ROLLUP: China Bitcoin Miners, John McAfee, EIP-1559 Testnet, Layer 2 Ethereum (4th Week of June)

4th Week of June 2021. Anthony on Twitter: https://twitter.com/sassal0x?s=20 Daily Gwei: https://thedailygwei.substack.com/ ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 💰 GEMINI | FIAT & CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://bankless.cc/go-gemini 🔀 BALANCER | EXCHANGE & POOL ASSETS https://bankless.cc/balancer 👻 AAVE | LEND & BORROW ASSETS https://bankless.cc/aave 🦄 UNISWAP | DECENTRALIZED FUNDING http://bankless.cc/uniswap ------ 📣 Ledger | Securely Exchange with Paraswap https://bankless.cc/LedgerYT2 ------ Topics Covered: 0:00 Intro 2:20 MARKETS 2:38 BTC Price 4:54 ETH Price 6:36 ETH/BTC Ratio 7:50 DeFi Action 12:06 Layer 2 Beat https://l2beat.com/ 16:13 100k ETH Staked in a Day https://cryptopotato.com/over-100k-eth-200-million-staked-in-ethereum-2-0-in-a-single-day/ 19:41 a16z $2.2B Fund https://twitter.com/TheBlock__/status/1408032726716928015?s=20 22:16 Yearn vs. Competition https://twitter.com/bantg/status/1407407535620083712?s=20 26:43 Alpha Homora Fees https://twitter.com/alphafinancelab/status/1407998167975563272?s=21 30:58 Borrowing on Aave https://twitter.com/tokenterminal/status/1408012619840110592?s=21 31:51 Cathie Wood bought the Dip https://news.bitcoin.com/cathie-wood-bought-the-dip-ark-invest-purchases-one-million-gbtc-shares/ 35:00 RELEASES 35:45 Futureswap V3 on Arbitrum https://twitter.com/futureswapx/status/1405952663318011904?s=20 39:30 Graph Supporting Optimism https://twitter.com/graphprotocol/status/1405929132932878339?s=20 41:39 Risk Harbor $3.2m Raise https://medium.com/riskharbor/risk-harbor-debuts-on-mainnet-with-a-new-round-of-funding-b18064dbd5dc 44:14 Yield Protocol Series A https://twitter.com/yield/status/1407701683954765827?s=20 45:06 Visa, PayPal, Blockchain Capital https://www.coindesk.com/visa-paypal-join-crypto-vc-blockchain-capitals-new-300m-fund 47:10 Aave News https://twitter.com/AaveGrants/status/1407042749627617287?s=20 48:25 Brave Search Engine https://www.cnet.com/google-amp/news/google-gets-a-new-rival-as-brave-search-opens-to-the-public/?__twitter_impression=true&s=09&utm_source=reddit.com https://www.cnet.com/google-amp/news/google-gets-a-new-rival-as-brave-search-opens-to-the-public/?__twitter_impression=true&s=09&utm_source=reddit.com 50:37 Coinbase in Japan https://www.coindesk.com/coinbase-enters-japanese-market-after-completing-registration-with-financial-watchdog 51:45 TOP SIGNAL https://twitter.com/BanklessHQ/status/1407446381103489030?s=20 53:00 NEWS 53:10 EIP-1559 Live on Ropsen http://watchtheburn.com/ 55:13 Venmo Digs ETH https://twitter.com/ryansadams/status/1405955767379824645?s=21 56:30 Stakehound $75m Disaster https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/109277/staking-company-serves-fireblocks-with-a-lawsuit-over-private-keys-to-over-75-million-in-eth 59:48 Alchemix Return ETH https://app.alchemix.fi/returneth 1:03:02 Reddit ‘Snoo’ NFTs https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/109450/reddit-nfts-cryptosnoos-ethereum-opensea 1:04:39 Bitcoin Miners in China Nic Carter: https://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-unpacking-hashrate-nic-cart-migration Good or Bad? https://www.coindesk.com/3-reasons-why-chinas-bitcoin-crackdown-isnt-all-that-bad 1:07:51 Microstrategy 100k BTC https://dailyhodl.com/2021/06/23/michael-saylors-microstrategy-now-owns-over-100000-btc-with-new-purchase/ 1:10:19 NYC Mayoral Lead Likes BTC https://www.theblockcrypto.com/linked/109475/new-york-city-center-of-bitcoins-eric-adams-mayoral-lead 1:10:44 RIP John McAfee https://www.euroweeklynews.com/2021/06/23/breaking-news-antivirus-creator-john-mcafee-found-dead-in-catalan-prison-cell/ 1:12:35 News Bites Goldman & JPM Repo https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-06-22/goldman-sachs-begins-trading-on-jpmorgan-repo-blockchain-network?sref=VB9Y24MI Fed Boston & MIT https://www.bostonfed.org/news-and-events/press-releases/2020/the-federal-reserve-bank-of-boston-announces-collaboration-with-mit-to-research-digital-currency.aspx 49% of Institutional Investors https://news.bitcoin.com/jpmorgan-survey-institutional-investors-cryptocurrency-rat-poison-warren-buffett-fad/ South African Ponzi https://fortune.com/2021/06/24/bitcoin-ameer-raees-cajee-theft-south-africa/ MLB and FTX https://www.mlb.com/news/mlb-ftx-cryptocurrency-exchange-partnership 1:15:45 TAKES 1:17:00 Migrating Hacks to BSC https://twitter.com/hosseeb/status/1405637755141431297?s=19 1:19:38 DAO Efficiency https://twitter.com/g_dip/status/1406086186850992128?s=21 1:21:35 Make Money with Friends https://twitter.com/markbeylin/status/1407411367603326981?s=21 1:23:10 Who will you Trust? https://twitter.com/gregisenberg/status/1405722055073542150?s=20 1:24:24 Bat Speaker Emojis https://twitter.com/search?q=%F0%9F%A6%87%F0%9F%94%8A&src=typed_query&f=user https://twitter.com/search?q=%F0%9F%A6%87%F0%9F%94%8A&src=typed_query&f=user 1:26:45 What Anthony’s Excited About 1:29:35 What David’s Excited About 1:30:30 MEME OF THE WEEK https://twitter.com/biancoresearch/status/1408017039508246531?s=21 1:31:37 The Daily Gwei 1:32:50 Closing & Disclaimers ------ This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/bankless-disclosures

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

• 0:08David Hoffman?

  Bankless Nation, welcome to this Friday's episode of the Bankless Weekly Rollup. Once again, for the second time this week, we have a special episode because our fearless leader, Ryan Sean Adams, is out on vacation. And so we have brought in a substitute teacher, Anthony Cizano, the second time that he stepped in for Ryan. And Anthony, welcome to the Bankless Weekly Rollup. Thanks for helping us go through the news, man.

• 0:31Speaker 01

  Hey David, thanks for having me again. You know, Ryan keeps slacking off. I have to keep making up for it. So, you know, I'm always happy to do that.

• 0:39David Hoffman?

  Yeah, well, Ryan does a ton of the legwork behind the scenes. And so we're happy to get a new face in on the show while Ryan deserves a well-deserved vacation, or slacking off, one of the two things. All right, Bankless Nation, I'm sure this isn't your first weekly rollup, so you know what to do. Get out your coffee, because we are going to be moving through a bunch of topics really quickly. First, we're stopping at the market. What happened in the last week in the market? Releases, what got released? News, what happened in the news cycle? Some ecosystem takes? Who had good opinions in the last week of crypto? And then finally, we will finish off with what David and Anthony are excited about. And the cherry on top after that, the meme of the week. Anthony, you ready to get going here?

• 1:23Speaker 01

  Let's do it. It's been an exciting week.

• 1:25David Hoffman?

  But guys, first, before we get into the show, we got to talk about Ledger and how you kind of need one. Have you been just fooling around in DeFi, doing yield farming and all that other stuff? And you've been doing it on your MetaMask and your hot wallet? If you've been using a hot wallet, you have to get a Ledger hardware wallet. And the Ledger hardware wallet only becomes more and more useful as Ledger integrates more and more DeFi apps. And the most recent DeFi app that they've integrated is Paraswap. And so you can now use Paraswap directly from the Ledger Live software, which is the software you can download on your computer. It's extremely friendly to all of your friends that you're trying to get into crypto. Get them a Ledger, first and foremost, and then send them to the Ledger Live app, which is a very safe environment to be in crypto.

• 2:10David Hoffman?

  While also being your own bank. If you are unfamiliar with what pair swap is, it is a Dex aggregator that combs the world and landscape of Dexes. And make sure that you get your, the best optimized trade whenever you swap your crypto assets. And now you can use it inside of your ledger. So check out the link in the show notes. If you want to download the Ledger Live app and also get a Ledger hardware wallet, which like I said, if you don't have a hardware wallet, you're playing it risky. So protect yourself with a ledger and just start using the Ledger Live app. All right, Bitcoin at the price of $34,300. Anthony, got any opinions as to the trajectory or price action that we've seen in the last week with Bitcoin?

• 2:50Speaker 01

  Not, not really, not any strong opinions. It's just been weak price wise for a little bit, you know, tried to, to bounce up a bit after falling under 30K again. And, you know, I think everyone's just holding their breath and seeing if it's going to maintain that because I feel like at this point in time, not just with Bitcoin, but with everything, people are just kind of like too scared to open long positions at right now. Because they're like, okay, if I can buy it back in cheaper, there's no rush really right now. Um, but yeah, who, who knows what's going to happen from here. It's really, uh, everyone that I follow, that's either a trader or investor, whatever, no one really knows what's going to happen in the short term. I think it's the most confused I've seen in the market in a very long time.

• 3:27David Hoffman?

  Yeah, confused definitely really seems to be the word of choice for the last week. What do you think about this head and shoulders formation that people traders are really talking about? Where the shoulder, the left shoulder is in January, February of 2021, and now we are establishing that right shoulder. And then the high range between 50 and 60,000 was the head. What do you think about this head and shoulders formation?

• 3:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've been watching it. It seems like something that the bears really, really want to play out because that would mean that BTC would go to around 20K or even below 20K. Which would be obviously like the buying opportunity of a lifetime on Bitcoin, or at least what people will consider to be the buying opportunity of a lifetime. But it still has time to invalidate. I mean, it has to get back over 40K, uh, it seems like to, and, and stay there. Like it tried to do that a little while ago and then it just failed. Um, but yeah, I think this is, this is quite scary if it plays out, uh, because just based on technicals, if it does play out properly, yeah, it'll be going to the old all time high, uh, to test it again. And, you know, that's always scary. There's a lot of precedent there to say that going underneath the old all-time high is just not something that Bitcoin does when it comes down.

• 4:35Speaker 01

  But at the same time, you know, who knows, right? This has been a weird bull market, so maybe it's going to be a weird bear market if we go into that.

• 4:41David Hoffman?

  Yeah, that's an interesting way to put it. My opinion here is that so many people have their eyes on their head and shoulders that it can't play out. Too many people are watching it, and so it's a crowded trade if it is a trade at all. Let's move to Ether price. Ether price currently hanging at around nineteen hundred and seventy dollars. It's been flirting above two thousand dollars recently. Yesterday and the day before, it got up to, I think, as high as two hundred or two thousand and forty dollars. And it's struggling to keep its head above that two thousand dollar mark, but doing a pretty good job of it. Again, right now falling below nineteen thousand and seventy dollars. Anthony, any opinions on the ETH price?

• 5:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it feels like ETH is just following Bitcoin at this point in time. It doesn't seem like, kind of like, head and shoulders pattern on ETH or anything like that, or any kind of like, I guess, obvious technical patterns. But I feel like Bitcoin led the way down, and it's kind of like leading the strength now in the market. And if Bitcoin seems strong, then ETH is going to seem strong. But yeah, I just, it's just limbo again. Like, the ETH, I guess the ETH price is even more confusing than the Bitcoin price because it's just not acting on its own. It's waiting for a signal from Bitcoin, which is waiting for a signal from whoever to kind of go and to go back up, basically.

