto exchange, it is really easy to get delisted. And I'm totally with you there.

• 41:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, so let's play this out, David, just to, you know, talk about this. Let's say the government, for whatever reason, went to war with Bitcoin and sent letters to Coinbase and every, everyone they could, every centralized exchange operative they could to de-list Bitcoin immediately. What would happen? I mean, I think what would happen is the same thing that's happening to XRP right now. It would be like, we would run out of sources for liquidity for Bitcoin. Now, they could do the same thing with ETH, but you can't de-list something from a trustless protocol like Uniswap.

• 42:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  So on Ethereum, there'll always be exchanges without an off button that can't be censored and are outside of the, the arm of, of regulators. That's, that's kind of a scenario, like in my mind, when, when I think about this take.

• 42:41David Hoffman?

  Yeah, the internal DeFi ecosystem offers like the strongest backstop for Ether and other trustless assets on Ethereum. I, I think that hopefully that future does not come out in Ether, in that same future where, you know, the nation state goes, goes hard after Bitcoin and probably Ether too, in that same, in that same vein. That would still be bad because then we don't have on and off ramps. And so we're kind of stuck in the DeFi world, but at least we still have liquidity.

• 43:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  Exactly. Yep, exactly. It's not going to happen, but anytime soon, I hope, but it is nice to have that feature here. Here's another take by, by Jacob Franek.

• 43:17David Hoffman?

  Yeah, from CoinMetrix, yeah.

• 43:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  From CoinMetrix.

• 43:19David Hoffman?

  This is one of my favorite takes that I've heard lately. A global value settlement layer needs no total addressable market. It is the total addressable market. I think that's an interesting perspective. What, what he's really saying is Ethereum as a global settlement layer, there is no like total addressable market for Ether, right? For Ethereum, right? It doesn't, it's not going after one specific market. It is the market, right? It is the host of economic activity. I think that's pretty cool.

• 43:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, absolutely. Okay, here's another take from Eva Baylin. Every time a payment company marginalizes more people, I buy ETH. What's she mean by this?

• 43:56David Hoffman?

  Yeah, Ava works at the graph. She, what she's just saying is that if if somebody gets like cut off from payments infrastructure, in that same way, we were just talking about how you can't list de-list assets on Uniswap or whatever. You also can't stop people from sending you money on Ethereum, right? Stablecoins, Ether, whatever. And so any anytime a payment company cuts off access to an industry or services, Ava is saying that she buys ETH because she's bullish on the need for trustless, permissionless payments. Quick take, just so super simple sentence. I love it, Ava. Nice job.

• 44:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  Kevin Awaki as well from Gitcoin wrote this editorial in CoinDesk. And I love the headline here, "How DeFi DGENs are Funding the Next Wave of Open Source Development." David, how are DGENs helping the public goods thesis here?

• 44:49David Hoffman?

  Yeah, Kevin Awaki extends this out of DeFi Summer 2020 when people would like ape into some random tokens or like just do something degenerate, as he would say, like ill-advised perhaps, trying to get rich quick. And what he's saying is that as a result of DeFi Summer, a number of protocols, Lion, Yams, a few other ones, Synthetix, they ended up donating and committing long-term funding for Ethereum development using Gitcoin, right? And so if you ever Yolo'd into like YFI, or if you ever Yolo'd into Yams or something, you by proxy helped fund public goods on Ethereum. So cool, really good job for Kevin Awaki for first off, building Gitcoin and allowing that capture to happen. And then also a nice job writing this article and putting it in CoinDesk.

• 45:33David Hoffman?

  Check that out. There will be a link in the notes.

• 45:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  David, you had a really good take here, and maybe this this will be our last take. So you said that yield is drying up in legacy markets with 30-year treasuries below 0.9%. AAA corporate bonds aren't much better. But you said on Ethereum, almost every single protocol offers yield in some way. So Ethereum and DeFi, according to you, almost becomes the last bastion of yield and investors will want this. Do you think that they will want this in 2021?

• 46:06David Hoffman?

  Absolutely. Yield is drying up in the legacy world, yet it is flourishing on Ethereum. I actually have a short piece coming out in CoinDesk following Awaki's piece in their 2020 Year in Review about this. People are waking up to Bitcoin and the idea of protocol constrained monetary policy. And I think when that, when you open up that door and you say yes to Bitcoin, you see behind Bitcoin, a very yield-rich fields in Ethereum. And I think that's going to get people very excited. When, when in treasuries, when 30-year treasuries drop below 1% in yield, people are going to take that capital and put it elsewhere. And some people are putting that in Bitcoin, even though Bitcoin doesn't offer yield.

• 46:50David Hoffman?

  But then also, some people could start to, you know, put their USDC into AVE, you know, maybe they, maybe they provide liquidity into a Uniswap position. People that provided liquidity to Uniswap within the ETH-USDC pair in 2020 earned a staggering 35% APY on a hybrid Ether US dollar position. So if you are cool with exposing yourself to Ether, which I think people, if you are interested in exposing yourself to Bitcoin, then therefore you're probably pretty interested in exposing yourself to Ether. But you can also get yield in partially US dollar-denominated terms by providing liquidity to Uniswap. Yield in Ethereum is abundant and investors want that.

