ROLLUP: Coinbase Crashes DC | Gary Grilled By Congress | Vitalik Deepfakes

WRU Last Week of September ----- Check your wallet with our brand new tool: Claimables 🎁 https://bankless.cc/GetClaimables ------ 📣 LayerZero | Accelerating Web3 Interoperability via GoogleCloud https://bankless.cc/layer-zero ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE ⁠https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2 https://%E2%81%A0https//k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2 ⁠ 🦊METAMASK PORTFOLIO | MANAGE YOUR WEB3 EVERYTHING ⁠https://bankless.cc/MetaMask https://%E2%81%A0https//bankless.cc/MetaMask ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM ⁠https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum ⁠ 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle ⁠ 🦄UNISWAP | ON-CHAIN MARKETPLACE ⁠https://bankless.cc/uniswap 🔗 CELO | CEL2 COMING SOON https://bankless.cc/Celo ----- TIMESTAMPS & RESOURCES 0:00 Intro 2:49 MARKETS https://twitter.com/kobeissiletter/status/1707104500341731367?s=46 8:05 JP Morgan Dissapointed With Ethereum https://www.theblock.co/post/252470/jpmorgan-ethereum-shanghai-disappointing https://twitter.com/pythianism/status/1706373977944289470?s=46&t=2ZINVXJQKx6xO_6Wiiu_2g https://twitter.com/pythianism/status/1706373977944289470?s=46&t=2ZINVXJQKx6xO_6Wiiu_2g 13:54 SEC Decision Delayed https://twitter.com/JSeyff/status/1706771264596050073 https://twitter.com/EricBalchunas/status/1706765369342382197 19:49 ETF Futures Next Week? https://x.com/EricBalchunas/status/1707394842827882826?s=20 17:25 Gary Grilled By Congress https://www.sec.gov/news/testimony/gensler-testimony-committee-financial-services-092723 https://x.com/BanklessHQ/status/1707042914520473953?s=20 https://x.com/BanklessHQ/status/1707060955257987256?s=20 https://x.com/BanklessHQ/status/1707072356802232697?s=20 https://twitter.com/BanklessHQ/status/1707040759059206493/photo/1 27:54 Gary's Identical Twin 29:08 Coinbase In Washington DC https://x.com/coinbase/status/1707184983599677793?s=20 https://x.com/YahooFinance/status/1707121790223258075?s=20 https://twitter.com/blockchaintpsht/status/1707162437512839345 https://twitter.com/haydenzadams/status/1707225322595262929?s=46&t=X0oQ26a3ezptVAZLp1QFaw https://twitter.com/haydenzadams/status/1707225322595262929?s=46&t=X0oQ26a3ezptVAZLp1QFaw 32:32 Kevin Owocki's Highlights https://twitter.com/owocki/status/1707217559932543085 35:05 Pudgy Penguins in WalMart https://x.com/Walmart/status/1706784567276040547?s=20 https://x.com/0xLoMel/status/1706708088684683474?s=20 https://twitter.com/LucaNetz/status/1706774209014235313?s=20 40:21 Vitalik DeepFake https://x.com/TrustlessState/status/1706388861545316512?s=20 https://youtu.be/RsIBqExwsT8?si=RmoRx2p7z5TEWvba 43:26 Buenos Aires ID's Coming to Ethereum https://blockworks.co/news/buenos-aires-government-id-ethereum-zksync 44:41 Equities on Kraken? https://twitter.com/deitaone/status/1707082785146495190?s=46&t=LKBC7Qtm18FnZ380xCF2pA https://twitter.com/deitaone/status/1707082785146495190?s=46&t=LKBC7Qtm18FnZ380xCF2pA 46:41 FriendTech Clones https://twitter.com/DefiIgnas/status/1706322149139447985 49:25 Base Introduces Pessimism https://twitter.com/BuildOnBase/status/1704217177904271827 51:13 Fred Wilson got phished https://avc.mirror.xyz/VUu7-BOTlH2J-qF9SctXr17CLBFx9Xu5xr6sACXehr8 53:46 MicroStrategy Bought More BTC https://www.microstrategy.com/content/dam/website-assets/collateral/financial-documents/financial-document-archive/form-8-k_9-25-2023.pdf 54:56 Chase Bank is banning crypto payments in the UK https://twitter.com/brian_armstrong/status/1706787540215460155 56:13 OFAC Adding More Sanctioned Wallets https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy1763 58:49 Rainbow Wallet Comes To The Web https://twitter.com/rainbowdotme/status/1704900402427166858?s=20 59:19 Raises Of The Week https://twitter.com/banklessvc/status/1706735211080270109?s=46 1:04:27 Questions From The Nation https://discord.com/channels/615592155481767941/1058053004705669211/1156588932826402866 1:08:01 Takes Of The Week 1:21:36 What Are We Bullish On? https://twitter.com/trustlessstate/status/1706440750911651847?s=46 1:29:14 Meme of The Week https://x.com/BanklessHQ/status/1707152459372564822?s=20 1:23:50 Moment Of Zen https://x.com/vaneck_us/status/1707204049487958255?s=20 ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures

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

• 0:00David Hoffman?

  Ms. Wagner is like, yo, MIT version of Gary was pro blockchain, but SEC Gary is anti blockchain. And then Richie Torres is like, yo, is the Pokemon card a security? These people are listening to crypto Twitter. They are like, these are our things. They, the power of crypto Twitter is like getting into Congress.

• 0:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, it's because it's distilled logic. I mean,

• 0:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bankless Nation, it is the last Friday of September. David, what time is it?

• 0:28David Hoffman?

  It's the Bankless Friday Weekly Rollup, Ryan, where we cover the entire weekly news in crypto, which is always an ambitious endeavor, yet we persevere nonetheless into the frontier. This week with a bunch of clips of Gary getting grilled. So everyone, everyone prepare for that one. If you're not listening to this with coffee, because it's too late in the day, well, then you should get your popcorn. That is what you will need.

• 0:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, this is catharsis, I think, for many of you in this episode. You'll enjoy this very much. Also, crypto was present in Washington this week.

• 0:57David Hoffman?

  It's a one-two punch.

• 0:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, Coinbase's Stand With Crypto Day was held at Capitol Hill the same day that Gensler was giving testimony in front of Congress.

• 1:05David Hoffman?

  Convenient.

• 1:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  What about the timing of that? David, what else we got?

• 1:08David Hoffman?

  After that, we'll talk about pudgy penguins in Walmart landing a huge deal. A ton of distribution for pudgy penguins. Also, with each toy purchased, having an on-chain identity on ZKSync. So we'll talk about that. And then after, also, not only are penguins getting identity, but citizens of Buenos Aires, perhaps also getting some on-chain presence as well. We'll talk about that. And then, of course, we're going to do the PSA of deep fakes and phishing attacks that are out there. We got a Vitalik deep fake that we want to show you. It's pretty hilarious, but not if you believe it. Notable, notable VC Fred Wilson got phished for 40 NFTs this week. So if Fred Wilson can get phished, so can you. We will talk about this and more. What else we got, Ryan?

• 1:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  You know, the usual Bitcoin ETF stuff. ETH might be getting futures. There's a ton to talk about every week. This is a bullish week, I think. I'm declaring it such, David.

• 1:59David Hoffman?

  It is a bullish week.

• 2:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  We got some green candles when we get to the markets, but before we get in. David, we got a message from our friends and sponsors over at Layer Zero. What do they want the folks at home to know?

• 2:08David Hoffman?

  They want you to know that after a year, over a year of combined effort, Layer Zero and Google Cloud have announced their partnership, and they are ready to build the interoperable cross-chain apps of the future. What is Layer Zero? Of course, Layer Zero is a set of smart contracts that are deployed on every single chain. These smart contracts connect to each other. How do they connect to each other? Well, they need some oracle service in the center to be the chatterboxes, the passing messages between all of the Layer Zero smart contracts across all of the 50 different chains. Google Cloud is that new default oracle. That is the partnership that they have created. So there is a link in the show notes for you to go explore more. If you're a builder who wants to build on Layer Zero, layerzero.network is also the URL.

• 2:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, you know what I want to learn more about this week, David, is markets.

• 2:53David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 2:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  Tell me about the old markets. I think, I think, I haven't looked at this yet, but I think we got some green on the week.

• 3:01David Hoffman?

  We got some green, dude.

• 3:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  Let's look at the Bitcoin charts first. What's Bitcoin showing us?

• 3:04David Hoffman?

  Some single-digit green. Look at that green right on the right. Yeah, that's your dose of dopamine for this week. It's like, whoo, Bitcoin up 2%. Wapping 2%. Started the week at 26,600, ending the week at, well, Thursday morning, if you call it the end of the week. It's not the end of the week. 27,150, up 2%. Ether price up a little bit more, starting the week at 1660, up 4.5% to the current price. Excuse me, starting the week at 1560, ending the week right around 1660, where we are right now, 1660. I mean, it's still low. That is a low price. We are getting excited about very little right now.

• 3:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it's up such a small degree, you shouldn't even be excited about this.

• 3:45David Hoffman?

  4.5%.

• 3:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yet we are, 4.5% on the week. I'll tell you, it's better than flat.

• 3:50David Hoffman?

  When's the last time we had a double-digit week, man?

• 3:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  Double-digit up or down?

• 3:54David Hoffman?

  Up.

• 3:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  I can't remember either, actually. We've been in the flatlands for so long. It's just like, kind of a little bit of a bleed out, all the way from 1900. Weren't we over 2000 a few weeks ago?

• 4:05David Hoffman?

  Yeah, we have touched, we have touched over 2000 in this bear market.

• 4:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Zooming out on the cracking charts.

• 4:09David Hoffman?

  It doesn't feel like it, yeah.

• 4:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  Last time we were at 2K was July, in July, briefly.

• 4:16David Hoffman?

  I can't even remember July. Um, well, I was, I was in the mountains. It's been downhill ever since I've been in, I caught back for the mountains.

• 4:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it really was. It's been all downhill since you guys. So you got, the, the only thing you could do, David, is go, go to the mountains. Bad things happen to Gary Gensler when you go to the mountains. Although I guess nothing bad happened to him this week. Anyway, I, I'm skipping too far ahead. We'll, we'll have our Gary later in the episode.

• 4:36David Hoffman?

  ETH Bitcoin up 2%, total crypto market cap, 1.11 trillion dollars. Uh, layer two scaling factor touched 6% uh, this week down to 5.5%. Still at all time highs. Layer zero, or excuse me.

• 4:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  What, what's touch 6%?

• 4:51David Hoffman?

  Excuse me, not 6%.

• 4:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Total value lock?

• 4:52David Hoffman?

  6X, 6X is what I mean.

• 4:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  Uh, activity.

• 4:55David Hoffman?

  Yes, layer two activity, uh, touched 6X of Ethereum's. Uh, and so, uh, but now it's at 5.69. Nice.

• 5:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  60 transactions per second, 64 transactions per second. Um, yeah, that's where we get the 6X. So, you know, we got, we got more transactions per second left in this tank, I think.

• 5:12David Hoffman?

  Oh, yeah.

• 5:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  David, you, you want to talk about the general markets, like all the tradFi markets? You want to talk about macro really quick? Cause it's been super confusing to me.

• 5:20David Hoffman?

  It's been super confusing. We're also doing a macro show on Tuesday as well. So a macro show, uh, so talking about the state of macro from a crypto person. So it's a crypto person who understands macro. So I'm really excited for that show.

• 5:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay. Are you a crypto person that understands macro, David? Do you understand macro?

• 5:36David Hoffman?

  When I have a smarter macro person with me, then yes, I understand macro.

• 5:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  My question to you is, does anybody really understand macro? Particularly right now, and this gets to the heart.

• 5:46David Hoffman?

  Current snapshot, definitely not.

• 5:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right. So here's the tweet. Current situation. One, stocks are falling like a recession is coming.

• 5:52David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 5:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Two, oil prices are rising like there's no recession in, in sight. Hmm, that's contradictory. Three, interest rates are rising like we have 10% inflation. Yes, they are. Four, gold is falling like inflation is gone. Five, housing prices are rising like rates are falling. And six, commercial real estate is falling like it's 2008. Nothing adds up here.