• 5:57David Hoffman?

  Yeah, absolutely. I think in a confused market, everyone is kind of waiting for Bitcoin to make its first move, right? It reminds me of that meme from Forrest Gump, where all the runners are running behind Forrest, and everyone's waiting to see what Forrest will do next. And so I think if, when we are going to finally get some clarity as to what this direction of the market is, it's going to probably come from Bitcoin first. Everyone's looking at the biggest whale in the room here, and of course, Bitcoin is still king, still number one. That's why we always start with Bitcoin price. But if any other asset happens to surpass Bitcoin in total market cap, we will lead with that one first. Speaking of, the most recent, the most likely

• 6:38David Hoffman?

  candidate is perhaps ether so let's talk about the eth BTC ratio currently at point zero five seven which historically still high again still high versus bitcoin coming off the highs that we touched just above point zero eight when it was the flippanting mania Anthony is are you seeing strength or weakness in the ETH BTC ratio?

• 6:59Speaker 01

  Again, it's I think this is related to what bitcoin's doing so I think if bitcoin starts going up and trying to confirm some bullish continuation the ratio is just going to fall because everyone's going to be piling into a bitcoin trade and I feel like ETH BTC does really well during bullish momentum but during kind of like bearish momentum it seems to either just trend down slowly get stuck in kind of limbo I'm eyeing that zero point zero five five level that it tested last time but you know it could go lower than that it just depends on if bitcoin starts sucking up all the air again and sorry sucking in all the air out of the room again we can see this drop further so generally I don't know people that kind of trade

• 7:41Speaker 01

  BTC they more trade sentiment around BTC and ETH which is which gets reflected in this chart so it's a very messy chart that's for sure.

• 7:50David Hoffman?

  And let's go to the DeFi Pulse Index which I have to admit defeat on my point zero one three bottom call we are at point zero one two which is meaningfully below point zero one three and it's been a week without trying to regain it I thought it put up a valiant effort but I guess we are just going lower than than what I thought however I still think that this is a good buying opportunity for DPI it's just approaching lower lower lows and lower lows and the fundamentals behind a lot of these DeFi tokens are only getting stronger especially when we talk about

• 8:26David Hoffman?

  price to sales ratio and and the cash flow as a price of earnings and comparing that to traditional valuations and traditional metrics really really cheap DeFi tokens in my opinion Anthony got any opinions here?

• 8:42Speaker 01

  I mean, it's a little bit surprising how weak DeFi has been against ETH in particular. This is, you know, it's pretty much like, I think it's at an all time low or something like that, or lower than its kind of last low there, we can see in the chart. You know, we could, I guess, talk about DPI's performance in general and like DeFi's performance for hours. But I think the one thing that caught a lot of people off guard was the fact that they thought during like the mania, people were going to pile into DeFi tokens, when in reality, they piled into like dog tokens and scams. And like retail never came for DeFi, at least Ethereum DeFi. I mean, you can, there's other quote unquote DeFi out there that, you know, i- i- is kind of falls into that category because they market themselves as such.

• 9:27Speaker 01

  But I just really think that, that the retail investors didn't come. And we don't have enough institutional and, and traditional investors in this space to really care about price to sales, price to earnings, yet to, to move the needle there. But at the same time, ETH is just like such an amazing shelling point of an asset for the Ethereum ecosystem. I mean, if you own DeFi, like Ethereum DeFi tokens, you own ETH. Like that already is enough signal to me because like, you know, DeFi is a broad kind of thing. And if I own ETH, it doesn't necessarily mean I own any kind of like specific DeFi token. I might own some of them, but it's not like everyone owns the same. Like me and you would own different kind of DeFi tokens, or we might have some overlap. But generally, we both own ETH though. So that, that shelling point of an asset, I think is incredibly important. And I think that's why it's so, so hard to outperform ETH in, in over the long run.

• 10:13David Hoffman?

  Yeah, as we know, ETH is ultrasound money. And so that's, that's always why we kind of look at this DPI versus ETH ratio. Because to me, the DPI dollar number is only, only tells so much of a story, right? The DeFi and ultrasound money, I think, orbit around each other. They, it's really the ratio between the magnitude of these two things, I think, is really the signal versus the noise. And I mean, we're all pretty convinced that over the long term, both DeFi tokens and ETH are going up in dollar terms anyway. So why don't we get ahead of that conversation and just start comparing these things to each other? We are currently standing at $51 billion locked in DeFi. Again, coming out of the highs, it used to be at 90 billion, but $50 billion, $50 billion is still a pretty high number.

• 10:58David Hoffman?

  Not setting any new flo- floors, I would say, staying above the, the $50 billion mark is, is pretty cool. Anthony, any opinions here?

• 11:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, the dollar value locked is just gonna follow the prices, obviously. So as prices come down, especially of ETH, that dollar value is gonna fall.

• 11:15David Hoffman?

  It just looks like the ETH chart.

• 11:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, basically, like, I feel like it's completely natural. And, you know, if you zoom out to like all on that chart, the growth is still like incredible. Absolutely incredible, right?

• 11:28David Hoffman?

  Even over just like the one year.

• 11:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, it really does look, it really does look exactly like the ETH chart, which is, which is pretty funny. But I think, I think, yeah, generally, like, obviously, if ETH is going down, then that number's gonna be going down. You know, at this point in time, because ETH is the, you know, premier collateral, the pristine collateral that everyone uses within these systems. And, you know, that, that, that's why it's tied, I think.

• 11:51David Hoffman?

  AVE coming in still at number one with the most value locked in 15% dominance, according to DeFi Pulse. AVE and DeFi Pulse report different numbers locked. If you go to the AVE page, they reported a different number. And so I'm wondering, I'm wondering where that discrepancy is counted from. Something new that we might be revisiting a lot on the Bankless Weekly Rollups is this new website called Layer 2 Beat, l2beat.com. And this is kind of similar to DeFi Pulse in that it compares the amount of value deposited onto different Layer 2s. And interestingly, it's decided to not include Polygon here, which I guess because Polygon isn't a true Layer 2, I guess they are drawing that line there.

• 12:31David Hoffman?

  I personally consider Polygon a Layer 2, just because any scaling solution, I think that's politically aligned with Ethereum at the very least is a Layer 2. That's a subject for perhaps a different day. But Loopring coming in at number one with 120 million locked, followed up by ZK Swap with 70 million and DYDX with 43 million. We got Optimism in there, we got Hermes in there, we got ZK Sync and, uh, let's see, what's the other one? Arbitrum as well, with, you know, just a relatively low number of $66,000 in Arbitrum. But I think that these numbers are going up and to the right and it's gonna happen pretty damn fast.

• 13:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think I think you can look at what happened with Polygon, even even if Polygon isn't included here, I think you can look at what happened there. And kind of like extrapolate that out to what's going to happen with things like Optimism, Arbitrum. You know, EVM compatible, ZK Sync and things like that, like. Once you have the platform live and the apps on there, the users come very, very quickly, as we've seen, because liquidity is so easy to move. And as long as you have the correct infrastructure tools and the correct kind of plumbing in there, you can get users across. So. Yeah, I think this this is kind of noise right now because the layer two Ethereum ecosystem is still so, so early. You know, and and a lot of these things aren't even live in a public fashion. Hopefully Arbitrum goes live very soon.

• 13:49Speaker 01

  And Optimism, obviously, you know, said that said that it'd be going live in July. I think they still might hit that. But and then, you know, the other ones are coming later. So I feel like in the next six months, this is going to look very, very different. And the top projects will probably be the the kind of like generalized platforms. Because Loopering is amazing, but Loopering is in the generalized platform, right? It's just its own ecosystem. So it probably can never be as big as the generalized ones, but that's not what they're going for. So that's fine. Same with things like DYDX and and ZK Swap and all that sort of stuff. So. Yeah, I think it's really cool that this site exists and I can't wait to to see what it looks like in six months' time.

• 14:26David Hoffman?

  Do you have an opinion as to why DYDX builds on its own layer two? Or or rather, instead of just picking out something like Arbitrum or Optimism that has more generalizability? And and perhaps a more diverse ecosystem in the future?

• 14:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, you get I guess you get more control, like building out your own thing. It's like. It's kind of like this theory that like every app should have its own chain, so to speak, so app-specific blockchain. And that's kind of like the Cosmos model, I guess, and and less to a lesser extent, maybe the Polkadot model. But you know, I I think for them, they just wanted to like be laser focused on their own products and not have like the noise of of of anything else in the background there. They they also rebuilt, I believe, DYDX in Cairo in Starkware's programming language. They didn't build it in Solidity. And they're using Starkware's new virtual machine, StarkOS or something like that, the operating. System there. So yeah, I think it's just like a different kind of um uh uh uh model. It's like the loop ring model, so to speak, but they want to create their own ecosystem.

• 15:26Speaker 01

  They want to be laser focused on their own product. They don't want to have anyone in there in, you know, crowding them out or whatever. But they still want to live on Ethereum and they still want to inherit Ethereum security. So yeah. I think there was a podcast done, I can't remember where it was, what it was done on. I don't know if it was done on bankers or somewhere else where uh D I D X and Stark were on there. And they were talking about like their philosophy through this and how they didn't mind having to. So yeah, yeah, okay. Well, then yeah, they didn't mind having to rebuild uh the thing from scratch because it only took like six months. And now they have like a fully, you know, um scalable roll up, so to speak, using some, some of the best technology in the space. So. Yeah, I don't, I, I, I think it's just like a different model at the end of the day.

• 16:04David Hoffman?

  Totally. Yeah. And if you guys want to check out the Anthony, the, or the podcast that Anthony is talking about, that was a state of the nation with D I D X and Starkware. You can find that on the YouTube. Here is something new that happened this last week. Over a hundred thousand Ether, two hundred million dollars was staked into Ethereum two point O in a single day. Anthony, do you know who, who did this?

• 16:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was me. Uh, I didn't want to, I didn't want to dox myself till today, but uh, yeah. No, you know what's, it's funny because like uh on Bitfinex at around seventeen hundred to eighteen hundred, when ETH was falling through. There was a massive, massive whale buying up ETH. Like I think they bought over a hundred thousand ETH. And I don't know if that same whale is the one that put this into staking. But this is a lot of ETH going into staking. I mean, the confidence that, that this signals about ETH, like because. This went in directly, didn't go in through some custodian, it didn't go in through uh Lido or anything. It went directly into the deposit contract, which means this ETH is locked until the merge. So this person is essentially saying, I don't want to sell this ETH until at least the merge.

• 17:07Speaker 01

  Um, so yeah, it's a huge photo confidence. It's really great to see. I, I, I believe like every bit of ETH going into staking, um, direct staking, not through like a third party that lets you exit whenever you want. Um, is, is a vote of confidence for the future of Ethereum. Uh, and, and you know, this is just a huge, like a hundred thousand ETH. I mean, the dollar value on that right now is what, like two, is it two billion dollars? Sorry, 200 million, not billion. That is, that is a massive amount of money going in. Um, so yeah, really, really cool to see this. I'm not sure who it is. Like, there's only a very few people who can afford that, that amount of ETH and who would actually buy that amount of ETH. Maybe it was already a, uh, someone that was already a whale. I have to do some on-chain analysis, but I haven't looked at it too closely yet.

• 17:45David Hoffman?