• 47:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Absolutely. It's, you know, we, we always use this, this image of we've got the traditional finance system and that's, that's kind of one world. And then we have like this bridge, right? They're connecting it. It's kind of Coinbase's exchanges on the other side of this bridge. Once you upload your money into the bankless financial system, you, you, you pop out into this magical world of yields of like 5%, 10%, 20% potentially, right? And so like, the, the pipe is relatively small because it takes a lot, like, it takes a decent amount to cross, cross that chasm to, to, to understand. What it takes to convert your fiat, upload your US dollars into some sort of stablecoin or some sort of reserve asset like Bitcoin and Eath. But once you pop out on the other

• 48:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  side, you're in this land of magical yields, right? And I think more and more people will be attracted by that and take that journey across the bridge to the other side. It's a good take. David, let's end here. What are you excited about going into 2021?

• 48:35David Hoffman?

  I'm pretty excited about this this new car that I just bought, but I'm particularly excited about how I financed it. And so I applied for a loan, except they didn't really like my four-month-long work history as a self-employed content producer in the crypto space. That didn't really sit well with them. I didn't, I did not get that loan approved. And so I just went to Ave and got a loan from Ave and they didn't care about what job or profession I was because I had collateral in there, albeit that is apples to oranges. One is unsecured credit, one is an over-collateralized loan. And I think I thought the experience of financing a car using a loan from DeFi where I didn't have to fill out any paperwork was a treat. The yield, the

• 49:17David Hoffman?

  the interest payments I'm paying from Ave are pretty steep, I think, for the average car loan, but I'm in it for the experience. You know, I'll pay yield, extra yield on Ethereum, just to have the experience of having financed a car using Ave.

• 49:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  That is a really cool story. Now, you've got to watch, of course, your liquidation price on there. So if there's a massive price drop, you could be liquidated, David. Are you concerned about that?

• 49:40David Hoffman?

  Yeah, well, no, my liquidation price is very, very low. I'm keeping that nicely under control and always keeping an eye on it, as you should. But at the same time, I needed a new car because for those that didn't know, I was driving a 1972 Volvo in Seattle, which it rains quite a lot. And in that car, when it rains, I would feel the rain at my ankles. And so I definitely needed a new car.

• 50:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, congrats, man. And the benefit there, of course, you don't have to sell your precious ETH, right? This does not require that when you take out a collateralized loan.

• 50:10David Hoffman?

  I would not have gotten a car if I would have to sell my ETH.

• 50:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  Not worth it.

• 50:13David Hoffman?

  Not worth it. All right, Ryan, what are you excited about?

• 50:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  Dude, I just think Bankless had a crazy awesome year. So we published 150 articles on the newsletter, plus 53 how-to tactics, how to do something cool in DeFi. Plus, David,

• 50:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  We just recently surpassed 100 podcasts. That's, that's a lot of time that we spent together, like between kind of weekly rollups, between our Monday podcast to the nation's 100 podcasts, my friend. Our getting started guide, getting started, how to get started, go bankless has been viewed over 1.2 million times and somehow, even though we suck at YouTube, people watch this on YouTube and we have close to 14,000 subscribers. So it's been a really exciting year, I think, for, for, for bankless and this movement is, is global now. We've got Chinese translations. We've got Russian translations. We've got French translations, the community there.

• 51:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  So I'm really excited about the reason we, we started this whole thing, David, which is to onboard the world, like a massive goal of getting a billion people into the bankless ecosystem, into open finance. That's kind of why we started and we're not necessarily going to do all of that, you know, kind of our media efforts are just one drop in, in, in the bucket. But the bankless meme, lowercase b, people choosing to take back financial sovereignty and go bankless, that is, I think, the narrative and the meme that can get us to a billion people in open finance, a billion people in crypto. And David, this is my prediction. I don't have a prediction for 2021 at this point, but I do have the prediction for end of decade.

• 51:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  There will be over a billion people in crypto. They're owning crypto, using crypto systems in some way by the end of this decade. I believe that. And, you know, I wanna, I wanna keep, keep doing what we're doing to help make that possible. So thanks to everyone who has supported Bankless over the past year, whether you're subscribing to the newsletter, whether you're watching this, whether you are telling your friends, you have made this possible and we appreciate it. We're, we're honored and, and humbled to be part of this

• 52:25David Hoffman?

  1 billion Bankless citizens by the end of the decade. I definitely hope that that comes true. And if that does come true, it's definitely not going to be because we did a bunch of podcasts or wrote a bunch of tactics. It's going to be because our listeners and everyone else in the crypto world helped spread the message. And so if you want this industry to survive, you need to pull in people in order to make that happen. We do believe that the value that the crypto industry is creating is not understood by the rest of the world. And it actually is ready for the rest of the world to come and use it. And so we just, at this point, we just need to get into more ears. And that is where you, the listener, comes into play. I hope you enjoyed all the podcasts.

• 53:09David Hoffman?

  I didn't know that we had passed 100 podcasts in 2020. That's pretty crazy. I hope you guys have enjoyed listening to our voices all of that time. I hope that's true. They better have been true. But thanks for bearing with us all this step of the way and look forward to a very content-rich 2021.

• 53:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Absolutely, guys. Happy New Year from Bankless. Of course, risks and disclaimers, none of this has been financial advice. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we are glad that you are with us. This has been Weekly Rollups from Bankless.