• 6:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's the way I feel about macro right now. It's very confusing. There is a confusing set of signals going on and it's not adding up in my head. What do you think about this?

• 6:24David Hoffman?

  Yeah, they follow through and they say it's the beginning. It's beginning to feel like a pivot point in sentiment. I don't know if I'm about to say what I think they are meaning by this, but when there's a bunch of confusion, people, I think, brace for something, brace for clarity. And then whatever that clarity is will define sentiment. Like, where are we going? We don't know. As soon as we find out, we'll know how we feel about it. But we know it's going to be different from here.

• 6:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  Different good or different bad? Those are the only two directions.

• 6:51David Hoffman?

  Right, yeah, I guess that's the, yeah, reductive state take about it.

• 6:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, so, but it's basically like, we don't really know.

• 6:57David Hoffman?

  We don't know.

• 6:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, that's why I'm very interested in doing this episode, this macro episode next week to see what, you know, the newest macro person kind of knows. I will say one thing, though. I think volatility is back on the menu. I think that's what this means. Because when the market doesn't know what direction it's going to go in, then it can kind of like lurch in one direction or the other. So weird macro climate right now. On the back of stimulus, on the back of money printing? Like, what's going on here?

• 7:25David Hoffman?

  And just to be clear about something, we've previously talked about stocks being at all time highs. That's been like kind of the theme of the last two months, or I would say, yeah.

• 7:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 7:36David Hoffman?

  Well, so from looking at the SPY, you don't have the chart up, but it has declined by 7% since July. So the SPY is down 7%, which is more, yeah.

• 7:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  That goes to the first bullet point. Stocks are falling like a recession is coming. I don't know, it's down 7% just doesn't feel like a lot to me.

• 7:54David Hoffman?

  Well, in the trad market, 7% is a lot historically, but not recently. 7% in the trad market is actually, that's just like, trad markets are also volatile.

• 8:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, well, we'll try to make sense of this, but let's get, let's get back to crypto. This is a negative report from JP Morgan, who said Ethereum's activity post Shanghai, that was the last hard fork back in March, has been disappointing. JP Morgan calling Ethereum's progress disappointing. They've got some reasons for this. While the shift from proof of work to proof of stake meant that the energy consumption from Ethereum collapsed by 99%, the Ethereum supply is shrinking and staking rose sharply by 50% since the Shanghai upgrade. While that happened, the increase in network activity has been rather disappointing. Ethereum's daily transactions, daily active addresses and total value locked on DeFi

• 8:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  protocols on the network have all experienced declines since the last hard fork. So JP Morgan, their analyst expressing some bearishness here.

• 8:56David Hoffman?

  Expressing disappointment.

• 8:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes. I'm not mad, just disappointed with activity.

• 9:02David Hoffman?

  My response to that is, who the hell are you? JP Morgan doesn't know how to analyze these things. Well, I don't know. Disappointed with Ethereum post Shanghai activity, bruh, it's just the broader crypto downturn. And also, they're just wrong. He, JP Morgan, he is wrong. They say layer twos have displayed mixed results? Well, no, TVL and economic activity on a layer twos across the board are all up. I don't know where the hell they're getting their data from, but not only is their data wrong, but their analysis is poor.

• 9:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, let's go to the actual numbers, Stephen. Layer two beat provides a good source for value locked on layer twos. What are we looking at?

• 9:39David Hoffman?

  At the 180 day timeframe, it's basically flat. It's marginally up. It's basically flat. So flat, flat TVL, 10 and a half billion dollars. Activity is up. It's up so much. It's unequivocally up by a lot. I'm disappointed in JP Morgan.

• 10:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wow. Have you ever been not disappointed with JP Morgan, David?

• 10:05David Hoffman?

  Generally disappointed by banking in general.

• 10:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Really? You should start a podcast called Bankless, David, about escaping your bank over time slowly. I think Vance Spencer put that tweet in perspective as well. Actually, I don't think he was responding to that tweet in particular.

• 10:23David Hoffman?

  But we are.

• 10:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  We got some perspective here from Vance Spencer. This is Ethereum, if you chart it against some of the fastest growing tech companies in human history, companies like Alphabet, it was Google, of course, and Meta, or Zoom, or Microsoft, and how quickly over time it took them to surpass 10 billion in revenue. Okay? How long did it take them? It took Ethereum seven years. And when charted against these other tech companies, there's only one that did that faster. And that is Google.

• 10:54David Hoffman?

  Google, yeah. Yeah. And Ethereum really did all of its $10 billion of revenue inside of like. 2020 to 2023.

• 11:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. I mean, so look at this line. It's just kind of like a slope line up. So I mean, doing pretty well, all things considered, JP Morgan.

• 11:12David Hoffman?

  Not disappointing. I'm not disappointed by this.

• 11:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  And I'm not disappointed. Also, long-term perspective, not disappointed in the price of ETH over the last seven years either.

• 11:22David Hoffman?

  Yep. And we can keep going. Uniswap this week hit 300 million in swaps. 300 million unique trades swaps has happened on Uniswap. Uniswap was invented in 2019. 300 million swaps since 2019. Is that disappointing? Is that disappointing? I'm not disappointed by that in the slightest.

• 11:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  I feel great about that.

• 11:44David Hoffman?

  I retain my disappointment about JP Morgan.

• 11:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  You know, I think it's part of a broader crypto sentiment and I've seen a lot of takes just in general in news, but even in financial analyst news, like JP Morgan Research, that sort of thing. It comes back down to this, David. Mainstream thinks that crypto is dead.

• 12:01David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 12:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  Again, like always, this always happens. And this is what makes this a buying opportunity, as with previous cycles. And when crypto 10x is the next cycle, don't let anybody tell you you didn't earn it.

• 12:18David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 12:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  Because if you're buying here, when everyone is saying crypto is dead, it's never coming back.

• 12:25David Hoffman?

  That they're disappointed in it.

• 12:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's how you earn.

• 12:30David Hoffman?

  It's so easy. The signals are just being laid at our feet right now.

• 12:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  They really are. Somebody, I tweeted something like that out and somebody responded with this life cycle. What are we looking at here?

• 12:41David Hoffman?

  Yeah, just like the cycle of the bull bear market. So in the top of the bull market, some crypto friend of you will tell you, a bankless listener, you're so lucky. I wish that I bought too. And then the crypto market will go down and be like, you're an idiot. I told you crypto was a scam. Yeah. So like, especially when they say the words like disappointing, it's like such an emotional word. It's like kind of just playing into the readership. I don't know if JP Morgan is about that game.

• 13:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I mean, that's where we're in the stage of the cycle where everyone thinks you're an idiot and they they told you it was a scam and you can't talk about crypto at your family events or parties because you're just the crypto moron who knows nothing and ha ha ha SPF FTX ah that's so stupid. You know scams, frauds, NFTs are such a joke.

• 13:27David Hoffman?

  Well, granted, some of those things are actually true.

• 13:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  Sure, sure. But if you're still in crypto and you know why you're here.

• 13:36David Hoffman?

  Right. You're no longer buying the scams because you can identify them.

• 13:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  And then and then you'll swing back to like, I am a genius. I am amazing. I am lucky. You know, or the third parties will say you're lucky when when that happens and you'll feel like genius. Anyway.

• 13:49David Hoffman?

  You've been chewing glass for three years. But, you know, you got lucky, though.

• 13:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  You got lucky. How about the Bitcoin ETF, David? Here's a tweet from James Saifert. What's this about?

• 14:01David Hoffman?

  He just says that the SEC has come out super early and delayed the Ark Invest and 21Shares Bitcoin ETF filing. There wasn't a decision due until November 11th and typically up until recently, the SEC has always gone up right up until the buzzer. But they decided to delay their decision on this earlier than usual.

• 14:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  You know why? Partially, it's some of the speculation. It's because the government's about to shut down. The US government's about to shut down.

• 14:29David Hoffman?

  That's on Monday, right? On Monday?

• 14:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. So apparently, if by Sunday night, this Sunday night, Congress doesn't reach some sort of compromise resolution, whatever, agreement to keep the government running, then it shuts down yet again. I mean, how many times have we been through this?

• 14:43David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 14:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  And so this, this is the SEC just getting ahead of that so that the stuff doesn't expire while the government shut down. And I guess, I don't know what would happen if the government shut down and, you know, these deadlines were missed. But maybe it would de facto be approved. I think that could be how it works.

• 15:00David Hoffman?

  Is this some sort of pseudo oracle about how the SEC thinks that if we do go for a shutdown, we'll get shut down all the way until at least November 11?

• 15:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  I have no idea. I have no idea what this could mean. I do know, this is good news. So Congress, both Democrats and Republican lawmakers, sent a letter to Gary Gensler pleading that he approve a spot Bitcoin ETF.

• 15:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay.

• 15:24David Hoffman?

  And I wouldn't even, I'm not even sure I would use the word pleading. The, the first line in this article in this letter says, "We write to ensure the SEC does not continue to discriminate against spot Bitcoin."

• 15:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, you're right. I shouldn't have said pleading. We're not begging him. We hired him. That's the thing. He's not our king, right? I always forget this. Like, we, he actually works for us and the people.

• 15:47David Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 15:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  He's part of the executive branch, but he works for the, the people.

• 15:51David Hoffman?

  That's us.

• 15:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  And Congress can rein him in. He operates under their legislation. And they, they said in this letter, "Following the Court of Appeals decision, there's no reason to continue to deny such applications under inconsistent and discriminatory standards." So that's Congress's take. And we're going to see a bit of the grilling that Gary takes in front of Congress in the next section. But one other thing this could mean, actually, David, is Ether Futures ETFs could be trading as early as Tuesday.

• 16:21David Hoffman?

  Hmm.

• 16:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is all part of this government shutdown.

• 16:23David Hoffman?

  Oh, we need to keep the government open until Tuesday.

• 16:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, the SEC is looking to speed things up in order to get it done before the looming shutdown. Okay, so they might actually approve it before. If they were going to approve it anyway, then they'll just approve it before the government shuts down. So that could happen. So there could be a world where we actually have Ether Futures trading on Tuesday. And we'll be talking about that next week if we do.

• 16:49David Hoffman?

  Fun fact, the crypto volume, crypto volumes are like heavily favored towards futures as soon as futures have ever come about. So the Ether Futures, that's a big unlock.

• 17:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. Well, you think it's a good thing or a bad thing? There's always that debate of whether, when you have kind of big liquidity unlocks, whether people just hit sell or people hit buy or what that, you know, what happens in the short run.

• 17:09David Hoffman?

  Right. Okay. So why, why do people think that? Well, we got, we got Bitcoin Futures ETF at the top of the market in 2017, and then we just proceeded to dump for 12 months. That was just a coincidence of the timing. Like, no.

• 17:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's just, I think it's just going to either do nothing or just amplify the trend that's already happening is what's going to happen.

• 17:27David Hoffman?

  More liquidity is bullish. And it's even more bullish when prices are low and liquidity is low. Like, when you add liquidity to a low liquid market, prices go up fundamentally. Yeah. All right. What's coming up next, David? Coming up next, Gary gets grilled in front of Congress again. We've clipped out some of the best moments, so we can just all have our schadenfreude. Meanwhile, crypto bites back. At the same time, Coinbase leads with their hashtag StandWithCryptoDay at Capitol Hill. So we got some pictures and coverage around that. Kevin Awaki gave some great takes. A lot of friends and family, we're all out there. Penguins are in Walmart, Pudgy Penguins lands a big deal with Walmart. We'll talk about the nuances and details behind that as well. All of this coming up more, but first a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors

• 18:10David Hoffman?

  that make this show possible, especially Kraken, a preferred crypto exchange in 2023. If you not have an account with Kraken, consider clicking the link in the show notes to get one today. Kraken Pro has easily become the best crypto trading platform in the industry. The place I use to check the charts and the crypto prices, even when I'm not looking to place a trade. On Kraken Pro, you'll have access to advanced charting tools, real-time market data, and lightning-fast trade execution, all inside their spiffy new modular interface. Kraken's new customizable modular layout lets you tailor your trading experience to suit your needs. Pick and choose your favorite modules and place them anywhere you want on your screen. With Kraken Pro, you have that power. Whether you are a seasoned pro or just starting out, join thousands of traders who trust Kraken Pro for their crypto trading needs. Visit pro.kraken.com to get started today.