  That would be in- insanely, uh, cool if we got a story out about somebody who bought the dip and then just immediately just yeeted it into the deposit contract. That would be really, really cool. The other, the other indicator, you, you said a vote of confidence. It, to me, it's just like, obvi- there's provable data of on-chain bulls. Like, only bulls are in the deposit contract. Only bulls are people that have, are buying ETH and, and putting it there. Because like, like you said, it's people that don't care about the price of ETH. They are, they are holders until the end of time, right? Um, staking is nice because it intrinsically rewards bullishness. Uh, we talked on the bankless weekly roll-up a few weeks ago about uh, people that had fears that, you know, when the, uh, merge finally happens, if there's going to be a bunch of ETH

• 18:29David Hoffman?

  coming to the secondary market to dump because, uh, a lot of ETH that got to place, uh, place into the deposit contract got placed at between like 300 and, and $1,000 ETH. And so people might want to take some profits. Uh, but my response to that is if you are depositing ETH into the, the, the deposit contract, you are intrinsically an ETH bull. Uh, and so you actually are the person that is most inclined to not sell your ETH. Uh, and so we'll, we'll see how that plays out when the merge actually decides to come around.

• 18:58Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. And, and I think it depends on what price, uh, what price ETH is at at that point in time as well. And also, uh, for those who don't know, there's actually a withdrawal queue. Like, not everyone can withdraw at once. I think a max 900 validators can get out a day, which is 900 times 32 ETH, whatever that is, um, can get out a day. So, uh, uh, that's the max amount of selling pressure. If you assume that they're all going to sell, that we would have. Uh, so, you know, when you think about that, I just, I don't know. I, I, I'm with you. I feel like staking your ETH is like a sign of bullishness. And I feel like most of that ETH is just going to stay in there forever. I really don't believe, uh, that it's just going to become, like, the merge is going to go through, the withdrawal is going to be enabled, and everyone's going to rush to the exits to sell. I, I just, I don't see that happening.

• 19:40David Hoffman?

  Totally. Agreed. Another sign that this bull market is not over is A16Z launches a new $2.2 billion crypto venture fund, which means $2.2 of investment is coming into this industry. That is the largest fund that I have ever seen, ever, by a long shot. I think that's what this article is about, is it's actually saying like, yeah, this is the largest fund out of crypto. So congratulations to A16Z, well deserved, part of that brand of power that you guys got there. Anthony, any comments here?

• 20:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is definitely the largest fund. It's their third fund, so they've got two other ones that they've already deployed. And I think the most exciting thing about these funds is that they have to deploy. You know, unless all the limited partners or LPs, as they're called, want all their money back, which, you know, a lot of the time they don't. These funds have to be deployed, which means that there's a lot of money coming into, I think a lot of it will go into the private markets, but A16Z still does OTC deals with projects. I mean, I think they did one recently with Solana. So this money's going to make its way into the ecosystem for sure, regardless if it's a private deal or a public deal or whatever. But this just means that anyone who wants to get funding, I mean, it's not just A16Z either. There are so many funds out there who recently raised money off the back of the bull market,

• 20:59Speaker 01

  where people kind of FOMO'd in. Like, I think when people look at funds, they think, oh, they're sophisticated, they don't FOMO in. No, man, they're humans, they FOMO in just like everyone else. So there's this money here, just like for builders, and we've seen some mega raises recently, like Starkwet, 75 or 80 million or something, DYDX at like 60 million. So these teams are going to be able to build through any kind of bear market. If we go into, for some reason, another two-year bear, these teams are fine. And there's more capital to raise, you know, Series As or Series Bs or Cs or whatever from these funds. So this is incredibly bullish, I think, for the builder space especially. And for the fact that, you know, during the bear market, there were not that many funds in the 2018, 2019 bear market, and not many things were getting kind of funding.

• 21:44Speaker 01

  Now, I mean, there's billions just waiting to be deployed, which is really exciting.

• 21:49David Hoffman?

  Yeah, there's a very strong conversation in 2018 and 2019 as to like, yo, how do we fund our industry? Ethereum really had that problem. And seeing these numbers come into funds like A16Z and like you said, A16Z is the biggest by now. So congratulations to them. But there are so many that are also very large. And so like, guys, we got we got fuel in the tank. If anything bad happens for the long term with crypto prices. Bantag out of the Urn team posted this chart that I thought was pretty interesting where it compares and contrasts the revenue generated by the Urn protocol versus some TradFi, some traditional finance correlates like Betterment, Wealthfront and BlackRock. And interestingly,

• 22:30David Hoffman?

  it also compares it as a revenue per employee basis. And so Urn made $123 million in revenue. And compared to Betterment, which made 50, and Wealthfront that made $30 million in revenue. But interestingly, revenue per employee, Urn made $5.86 million per employee. And Betterment just made .17 and Wealthfront made .13 million dollars per employee. Ryan Sean Adams, if he was here, he would say exactly what I'm about to say right now. But DeFi protocols don't have much costs. They are protocols. They're autonomous software on Ethereum. Once they work, they work. And Ethereum and Ethereum security is what actually is the thing that is costly to maintain.

• 23:14David Hoffman?

  And that is, that's, that's a whole separate consensus mechanism. That's, that's proof of work and proof of stake and ultrasound money and all that. Once that is taken care of, DeFi apps are free to maintain. And so all that's needed for things like Urn or Uniswap is just a little bit of continued development from a relatively small team, which makes them some of the most efficient capital generating entities that we have ever seen in this world.

• 23:37Speaker 01

  I wrote about a bit about this in the Daily Way newsletter the other day, where I basically said that it's just absolutely incredible, the flattening of costs here across DeFi protocols with their centralized counterparts, I guess you could call them. I know you went through the table here. I think it's funny because you can look at the number here for Urn, 21 team members. There's all Also the community as well. I think the difference between these kind of like Bedamins, Wealthfronts, whatever, and Yarn is that Yarn has a core team that does, you know, the core development, but then they also have a massive community. Bedamins and Wealthfront don't have any organic communities from what I've seen, or even Blackrock, right? They're they're just like, their community is their company, so to speak.

• 24:18Speaker 01

  Whereas you can be a Yarn community member or a, you know, Wi-Fi token holder and have absolutely nothing to do with the the core development. And on top of that, there's a lot of other protocols out there that are essentially done and don't need stewarding or don't need kind of like, I guess, like continued building. You know, Uniswap's a perfect example here where V2 is still going strong. V3 is out there, but V2 is very strong. And there is no development on V2 because you can't, you can't do anything on V2 because the contracts are immutable. It's completely decentralized. Governance doesn't have any control over V2.

• 24:50Speaker 01

  So essentially, it's done. There's zero employees and it's still making revenue for the protocol and the LPs and things like that. So I I think this is just going to be a massive kind of thing going forward where, as I was saying before, there's not enough sophisticated investors in this space yet to care about this stuff, but going forward there will be. And they'll be like, you know, how is this possible? Like this this protocol is doing this, you know, price to share. They have like such low costs, you know, their growth prospects are insane. Why is this token only trading at X and X market cap? And I I think that is going to be a massive shift here because at the end of the day, Yarn wants to be like similar to something like Blackrock or Bedamins and Wealthfront.

• 25:29Speaker 01

  And they're already doing more revenue than Bedamins and Wealthfront with way less team members and and and and also with way higher growth prospects too. So, yeah, I don't know. I just feel like the market can't just stay really dumb forever.

• 25:43David Hoffman?

  No, that I'm I'm with you 100% brother. Like to some degree, on my bearish days, I'll be confused. I'd be like, well, some of these apps aren't actually throwing off cash. Some of these like governance tokens, do people actually want governance tokens? Are they really what we say they are? But at the end of the day, when I put my bullish hat back on, it's like, all that all that people have to do is make the association, right? All that all that people have to do is believe that it makes sense to buy. Buy these things because they generate revenue for the protocol and maybe maybe they're not throwing off cash into your pocket. Maybe there's just a lot of traffic controlling of value by these governance tokens, but all people have to do is believe that they are generating the the numbers.

• 26:23David Hoffman?

  Because a lot of these typical equities, they don't pay dividends either. And so to some degree, it's very much a belief system. It's like, do these tokens have control over the value that they say that they have? And there's a lot of value that these DeFi apps are controlling. And so at some point, I do think there's just going to be like a herd mentality. Like, oh, yeah, these tokens are really valuable. Let's buy them. All right. On the same vein of protocols with cash flow and fees, Alpha Homora is one of the few protocols that actually does put cash in your pocket as a token holder. So, and Alpha Homora V2 has already generated almost $700,000 in protocol fees in just about one month.

• 27:01David Hoffman?

  Annualized total fees collected by all Alpha Homora products, V1, V2, and on Binance Smart Chain will be $13.85 million if that was annualized over a year. Which puts Alpha Homora decently up the the charts of revenue generating cash flowing assets in DeFi.

• 27:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think this is really cool that Alpha is already that kind of like that big and returning things to token holders. But at the same time, I have a little bit of a maybe a different view here where I actually believe that token holders shouldn't be getting anything at this point in the in the lifecycle of these products. It's too early. All the money and all the revenue that's being generated should be reinvested back into growing the protocol. That's a lot of money that can be reinvested into building. And I really, I don't, I don't really think that token holders should be getting like a dividend. What? And not even a year after Alpha Finance has launched, for example. And, you know, you see this play out a lot in the traditional kind of finance system or the traditional, any, any kind of company system where dividends or or maybe a public, a company won't even go public for a long time.

• 28:06Speaker 01

  And they won't pay dividends for a for a long time there as well. So, and they just reinvest. I mean, Amazon does it still. They reinvest all their profits into growing Amazon and the Amazon stock price hasn't suffered at all like it's, you know, so I. I have a bit of a different opinion there, but I I I think it's still cool to to be paying out to token holders. But maybe it's just a bit too early to be doing so. And I don't know about Alpha Finance specifically. I know some protocols do both where they take uh money for their treasury and they take and they pay out some to stakers to act as like an insurance backstop, which I think is cool. If if there's actually like a productivity being done here where staking tokens um gives you access to like revenue of the system, but it also means that your tokens are at risk if you're part of like some insurance pool

• 28:49Speaker 01

  or you have you have to act as like a backstop for the protocol, whatever. So I think that that that's a better model, but just straight paying people for staking, you know, and and not giving and them not taking on any risk, I think is too early and probably not the best model going forward.

• 29:03David Hoffman?

  Let's actually camp on this point here because I want to parse this apart. Um. I agree with you in the sense that there's cer- certain laws about finance just are exist no matter what and you know, young upstarting protocols shouldn't be paying out dividends because they need that cash flow for themselves. At the same time, I think it would be really important if like the DeFi ecosystem planted a flag and be like, no, we are not a because there's a critique of the legacy financial markets that all of these non-dividend paying stocks are really just a greater fools analysis like or a greater fools like valuation theories like, oh, I'm going to buy Apple stock. Why am I buying Apple stock? It doesn't pay me any money, but I'm going to buy it so I can sell it to somebody else at a higher price later. Which is a greater fools like uh like argument for why you think that's uh.

• 29:46Speaker 01

  Apple does stock buybacks too. I guess that's another thing. It's like the it's like the YFI model, right? Where uh essentially you you would uh buy it because you you know they're going to buy it back and it doesn't matter if they're not going to burn it or whatever. Um. They're still buying it back, which adds buy pressure. But I get what you're saying. Like, there is definitely a faith-based or greater fool element, if you want to call it, to a lot of these things. But yeah, sorry, go on.

• 30:08David Hoffman?

  Well, so so we have the option to pay dividends to token holders, which is one option. We can buy back and and and and kind of make or doubt is the buyback and burn. Uh, YFI is buy back and put it in the treasury. YFI is and urine is also buying back ETH and putting ETH on the treasury. And so these are three different ways to like add value to your protocol, dividends, um, buybacks and. Then ETH and stablecoins put that on the treasury. And I actually think buying DAI or USCC or ETH and putting that on the treasury and inside the protocol, which is governed by token holders is actually a nice compromise. Because that allows the protocol to still tap into the revenue that they're generating. But it allows for the governance tokens to govern over what is a growing mountain of cash.