• 18:53David Hoffman?

  Cello is the mobile-first, EVM-compatible, carbon-negative blockchain built for the real world. And now, something big is happening. Introducing the Cello Layer 2. It's a game-changing proposal that's going to bring Cello's rapidly-growing ecosystem home to Ethereum. Vitalik has shared his excitement for the Cello Layer 2 on the Cello Forum, so has Ben Jones from Optimism. But why? The Cello Layer 2 will bring huge advantages, like a decentralized sequencer, off-chain data availability, and one-block finality. What does all that mean? Rock-solid security, a trustless bridge to Ethereum, and more real-world use cases for Ethereum without compromise. And real-world adoption is happening. Active addresses on Cello have grown over 500% in the last six months. With the Cello Layer 2, gas fees will stay low, and you can even pay for gas using ERC20 tokens.

• 19:37David Hoffman?

  But Cello is a community-governed protocol. This means that Cello needs you to weigh in and make your voice heard. Join the conversation in the Cello Forum. Follow @celloorg on Twitter and visit cello.org to shape the future of Ethereum.

• 19:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  Gary Gensler, under pressure this week in front of Congress, he was grilled, I would say. We got some clips coming up, but he testified before the House Financial Services Committee. And Republicans, I would say, are increasingly apoplectic about the more than 40 rules Gensler has been proposing lately, especially now that the market is adopting them. And he's been blamed for kneecapping US capital markets. And some of the discussion was actually about crypto as well. And some guests made some appearances, particularly some pro crypto legislators, asking some questions of Mr. Gensler. David, you actually did this for us. You livestreamed this whole entire event and you helped curate the clips that we're about to watch.

• 20:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  What were your takes as you were like watching this, this event unfold? Like, is it just like watching C-SPAN? Is it boring?

• 20:42David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so there, so everyone in the Senate Finance, the House Finance Committee gets to have their like five minutes where they just talk and they ask Gary questions. And so there's a wide variety of subjects. There was actually, before we get into the crypto stuff, there was a lot of focus on climate change and capital markets around climate change. And it just seems so contrived. I was like really frustrated because like all the people that were bringing up like climate change, like they couldn't connect it to the SEC. And anyway, I'm like, why this? And so-

• 21:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  They just wanted to talk about climate change.

• 21:14David Hoffman?

  Kind of, yeah, a little bit. It was a little bit forced.

• 21:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  Fit that in?

• 21:17David Hoffman?

  At least it was, it felt forced to me. So it starts off with Pat McHenry, who always starts these things off. And this is the second time we've done this, so I've seen this kind of rodeo for the second time now. So Patrick McHenry starts it off, grills Gary Gensler because he's a pro crypto person. So it always starts off with a bang. And then the baton is immediately passed to Maxine Waters, who dumb-

• 21:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  Last scene, blowing kisses to SBF.

• 21:44David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so, so she's just like dousing water, like her last name on the, on the whole thing because she, because Patrick McHenry starts off saying, "I'm fed up and tired" with, with Gary Gensler shenanigans. And then Maxine Waters goes, "Well, I'm fed up and tired with the opposite side of the aisle." And just immediately turns it into red versus blue. And so there was a lot of like red versus bluing about it. And so that was the start. And then it went into like 30 minutes of non crypto stuff. All the good stuff happened at the end. So you had to wait to the very end where-

• 22:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  Let's play the good stuff.

• 22:14David Hoffman?

  Warren Torres and Wagner, yeah.

• 22:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, what are we about to watch? So I think the first clip is-

• 22:19David Hoffman?

  We're gonna start with Patrick McHenry because he starts the whole thing off.

• 22:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  I know.

• 22:23David Hoffman?

  In a fantastic bow tie.

• 22:25Speaker 02

  You've got serious questions to answer to the public and to Congress, and we intend to get your compliance. We can do it the easy way or the hard way.

• 22:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  Whoa, play the east way.

• 22:35Speaker 02

  And you'll back. The ranking member is now recognized for five minutes.

• 22:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wow, that really sets the tone.

• 22:42David Hoffman?

  Yes, the ranking member is Maxine Waters. We're not gonna play that because it's just dumb. We're only gonna play the good stuff.

• 22:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  Who's this?

• 22:49David Hoffman?

  This is Mrs. Wagner. She is a big fan.

• 22:55Speaker 03

  I'm confused at which Gary Gensler, the American public, should believe. The academic version, who spoke glowingly about the power of technology to help more investors participate in US and capital, global capital markets, or the SEC version, who apparently thinks all use of any technology by broker dealers and investment advisors is inherently conflicted, and firms should just stop using technology altogether. Gary Gensler, you know, could you please briefly explain this change in your views?

• 23:29Speaker 04

  I thank you for the question, a clever question. It's the same Gary Gensler. It's not my identical twin brother, Rob, or anything. It's me.

• 23:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wait, wait!

• 23:39David Hoffman?

  So this is how I found out that Gary Gensler has an identical twin brother. I don't, we don't have that clip in the agenda, but I feel like now we have to actually bring that up.

• 23:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  No, no, no. Okay, we need to talk about this. So Gary Gensler actually has an identical twin brother.

• 23:50David Hoffman?

  We don't, we don't have that in the agenda, but we'll put a, we'll go and pause and go get the clip and then we'll do this after.

• 23:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes, we need to hear more about Gary Gensler's twin brother.

• 23:58David Hoffman?

  First the lashing, and then we'll find that, we'll talk about the Gary Gensler identical twin brother.

• 24:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, this was the best one, though. This is my favorite clip, maybe the clip of the year that I've seen from Representative Richie Torres, who's actually been on the Bankless Podcast before. So let's play it.

• 24:12Speaker 05

  Suppose I were to purchase a Pokemon card. Would doing so constitute a security transaction?

• 24:19Speaker 04

  You can purchase a Pokemon card. It's I don't know what the context is, but if you're just purchasing a Pokemon card.

• 24:26Speaker 05

  If I purchase a Pokemon card, is that a security transaction?

• 24:28Speaker 04

  At a retail store, that's not a security.

• 24:29Speaker 05

  Okay. If I were to purchase a tokenized Pokemon card on a digital exchange via a blockchain, is that a security transaction?

• 24:39Speaker 04

  I'd have to know more.

• 24:41Speaker 05

  Okay. So for you, the process of tokenization is what transforms a non-security transaction into a security transaction?

• 24:48Speaker 04

  Look, if the investing.

• 24:50Speaker 05

  I thought you were technology neutral.

• 24:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, wow. He asked the question, David, that we've always wanted to ask. How about baseball cards? How about Pokemon cards and these securities?

• 25:01David Hoffman?

  So Ms. Wagner is like, yo, MIT version of Gary was pro blockchain, but SEC Gary is anti-blockchain. And then Richie Torres is like, yo, is a Pokemon card a security? These people are listening to crypto Twitter. They are like, these are our things. They the power of crypto Twitter is like getting into Congress.

• 25:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, it's because it's distilled logic. I mean, Gary Gensler thinks that everything that is tokenized should be a security, and that is just an untenable position.

• 25:29David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 25:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's an untenable position. He refuses to provide any clarity. We are not saying, on the crypto side, we are not saying that tokenized things can't be securities. There are things that are tokenized that can be securities. We're not taking the binary, every token is not a security. He is taking the binary, every token is a security, and he's got to defend that, and it's indefensible. Or else Pokemon cards and Magic the Gathering cards and Pogs and all of these, and if all of these things are securities. And it's so satisfying.

• 26:00David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 26:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  To I, look, I know this is just, just like kind of showboating.

• 26:05David Hoffman?

  It's for the show. This is a carnival.

• 26:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's for the show. I know that, but it's.

• 26:09David Hoffman?

  It's important. It's important because each representative is trying to give scaffolding for their constituents to rally behind. And so even though like nothing is getting done, we are just publicly like Gary is just having tomatoes thrown at him, and he's going to go home and shower it off. He's going to be totally fine. But like, the public is like, these are scaffolding for the public to go around.

• 26:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's also, I think this meme will spread, David. This clip is, I've already seen it all over the place. It's spreading, kind of like the.

• 26:33David Hoffman?

  And that's the best thing that we could expect. That's the best outcome that we could is like, we have memeable clips that are showing what a far scary Gensler is.

• 26:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Governing this country by meme. I guess that's what we're descending into here, but.

• 26:46David Hoffman?

  Okay, so did you see this? So in every, every one of these, this is the second time or third time that we've had one of these, Gary, Gary gets a few minutes to speak, like he gets to say words.

• 26:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  Opening statements?

• 26:57David Hoffman?

  Opening statements. Someone in the back of the camera, behind Gary, pulled out the Coinbase Stand With Crypto Shield logo icon and was just like flashing it, like the, holding it there. There's, in a different clip, you also see a Stand With Crypto bag. So like Gary, while he's saying his statements about like how crypto is full of frauds, there's a bunch of like Stand With Crypto icons like in the back. Great, great stuff.

• 27:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. Ironically, by the way, that's an NFT, which Gary Gensler probably thinks is

• 27:24David Hoffman?

  That is an NFT. You're totally right. I forgot about that.

• 27:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  And if you, you contrast it to, remember 2017, Janet Yellen, Buy Bitcoin? It's not the first time this has happened.

• 27:33David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I interviewed that guy, by the way, on POV Crypto.

• 27:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, the Buy Bitcoin guy?

• 27:37David Hoffman?

  Yeah, the Buy Bitcoin guy.

• 27:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  Why'd he do that? What's the story there?

• 27:39David Hoffman?

  He's an, he's an Urbit guy.

• 27:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  He's an Urbit guy?

• 27:42David Hoffman?

  He's an Urbit, yeah.

• 27:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  Pretty passionate then. Okay, so that was the Gary grilling in front of DC and, you know, hopefully we get some clips, we get some memes, we get some arguments. We don't expect a lot to come from the lashing otherwise. Okay, we get, we gotta come back to the twin thing. So Gary Gensler has an identical twin. That's, and you, you have a video that proves this?

• 28:02David Hoffman?

  Yes, there's a video. This is Gary Gensler in MIT World, talking about crypto. And he brings in his brother, identical twin brother Rob, who I think at the time is working at T. Rowe Price. Okay, so like the person you see on your screen is Gary Gensler. Now, watch closely, cause you might lose him, cause there's two of them.

• 28:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is Rob.

• 28:30David Hoffman?

  That's Gary.

• 28:33David Hoffman?

  That's Rob Gensler!

• 28:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, wow, Rob. Rob.

• 28:38David Hoffman?

  What the shit?

• 28:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  What do you think Rob thinks about crypto, David? Do you think he's like a crypto, a big crypto fan?

• 28:46David Hoffman?

  That'd be hard to go in public as a crypto fan. This is like, like Mr. Smith from The Matrix. There's like two of them.

• 28:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's funny. But, yeah, didn't know about that. So a big reveal.

• 28:58David Hoffman?

  That is nuts!

• 29:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  twin identical brother that is maybe pro crypto. I want to mean that into existence. We should get Rob on the podcast.

• 29:08David Hoffman?

  There's a Horcrux joke here somewhere.

• 29:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, to fight these forces of genslerness in DC, crypto showed up. Crypto showed up on Capitol Hill this week. So what are we looking at?

• 29:18David Hoffman?

  Coinbase has organized this Stand With Crypto Day where just a bunch of crypto founders and leaders and policy advocates came to Capitol Hill to advocate for crypto conveniently. At the same time that Gensler was in his hearing. Coincidence? I think not. So 50 plus founders from over 15 different states all visited DC. And so this has been a, this was not just like people visiting. This was a big push. This was a policy and advocacy push. Here is Brian Armstrong on Yahoo Finance getting interviewed. I thought it was a great little clip.

• 29:48Speaker 06

  Yeah. So Stand With Crypto is here to tell people that 52 million Americans have now used crypto. That's 3X the number that own electric vehicles. It's more than hold union cards in the United States. It's a massive constituency and they're frankly, a little unhappy with the US because the US is lagging behind. We don't have clear rules on the books. Like 83% of the rest of the G20 countries for how crypto should be regulated, how consumers should be protected and how this innovation can happen here in the US. And so there's a couple of bills going through the House right now that have bipartisan support for how we get clear market structure, how we get stable coins in the US. And these entrepreneurs and the 52 million Americans really want this to happen. And so we're here, we're here talking about Stand With Crypto. We've got the pins.

• 30:30Speaker 06

  People can check out standwithcrypto.org and sign up if they want to be a crypto advocate. This is something America needs to get right.

• 30:37David Hoffman?

  The pins, of course, are the shields, the shield pins. Yeah. And he's got these talking points absolutely rehearsed, comparing them to other constituents that people totally can like resonate with and vibe with on an emotional level, which is the right way to do this.

• 30:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 30:51David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 30:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's actually pretty cool. Brian also said this, I guess maybe he gave a speech on a panel, at least a statement on a panel. And he talks about Hayden Adams, the entrepreneurs, as he was referencing in that clip. Hayden Adams of Uniswap is an American hero. And I mean that literally, he's the kind of person that any country in the world would kill to have, building the future of technology. And Elizabeth Warren called him a shadowy super coder. He actually put that on his Twitter profile as a badge of honor. If that's what it means to be an innovator in this country, then I'm a shadowy super coder too. And it's despicable that anyone keeps attacking American heroes like this, who are helping propel our economy and our freedom and the future of this country forward. That was a statement from Brian Armstrong.

• 31:35David Hoffman?

  Great line. Great line. Of course, Hayden Adams on Twitter says, you know, thanks, Brian Armstrong. Thanks for the kind words. So glad we have you and Coinbase standing with DeFi and fighting for the whole industry. Really, I think that is what this represented as a symbol. We have 50 plus founders showing up the day Gary Gensler is getting a hearing to go meet, like in a coordinated fashion with talking points and just like PR and press. And they had this like armored car out there, this painted blue armored car. That was all about, hey, money doesn't need to be driven around in armored cars in the year 2023. Let's upgrade the financial system. Saying that 87% of Americans would think that we should upgrade our financial system. And 52 million Americans own crypto. So there's obviously a wide base of support.

• 32:21David Hoffman?

  That is the facts that Coinbase is coming to Capitol Hill with. And overall, it just was a, the biggest show of force, a coordinated show of force of support for crypto on Capitol Hill on a day where, you know, it counted more than most.

• 32:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, that's real people, right? And one of the shadowy super coders that showed up is our friend Kevin O'Wakki. He showed up in this cohort. And this was actually a fantastic thread of his just takeaways. And I think we should read a few of them. So this was his experience. He's one of 40 founders invited to DC in the Stand with Crypto Day. And then he reiterates the stats that you just gave. The first day of their session was watching Gary Gensler live. So they actually got to go into the congressional chambers and watch this live. And Kevin makes a comment.

• 33:07David Hoffman?

  It kind of explains why there was a stand with crypto.

• 33:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, somebody was in there. Oh, who was it? And he said, well, I found the hearing itself to be pretty toothless. And that most congresspeople wanted mostly to get soundbites. That's what we saw a little bit. It's still nice to see that Gensler's prejudice against crypto are not shared by all of the legislative branch. And next, they met with some of the congressional leaders. So Richie Torres, Mark Molinaro, Hakeem Jeffries, several more. And Kevin goes on.

• 33:39David Hoffman?

  Some lines that we'll pull out here. He said, Kevin Nowacki says, "The White House doesn't like crypto, but no one really seems to know why. As far as I know, no one with Stand With Crypto was able to meet with the executive branch." Interesting.

• 33:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  So they're still not engaging in the executive branch?

• 33:53David Hoffman?

  Yeah. He says, quote of the day was from Mike Novogratz, who was also there. "The extra-legal de-banking of crypto companies is the most un-American thing I've ever seen."

• 34:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  Hard agree.

• 34:03David Hoffman?

  Quote of the day, yeah. He says, "This stank of SBF seems to have mostly lifted. The opportunists who use SBF and FTX implosion to advance their agenda last year have already played their hands already." Wow, nice. And then last thing I'll pull out here is Kevin says, "It was cool to sit shoulder to shoulder pushing for regulatory clarity with prominent crypto luminaries like Brian Armstrong, Ryan Selkis, Mike Novogratz, or Fred Arisim." And then, of course, he finishes with the action item of, "Call your congressman." This is not just him saying, hey, you should do this. This is saying, hey, this is what is the most effective. This is the advice that I've gotten from people in Congress who I just talked to. Call your congressman. If you don't know who or how to approach them, you can check out Coinbase's guide

• 34:48David Hoffman?

  at www.standwithcrypto.org. So that is your big action item, Bankless listener.

• 34:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Literally, five minutes.

• 34:54David Hoffman?

  For the week. Go to standwithcrypto.org and just press the buttons and then call your congressman.

• 34:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  Sorry, you might have to be US citizen for this one. So sorry, dollar international users, but we're fighting America, you know, in America for this, for sure. David, speak of America, what's more American than Walmart? And we got pudgy penguins on the shelves. What happened this week?

• 35:14David Hoffman?

  2,000 Walmart stores have put pudgy penguin like stuffed animals on their shelves. So this is just a big co-marketing push between pudgy penguins and Walmart. Walmart even tweeted out the pudgy penguins like retweeted and showed their, their, added their own quote to the pudgy penguins like animation about pudgy penguins being in Walmart. I mean, this is probably the biggest distribution event for any NFT ever.

• 35:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  Can you describe what you're actually talking about? So you're not just talking about the NFTs, of course.

• 35:44David Hoffman?

  No, no, no, no.

• 35:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  In case it wasn't obvious, you're talking about stuffed animals.

• 35:48David Hoffman?

  Yeah, pudgy penguin stuffed animals. Yeah.

• 35:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh my God, they're so cute. Do you have a pudgy penguin, David, still?

• 35:54David Hoffman?

  No, I sold mine. I bought him, I bought him the shit out of that. I, I took a long bet on cool cats and sold pudgies and I, that was the wrong trade.

• 36:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  No, no cool cats at Walmart. Well, pudgies was an interesting project because it got like resold to somebody else, right?

• 36:08David Hoffman?

  Yeah, right. Yeah. So the founders sold it to this guy Luca, who I think has just been doing absolute Chad work.

• 36:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Is that this guy?

• 36:16David Hoffman?

  That, I don't, I don't know if that's him.

• 36:20David Hoffman?

  But yeah, he's been doing just a killer job executing. He's coming from the old world of IP and just IP growth. So. Pudgy Penguin toys cost between $3 and $12, depending on the toy. Okay. The crazy thing about this is each toy has, I think, one of those RFID chips in there. And so each toy has its own identity as an NFT on ZK Sync Era, where people can build their forever pudgy characters inside of the pudgy world, their digital social platform. So, you know, mini games, interact with others, and then you get like some certain like traits. There, there's like this on-chain component where every single stuffed animal has a life on ZK Sync Era. Big win for ZK Sync Era. Really cool.

• 37:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's really cool altogether. I mean, we have a, you know, an NFT that's redeemable for some sort of token representation on a layer two. A ZK EVM layer two.

• 37:10David Hoffman?

  IRL verse metaverse kind of connection. Yeah.

• 37:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  I love it. NFTs in Walmart is somehow a fitting in the spare market. We are, we are down bad. But actually I'm incredibly bullish. I mean, this is, the big potential for NFTs is really as a kind of a brand. You know, in some ways, a headless brand, in some ways, like a kind of a, you know, a centralized led brand. So are you going to get one of these stuffed animals? Are they cute enough? Are you just interested in the speculation aspect, David?

• 37:36David Hoffman?

  I'm not necessarily a collector of stuffed animals, but for other, I do think there is some like interesting dichotomy of like crypto D gens owning pudgy penguins and then like children thinking that that's their favorite stuffed animal because it is like, that's a funny thing of, I don't know.

• 37:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. Oh, there you go. Oh, look at this. Some of them are getting swept. So looks like it's not just for children. Looks like some of the NFT.

• 38:01David Hoffman?

  Well, that's, this is Luca. This is the CEO of pudgy penguins. He's buying his own products. He probably put that on the company card. That's a, he's yield farming pudgies right now.

• 38:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right. What do we got coming up next?

• 38:12David Hoffman?

  Coming up next, did you know there's like six forks of Friend Tech and it's all on different chains? We'll talk about all of them, but not really. We're just going to burn through those. Vitalik deepfakes and how we can stop them. And also Chase Bank has banning crypto payments in the UK. Oof, not great. This is why we go bankless, of course. So we're going to get to all of that and more. But first a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible, especially Metamask Portfolio. If you have not opened up your Metamask Portfolio, it is a new and improved way of looking at all your crypto assets on all the various chains. There's a link in the show notes. Go find out. Let's go hear from them right now. Are you a Metamask user? Well, you're listening to Bankless, so of course you are. The wallet you know and love just got a whole lot better. Metamask Portfolio is the ultimate one stop shop for all of your crypto needs. It gives you a holistic view

• 38:54David Hoffman?

  of your crypto portfolio across multiple chains and multiple addresses all at once. You can easily view and manage all your coins, tokens and NFTs in one convenient place just by connecting your wallet. Metamask Portfolio goes beyond just viewing your portfolio, though. Inside the portfolio, you can do all the incredible money verbs that make DeFi so powerful. You can buy, swap, bridge and stake your crypto assets with ease. It's like having a powerful battle station for all your DeFi moves right at your fingertips. So if you're looking to do more in Web 3 your way, Metamask Portfolio is the answer. I already know that you have Metamask Wallet, so go check out your Metamask Portfolio. Learn more at metamask.io slash portfolio.

• 39:32David Hoffman?

  You know Uniswap, it's the world's largest decentralized exchange with over 1.4 trillion dollars in trading volume. You know this because we talk about it endlessly on Bakeless. It's Uniswap, but Uniswap is becoming so much more. Uniswap Labs just released the Uniswap Mobile Wallet for iOS, the newest, easiest way to trade tokens on the go. With the Uniswap Wallet, you can easily create or import a new wallet, buy crypto on any available exchange with your debit card with extremely low fiat on-ramp fees, and you can seamlessly swap on mainnet, Polygon, Arbitrum, and Optimism. On the Uniswap Mobile Wallet, you can store and display your beautiful NFTs, and you can also explore Web3 with the in-app search features, market leaderboards, and price charts, or use Wallet Connect to connect to any Web3 application. So you can now go directly to DeFi with the Uniswap Mobile Wallet.

• 40:17David Hoffman?

  Safe, simple custody from the most trusted team in DeFi. Download the Uniswap Wallet today on iOS. There is a link in the show notes. Ryan, this clip of Vitalik has shown me which token I want to buy next. Let's play it.

• 40:30Speaker 07

  Alright. Um, everyone remembers when I sold billions of Shiba Inu tokens back in the day. Do I regret it? Well, I didn't. That is, uh, not until I heard about Shib Exchange. Um, yeah, but Shib Exchange is pretty revolutionary in the crypto space. Making Shiba Inu the quote "token" is just genius. If I still had all those Shiba Inu tokens, I know exactly where I would take them. Let's fucking go.

• 40:57David Hoffman?

  Well, that, that, that is classic Vitalik. That's classic Vitalik.

• 41:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh my god.

• 41:03David Hoffman?

  The "let's fucking go" is just the funniest way to end this thing. Like, when I was watching it, it's like, "Yeah, yeah, I can, I know Vitalik's mannerisms. I don't, I know that that was like manipulated a little bit." But man, if you're not paying attention, or if you don't know Vitalik, then like, yeah, this guy just killed Shib Exchange.

• 41:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  What do you think that is out of 10? Like, the, the quality of this?

• 41:22David Hoffman?