• 30:52David Hoffman?

  And so that's a pretty direct way to add value to the token.

• 30:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I think so, definitely.

• 30:59David Hoffman?

  Monthly average borrowing volume on AVE has just gone up through the roof. And so in June 2021, we are already past where we were in May.

• 31:11David Hoffman?

  Despite the decreasing crypto asset prices, borrowing volume continues to skyrocket with AVE. It's probably going to breach $10 billion in the next couple of days, which is absolutely crazy. So tip of the hat, AVE has not stopped growing since day one.

• 31:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, I would be curious to see which assets people are borrowing here. Because obviously, when the market's bullish, people borrow stablecoins to go long on things. But are people borrowing like ETH or BTC or wrapped Bitcoin or whatever to short it right now? You know, I'd be very curious to see where this borrowing volume is coming from, actually.

• 31:45David Hoffman?

  Yeah, shout out to whoever put this truck together, Token Terminal. Maybe you can answer that question. And then the last section in the markets before we get to it releases. Kathy Wood bought the dip, Ark Invest purchases 1 million GBTC shares. So those are the trusts out of Grayscale. Not only is Bitcoin in a dip, but the Grayscale GBTC has had a discount to it. And so Kathy Wood wanted to take advantage of that discount by buying a bunch of GBTC. So discounted Bitcoin with a discounted asset wrapper around Bitcoin. So Kathy Woods thinks that this is a really good deal. And then also the conversation of ETFs comes up.

• 32:27David Hoffman?

  Because as soon as Grayscale, they've communicated their intentions to turn GBTC into an ETF as soon as they can. And as soon as that happens, the discount on GBTC just immediately gets eliminated. And this thing will immediately trade on par with the assets under management. And so if that happens anytime soon, this will all be a good trade. Anthony, any thoughts here?

• 32:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, the trade really is hoping that the the discount goes away. Um, and you know, you bet you were able to buy kind of like Bitcoin at a steep discount here and then obviously sell it later on. But uh, yeah, I guess it's it's a risky play uh, for sure. And I I've seen charts that a lot of these GBTC is see kind of things are unlocking over the next month, where Bitcoin basically becomes liquid and these kind of people can close the arb. So maybe that's why she did it because she is betting on that um, that kind of like spread being closed due to unlocks. Uh, so we'll see, we'll see what happens there. But the thing is, is that if Bitcoin goes below the discount that um, GBTC was at, like if spot Bitcoin goes below it, then it becomes like a really bad trade.

• 33:33Speaker 01

  So it's it's definitely risky, but I mean Cathie Wood uh, from Arc obviously knows what she's doing. So I'd be I'd be very curious to see how this plays out for her.

• 33:41David Hoffman?

  All right, guys, we are going to get into releases. There's a lot of hot stuff that came out in the last week. But first, we're going to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible. 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.

• 34:25David Hoffman?

  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. 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 uni-grant 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. Aave is a borrowing and lending protocol on Ethereum and just recently released Aave

• 35:06David Hoffman?

  version 2, which has a ton of cool new features that makes using Aave even more powerful. With Aave, you can leverage the full power of DeFi money Legos, yield and composability all in one application. On Aave, there are a ton of assets that you can deposit in order to gain yield and all of those same assets can also be borrowed from the protocol if you have deposited collateral. Here you can see me getting a 200 USDC loan against my portfolio of a number of different DeFi tokens and ETH. I'll choose a variable interest rate because it's a lower rate than the stable interest rate option, but I could choose the stable interest rate option if I wanted to lock that interest rate in permanently.

• 35:47David Hoffman?

  One of Aave's V2 features is the ability to swap collateral without having to withdraw your assets, trade them on Uniswap and then deposit them back into Aave. Aave does all of this for you, all in one seamless transaction, so you don't have to repay loans in order to change the collateral you have backing them. Check out the power of Aave at Aave.com. That's A-A-V-E dot com. Alright guys, we are back with releases. First release is another deployment on to Arbitrum. FutureSwap, FutureSwap V3 going to Arbitrum. Anthony, I know you like Arbitrum. Got any opinions on FutureSwap and Arbitrum?

• 36:22Speaker 01

  I think the most exciting thing about this is that FutureSwap is not deploying to Layer 1. They're only deploying to Arbitrum as Layer 2 and I think this is actually going to be what happens going forward, where teams aren't going to necessarily deploy to Layer 1 because there will be no point, because we're expecting users to just go to Layer 2 and that'll be the kind of user layer. So why would you even deploy to Layer 1 unless, you know, you're like a protocol that can take advantage of Layer 1 in terms of like liquidity pools and things like that and just building liquidity there. But I think generally a lot of projects are just going to go for the Layer 2 approach now when launching their maybe new versions or kind of like a new product. I've seen like a few of them recently where they say, "We're launching natively on Optimism" or "We're launching

• 37:07Speaker 01

  natively on this Layer 2" because they really don't see the point to launching on Layer Because they have to launch on layer two anyway. And I've been speaking a lot about this on the refuel on on my daily kind of YouTube videos that I do. Where I'm saying that it it the reason why I don't believe in like a multi chain future, like a multi chain future where like twenty, thirty, forty different trains exist. Is because the overhead is is intense there for for for that developers because. Developers don't want to have to maintain like twenty different instantiations of their app like it's too hard to do that. Uh you have to kind of like monitor the the different kind of like parameters on each chain. You have to upgrade it on each chain whenever you do an upgrade or change anything governance would have to govern like twenty different kind of instantiations. So I I believe that we're going to only have a handful of them. So I think that.

• 37:51Speaker 01

  That handful will obviously include Ethereum layer twos and maybe there's some other chains that get get some kind of traction here. But uh yeah, going forward, I I think more and more teams are just going to natively. Uh launch on layer two or just like completely migrate to layer two. I think synthetics is actually not going to be on layer one once their layer two. Migration is complete. Uh they want to get off layer one completely. So that is the future of Ethereum for sure, I believe.

• 38:13David Hoffman?

  Yeah, and I think it's really a interesting sign of of already some level of maturity on uh these L twos, very early indications of this because people are just. Choosing to not even bother with the L one anymore, which kind of leaves the L one to what it's really supposed to do. Which is really just traffic our assets and our value between other L twos. Um some interesting piece of Ethereum trivia trivia for you guys. Future Swap was actually. The first, I believe, the first governance token in their beta. And so if you came and use Future Swap, which is a perpetual exchange protocol. Uh they would actually give the their beta users their governance token. And this was before comp.

• 38:52David Hoffman?

  Liquidity mining was even introduced. Uh and this is actually what turned Dan Helder's attention into governance tokens and liquidity mining. Uh because they Future Swap had so much success in their beta. That they had to shut it down because they were too nervous because it was an unaudited contract. And like I think two hundred million dollars got yeeted into this unaudited contract because people wanted to farm. The governance tokens before we even called it farming and governance tokens. Uh and so like, sound familiar? Like unaudited contracts, yeeting two hundred million dollars? Uh fun fun little piece of Ethereum trivia right there.

• 39:30David Hoffman?

  Alright guys, another deployment on NL2 is the graph is now working with optimism on their mainnet launch to help scale Ethereum. The graph, the way that I use, the metaphor I use to help explain the graph, it's like Chainlink but reversed. So Chainlink wants to bring outside data to Ethereum. The graph wants to bring Ethereum data to the outside and allows you to consume and output Ethereum data. And it looks like they are going to work with optimism to do the same thing for optimism. Anthony, any thoughts here?

• 40:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, every Layer 2 and you know Layer 1 chain needs this supporting infrastructure. So there's actually like a core set that I consider to be supporting infrastructure. And that is something like Infura and Alchemy, which are node infrastructure providers. The graph, which is middleware, as you said, it brings data inside Ethereum to outside of Ethereum. People will use the graph without even knowing it because it sits in the background of pretty much every DeFi front end that you use, especially things like Zapr, they use the graph in the background there. You know, there's Chainlink for Oracles, there's Block Explorers like the EtherScan-like Block Explorer. And if people have been paying attention, Arbitrum and Optimism are basically on neck and neck

• 40:44Speaker 01

  in terms of integrations right now. And I believe Polygon also has all this support. And I think this is the reason why optimism was delayed back in March. They didn't have any of this infrastructure in place, which means that developers couldn't even do anything on the Layer 2. And that's why I believe that Arbitrum went a little bit of different kind of route here and said, okay, well, we're going to have a developer mainnet. We're going to get all this supporting infrastructure in place and live. And then we're going to launch to the public because there's no point launching to the public if you don't have this infrastructure because you want to give them the same experience that they have on Layer 1 just with cheaper fees. And you can't do that without this infrastructure. So this is really, really positive. But I expect obviously all the Layer 2s to kind of have this supporting infrastructure before they launch in any kind of like big way to users.

• 41:29David Hoffman?

  Right, yeah, so all the people that are itching to get on Layer 2s and see when it, when is it coming? When is it coming? When is it coming? Like, yo, guys, developers gotta go first. Like, they gotta actually build the stuff that we all want to use. Alright, moving on into more raises. Risk Harbor debuts on mainnet with a round of funding. Risk Harbor, it looks like a competitor to Nexus Mutual for on-chain smart contract protocol insurance. So if your smart contract has a bug or an exploit, you could buy protection from Harbor. And so not only are they launching their application, but they're also announcing their 3.25 million dollar seed round, led by Pantera Capital and Framework Ventures, and additional support from Coinbase Ventures, Digital Currency Group, Bain Capital, Neiman Capital.

• 42:12David Hoffman?

  Anthony, do you know anything about Risk Harbor? These guys are new to me.

• 42:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're new to me as well. I hadn't heard about them until, until this raise. I think they were in stealth, so that's why. But essentially, yeah, I mean, this is just another kind of, I guess, insurance protocol out there, like Nexus Mutual and Insure Ace, and I think like cover protocol. I mean, there's a bunch of them out there right now. But that's a strong list of investors that they have there. And I think that, you know, the fact that they're already live on mainnet is really, really cool. I, you know, you can get, I think if you scroll down a bit, it shows which apps they already support. I think all the popular DeFi apps, yeah, Curve, Urn, Ave, Compound, Uniswap. You know, and their apps ready to be used. And it's really beautiful. I like, I like the interface and everything like that. So, yeah, I mean, we definitely need more insurance kind of like protocols than not.

• 43:01Speaker 01

  But the thing about insurance protocols, and I was talking to a friend about this yesterday, they need to be battle-tested. You know, before I trust one of these protocols, I need to see that they are completely battle-tested and I need to see that they actually pay out on claims. Like, if they don't pay out the claims, then they're not really much of a good insurance protocol. So I think Nexus Mutual is still obviously the leader here, but good to see more competition hitting the market. And I saw you highlighted that Pomp invested in this. And I saw this too, and I was like, what a, what a, what a, you know, what a laugh. Because, I mean, for those who don't know, Pomp has been like, you know, crapping all over Ethereum-based DeFi. Now he's investing in it. I mean, it's like money talks, right?

• 43:44David Hoffman?

  Yeah, absolutely. And interestingly enough, when he tweeted out that he was investing in Risk Harbor, he used DeFi but did not use Ethereum. And so I'd like to see Pumps spin that narrative. But also Naval Ravikant, also on the list of investors. Naval, that's pretty cool. So really strong backing here. So maybe DeFi is about to become a lot less risky if you buy insurance. Maybe the insurance ecosystem is, you know, it's definitely getting another player. So maybe that part of the industry is going to build out a little bit. Yield Protocol also got some money. Excited to announce the close of our Series A funding led by Paradigm, and also to share some new details to version 2 of Yield. So there has been some money being thrown around.