  This is one of the best quality Deepfakes I've seen in a while, because he's got the, like, relatively natural body movements, even though they're a little bit repetitive. Like, the body movements are natural.

• 41:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  And the voice was close-ish.

• 41:32David Hoffman?

  The voice is pretty good.

• 41:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's not, it's not quite there, but it's close-ish.

• 41:35David Hoffman?

  Vitalik will never, ever say "let's fucking go."

• 41:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, with a different script, I think I would give it like a 7. Or eight out of 10, right? Whereas like a 10 for me would be like indiscernible from somebody who's spent some time virtually with Vitalik would be indiscernible from from that experience. And this is maybe a seven or eight, which like these are going to be everywhere.

• 41:56David Hoffman?

  These are pretty good clips.

• 41:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, so many bots on Twitter all over the place of just like Vitalik, you know, is giving away free ETH. It's always been this way since like 2016 onwards. Vitalik's giving in free ETH. He, his image is going to be used in deepfakes in all sorts of ways. So what, what is the prevention for this? How do we fix this problem?

• 42:15David Hoffman?

  Well, of course, there's the Ethereum adestation service, but that's not a quick fix. That is going to be years of infrastructure and building in progress. We have the tools. We just need, you know, maturation and development. The fix is that everyone just needs to know that the internet is not a safe place. And especially with the emergence of private keys and owning your own assets, like the internet is very unsecure at this very moment.

• 42:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it's a lot of phishing, like a lot of people want to steal your money. This was actually useful too on Twitter is the community notes. I've been looking at this more and more on Twitter.

• 42:46David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 42:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Readers added context. They thought people would want to know the video is a deep fake. So that, yeah, that's good context to know. So be on your guard and we'll get back to that. But hopefully something like Ethereum adestation service will allow Vitalik to release Vitalik content signed with his private keys.

• 43:01David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 43:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  And that, you know, that is much, that is unforgeable, is not fakeable. Whoever has his private keys can actually sign it.

• 43:08David Hoffman?

  Yeah, the bull case for this is that actually every single bit of content will have some sort of adestation. And so weird content will be missing the adestation. And so it's, the idea is like eventually everything will have some sort of tag of inception. Like where did this come from? And like content without that tag will be extremely sus.

• 43:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  Exactly. David, this is a pretty cool experiment. In Buenos Aires, government ID coming to Ethereum again via ZK Sync. What's this?

• 43:37David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so there's actually an interesting like corollary. I mean, maybe I'm just making this up in my head, but like pudgy penguins. When you buy the stuffed animal, you have this like NFT that has this digital identity on ZK Sync. The, this is, I mean, it's not anything to do with penguin penguins or stuffed animals, but Buenos Aires, the government of Buenos Aires, which is of course, part of the government, the country of Argentina, but is also its own kind of like city state. Buenos Aires citizens will be able to download this wallet and claim essential personal documents, such as birth and marriage certificates, which are very important documents in Argentina for accessing the social benefits, using a digital wallet. So like self custody of your digital documents, using your, using a private key, using a wallet.

• 44:21David Hoffman?

  And so this is being, also being used on ZK Sync era. And so it's just a way for like infrastructure of the nation state, city state sector of things, using public infrastructure to do things that they already need to do better. Pretty cool.

• 44:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  You could put anything in your wallet. Penguins are passports, right?

• 44:41David Hoffman?

  Penguins are passports, yeah.

• 44:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is cool. You know, Kraken, our number one recommended exchange for 2023, David, you know what they're up to?

• 44:50David Hoffman?

  Tell me.

• 44:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  They are getting ready to push into stock trading.

• 44:54David Hoffman?

  This is a rumor. So I took this tweet from Walter Bloomberg, crypto exchange plans to push into stock trading. This came from the Bloomberg article that says this.

• 45:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  Still a rumor?

• 45:05David Hoffman?

  I asked Kraken, it's like, yo, what's going on with this? And their response is Kraken is always exploring how it can power the global adoption of cryptocurrencies. We can't comment on rumors or speculation. We're looking to broaden and enhance our offering. So clients continue to have secure and seamless access to Kraken's full product suite. Pretty generic, neither confirm nor deny.

• 45:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Didn't say no.

• 45:27David Hoffman?

  They did not say no. They did not say no.

• 45:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  And we have no special knowledge about this.

• 45:32David Hoffman?

  No, we don't.

• 45:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  You know, all we know is basically that statement, but this would be cool if true.

• 45:36David Hoffman?

  I would say as someone who has not bought an equity and a stock since 2018, up until this week, actually, we'll talk about that later in a different show. Like Robinhood ever said, we always thought Robinhood was like the app for the people, right? Like democratizing access to finance. And then the whole Citadel GME thing just totally popped that bubble. One of the big reasons why I haven't bought an equity is because I don't want to use Robinhood. That's tradFi. There is demand, believe it or not, for crypto people to buy.

• 46:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  No, I believe it.

• 46:08David Hoffman?

  But we just need a crypto native platform to do, go back to the old world.

• 46:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  And Robinhood has good UX. Have you ever used something like E-Trade or ever used something like Fidelity or something like this? Charles Schwab?

• 46:18David Hoffman?

  No way.

• 46:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like, you couldn't. Like, you would not be able to navigate this.

• 46:22David Hoffman?

  I wouldn't know how to do it.

• 46:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's so stupid. It's so like 2000s era. And crypto exchanges have gotten the UX right. Like, it's easy to navigate. And so why not start listing other assets?

• 46:34David Hoffman?

  Take Kraken Pro UX and put it into equities and we can talk. Maybe.

• 46:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  Maybe Kraken's doing that. Maybe they're not. We have nothing.

• 46:41David Hoffman?

  Maybe it's a rumor. Yeah, it could just be a rumor.

• 46:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  A friend tech fork for every chain. Okay, there are all of these friend tech clones. We should have, we expected this would happen, right? Of course, a successful app is going to have like thousands of clones. What specifically is happening? How many clones do we have at this point?

• 46:56David Hoffman?

  Okay, so on Base, there's Friends Tech. There's Post Tech on Arbitrum. There's Frenzy on Solana. There's Fan.Tech on Mantle. There's Alpha on Bitcoin. What the sh- oh my gosh.

• 47:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  What's Bitcoin L3? That's what this says.

• 47:12David Hoffman?

  I don't know. People have been trying to tweet at me saying, hey, David, you're really popular on Alpha on Bitcoin. You should sign up. And I'm like, I don't believe you. No one is in the Bitcoin world that's unpopular.

• 47:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  They're trying to steal your private keys, David. They're phishing you. Maybe. Of course, these are clones, so there's not a lot of difference. But there is some like minor innovation. So, one, there is, one version of this clone is introducing a bidding action for new accounts in order to prevent bots. Another is including features like public and private posts. So you could see accounts you could follow on Twitter, dark mode, stats mode, that sort of thing. A referral system. So some are even working through the economic. Of these platforms and like juicing them, making them maybe even more Ponzi like in the games. So there's like these micro innovations that are happening across all of these clones.

• 48:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  And I think that this will push things forward is the optimistic view is some of these features will work. Others won't. The ones that don't fall by the wayside and die, the ones that do will improve the product. Friend tech will continue to have to level up. Fortunes will be made. Fortunes will be lost. You know, that's what always happens in this space, but I do think a lot of experiments will kind of level us up. I guess maybe the bear case for all of this is like, uh, it's too much fragmentation and we're just chasing a bunch of kind of, I don't know, nothing products. And this is instead of innovating, everyone's copying, um, you know, the other apps. I guess you could take a bear case on it too, but uh, yeah, overall, I think it's cool. And of course it would happen. This is crypto. It's completely permissionless.

• 48:50David Hoffman?

  Well, as soon as you do get the forking phenomenon, it is just a big plus one to the legitimacy of the actual inception.

• 48:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 48:58David Hoffman?

  Right? Like Bitcoin had the fork and fair launch era. There was the ICO mania after Ethereum, DeFi food farms. Like anytime something gets forked a bajillion times, whatever is getting forked, it's very successful.

• 49:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  In some measure.

• 49:10David Hoffman?

  Yeah. And I will say, even though I don't really understand the long-term economics and the long-term sustainability of friend tech. Like it, it doesn't care what I think. It is still alive.

• 49:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 49:21David Hoffman?

  And so I'll, I'll give a plus one to that.

• 49:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  I am too exhausted to create accounts in all of these apps and try them all out. I've got my friend tech. That's it.

• 49:28David Hoffman?

  Coming out of the OP stack, super chain base world, base has introduced pessimism, which is an open source monitoring, monitoring system designed to enhance security of base.

• 49:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  Hilariously named as well, of course, not optimism.

• 49:42David Hoffman?

  Yes. It's, it's the right way to, to view this. It's a monitoring system for like, think of it as like a second line of defense. So post someone attempting to exploit you, whatever that means, smart contracts, the actual protocol, et cetera. This is an alert system after that fact. Uh, so there's like three different subsystems here. There's like a risk engine, alerting system, uh, and then just another system that's responsible. For parsing and transforming real time data, basically trying to give you a live alerts of like, hey, some shenanigans is going on and it's just a monitoring system.

• 50:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  And all OP stack chains can benefit from this, right?

• 50:18David Hoffman?

  That's a really cool thing. Like this is kind of like, it has previously been deployed in other contexts. We've seen other projects like this, but the cool thing about this is Base is building this to protect the base chain for their base users. It's just like extra protection for all base users. And it's really important because that's Coinbase. But since it's on the OP stack, all OP stack chains can also leverage this open source system. So this is about everything growing in security all at once. We like it. We like it.

• 50:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  Binance is interesting. Speaking of Base, Binance is now supporting Base as well. So you can withdraw a deposit from Binance to Base. I wonder if that has any implications for the future of BNB chain, David?

• 50:56David Hoffman?

  Right. That's the big question is like now with Base, the BNB chain of the West, if you will. What is the future of BNB chain? It's always in.

• 51:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Do you think BNB chain just becomes a roll up at some point?

• 51:07David Hoffman?

  I would, I can only hope.

• 51:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like, you know, why be a side chain in this, in this economy?

• 51:12David Hoffman?

  Why be a silo when you could join in the crowd?

• 51:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is a Fred Wilson post. Fred Wilson is a notable venture capitalist, Union Square Ventures. I followed his blog post for a while. I just noticed this week on September 9th, he's writing on the 27th, but on September 9th, apparently he was the victim of a phishing attack. So he got over 40 of his NFTs stolen, some of his most valuable NFTs, 46th to be exact. And it was because, I believe he was in a crypto wallet. He doesn't mention the wallet, but I'm guessing it was probably like a Coinbase wallet. He received a message, maybe a message from X M T P telling him to click this link. He said this, while waiting for our luggage, I got a push notification. I guess he was at the airport. So distracted, you know, waiting for your luggage. You just got a few minutes on your phone.

• 51:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  In my wallet about an NFT drop that I could participate in. So I clicked the link, signed the transaction and nothing happened. So I tried again. Again, nothing happened. Frustrated, I turned my attention to the luggage, retrieved it and got in the car. On the way home, I tried again a few more times. Turns out that each of my failed attempts to mint an NFT was a scam that allowed a thief to eventually take 46 of my most valuable NFTs. David, we were just talking about this last week with Mark Cuban getting drained from a similar kind of phishing scam. It's unfortunate. Yeah. Do you have a take on this? There is some good news at the end, but do you have a take on this first?

• 52:35David Hoffman?

  I have two takes. One is that you should not be having your wallet with 46 of your most valuable NFTs be your mobile wallet that you have on your phone.

• 52:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  So if, guys, if you do that right now, stop doing that immediately.

• 52:49David Hoffman?

  Like, don't, don't sign things that are also ought to be your cold storage.

• 52:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes. Have your cold storage a separate wallet completely from your active wallet that you do this kind of like activity on.

• 53:00David Hoffman?

  My other take is that we should be able to sign messages with our cold storage and not get rugged.

• 53:07David Hoffman?

  We should be, we should do both.

• 53:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, how do we do the second there?

• 53:11David Hoffman?

  Like, that, yeah, that's call for, call for startups.