• 44:28David Hoffman?

  And Paradigm, this is not the first, or Paradigm has led a bunch of rounds in the last few weeks. And so they are dishing out the cash. Anthony, any thoughts here?

• 44:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, $10 million Series A is pretty positive. I think the Yield team's been around for a little while now, doing kind of fixed rate things, fixed rate borrowing. I think they had something for Maker DEX deployed as well. But it's cool to see that their V2 is coming soon. And yeah, this is a good list of investors. They have Paradigm as the leader, and then they have like Framework, people will know, Variant, and DeFi Alliance, and a bunch of others there. So yeah, really, really cool to see this.

• 45:07David Hoffman?

  Last, but definitely not least, Visa and PayPal join Blockchain Capital in their new fund, which is $300 million. I guess this week is just funds deploying capital and raising more money week. Congratulations Spencer Bogart, that's the guy pictured here, and also Blockchain Capital, for getting Visa and PayPal on board for Blockchain Capital. And again, $300 million about to be deployed into this industry. That's a lot of money, and this is like the third time we've been talking about this on this weekly rollup. At some point, I'm like, yo, guys, can you like buy some ETH? Can you like pump the ETH price a little bit? Like, come on, come on.

• 45:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, and that's a funny thing to think about is just like, you know, a lot of these funds aren't going to be buying ETH directly. They're going to be investing in like private rounds and things like that. But I think just just generally more money coming into this ecosystem is good for the entire ecosystem. I really don't think that, uh, you know, it'd be very hard to measure what affects, uh, the, the fact that the money goes into, you know, private rounds versus ETH has and like if that money had gone into ETH, would it have actually done stuff? Because at the end of the day, these, these kind of like, I guess, private rounds like seed, series As are done on the apps that build on Ethereum. And those apps are what add a lot of value to Ethereum. So it should still flow to ETH, um, generally. But this goes back to like the fat protocol thesis and stuff like that. So it's a much deeper discussion, but still,

• 46:28Speaker 01

  I think any money coming into this ecosystem is fine. Uh, but I mean, okay, actually I should qualify that by saying that not just any money. I think that the dumb retail money that comes in and buys dog coins is actually pretty poisonous, uh, for the short to medium term, because it means a lot of money exits the ecosystem and it means a lot of people get wrecked. So I, I think money going into like just, you know, the builders, like funding builders, like actual builders is, is the, the right approach here.

• 46:53David Hoffman?

  Totally. Yeah. Retail should, I mean, there needs to be legitimate things to invest in if we want retail to be smart and come into this industry. And at some point we need VCs to like fund and like be intentional about where this money goes. And so, um, that's what I see happening here. For those that really want to follow along with the AVE ecosystem, AVE Grants Dow, uh, at AVE Grants on Twitter announces AVE News, a recap of the latest updates and happenings in the AVE ecosystem. Apparently AVE is so big that it needs its own newsletter to keep up with what's going on in AVE.

• 47:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I was actually looking at this the other day. I'm like, wow, uh, this is incredible to put the newsletter together would have taken a, a few hours because there were so many, uh, kind of things in there. But yeah, the fact that just one app on Ethereum, yes, it's, it's probably the biggest app on Ethereum right now. But just the fact that just one has so much to report on each week is, is incredible. And I mean, I love it. And I love that this was launched by the AVE Grant, Grants Dow, like by the AVE Dow and the AVE token holders and Coming together to to do this. It's it's really, really cool.

• 47:57David Hoffman?

  Yeah, and this kind of feels a similar vibe to perhaps like an investor newsletter, right? You know, hey, like if you are an AVE token holder, you know, who do you think reads the AVE newsletter? It's probably AVE token holders. And so the AVE newsletter is probably saying, hey, token holders, here's what we're up to. And so at some point, it's just good investor relations to have a newsletter like this and can definitely replace some of the very slow quarterly reports that we would get from from TradFi.

• 48:26David Hoffman?

  Not specifically crypto related, but Brave Browser, which has, it's a very crypto forward and a browser used by crypto people because it kind of shares some of the ethos of crypto and also has the basic attention token to pay for payments. Brave Browser now has a search engine, so now rivaling Google and being in the search engine game. And I think the reason why I wanted to talk about this, even though it's not really super crypto focused, is that other than the fact that crypto people love Brave Browser, is that all of the values and ethos is being baked into Brave Browser of the crypto industry. And now the Brave Browser is venturing off into more competitive territories with a search engine.

• 49:07David Hoffman?

  And so I'm rooting for him. Like, let's change the game with with the values and ethos of our industry. Let's change the game of some web two technologies. Anthony, any opinions here?

• 49:18Speaker 01

  I think this is cool, but it's also like a very uphill battle. I mean, there's DuckDuckGo that's been trying to go have a go at Google for a while. It's been growing and and everything, but it's still dwarfed by Google. I mean, Google at this point is like a monopoly in the search engine kind of arena. I don't know if any free market competition can actually take down Google. And, you know, maybe in the very long term, something could happen here. But like taking any market share away from Google, I guess, is like a positive. But still, they have such a stranglehold on on search and search is their their only product, really. I mean, Google has other products, but search makes, I think, more than 90% or even higher than that of their revenue. So search really is their core product and they've been refining that for like 20 years and they have their own algorithms.

• 50:01Speaker 01

  I mean, I'm not saying that people shouldn't compete, but like. Like I I would I'm curious to see where this goes because there's already been other attempts like Bing and stuff like that not even Bing has put much of a dent in Google and Bing is supported by Microsoft which obviously makes it the default search engine on all of their um Windows operating systems and it's still not competing with Google because Google I mean Google's a verb right like um it's like just Google that right um or maybe I'm not using the word right there but like just just Google that

• 50:27David Hoffman?

  Google it yeah

• 50:28Speaker 01

  Yeah yeah just just just just just Google it right like it's not like just search it on the web it's just Google it

• 50:36David Hoffman?

  Totally totally all right moving on Coinbase enters the Japanese market after completing registrations with a financial watchdog I didn't actually know Coinbase wasn't in Japan but now it is uh so cool Coinbase released in Japan Anthony any thoughts here

• 50:51Speaker 01

  From all I know about Japan is that their financial or system or generally like their investing kind of like system there is very quiet if you look at Japan's stock index it only recently got back to its all time high after like thirty or forty years or something like that um and they're I generally I don't think uh for some reason Japan is just not very um uh very good with financial markets like their financial markets are very quiet not very speculative I don't know how much they do with crypto but yeah I mean there's a Japanese community I I I and we obviously um we went to um DevCon in Osaka uh and all that sort of stuff but yeah it's just uh it's I I didn't know that wasn't there yet so that just speaks to the fact they're very slow on their financial markets it seems

• 51:33David Hoffman?

  Yeah maybe to some degree that just stagnation and the Japanese financial markets just made the financial industry really unexciting and allowed people to just like work in slow motion I guess

• 51:45David Hoffman?

  The last release that we've got this week is coming out of Bankless my favorite podcast introducing a new show uh me and my uh new co-host Michael Wong uh doing the Top Signal show which is going to be all about entertainment and comedy some gags some bits some jokes uh Anthony you're actually going to be one of our very first guests along with a DeFi dad and Kevin Awaki coming to a show new you near you Tuesday night so everyone mark it on your calendars this coming Tuesday evening is when we will be uh live streaming uh Top Signal the very first episode uh and we got some we got a cool agenda lined up for you Anthony it's gonna be it's gonna be a fun time you ready for it

• 52:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm really excited for this. And yeah, I mean, as you said, you have an agenda lined up, but I haven't seen it yet. But I think it's gonna be really funny. You've been talking to me about this for a little while, that project that you guys were working on. And yeah, I'm excited. I'm excited for this. It's, I think, you know, it's funny because like a lot of the, the stuff that like we all do, like, the rollups, the refuels, the weekly recaps on ETH and stuff. There's not much comedy sprinkled in, right? It just focuses on like the news and the fundamental stuff.

• 52:48David Hoffman?

  It's work. It's work. It's work to produce and it's work to listen to.

• 52:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, really. Like, it's, it's, it's part of that arena. Whereas like a lot of crypto really is memes and comedy and jokes. And like all of crypto Twitter is just one giant shitpost. So, you know, capturing that in kind of like a, a, a, a pod, a kind of like podcast video form, I think it's gonna be really fun.

• 53:07David Hoffman?

  I, I hope it works out. Hopefully, we are as funny as I think that we are. We are about to find out. All right, getting into news. EIP1559 live on the Robson testnet. And so, one step closer to getting EIP live on the Ethereum mainnet. Not quite here yet. But we've got some pretty interesting infrastructure already going live. Here's Tim Bako saying, "We have a block." Took a little bit longer than expected, but London is live on Robson. And then we have this new watchtheburn.com website, which is only pointing towards Robson because it's only on, on testnet right now. But I think this is going to be a website that we are going to revisit as a community quite often because we all are going to enjoy watching Ether burn.

• 53:51David Hoffman?

  And so, watchtheburn.com is going to be a website to watch Ether get burned. It's a little bit slow to load right now, but I promise it works.

• 54:01Speaker 01

  It does this sometimes for me as well.

• 54:03David Hoffman?

  Anthony, any thoughts about EIP1559 live on Robson?

• 54:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's obviously super exciting to see that it's finally live on a public testnet here. You know, Gurili comes next in a week, and then like another week after that will be Rinkabye, and then we'll get a mainnet date, I think, sooner rather than later. So, yeah, I mean, yeah, you can see here on the site like how much Ether's been burned. But it's funny because I, I saw that there's a lot of transaction spam happening right now on Robson to test 1559. So it's like, you know, trying to to break it because essentially this is what test nets are for. We want to see if we can break the mechanisms and you know, that's why 88,000 ETH has been burned in like two days.

• 54:41David Hoffman?

  Rob's in it specifically.

• 54:43Speaker 01

  Rob's in it. Exactly. I should mention that. This is not real ETH. So don't get your hopes up, guys. It's not real ETH, but.

• 54:50David Hoffman?

  One day, one day.

• 54:51Speaker 01

  One day. Yes. Yeah, exactly. And this is total fee. So one day we're going to have like total fees be like a million ETH burned. It's going to be really cool to see that that play out. So yeah, exciting developments, y'all.

• 55:01David Hoffman?

  Yeah, not only is the test net testing out how much ETH can we burn, but the content producers are testing out how much ETH burn can we talk about? So we're in test mode, test net mode, left and right. All right, moving on. This is a tweet out of fearless leader Ryan Sean Adams goes, seriously, Venmo, nice job on the ETH description. Revolutionizing the way we borrow, lend and trade value with each other over the internet, all without the need for banks. Yeah, this is not something that you see often. I think when you see like, you know, Web two and TradFi companies trying to explain Ethereum, they usually don't get it right. But Venmo got it right. Anthony, have you seen this description before? It's absolutely fantastic.

• 55:44Speaker 01

  I haven't seen it and that is a really, really great way to put it, I think. You know, very simple as well, like for like, I guess normies, you can call them to understand, right? Not doesn't use our like typical crypto DeFi jargon. It just says, you know, this is what you can do with it. This is the value, you know, here you go.

• 56:01David Hoffman?

  The apps built on the Ethereum blockchain aren't like your other apps. Some allow, some of them allow you to lend, borrow and exchange crypto without going through a bank. To interact with these apps, you need to make transactions on the Ethereum blockchain. Each transaction requires fees paid in ETH. And then it has a section as to what makes Ethereum so interesting. They really got this one right. And like I said, this is not something that you usually people don't get things right about Ethereum. Usually people just miss left and right, but nice job. Nice job, crypto team over at Venmo. Anthony, I'm sure you heard about this one. This was a little bit unfortunate, but staking company sues Fireblocks, which is a custodian with a lawsuit over the private key. Keys lost to after they lost seventy five million dollars in ETH.

• 56:45David Hoffman?

  So there was a staking as a service company, which was using this Fireblocks as a custodian to custody their staked ETH. And Fireblocks lost the private keys. Whoops. And so that's a little bit unfortunate if any of the listeners had their ETH inside of the staking as a service company. I'm sorry that you lost your ETH. Hopefully the settlement works out for you. For the rest of us, Ether just got a little bit more scarce.

• 57:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, this is like, I mean, there wasn't just this, there was also, so this was StakeHound. There was also shared stake recently that kind of lost some ETH as well. But this just speaks to the fact that what we have all been trying to drum home with people is that if you can, if you are able to, if you have that thirty two ETH minimum, stake on your own, like for for your own sake. Don't don't go through a third party provider. Like, I mean, not to say that all third party providers are bad. You know, there's some of them that have like insurance and things like that, like exchanges and all that sort of stuff. But you know, you're always giving up control over your private key by staking with kind of one of these third party providers at this point in time.

• 57:49Speaker 01

  I think post-merge, you'll be able to like do some kind of like delegation where you keep the private key and then you give your signing key to a third party. But even then, like this third party could sign something that goes against the protocol rules and get you slashed or whatever. So at the end of the day, like I always advocate for solo staking. If you have the thirty two ETH, if you don't and you need to kind of like stake with a provider, I would suggest to centralize things like Rocketpool. I don't think Rocketpool's live just yet. Yeah, yeah, I suggest that kind of stuff. But then if you if you have to go through like more of a centralized provider, I suggest something like Lido because at least they take your ETH and like distribute it among different staking providers. And you also get like STE, which is a representation of that ETH and you can do things with that in DeFi.

• 58:35Speaker 01

  I typically steer clear of like just centralized exchanges, like especially the Binance's of the world. I would never ever stake through Binance. But like Coinbase, I guess, is the is the is another option. But again, if you're able to, stake on your own.

• 58:50David Hoffman?

  Yeah, there's a reason why the Ethereum, Ethereum 2.0 has taken such a long time to get out the door. And that's because developers and the Ethereum researchers worked really, really hard to make it easy for us to stake at home. So we should take advantage of the fact that they put all of that blood, sweat and tears into making Ethereum accessible. And allowing you to provide security to Ethereum from the comfort of your own home. And this also speaks to the difficulty of just private key management. But also the, the Stakehounds claim against Fireblocks and why they're trying, they're going after them and trying to sue them. Is that they just claim negligence. They, a quote in the article says, "In a short, in short, a series of errors by Fireblocks

• 59:30David Hoffman?

  caused the loss of two of the keys that are part of a three of four signature, this is a multi-sig, for the shards that form the withdrawal key. Fireblocks did not generate their private keys in a production environment and did not include the private keys required to decrypt their two key shares in the backup and lost both the keys." Kind of a big whoopsie. All right, let's go ahead and move on here to Scooby Truples. If you guys watched the Bankless Weekly roll up last week, we talked about the, I don't even know what to call it. A bug in the Alchemics Al ETH vault that allowed people to deposit ETH, borrow Al ETH from Alchemics, and then also withdraw their collateral. And, and so people got to borrow free ETH from the protocol. And so they have asked people, "Hey, can you give it back?"

• 1:00:15David Hoffman?

  And almost 50% of the ETH has been returned. And so CryptoGucci says, shout out to CryptoGucci. "Did you receive free ETH slash Al ETH from the Alchemics contract bug? Alchemics is airdropping ALCEX, the ALCX token, the governance token for Alchemics, in the equivalent amount of ETH or Al ETH that you received." And they've generated this special page on their website to go and return that ETH. And a decent amount of ETH has actually been returned, which is, which is just overall like, well, good, good for the protocol because we need to clear that debt, but also a very interesting indicator of the holisticness of the Alchemics community. Scooby Truples on Twitter says, "I have a feeling people who return their Al ETH or ETH to Alchemics

• 1:00:59David Hoffman?

  will be in several lists that goes to benefit them for a long time. A crypto verifiable good person list, because no one's forcing them to return this money. They can just keep it if they wanted to, but yet they are returning it because they are good people." Anthony, any thoughts here?

• 1:01:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's really cool to see that basically what half of it has been returned so far, just under half of it, I think, uh, has been returned so far, uh, which is awesome. And yeah, I mean, I think that this is like the best bug that could have happened. It's not, I mean, it's not a huge bug, and even if like not all the funds get returned, there's other ways to kind of, I guess, uh, recapitalize the system here. So yeah, really, really cool to see this. And I think, you know, if you were a part of this and you got some bonus ETH, just return it. I mean, really, at the end of the day, we're all good stewards within Ethereum. We should definitely do this, but I, I, I kind of get it. Like for some people, if they receive like all this ETH, say they got like fifty bonus ETH back, that could be like life changing for them. I, I get it. I really do get it. But at the same time,

• 1:01:55Speaker 01

  it's not yours technically, right? It is the protocols and you should definitely be a good steward here and return it if you, if you're, if you, um, kind of like suffered from this, I guess.

• 1:02:03David Hoffman?

  And what Scoopy is trying to say, and I kind of agree with, or at least I think people should consider that like if you, if you have an account, an Ethereum address that got Ether or L ETH that shouldn't have, and you return it, that account is now verifiably a good person. And, uh, I think a lot of, um, it, it's, it's beneficial to have a good footprint in DeFi, right? And so if you use Uniswap, if you, uh, if you've done a bunch of things, you got a ton of airdrops from just being a DeFi participant. And I think doing this and returning your Ether stamps your Ethereum address as somebody, somebody's Ethereum address that people want to just include as a reward because they want you

• 1:02:45David Hoffman?

  to use their protocol because you are provably a good person. This is just good surface area to have. And so it might work out in the long term to actually return the Ether because you want to show to the Ethereum community that you did something that you didn't have to do and you're a good person.

• 1:03:01Speaker 01

  Yep, yep, exactly.

• 1:03:02David Hoffman?

  All right, moving on to Reddit is now selling three Ethereum NFTs. Reddit is already a very much an Ethereum aligned platform, but they are selling three NFTs of its mascot, Snue, uh, which, uh, I've always enjoyed the Reddit Alien. I'd always kind of thought he was a cute little character. Uh, and now if you want to, you can buy Snue, the NFT. Anthony, you're gonna buy any of these NFTs?

• 1:03:27Speaker 01

  Uh, probably not. I don't think I'm gonna be able to afford these for starters. I feel like they're gonna get bit up a lot. But yeah, I mean Reddit, Reddit has been doing a lot of things in Ethereum. They did their scaling challenge a while ago. They've done the moons and, and things like community point system. Uh, yeah, it's just cool to see them doing like NFTs uh now. I think these are gonna be very valuable in the long run, uh, because of the fact that these will be the first NFTs that Reddit does. Um, and I'm sure they'll do more going down the line. So yeah, cool to see them just jumping into that arena there.

• 1:03:54David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I've always been optimistic that Reddit can really be a use case for Ethereum. Just because they, they have their, their community reward points, right? Like what happens if we can like we and the, our ETH trader community had their uh donut token experiment. I think there's a lot of potential with tokenized communities and Reddit to really become aligned. Uh, and so like Reddit might be one of the biggest and most, and largest communities that are non Ethereum native. That come onto Ethereum and start using Ethereum in order to just better their own community. Uh, and so if that does happen, that actually would uh indicate a lot of value in these NFTs. Uh, because the NFT focused community on Reddit would uh, and the fact that Reddit uses Ethereum would bestow more, even more value on the first NFTs that Reddit even made.

• 1:04:38Speaker 01

  Yep, yep, totally.

• 1:04:39David Hoffman?

  Moving on to Bitcoin stuff, Anthony's favorite section, uh, we got some crazy Bitcoin news out of China this week. Where uh, it has now been basically confirmed to be by, based off the exodus of hash flow. That China is straight up mining or banning all Bitcoin miners, not banning Bitcoin, but mining, banning Bitcoin miners. And so Nic Carter tweeted out, uh, or wrote an article actually that I thought was uh, pretty, pretty interesting. Where he goes, go west Bitcoin, unpacking the great hash rate migration. And he says that by now, it should be clear that the hash rate migration out of China is real. Miners are leaving China for good. As of April of 2020, an estimated 65% of Bitcoin hash rate was domiciled in China.

• 1:05:23David Hoffman?

  And with confirmed bans across that, uh, across the country, he says that figure will be far lower in the 12 months from now. And he says the precise magnitude and schedule of the westward move is currently unknown. There's a lot of conversations going around. About how this is actually going to be really good for Bitcoin. TM, this is good for Bitcoin. But A, like I said, BTC, the asset, not banned in China. And this actually does a decent amount of improving the decentralization of Bitcoin's hash rate. Because so much of it was in China, now it's going anywhere else. And so maybe that makes US regulators more comfortable with Bitcoin, who knows? And also, China's generally been the dirtiest hash rate source for Bitcoin.

• 1:06:04David Hoffman?

  And so any hash rate migration out of China is likely going into greener and greener pastures. Anthony, any opinions about the BTC hash rate migration out of China?

• 1:06:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, this is probably the main reason why the crypto markets have been so weak. I think it's just like all of this coming out of China. It's definitely like, it's funny because at first, whenever you hear China doing something with Bitcoin, you don't believe it because it's like the boy who cried wolf, right? They always did this over the years. But yeah, I mean, as Nick says, this is very, very real. Miners are leaving China in a very big way. And that's going to cause short-term disruption at the end of the day. And, you know, I mean, it's funny because I have different opinions on proof of work in Bitcoin. But I think that objectively speaking, miners moving out of China is a good thing. Regardless of your views on proof of work and mining, whatever. China has always been kind of like that centralizing vector for Bitcoin mining.

• 1:06:57Speaker 01

  But at the same time, as you said, it's also been a wasteful kind of miner too. So if it can move towards more greener kind of energy sources, then that's good for, I guess, like the industry as a whole as well.

• 1:07:07David Hoffman?

  There's also conversations that China is doing this in order to prepare to really push their Chinese central bank digital currency, which is confusing to me because if you really were doing that, why wouldn't you also ban Bitcoin? And to some degree, I'm a little bit confused with China's strategy here because China as somebody that wants to disrupt the US dollar and the power of the US, might actually be more interested in aligning with Bitcoin than rejecting it. And so now we are, can be definitely just confirm that China has no interest in putting Bitcoin on the balance sheet. Otherwise, it would have been subsidizing Bitcoin miners, not banning them. And so the China Bitcoin story is going to be a long one. It's going to unfold for years and years to come. So we will be following it.

• 1:07:52David Hoffman?

  Out of the daily huddle, MicroSailor, MicroStrategy now owns over a hundred thousand Bitcoins with new purchase. He is by far the largest single holder of Bitcoin, I'm pretty sure that's true. And now over the hundred thousand dollar, or hundred thousand Bitcoin mark. Anthony, is this crazy or what? What's your take here?

• 1:08:13Speaker 01

  I mean, first of all, I think Tim Draper, or the Winklevoss Twins, or Eric Voorhees may own more BTC than he does here. I know, Tim Draper owns a lot of BTC. He bought them a while ago. But yeah, I mean, this, obviously Sailor's one of the largest single holders now. And, and, and, I mean, I guess it's not just him, it's MicroStrategy that's, that's kind of holding it.

• 1:08:35David Hoffman?

  It's him.