• 53:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 53:15David Hoffman?

  Actually, delegate.cash, Fubar's project is working on this. But still.

• 53:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  There are a number of attempts. It's something we definitely have to solve because this is not good user experience to get drained of all of your funds because you clicked the wrong link. Anyway, you know, and by the way, just the PSA is even the pros can get rugged like this.

• 53:36David Hoffman?

  Even the pros.

• 53:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  Actually, Anthony Sisano had a similar event that he talked about in the Daily Gua earlier this week. If it can happen to someone like Fred or Anthony, it can happen to anybody. David, what did Michael Saylor do last week?

• 53:50David Hoffman?

  What does Michael Saylor do every week, Ryan? He purchases Bitcoin. Also, all that Bitcoin Ether strength ratio, that was because Michael Saylor was buying a bunch of Bitcoin.

• 53:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, really?

• 53:59David Hoffman?

  Purchase, yeah. This has happened like three times now, like Bitcoin Ether shows strength and then the sailor, that sailor, it was sailor. Purchased 5,445 Bitcoin for almost $150 million. Where does he get all this money?

• 54:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wait, he just spent another 150 million on Bitcoin?

• 54:16David Hoffman?

  Yes, yes, yes. That's exactly right.

• 54:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  He's borrowing it from bondholders.

• 54:22David Hoffman?

  Yeah, but everyone runs out of capital of margin. Like, if you run out of capital, sure, you take leverage. And then once, sometimes you run out of margin. Anyways, he's at 0.75% of the 21 million.

• 54:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  He almost owns one full percent of all Bitcoin in existence.

• 54:37David Hoffman?

  Over three quarters of 1%. Yeah. He is down 8% in dollar terms on his Bitcoin buy.

• 54:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  He is so like tenacious about this. It's impressive. And I've always said, I think he'll do well on it eventually.

• 54:51David Hoffman?

  Yeah, eventually. So he has bought a total of $4.7 billion of Bitcoin, and that is currently worth $4.3 billion of Bitcoin.

• 55:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  David, Chase Bank is banning crypto payments. Why? What's going on?

• 55:05David Hoffman?

  Why? I don't, I don't know. They just say that our policy around crypto is changing. Here's what it means for you. If we think you're making a payment related to crypto assets, we'll decline it. But customers are free to use a different bank or provider to invest in crypto.

• 55:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's called being unbanked. You're just...

• 55:21David Hoffman?

  Wow.

• 55:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  I got one of these letters from Bank of America one time with one of my accounts that just saw me transferring into Coinbase. And they sent me a letter and they said, you're too risky. Bye.

• 55:30David Hoffman?

  Right. They say, here's why they do it. Fraudsters are increasingly using crypto assets to steal large sums of money from people. We're committed to helping keep our customers' money safe and secure. So they're saying that like, because people are losing money in crypto, that they're not going to let you buy crypto. Which like, it's, the evidence is that yes, people are sadly being fished all the time. We have been talking about this. Does that mean that you just close down the gates to buying crypto? That's its reach?

• 55:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  I also think that this is maybe Operation Choke Point hitting the UK. The same kind of effect here of big banks saying, no, we will, if you're dealing in crypto, we will unbank you. Back to the Novogratz tweet earlier in this episode, right?

• 56:11David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 56:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  Of, you know, of companies getting unbanked as a result of this. David, another Ethereum address was just added to the OFAC sanction list. This time, the Sinaloa cartel. This is a fentanyl trafficking operation in a Colombian cartel leader, apparently. So added to the OFAC sanction list. I don't think that this is going to stop, by the way. Of course, you know, Bankless is no friend of drug cartels. You'll know that. But it does set a bad precedent, I think, if this is not handled correctly. This is actually a GitHub, maintained by ultrasound money, of all addresses, Ethereum addresses that are on the OFAC sanction list. You see this?

• 56:53David Hoffman?

  21 of them.

• 56:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, 21 of them.

• 56:56David Hoffman?

  Oh, there's Roman Semenov.

• 56:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  Roman Semenov's on here.

• 56:59David Hoffman?

  With eight addresses. Wow.

• 57:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  21 entities have been added to the OFAC sanction list right now. And... I don't know, I'm, I like, not a friend of drug cartels, but am worried about this blacklist

• 57:12David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 57:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  type of capability that the US is, is growing in scope. And I, I guess I have a few takes on this. One, I don't think we're going to get out of this. Like, I think they're going to continue to add bad guys to this list, right? So that's going to be with us always. But I feel like we need to hold the line in some specific places. Like, one is, they can't be sanctioning privacy smart contracts as they have with tornado cash, right? It's a general purpose privacy tool. You can't add that to the OFAC sanction list. And I know we're, we're battling that in the court system right now. I'm also worried about increased demands to AML KYC, all of DeFi,

• 57:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  all front ends. And to have them essentially, like, have to check the OFAC sanction list before they can, they can serve up, you know, the, the DeFi in the, in the user interface and application. So I'm worried about this, I guess I would say. I don't really have a solution other than there, there's gotta be some places we hold the line here. And yeah, I don't know if you have any wisdom for this, David?

• 58:17David Hoffman?

  Do you ever think we'll see bankless on ETH on there?

• 58:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Better not. Well, what are you doing?

• 58:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  What are you doing with our private keys, man?

• 58:25David Hoffman?

  Nothing, bro. They're coming for me.

• 58:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, it's, I, it's fine when it's all bad guys on the list, I guess, right?

• 58:31David Hoffman?

  So that's the point I'm making.

• 58:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's the point.

• 58:33David Hoffman?

  When, when does bankless narrative become enemy of the state?

• 58:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, there's our, there's already some people who, I mean, we certainly argue are not bad guys. Like, a tornado cash is on this list. Roman Semenoff is on this list. Open source privacy developer. Eight, eight addresses he has on this list. So that is not comforting. David, we got a new wallet, though. Onto brighter news. What's this?

• 58:56David Hoffman?

  New browser extension out of the Rainbow Wallet. Rainbow is definitely a beloved wallet in this space, I would say. They, it's been a mobile wallet. They've been pioneering mobile, but now they are now entering the world of being a wallet extension. I'm actually doing a show with Mike from Rainbow on Friday. He's a local, local Williamsburg resident. But we will still, we will still be doing it over. Oh, you're not doing it in person? Yeah, we got you. We have to do, we have to do share screen. So it's a virtual product. He's got to show you some stuff. I get it. How about raises of the week, David? What do we got? One raise from Bankless Ventures out of this week. Again, this is the way that we do this. Whenever Bankless Ventures makes an investment, we talk about it here in the weekly roll up as the inception of a conflict of interest. So y'all can know about it. And it also gives us a moment to explain why we invested in the raise.

• 59:39David Hoffman?

  The raise this week is Phoenix. Phoenix spelled with an F, F, H, E, N, I, X. This is privacy. This is encryption and privacy on the blockchain. And we're, we're just leading the charge in investing in more of these things because there needs to be more privacy on the, because there needs to be more privacy in the world of crypto. So there's a $7.5 million seed round dedicated to bring fully in morphic encryption to a layer two on Ethereum. And overall, just pushing the frontier of F H E, fully homomorphic encryption into the world of crypto. So this is, I think, stands in contrast to ZK cryptography, which is the more commonly known form of privacy.

• 1:00:21David Hoffman?

  Interestingly, privacy and scalability are actually two sides of the same coin. So you get ZK rollups, which are hyper scalable, but you also get ZK, ZK rollups like Aztec, which are private. This is a different strategy for producing privacy. Fully homomorphic encryption existed before crypto. It's, it's just general cryptography, not cryptocurrency. But now we are imbuing it into a layer two for, to have fully encrypted data. So the way that ZK rollups work, or ZK in general, is that you generate a proof off chain. And then you put the proof on chain and then everyone's like, yeah, that's the correct proof. It checks out. Fully homomorphic encryption operates differently.

• 1:00:59David Hoffman?

  It's more just like the, all the data, all the state is parseable because all the, all the state is present on chain. So it's a more rich state of data that's just encrypted. So you can run, you can run compute on it when it's in its encrypted form. Exactly. Yes. Yeah. So you get, it's more composable because the state of things is all hosted locally on chain. All present and accounted for is just encrypted. And so more composability, more utility out of this kind of say, a new approach, an alternative approach to the ZK space, potentially more scalable.

• 1:01:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, we need more privacy solutions specifically on layer two. And last fun fact, you know, this was founded by two guys and I mean that literally.

• 1:01:44David Hoffman?

  Damn it, I was gonna give this joke.

• 1:01:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  I front ran you, David.

• 1:01:47David Hoffman?

  All of that stuff was interesting, but the real reason why we invested in this deal is because the two founding co-founders are Guy and Guy.

• 1:01:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is too good. If that's not bullish, I don't know what is. David, what do we have coming up next?

• 1:02:04David Hoffman?

  Coming up next, will ETFs push crypto values away? Are they coming to infiltrate and corrupt crypto? We'll talk about that. Also, another take, are we at the peak ignorance of crypto? Is are we in the peak ignorance phase of the of the market, I think possible? And then also, is Ethereum a technology absorbing black hole? There is, I think, seven takes this week. It's a whole entire section of this.

• 1:02:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  So good, though. So good.

• 1:02:26David Hoffman?

  They're all so good. So big, big takes, big take section this this week. So we're going to get to all of that and more. But first, a moment to talk about these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible. Mantle, formerly known as BitDow, is the first DAO-led Web3 ecosystem, all built on top of Mantle's first core product, the Mantle network, a brand new, high-performance Ethereum Layer 2 built using the OP stack, but uses Eigenlayer's data availability solution instead of the expensive Ethereum Layer 1. Not only does this reduce Mantle Network's gas fees by 80%, but it also reduces gas fee volatility, providing a more stable foundation for Mantle's applications. The Mantle Treasury is one of the biggest DAO-owned treasuries, which is seeding an ecosystem of projects from all around the Web3 space for Mantle. Mantle already has sub-communities from around Web3 on-boarded,

• 1:03:10David Hoffman?

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• 1:03:52David Hoffman?

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• 1:04:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  Here's a question of the week from Bankless Citizen KiwiDog. "When the Bitcoin and Ether ETFs are finally approved, are you worried that the wacky but value-oriented crypto culture," which I love so much, "is going to be overrun by a rush of new people who have large amounts of power in the existing system? David, are all these TradFi people going to erode the crypto values that make us special, make this whole thing decentralized, make this whole thing corruption resistant? Should we be worried about the ETFs from that perspective?"

• 1:04:58David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I actually wrote a blurb about this in one of my David's Takes articles, The Last Crypto Cycle is here, where I talked about Bitcoin ETFs and also Bitcoin Ether ETFs and also running through getting regulatory clarity, like we are currently battling with regulators. We will get clarity one way or another. Eventually Bitcoin and Ether ETFs will be approved. So, there's this growing east of crypto, if you will, like the civilized, law-abiding, regulated civilization of the east of crypto. That is growing. We are watching that grow. Will we be able to retain the freedom of the west? I think by default, absolutely, because private keys are permissionless. Everything is a bearer asset. The West is the default in the world of crypto.

• 1:05:43David Hoffman?

  The East has to be built. So that is actually an inverse in the historical corollary where like people show up in the East. They're moving West to go away from Britain and the monarchy. And then they establish their own civilization. But then people keep on going West because they're inherently looking for freedom always. So as civilization is born, they keep going West. Crypto is the Wild West and it always has been and always will be because we have like freedom and private keys and power and responsibility and opportunity imbued into us by default. That is like the substrate that crypto exists upon. Will it be encroached? Well, with ETFs, people are buying Ether Bitcoin through their ETFs, but they're staying in the trad world. That capital's staying trad. That's staying in fidelity.

• 1:06:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  They're also buying a worse product.

• 1:06:30David Hoffman?

  Yes, and they're free to do that. And so actually, the line between TradFi and DeFi will definitely be retained. DeFi will just be the permissionless version of finance. And all that ETFs do is actually wraps Ether, kind of like wrapped Ether, and then makes it composable inside of TradFi. But it actually is us, we're corrupting Wall Street. They should be worried about us.