• 1:08:35Speaker 01

  But, yeah, yeah, I mean, technically, yes. But, um, I think it's funny because he bought these at like thirty-seven K or thirty-eight K, or something like that, a couple of weeks ago. And I think his average buy price, yeah, I think it's, yeah, the average buying price is twenty-six thousand. So if it goes below twenty-six thousand, he's underwater on, on all of it. And he's not very much above water right now. But I think he's such a Bitcoin bull, like, and, you know, Bitcoin Maximus, whatever you want to call him, that he's gonna go down with the ship at the end of the day. He's just gonna keep buying as much as he can, in, in any way that he can. And he's not gonna, he's just gonna buy whenever, he doesn't care, which seems to be the case here. So he's not trying to buy the dips or whatever, he's just trying to buy as much Bitcoin as possible.

• 1:09:18Speaker 01

  But I was seeing some chatter about this being like a pretty big negative, that having one kind of like person, especially someone who's pretty volatile, like, I don't know if people have seen, but Sailor seems to be pretty volatile as a person. Having him own so much of the supply, and having that as like an overhang where people say, well, this guy owns so much of it, what's stopping him from just dumping it whenever he wants to? And like putting huge downward pressure on the price. So there's that concern. I don't know if that's a huge concern. Like, I feel like at this point Sailor has pretty much signaled that, you know, he's not going to sell this Bitcoin at these prices. Maybe he sells it much, much higher than where it is now. But he's definitely not selling around here. So, yeah, I guess net positive, I guess, for the ecosystem in terms of like price movement, but it'll probably play out over the longer term, you know?

• 1:10:01David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I, I agree there. It would be really nice if Sailor had an ally kind of going after trying to compete for these Bitcoins, rather than it just being him. He really does seem to be trying to like brute force Bitcoin price to go up. He's like, "I'll do it myself, damn it."

• 1:10:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, pretty much, yeah.

• 1:10:19David Hoffman?

  Alright, I'm gonna burn through this one real quick. "New York City will become a Bitcoin center," says the city mayoral lead candidate Eric Adams. Which actually surprised me when I read this headline. I was ready to have that be Andrew Yang. Turns out Andrew Yang isn't the city's mayoral lead candidate. I'm not, I don't know, I'm not in New York. But either way, seems like New York is getting a Bitcoin-focused mayor. So that's pretty cool. A few more things. John McAfee found dead in his prison cell after he was about to be extradited to the United States. For those that aren't familiar, John McAfee was extremely active in crypto in 2017. He's been much less active this time around. Some nefarious activity, I would say. Definitely some pump and dumps.

• 1:11:02David Hoffman?

  And there's been conversations that he's been on the run, trying to escape the IRS for not paying taxes. And so he kinda had this like very questionable last three years of his life. And unfortunately, he was found dead in a prison cell in Catalan. Anthony, what are your takes here?

• 1:11:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would say it's a lot longer than three years that he's been a controversial, kinda colorful figure. He's, he's been very eccentric. But yeah, I mean, essentially like the amount of conspiracy theories that we're going to be hearing about, about his death here are gonna go on for a very long time. Because he put out tweets saying, you know, "If I die in prison, and I didn't get, I got Epstein'd," essentially, right? Like, "I didn't kill myself, it was someone else."

• 1:11:44David Hoffman?

  He front-ran this event in his tweets.

• 1:11:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. So, and people are gonna be like, "Okay, well, did he kill himself, or did he get killed?" I don't know. I just feel like people are gonna, you know, tell those stories for years to come. But, I mean, a sad life to, sorry, sad, sad end to a bit of a sad life, I think. I mean, he projected as if he was like very happy and things like that. But it did seem like he had some mental problems, you know, generally. So, yeah, I guess like always sad, but, you know, I guess that we probably, we won't be hearing from him anymore in the crypto ecosystem.

• 1:12:14David Hoffman?

  Yeah, uh, I, I, I had, he, to me, he's a mixed bag. He's had some really good takes and really interesting like content and like one-liners that have come out. It's like, oh, wow, that's really profound. And then he is like provably a part of like a paid pump and dump scheme at the same time.

• 1:12:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:28David Hoffman?

  Very controversial figure.

• 1:12:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, definitely.

• 1:12:31David Hoffman?

  All right, Anthony, I'm gonna burn through some of these so we can save some time here. But Goldman Sachs begins trading on JP Morgan's repo blockchain network. And if I'm not mistaken, JP Morgan's blockchain network is a fork of Ethereum called Quorum. It is a private version of Ethereum. So not doing some overnight repo trading, um, and so not one step away from actually using something that looks and feels exactly like Ethereum. The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston announces collaboration with MIT to research digital currencies. Ryan and I, we stopped reporting on the Western world's development into the world of digital currencies because it's just a conversations about people having conversations about digital currencies. Like, oh, yeah, we're, we're researching into it. We're looking into it.

• 1:13:16David Hoffman?

  Once again, China is moving full steam ahead with its digital yuan, actually putting that into production, and the West is continuing to research. Nice job, guys, I guess. JP Morgan survey says 49 of institutional investors agree cryptocurrency is rat poison, as Warren Buffett said is a fad. But the important thing is, is actually more people said that crypto is here to stay than what is probably rat poison squared. And so there is a flipping of sorts of people bestowing legitimacy onto this industry. So that is pretty cool. South African brothers disappear along with $3.6 billion in Bitcoin from an exit scam on an exchange. Exchanges are a honeypot of assets. This is why we defy.

• 1:14:01David Hoffman?

  If it's not your, if it's not your private keys, it's not your coins. And this has always been, in my mind, one of the biggest weaknesses of Bitcoin is because if you want to buy or sell it, you gotta give it to an exchange and gives up custody of your Bitcoin. And that ultimately becomes a honeypot of, of, of interested exploits and attackers. And so this is why we defy. MLB is a new FTX partner, FTX exchange. They also bought the rights to put their name on the Miami Heat basketball arena in, in Miami. And now they are the official cryptocurrency exchange partner of the MLB. Anthony, I know you don't know what the MLB is. It's Major League Baseball.

• 1:14:42Speaker 01

  I know what the MLB is.

• 1:14:46Speaker 01

  You know, this feels very dot com era to me where like all these companies flush with cash are just doing these random sponsorships, but I guess, yeah, it is what it is.

• 1:14:55David Hoffman?

  Yeah, well, Sam Bankman-Fried is going to put the FTX name on every single arena that he can, it sounds like. All right, guys, we've got some really interesting takes coming at you right after we talk for a moment about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible. 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, Balancer lets you collect fees from traders who use your portfolio for liquidity.

• 1:15:38David Hoffman?

  Additionally, Balancer 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. At Bankless, we used a liquidity bootstrapping pool to sell our BAP t-shirts to much success. Balancer 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, Balancer is reimbursing all gas costs with BAV rewards, meaning that all your gas costs are returned to your wallet with the Balancer Governance Token. Balancer's mission is to become the primary source of liquidity in DeFi by providing the most flexible and powerful platform for asset management in decentralized exchange.

• 1:16:23David Hoffman?

  Dive into the Balancer pools at pools-balancer exchange. 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, 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.

• 1:17:08David Hoffman?

  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 the same time. You can open up a free account in under three minutes at Gemini.com/goBanklist. And if you trade more than $100 within the first 30 days after signup, you'll be gifted a free $15 Bitcoin bonus. Check them out at Gemini.com/goBanklist. Alright guys, and we are back with the first take. And this comes out of Haseeb Qureshi, who says a snapshot of DeFi hacks since 2020

• 1:17:51David Hoffman?

  notices the transition from Ethereum to Binance Smart Chain. So I'm going to blow that up here, but you can see all of these yellow highlighted projects are Ethereum, and this is a chronological list of hacks. And all of a sudden, it goes from Ethereum to basically only Binance Smart Chain. And so that's just interesting. All the hacks and exploits are happening on Binance Smart Chain. It kind of just makes you feel that like Binance is kind of just living in Ethereum's wake, right? Like Ethereum had its DeFi summer, and then Binance had its DeFi winter. And now all of the hacks on Ethereum kind of got solved, and now Binance is still dealing with them. Anthony, any opinions here?

• 1:18:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think it's just like a culture of people actually, you know, on Ethereum, building apps on Ethereum, you know, they're taking more care with it. But also the fact that when you, so maybe I should say that like it's got to do with the lower fees, I think. Like when you have like such low fees to deploy anything for users to kind of like play in, then you're going to get more scams. I think this is actually going to happen on Layer 2, if I'm being honest, where these generalized Layer 2s are going to have so much space available for people. We're going to get so many users on there, and there's going to be a lot of rug pulls and scams, I think. So, and it's going to be interesting to see how the Layer 2s deal with that, because a lot of the Layer 2s, like Arbitrum and Optimism, they're going to be centralized from the start, because they're going to have like upgrade keys and admin keys. Are they going to interfere with this? Like, are they going to actually kind of like return funds to users?

• 1:19:13Speaker 01

  Or like kick people off the? Off the layer two, I think if they did that, I'd be very disappointed, to be honest, because that goes against like the spirit of what these systems are. But it's going to be interesting. It's very interesting to see like where these rug pulls, I guess, migrate to over time.

• 1:19:28David Hoffman?

  Yeah, totally, absolutely. Maybe we start to see new colors in there for the different Ethereum version two, layer two, excuse me. This is a take from Greg DiPristio, who used to work at the Maker Foundation. And this was a conversation that we had about how DAOs are going to operate. And he says, in my more complex opinion, after having some conversations with me on Twitter, is that DAOs scale in a bell curve where the X axis is the inverse of efficiency. So as you go higher up, you actually get less efficient. And he says that DAOs are great with only a few members, and they are horrible at the size of a standard organization, and also a new paradigm in big numbers.

• 1:20:11David Hoffman?

  And he also says the caveat is that it's exponentially difficult to get over the hump. So what Greg is saying is that DAOs or online organizations are really, really good with maybe just a handful of people, maybe five to 15 to 20 people. And as soon as you get to maybe 50, 100, 150 people, efficiency actually gets really, really terrible. But then maybe when you get into maybe the 500s or thousands or tens of thousands, maybe we actually get some of that efficiency back, just because there's so many little worker bees. Anthony, do you have any opinions on this take?

• 1:20:41Speaker 01

  I mean, I completely agree with that, but I would also say that this can still apply to like traditional companies. Because if anyone's ever worked in a big corporate company, you'll know that the efficiency is like very, very low in those companies as compared to a startup. I think that's just the nature of just scaling people and scaling like the social kind of layer in general. It's just very hard, once you get past a certain point, to keep everything cohesive and to keep everyone kind of like informed and managed correctly. But I think, yeah, DAOs definitely, you could call it like a lean DAO. A DAO with like 20 or less members, like core members, that are all kind of like stewarding the protocol along, and they like take inputs in. It's kind of like the core developers of Ethereum, right? Where they take inputs in from the community, they consider things, they kind of like use

• 1:21:25Speaker 01

  that kind of social consensus and things like that. So yeah, I mean, I totally agree here that DAOs with 100, 150 members as being like core members is not going to scale very well.

• 1:21:36David Hoffman?

  And in that same vein, the next take we got is coming out of Mark Balin, who says, "From an end user perspective, it isn't how do I launch a DAO? It's how do I make money with my friends online as easily as possible? And DAOs are just the best solution." I thought this was a really succinct and powerful statement. Anthony, any thoughts here?

• 1:21:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think Mark puts it really well here. That's definitely the feeling that I've been getting is like, you know, like you can basically get together with anyone around the world, whether it be your friends or anyone else, launch a DAO and launch products within that DAO and make money some way and, and kind of like sustain yourself, which I think is really, really cool.

• 1:22:11David Hoffman?

  Do you think that we need a rebrand for DAOs from DAOs to do's? I always thought that perhaps we should just call these things digital organizations, because a decentralized autonomous organization really meant something completely differently. And in my opinion, it's actually just straight up the wrong label.

• 1:22:27Speaker 01

  It's, I mean, good luck, good luck changing. This is like the layer two debate, right? Is this a layer two? Is it not a layer two? People are going to use the language that is easiest to use, the path of least resistance. So even if DAO is technically incorrect, people are going to use that. So I, I, I don't think it's worth trying to fight that.