• 1:06:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  We're decentralizing them. Yeah, I know. I totally agree. I think this whole thing is one big Trojan horse and we got them.

• 1:06:59David Hoffman?

  Yes.

• 1:06:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  And I think that, we've said this before too.

• 1:07:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  You can't build something decentralized on something centralized, right? But it's fine if you put something centralized on something decentralized. So long as the base layer is preserved, right? And that's why we are so passionate about the Layer 1 and the Layer 0, which is kind of the social community, keeping those layers decentralized, all right? Our validator set matters so much, right? Making sure that the entire block building, you know, searching, building, validating, like chain is corruption free and censorship resistant, right? That's the stuff that matters. So who cares what they build that's centralized on top of those layers? So long as those layers remain decentralized and corruption resistant and quote unquote pure.

• 1:07:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's what we care the most about.

• 1:07:50David Hoffman?

  With the Ether ETFs, Ether gets sucked up into TradFi. ETH price goes up.

• 1:07:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:56David Hoffman?

  And they add jet fuel to the values that power up crypto.

• 1:08:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  They adopt crypto protocols, they adopt crypto values. Shouldn't I do a song? Chris Berninski, "Eclipse is like a Solana Embassy in Ethereum Nation." Wow, this take from Chris Berninski. What, give us some background on Eclipse first.

• 1:08:19David Hoffman?

  Right. So Eclipse is the predicted outcome, I think, of the rollup-centric roadmap thesis, which is that new and alternative non-EVM execution environments can turn themselves into a layer two and settle on Ethereum and benefit from Ethereum's network effects and composability and liquidity and assets. Eclipse, we did the show not too long ago. Eclipse is Solana's, Solana virtual machine as a layer two. And so Chris is putting this into nation-state metaphors, which I so wholly appreciate. And he's saying Eclipse is like a Solana Embassy on the Ethereum nation. So like a little domicile for Solana on Ethereum. And he follows up and says, "Eclipse will further trade relations between two of crypto's major economies, cementing the importance of ETH and Sol as a means of trade production and consumption." That is his take.

• 1:09:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  That is his take.

• 1:09:05David Hoffman?

  That is Chris's take.

• 1:09:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  I do agree with you. That is Chris's take.

• 1:09:08David Hoffman?

  Yeah. You can see my take, my response to Chris's take.

• 1:09:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  Did you say something?

• 1:09:12David Hoffman?

  Yeah, well, kind of.

• 1:09:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  Om nom nom.

• 1:09:15David Hoffman?

  I said om nom nom nom nom nom, which is my version of saying Ethereum is just gobbling up Solana. So it's not, it's not the Solana Embassy coming to Ethereum, it's just Ethereum just absorbing it and digesting it.

• 1:09:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, that brings us to the next take, which is this one from not you, but swagtimist.eith. "The beauty of Ethereum is that it's a technology-absorbing black hole. EVMs, layer twos, optimistic rollups, ZK rollups, snarks, starks, SVM, that's the Solana virtual machine. It doesn't matter. Everything ends up in Ethereum eventually. Ethereum's culture and draw is just too strong. And once you're caught up in it, there's no going back. So embassy versus black hole. Two different analogies here for, for something similar. Yeah. Do you have anything to add to this?

• 1:10:01David Hoffman?

  So this, this one is Swag's take, but it's also my take as well, because I 100% agree with this. I have my own version of this tweet all the way back in 2019. You can understand this from first principles. Source code aggregates better open source code depends on to better open source code. And Ethereum is a platform for open source code. So we've seen this play out before. Do you remember EOS turned into Loom network? Well, neither of those ideas worked, so they both just died. But Zcash, that's that's Aztec on Ethereum as a layer two. Like we have that technology, like all of these things. Useful Ethereum, useful open source cryptocurrency related code can just append on to Ethereum. And then Ethereum grows.

• 1:10:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think.

• 1:10:43David Hoffman?

  So like, sure, sure. It's an embassy for now, but then it's just, it's just going to get gobbled.

• 1:10:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I think that the the black hole analogy is good. I would also use just use the, you know, gravity, the gravitational pull analogy is good. And I would use like a star or a sun type of metaphor. If you are a layer one with a monetary unit and massive liquidity and massive economic bandwidth. Right. And a culture of innovation, then you're just going to suck in all of the other stellar objects towards you, right? And they're going to start orbiting you. Right? And so the goal, I mean, this is the bankless thesis is to become the most massive star in your ecosystem. Maybe there'll be a binary star system though, David. That's what, you know, that's what, that's what some others would say.

• 1:11:28David Hoffman?

  Binary star systems work when two equivalently sized stars about within some range start like having a dance with each other. But if there's an imbalance between these two stars, one just gobbles up the other.

• 1:11:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bitcoin and Ethereum, or is that a binary star system?

• 1:11:44David Hoffman?

  I would currently call that a binary star system.

• 1:11:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  We are stretching the metaphor too, too far. But this is another take from Brenner. We told you we had a lot this week. Given the concept of soulmate, there's probably a similar build mate. Somebody, someone where the two of you enjoy building or creating stuff together. The creations will be stellar and the two of you will have so much fun doing it. Oh, this is a sweet one. Who put this on the agenda? A build mate, find your build mate, you got your soulmate.

• 1:12:10David Hoffman?

  Yeah, it reminds me of the bear market buddy take like.

• 1:12:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:13David Hoffman?

  Everything is just easier in crypto when you have a buddy. Find your build mate.

• 1:12:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is very heartwarming. This is a good time to find your build mate too.

• 1:12:20David Hoffman?

  Fun fact, I went to college with Brenner.

• 1:12:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, really? Yeah. I feel like you always say that, like every show, it's just like some.

• 1:12:25David Hoffman?

  I went to college with someone.

• 1:12:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  You went to college or you know this person.

• 1:12:28David Hoffman?

  This is what happens when you go outside, Ryan.

• 1:12:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  All my friends are like virtual, so you know.

• 1:12:34David Hoffman?

  So this take requires some context. You know how we talk about blockchain fees are the taxes for the system, like the gas fees are the Ethereum taxes that you pay for the protocol?

• 1:12:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, they go to the public good of the protocol, which yeah, got it.

• 1:12:46David Hoffman?

  Fits the pattern, right? But Dr. Membrane here, I think, provides an alternative perspective. He says, or they say, a tax is dictated top down. An auction means pricing is set bottom up. In other words, if they didn't want to pay that price, the gas fee, that wouldn't be the price. The only reason the price is that is because people are, there are willing buyers. So when I think as we move forward and talk about, I think we will continue to talk about gas fees are the tax to Ethereum, but there's this important nuance that the taxes to Ethereum are determined by the market, not by a top down, heavy handed system.

• 1:13:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  A tax that's driven by market forces is how I put it.

• 1:13:25David Hoffman?

  Yes.

• 1:13:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  So what's the context for this tweet, though? It looks like it's a response to a thread.

• 1:13:29David Hoffman?

  I was arguing with a lot of people about like.

• 1:13:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  High fees versus low fees, kind of argument?

• 1:13:35David Hoffman?

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

• 1:13:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  Got it. Vance Spencer tweet, his second one of the episode. Wow. Big week for Vance. "It is now clear that there is going to be 10 to 100 restaking protocols and that the restaking game will increasingly become a hot ball of money. Why? It is unlikely that any one primitive data availability, bridge, oracle secured by restaked ETH will be able to meaningfully augment ETH layer one yield for the 23 million ETH and growing, staked over a long period of time. Moving from one restaking protocol to another while their inflation is high will become the game." All right, let's take us to this corner of the universe here in crypto, restaking. This is like Eigenlayer.

• 1:14:16David Hoffman?

  Yep.

• 1:14:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Help us recall. So restaking is first you stake it and then you restake it. And the reason you might restake it with a protocol like Eigenlayer is so that you can get some additional yield and put that capital at risk, you know, in exchange for performing some other and get some other function and generate some other yield. So Vance is saying that this is going to be a hot ball of money and a game and there'll be many market participants, yes?

• 1:14:42David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so you remember how we were talking about all the friend tech clones that have spun up and forked out?

• 1:14:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes.

• 1:14:47David Hoffman?

  How the Bitcoin fork and fair launch era, the ICO, food farms in 2020, like there's just this pattern in crypto of first you have this one thing and then you have the explosion of other things that are all kind of iterations on that. The cool thing about Eigenlayer is that it's actually not just one thing. Eigenlayer data availability is one restaking chain. I can't remember the name of it, but there's another oracle chain, which is why the oracle thing is an example here. There's a bridge chain. There's many different use cases for Eigenlayer restaking networks. And so what he's saying is applying this phenomenon that we totally understand where there's as soon as one thing is successful, you have the iterations and iterations. And then you also have like the liquidity locus, the mercenary, the yield farmers of DeFi summer.

• 1:15:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:31David Hoffman?

  There's always going to be demand for a new restaking network because that's the pattern that we see.

• 1:15:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  Is he talking about there's going to be a ton of different Eigenlayers, like restaking protocols? Or a ton of different sort of?

• 1:15:43David Hoffman?

  Eigenlayer networks, not Eigenlayers.

• 1:15:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Ah, I see. Just different protocols.

• 1:15:50David Hoffman?

  Right. Yeah, he's not, he's not calling for a forking of Eigenlayer. He's calling for a just a large supply of interested restaking capital that will produce demand for further restaking networks as the yields get sucked up by more and more people playing this game.

• 1:16:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, I think this clarifies it. So in his next tweet, he says, I think the winners here are the dominant ETH1 staking protocols. So that would be like a Lido or Rocketpool and generally ETH itself. People will get more comfortable using it, withdraw more sexy to on-chain and continue bootstrapping the ETH monetary premium.

• 1:16:24David Hoffman?

  That has always been my thesis behind Eigenlayer is that this just shifts power, the pendulum from the alt, many alt layer one thesis to the ether is the capital of the internet.

• 1:16:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it strengthened the ETH is money thing and the cold kind of monetary game that all layer ones need to play. David, are we at peak ignorance of crypto? That's what this next take says. What are we looking at?

• 1:16:47David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so this is Ken Dieter, who tweets out this graphic, which I'll explain here in a second, and says, "This is my mental model for comparing how crypto progresses through time to how people outside of crypto perceive that progress." So we got two lines here. One is a kind of stair-steppy upwards and to the right green line. And so the stair steps, I think, are kind of happen inverted to the market. So when there is a bull market, we hit a plateau because no one gets any fucking work done in a bull market because we're all gambling and it's raining money everywhere and everyone's distracted. And then that's the peak bull. And then in the peak bear is when work actually gets done, but everyone thinks that crypto is totally dead.

• 1:17:31David Hoffman?

  And I actually appreciate this subtle nuance in this graphic that the what crypto can actually do line, the stair stepping up into the right line, is also accelerating because progress compounds. But meanwhile, what everyone thinks crypto can do is kind of sign you sorting, oscillating around what crypto can actually do.

• 1:17:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  So the axes here are it's over time, but it's capabilities over time, right? And so the green line signifies that what crypto can actually do is greater capabilities over time. That's actually happening, right? It happens in kind of like different waves as we unlock various things. But what happens during bull markets is we overshoot the capabilities and we're like, "It's the best thing ever. It's going to change everything."

• 1:18:13David Hoffman?

  You just price forward the future.

• 1:18:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  You totally do. And then what happens during the bear markets is we're like, "It's doomed. It's over. Crypto is good for nothing. It's just a bunch of Ponzi schemes and there's nothing that it's going to affect and we'll never go mainstream," right? And we're at the, would you say we're at peak bear right now?

• 1:18:32David Hoffman?

  Oh, yeah. I think we're coming out of it, actually. Like the whole show of force from...

• 1:18:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. What does that have to do with peak ignorance of crypto? Is he just saying like, "In the bear, you are peak ignorant"?

• 1:18:45David Hoffman?

  Yeah. Like, none of your friends want to hear about the pudgy penguins in Walmart right now. So that's where we are in the cycles. That's where we are. Peak ignorance. Yeah, that's right. Good name for this episode. Peak ignorance. David, last take of the week. What's this one? This is such a good one. This is a deep cut for the, both for long-term and newer listeners who don't know about these dynamics. Coinfessions is a Twitter account that just tweets out like statements from people. It's like a, it's a meme account that tweets out statements from anonymous people. Real statements, though? Real statements that are submitted. Yes, yes, yeah. So the statement that was submitted to this coinfession was, "I was employed by a Bitcoin mining company to spread negative information about Ethereum on Twitter and 4chan for a duration of two years."

• 1:19:28David Hoffman?

  Now, if you are a veteran, you understand exactly who this company is. It's called Blockstream. They are the mining company. I mean, this is my take. This is my guess. I do not know this fact, but man, like, prove me wrong. There, here's another bit of information. My first boss in crypto was a Bitcoin OG and who converted to Ethereum in the ICO mania. And, but also just like disclosed to the entire company that like him and a few of his Bitcoin whale-owning friends financed the subversion campaign of Ethereum from, from 2015, bro. And he just told us, the whole entire company, like, yeah, we paid for like, we paid for like FUD. We paid for the FUD of Ethereum.

• 1:20:11David Hoffman?

  Like the extra FUD on top of the DAO hack and Ethereum classic and all of these things? Every time something negative went down, they just magnified it tenfold. Yes, yeah. The Ethereum is centralized, you can't run a node, like just funding Ethereum just because that was, that you could play that game. It was the, truly the Wild West back then. And so this coinfession is just like, the Blockstream employed, they like, you just look, go look at Grubles, if you remember Grubles. Samson Mao, like, if you want to listen to the most cringe piece of content ever, listen to Samson Mao from Blockstream and Vitalik Buterin on what Bitcoin did. Oh, I remember that episode. That was so bad. I can't believe Vitalik did that. Anyways, these are the tactics that have existed and still exist.

• 1:20:55David Hoffman?

  And I say, I would say that, I think that Bree has gone from Bitcoin, like, it's Left its scar on the Bitcoin culture. These tactics still exist. It still happens. This is still unalive. And it's probably being, it's probably higher up the market cap stack than you would think.

• 1:21:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  You have to curate your news, like your sources of information in this space because there's so much bad information like out there or disinformation or pure FUD. It's no wonder it's so difficult to find your way in crypto, right?

• 1:21:23David Hoffman?

  People who are relentlessly on crypto Twitter pushing narratives all of the time, like that you should proceed with caution.

• 1:21:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Unless they're podcasters, right, David?

• 1:21:32David Hoffman?

  Unless they're podcasters. Unless not us, we wouldn't do these things.

• 1:21:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, my God. We didn't even mention BitBoys in jail right now. And that's fine. Didn't even make the agenda.

• 1:21:41David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I didn't want to.

• 1:21:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  Anyway, moving on. David, what are you bullish on this week?

• 1:21:45David Hoffman?

  Okay, I attended, there's this rabbit hole that I know exists that I've been trying to go down. And I've gotten like nibbles of it. I went to a meetup in New York that was like 30 people. It kind of felt me, it felt like the Ethereum meetups of old where like, you know, folding chairs and like this basement basement kind of looking thing. And everyone is there just because we're nerds looking at this stuff.

• 1:22:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  What are you, what are you nerding out about?

• 1:22:05David Hoffman?

  This is, the words that we have described are autonomous worlds. This is being pioneered by Lattice, Xerox PARC guys, Mud, but there's just interest in this.

• 1:22:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Who are these people? Lattice, Mud? I don't think I've heard.

• 1:22:20David Hoffman?

  Like very skunk quirky people.

• 1:22:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay. These are individual Twitter accounts or?

• 1:22:24David Hoffman?

  Yeah, like the Xerox PARC guys are funded by grants. So they're, they're just like the developers, developers. Autonomous worlds. It's like crypto gaming, but not like the crypto gaming that you know. Fully as much logic on chain as possible. And so you get unique properties about that. Ryan, I think everyone understands when I say NFT, there's like, what's an NFT? It's like, oh, it's a CryptoPunk, it's a pudgy penguin, it's a collectible of some core, it's a JPEG. And maybe, maybe the team adds some like utility or access to that.

• 1:22:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Sure.

• 1:22:57David Hoffman?

  That is.

• 1:22:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  Or a plushy toy in Walmart.

• 1:23:00David Hoffman?

  That exactly. That is the Stone Age of what NFTs can be. Inert objects, that is like the first iteration, kind of like the Bitcoin is the Stone Age of crypto, my take. Ethereum is like the sci-fi version of this. We are, we are in the Stone Age version of NFTs. What if I told you, Ryan, that an NFT could be a universe with specific laws of physics and specific types of property rights, internal property rights, and that universe is defined by an NFT and that NFT is transferable?

• 1:23:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  One, I don't know entirely what you mean. Two, it sounds cool. Three, do I actually want that? I don't know.

• 1:23:43David Hoffman?

  With, when universes can become like, again, with state, internal state, internal laws that are different from Ethereum and can have their own, their own internal logic, and that is a transferable object? I mean, we, we talked about in our metaverse episode, what are NFTs? They're digital objects. You know what's an object? A whole entire universe, bro.

• 1:24:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's funny, it's funny you use the, the M word, the metaverse word, because that has so much fallen out of fashion in crypto. And it's, by the way, I, crypto started using that word before Zuckerberg took it, took it over.

• 1:24:16David Hoffman?

  That was our word.

• 1:24:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  And then he killed it. And it's, anyway, it's, it's dead, dead, dead now. But do you know that, that, that statement of, of basically like, everything that, you know, the, the bulls predicted about crypto will come true. It's just a matter of timing, right? Same thing happened with the internet. I feel like that's very much true. And this is basically that concept. It's property rights, digital property rights, autonomous worlds, inside of like what you're talking about. Another word for autonomous worlds is like metaverse, is what we used to kind of call it. Are you saying, you're seeing hints? You're seeing green shoots of like growth, new growth in this autonomous world? It's, how do I enter an autonomous world right now? Is there a game I play or like?

• 1:24:59David Hoffman?

  Yeah, there is. Maybe you'll resonate with this metaphor. Mud is like this game engine that this, the Mud team are, are building this game called Sky Strife. So that is the game that you actually see on screen, built on Mud. And so they're kind of dog fooding their own game. Is this happening anytime soon? No, this is, this like needs years of iteration and development. Like some of the more informed numbers I've gotten is like three plus years. But there's a there there. And it's kind of the, one of the big pills that I remember taking way back when, when I realized that like, yo, you can put any logic on chain. We just need to figure out how to compress it and make it finish, make it scalable. This is why, this is what they're doing.

• 1:25:40David Hoffman?

  They're like, Mud is putting, it's an on-chain game universe engine. And people are trying to figure out how to make rich, vibrant, stateful universes inside of like things like an NFT.

• 1:25:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's so cool. I, I, I think it's cool and yet I still don't fully like, I feel like I need to experience it in order to understand it.

• 1:25:59David Hoffman?

  I think the TLDR is, why am I bullish on this? It's just one of many things that I think like, there is so much juice left in crypto to squeeze. Like we are just tip of the iceberg. We can't even imagine some of the future stuff.

• 1:26:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  So you think we're going to sell all that, this, this cheap block space we're creating? Cause I've been worried about that lately, David. We got real cheap block space, but maybe autonomous worlds will, will buy it all up from us.

• 1:26:19David Hoffman?

  Yeah, no, that's right. That's right. Ryan, where do you bullish on?

• 1:26:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  I am bullish on what we were talking about earlier. Crypto people showing up in DC and the good people this time. All right, guess who wasn't there, David? Stan Bankman Freed.

• 1:26:32David Hoffman?

  Oh yeah, right.

• 1:26:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right. I mean, he, he was in jail and I think that crypto has been a little late to the party with respect to like participation in DC. But it's here now and like some reasons it's been late to the party. I think most other industries would have been in DC lobbying from like day one and participating in the way that crypto is from day one. But crypto didn't. And I think part of it comes from this, um, this core kind of libertarian governments are bad type of ethos. That's maybe one part of it. Another is I think there are some builders in the space who are a bit more techno utopian. We're basically like, we don't have to play the lobby games like, you know, the old tribe did. If we build it, they will come, they'll see it's a better system, they'll just adopt it, right? And then there's another element of why we haven't participated.

• 1:27:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  We just really didn't have the use cases. Like what do you go to the US government and be like, yeah, we're gonna supplant the dollar with this new, you know, cryptocurrency. They're not going to act very favorably to that. But now we have stable coins, for instance, now we have, you know, DeFi, now we have the creator economy with NFTs. But I think the realization crypto has had that if it doesn't show up in DC, if the good guys don't go to DC. Someone else will, someone like SBF, right? And he really revealed that there's a power vacuum to fill. And that if you're ambitious, if you're crafty, if you're short-termist, if you're organized, then you can go fill that that vacuum with like political bribes to try to, you know, capture all of the the entire regulatory apparatus and bend it to your will.

• 1:28:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right? And so, anyway, I'm bullish that SBF is out and some of the good guys are in and actually playing this game in a good way. And that we're getting organized, that exchanges are there, that our lawyers are on top of things, that our educators and lobbyists are there, that our builders like Kevin Awaki earlier in this episode showed up in DC. And I still feel like we have a massively, like a very long, long fight in the US. You know, we gotta fight the IRS, we gotta fight the SEC, the CFTC. The entire past year, the roll up, we have been talking about regulatory way more than like I am comfortable, like I hate talking about it every week. And yet, that is the thing that we are fighting right now.

• 1:28:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  But I am bullish with with kind of this new wave of of progress in our participation there and channeling, like, we're just more aligned and organized than we ever have been. And I think we'll make real progress in the US, even though it won't be easy.

• 1:28:59David Hoffman?

  Yeah. And I'm reminded about, I think my favorite line out of Permissionless, which was Hester Percy's quote, which is that the courts are on our side, the law is on our side. We just have to show up.

• 1:29:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:10David Hoffman?

  And we haven't, we actually haven't seen-

• 1:29:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's right. We haven't even showed up yet.

• 1:29:13David Hoffman?

  Yeah. We haven't even seen what we can do when we show up.

• 1:29:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  Hundred percent.

• 1:29:17David Hoffman?

  Yeah. So absolutely massive unlock.

• 1:29:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  David, meme of the week, you ready for this?

• 1:29:22David Hoffman?

  Meme of the week, yep.

• 1:29:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  Uh, what are we looking at?

• 1:29:24David Hoffman?

  This is a 100% convinced that Ryan Sean Adams put this meme together. The quote is, "Another unregistered securities exchange, absolutely disgusting." And the picture is what looks like a middle school Pokemon competition with a, with a nice young lady in a Pokemon suit.

• 1:29:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  Look at her trading her cards, like what's going on here.

• 1:29:47David Hoffman?

  Violating securities laws.

• 1:29:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  Absolutely. Lock these kids up.

• 1:29:51David Hoffman?

  I bet she's not even paying her taxes.

• 1:29:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  David, we got a moment of Zen this week that we just found prior to this episode. It's actually from a source you would not expect. I believe that source is Van Eck, of all places. So we're gonna play that moment of Zen in just a minute. Do you want to say anything to tee this up?

• 1:30:07David Hoffman?

  Uh, Van Eck, very trad-fi, boomer, capital, uncharacteristically zoomer meme. That's all I'll say.

• 1:30:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's really good. It's really good. Uh, disclosures. We're gonna end with risk in a minute, but first we disclose. Bankless Ventures, as we mentioned, is an investor in Phoenix. We talked about them earlier in the show. David and I are both advisors to Matter Labs as well, the ZK Sync project, and of course, David and I hold ETH.

• 1:30:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  We are long-term investors. We're not journalists. We don't do paid content. There's always a link to all Bankless disclosures in the show notes. I'm gonna end with this. You know crypto is risky. You could get fished. You could lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the Bankless journey. Thanks a lot. Ethereum.

• 1:30:53Speaker 08

  Ethereum. Now in an ETF form, coming soon.

• 1:30:57Speaker 09

  Follow us to stay informed on the release. O and H O D L work for K O F.