• 1:22:45David Hoffman?

  Fair enough. I remember trying to make op fi or open finance a thing. Yeah, that took.

• 1:22:51Speaker 01

  We tried to do that in the early days of DeFi as well. We didn't succeed, so.

• 1:22:56David Hoffman?

  And that if we couldn't do it then, like it's already, it's probably already too late for DAOs. But yeah, we, you, me, Eric Connor, we tried to meme op fi or open finance into existence. And we just got absolute, absolutely obliterated. Just took a big fat L on that one. Another take that we had that I thought was pretty interesting was from Greg Eisenberg. And he says, "Where the world is going? I'd rather trust a blockchain over a government. I'd rather trust a smart contract over a terms of service. I'd rather trust a community over a company. Who we trust is changing fast." I thought this was really profound. Any thoughts here?

• 1:23:29Speaker 01

  I think so too, and I think the funny thing is, is that we don't actually have to trust these things. They're trustless and we trust them because they're trustless, if that makes sense. Where we trust a smart contract over a terms of service because we can see a smart contract is programmed and is immutable on Ethereum, like if it's coded that way to be immutable. Like I can trust that Uniswap V2 is going to run as programmed because I know that those contracts are immutable. And you know, I don't trust the community over a company. Well, yeah, I mean, the community has different kind of like allegiances and incentives.

• 1:23:59David Hoffman?

  Those are your friends too.

• 1:24:00Speaker 01

  Someone, yeah, exactly, exactly. As, yeah, I know, as opposed to someone working in a company. So, yeah, I think the fact that we can trust these things because they are trustless is like a new paradigm. Maybe I shouldn't use that term so loudly.

• 1:24:11David Hoffman?

  No, no.

• 1:24:11Speaker 01

  Sorry, market, don't, don't, don't listen to me.

• 1:24:13David Hoffman?

  No, I specifically try and use the phrase new paradigm as frequently as possible. Specifically to get over that hump. It's like, no, I want to use that word. I want to say paradigm.

• 1:24:25David Hoffman?

  Here's something that I thought was pretty cool. Anthony, right before I, we started recording this, I went to Twitter and realized that you can actually search emojis in Twitter and specifically with people. And so here are all the people, let me zoom out a little bit. Here are all of the people that have the bat and then the speaker emojis in their names on Twitter. The list just goes and goes and goes. And I think it's over like 300 or 400 Twitter accounts that have, Zoom isn't really capturing my scrolling, but I am scrolling through these people here. And it, I, it could be, it's literally a countless number. And so there's a lot of people with Twitter accounts that have the bat emoji and the speaker symbol in their name.

• 1:25:10David Hoffman?

  Of course, what does that mean? Ultrasound money. It's kind of Ethereum's first big like Twitter like banner. We've never really had a Twitter banner before, but it seems to be the bat and then speaker emojis. Anthony, I'm pretty sure you have the bat and speaker emoji on your Twitter account, right?

• 1:25:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, it's it's a movement, right? Like, it's the ultrasound money movement, and people are just signaling their kind of like, I guess, allegiance or bullishness to the movement. So I it's really cool that you can do this. I hadn't I mean, I see people with the with the emojis in their name and everything, but I didn't know it was this many people. And this is hilarious to me, because this is exactly why there are some contrarians out there right now who are saying that, oh, the only reason people care about 1559 is because of the fee burning. And I was wondering, you know, where are they getting this narrative from? And it's I think it's because of this ultrasound money meme, which I think I mean, I think these people are wrong, the contrarians are wrong. But I just didn't realize like how far this meme had gone. It's it's it's everywhere, which is really, really cool.

• 1:26:05David Hoffman?

  I I wish Zoom was capturing how much I'm scrolling right now a lot better. So go to my tweet. It's linked in the show notes. Go to my tweet and do it for yourself. Scroll down. I haven't stopped. I'm still going. I'm still going. Like, it's it it's endless. It's an endless pit of people that have just the ultrasound money logos in their names on Twitter. And so if you have a Twitter account and you haven't added ultrasound money to your Twitter name, like, hmm, get with it, guys. Like, that's what we do now.

• 1:26:31Speaker 01

  You should do you should do you should do a search for how many Bitcoiners have the lightning emoji in their name still.

• 1:26:36David Hoffman?

  Oh, God, no, I don't want to do that.

• 1:26:38Speaker 01

  Because that used to be a big thing where a lot of them had it, but then they removed it when lightning adoption kind of like didn't go anywhere.

• 1:26:45David Hoffman?

  All right, guys, we got the meme of the week coming up next. But before we get there, of course, we got to talk about what we are excited about. Anthony, what are you excited about?

• 1:26:54Speaker 01

  So this might be a little bit kind of, I don't know if it's off topic, but like a little bit different, where I'm actually really excited about different narratives within the crypto ecosystem being challenged. And now what I mean by this is that, let's take an example narrative out of the Bitcoiner camp that said that they always said, you know, China would never mess with Bitcoin, because that would mean that they're giving more political power or more power to the US in the Bitcoin kind of arena, so to speak. But I think that narrative is being challenged right now, because, as you said, they're not banning Bitcoin, but they are really getting rid of most of the Bitcoin activity in their country by by getting rid of miners. So that narrative is being challenged in a really big way. I believe there are other narratives out there that are getting challenged and then I have been getting challenged over time like people saying oh ETH can never accrue value or DeFi is going to outperform ETH.

• 1:27:39Speaker 01

  Well, no, we've seen that ETH is accruing a lot of value. DeFi is not outperforming ETH. And you know, on top of that, we have so many other just narratives over time that are have are being challenged at this point in time. And I think, you know, the people saying, oh, the flipping can never happen. Well, you know, I I think it can like, yes, the ETH BTC ratio has come down a lot, but I think it it's still higher than what it was, like a lot higher than what it was at the at the lows. And I I believe it's still going to go higher. And and I think that there's narratives around, oh, you know, Ethereum is never going to ship the ship the merge, which I think is is gonna is gonna go away. So, you know, just generally this thing of like people coming up with stories and narratives and perpetuating them and then just always being wrong.

• 1:28:19Speaker 01

  And these narratives being challenged, and the more they get challenged and the more that these people are wrong, the more skeptical people are of the new narratives that these same people come up with. So I'm just excited to see the shifts there because I think narratives rule this space. And I think Ethereum has been the uh has has taken the brunt of the really crappy narratives over the years and it's really kind of like suffered from that. But I think going forward, Ethereum has very strong narratives to play off of. And I think it's going to get like, uh, it's going to be even better and and be viewed better by the community because of that.

• 1:28:48David Hoffman?

  Yeah, totally. Um, the image that comes to mind is of the youth and age of roller coaster, which we talk about for um for tokens, that fork tokens, that fork and fork fork more tokens and fork more tokens. But I think what's going on with with what you're saying is that like, well, if you're on the wrong side of the narrative, like each new FUD narrative or or narrative against something that continues to be right. Each new narrative becomes less and less more powerful over time. Uh, and and so at some point, these narratives just straight up expire. Uh, and I totally think you're right. I I do think that the death of anti Ethereum narratives comes at the merge, uh, which that will be one of the of all the great benefits that the merge will bring.

• 1:29:29David Hoffman?

  That will be one of them for sure is like just putting to death that like Ethereum 2.0 is never going to ship.

• 1:29:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, definitely a big one there. But yeah, I mean, what are you excited about, David?

• 1:29:39David Hoffman?

  Well, OK, so one of the things I was excited about was that bat speaker emoji. So I accidentally put that out of the wrong order. And so we actually already talked about that was what I was so excited about is like, there's an apparently an infinity number of people with the bat emoji in their in their Twitter handle. But I'm also excited about Top Signal. And I know you're excited about it because you're going to be on the first show. And so I'm ready to try and take my hand and make some new content that isn't all the content that bankless listeners are used to listen to and try and delve into something new. And so, like I said earlier, Tuesday evening is going to be the first show for Top Signal. And so I'm I hope I hope we're funny. I hope we're funny.

• 1:30:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's the thing like humor is like pretty subjective, right? And you know, I guess, like, doing it for the first time as well, it might be a little bit, a little bit funny. But I think I think it's going to be good. I'm excited for it as well.

• 1:30:28David Hoffman?

  Absolutely. I hope it's good. Anthony, are you ready to see the meme of the week?

• 1:30:34Speaker 01

  Let's get let's get into it.

• 1:30:36David Hoffman?

  All right, this meme came from Jim Bianco, who we actually just had on the bankless podcast on Monday. It was a fantastic podcast. I guess this isn't really a meme. It's just a comic, but whatever. And so we have a what is looking like a corporate looking individual talking to his corporate other little board members. And he says, instead of risking anything new, let's play it safe by continuing our slow decline into obsolescence. Anthony, what do you think about this joke?

• 1:31:01Speaker 01

  I saw it. And he was referencing kind of no coiners here. So people who are like, I guess, anti crypto. And I think that this is really funny, because this, I believe this this comic probably talks about technology and how a lot of different companies fail to embrace new technology and get disrupted. And, you know, they 10 years down the line, they're like, what happened? Like, why is our company worth nothing now? It's like, well, because you failed to embrace new technology. And I think the same thing plays out with crypto, definitely.

• 1:31:25David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I'm reminded of the Red Queen metaphor from Alice in Wonderland, where in order to stay in the same place, you have to be running forwards. And so if you are not changing, you are actually falling behind. Anthony, can't thank you enough for coming in and stepping in Ryan's very big shoes with the bankless weekly rollout. But you are a fantastic substitute teacher, and I'm sure the bankless nation appreciated you to come in. Tell us a little bit more about all about the daily GUE and what you do over there and where they can find more about all of the content that you produce.

• 1:31:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, so thanks again for having me. Really enjoyed it today. I always enjoy doing these with you. But yeah, I mean, what I do is essentially a bunch of different education as well, similar to what you guys do at Bankless. I have a YouTube channel called The Daily Guey, where I give like daily recaps of Ethereum every weekday. And I have a newsletter as well, but you can find links to all of that at my Twitter. So sasal0x on Twitter, S A S S A L zero X. I'm sure David will link that in the show notes or whatever for you guys. But yeah, I do all of this pretty much every day. So yeah, if you're very interested in giving up with Ethereum and want to be at the bleeding edge, all you have to do is follow The Daily Guey.

• 1:32:32David Hoffman?

  Yeah, Anthony does this at The Daily Guey. He also does this with the ETHub Weekly Recap. And then, and then sometimes I need him to come and step in for the Bankless Weekly Rollup. So I just ask him to do the same thing for the third time in the day, and he's absolutely fantastic at it. We will link The Daily Guey YouTube and newsletter in the show notes, so make sure you go subscribe there. All right, guys, just coming up after this, we have a fantastic moment of zen. It's a really nice song. I hope you guys enjoy it. But before that, ETH is risky, crypto is risky, DeFi is risky. You could lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we are glad you are with us on the Bankless journey. Thanks a lot.

• 1:33:13Speaker 01

  Thanks, Ryan.

• 1:33:14David Hoffman?

  Nice.

• 1:33:18Speaker 02

  Stay on E Stay on E Stay E though Stay on E I'll be gone to the north

• 1:33:40Speaker 02

  So you need it to stay There's lots of it But I'll be staking every day Slowly merge the chains is okay Say it after me It's better to be safe than sorry Stay on E Stay on E Stay E though Stay on E I'll be gone to the north

• 1:34:20David 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, Ask Me Anythings, and weekly rollups where we summarize the week in crypto and other

• 1:35:05David Hoffman?

  fantastic content. Thanks everyone for watching and being on the journey as we build out the Bankless Nation.