ROLLUP: Jay-Z NFTs, Axie Infinity, China's Bitcoin Miners, Coinbase USDC, (5th Week of June)

5th Week of June 2021. ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/ 🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/ 🎖 CLAIM YOUR BADGE: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/-guide-2-using-the-bankless-badge ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 💰 GEMINI | FIAT & CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://bankless.cc/go-gemini 🔀 BALANCER | EXCHANGE & POOL ASSETS https://bankless.cc/balancer 👻 AAVE | LEND & BORROW ASSETS https://bankless.cc/aave 🦄 UNISWAP | DECENTRALIZED FUNDING http://bankless.cc/unigrants ------ 📣 KYBER | Liquidity mine with Rainmaker https://bankless.cc/kyber ------ Topics Covered: 0:00 Intro 2:25 MARKETS 2:35 BTC Price 3:10 ETH Price 3:32 ETH/BTC Price 4:26 ETH Outperforming BTC https://twitter.com/RyanSAdams/status/1410601434240880646?s=20 6:20 DeFi Action 8:00 Layer 2 TVL https://l2beat.com/ 11:00 RELEASES 11:30 Compound Treasury https://twitter.com/current/status/1409600420369084420?s=20 13:35 Polygon Avail https://twitter.com/0xPolygon/status/1409520012960825349?s=20 15:00 Cream on Polygon https://www.coindesk.com/cream-finance-announces-integration-with-polygon 15:53 Perpetual Protocol V2 https://twitter.com/perpprotocol/status/1410221752526028801?s=20 16:50 Element. Fi on Mainnet https://shows.banklesshq.com/p/sotn-42-ethereum-devs-building-defi 17:55 Coinbase USDC 4% https://blog.coinbase.com/sign-up-to-earn-4-apy-on-usd-coin-with-coinbase-cdad79e5f5eb 19:53 Top Signal https://twitter.com/BanklessHQ/status/1409605228744175616?s=20 22:14 Raises Nansen a16z https://www.theblockcrypto.com/linked/109959/blockchain-data-nansen-12-million-series-a-a16z TracerDAO https://tracer.finance/radar/tracer-dao-raise/ 24:00 NEWS 24:10 Uniswap Education Fund https://gov.uniswap.org/t/governance-proposal-005-defi-education-fund/12963 27:25 Decentralizing Coinbase https://blog.coinbase.com/embracing-decentralization-at-coinbase-7fa0e5d1084b 30:15 Kain & Synthetix https://thedefiant.io/synthetix-founder-announces-return-to-save-the-project/ 31:50 Axie Infinity https://metaversal.banklesshq.com/p/the-axie-infinity-boom 34:10 Twitter NFTs https://twitter.com/sassal0x/status/1410234844353761285?s=21 35:47 Tim Berners-Lee NFT https://www.cnn.com/style/article/tim-berners-lee-nft-auction/index.html 37:35 Jay-Z Cryptopunk https://twitter.com/DeFi_Dad/status/1408434725551759360?s=20 Sotheby’s: https://www.coindesk.com/jay-z-to-auction-reasonable-doubt-nft-at-sothebys 40:14 Bitcoin Miner Migration https://preview.redd.it/wg88833hff871.jpg?width=1024&auto=webp&s=cf8bf121e8e6be28b659f626b4e5a0f92c17352f https://preview.redd.it/wg88833hff871.jpg?width=1024&auto=webp&s=cf8bf121e8e6be28b659f626b4e5a0f92c17352f 41:37 TeraWulf Mining Firm https://www.theblockcrypto.com/linked/110101/bitcoin-mining-firm-terawulf-orders-new-machines-cost-estimated-at-nearly-100-million 47:48 Ark Invest BTC ETF https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/28/cathie-woods-ark-invest-files-to-create-a-bitcoin-etf.html 49:07 El Salvador Airdrop https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthart/2021/06/25/adults-in-el-salvador-to-get-30-in-bitcoin-as-nation-unveils-details-to-make-crypto-legal-tender/amp/?__twitter_impression=true 50:54 UK on Finance https://www.wsj.com/articles/binance-crypto-exchange-ordered-to-cease-u-k-activities-11624812672 51:30 Fed & CDBC https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/quarles20210628a.htm 53:15 FTX, Tom Brady & Gisele https://decrypt.co/74771/tom-brady-and-gisele-bundchen-invest-in-ftx 54:40 Drive By’s ICP: https://twitter.com/jamesspediacci/status/1408532682192035840?s=21 Visa Hiring: https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/110119/visa-makes-five-strategic-crypto-hires-and-placements USDC Multi-Chain: https://twitter.com/CoinDesk/status/1409992722878980104?s=19 59:00 TAKES 59:30 .com to .eth https://twitter.com/robogajesh/status/1408146369471139842?s=20 1:02:00 Unraveling Hierarchies https://twitter.com/joshuarosenthal/status/1408814378913341443?s=21 1:03:34 Coinbase will sell anything https://twitter.com/TheBlock__/status/1409676059302236162 1:05:27 Adios Uber https://twitter.com/EthereumFear/status/1409874076491993125?s=20 1:08:10 DAOs https://coopahtroopa.mirror.xyz/_EDyn4cs9tDoOxNGZLfKL7JjLo5rGkkEfRa_a-6VEWw 1:08:50 What David’s Excited About 1:11:11 What Ryan’s Excited About 1:15:53 The Future is DAO https://twitter.com/thefutureisdao1/status/1409862176953806850?s=21 1:16:58 MEME OF THE WEEK https://i.redd.it/c6nu7bdec8771.png ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/bankless-disclosures

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

• 0:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  Hey Bankless Nation, it is the fifth and final week of June. We have begun July and it is time for rollups, weekly rollups. David, you ready for this?

• 0:23David Hoffman?

  Absolutely. I drank my coffee. I've got the energy. I'm ready to roll up the week in crypto with you, Ryan.

• 0:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  Dude, it's almost like the 4th of July. Are you celebrating this weekend?

• 0:33David Hoffman?

  Yeah, tomorrow I'm going on a boat. And then on Friday, I'm watching fireworks, as one does. Or excuse me, on Sunday.

• 0:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, as am I. And I was kind of curious, it's like, what stage do you think will be in where blockchains have their own holidays? Do you think that'll happen? There will be a day, like maybe in the future, was it December 1st? ETH 2 staking first went live? Will the Ethereum community celebrate that as a holiday?

• 0:58David Hoffman?

  Right, yeah. Well, I can tell you, the United States of America would, will not be celebrating that because that's a nation's day holiday, not a blockchain holiday. So really, it'll only kind of be for like the Ethereum native to like have kind of their own day. But then it's not a holiday, right? It's like, hey, it's the 10th anniversary of EIP 1559, like not coming into work. Like, no, like that's not gonna happen.

• 1:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, well, maybe we'll celebrate on Bankless. Anyway, sorry, for the digress, guys. This is the quickest way to get crypto downloaded into your brain. Every week we cover market releases, news takes. And then what we're excited about this comes out every Friday with your morning coffee. Live, not live, but it comes on YouTube and also on the podcast. If you want to get it, feels pretty live. David, we should talk about Kyber first because we've been promising this for a while. But they just rolled out a really cool liquidity program. What's going on with Kyber?

• 1:47David Hoffman?

  Yeah, Kyber is doing a liquidity mining program, both on the L1, but also on the Polygon L2. This is part of the DeFi Summer Thesis L Layer 2 Edition. Is that there's going to be a bunch of liquidity mining rewards existing on the Layer 2. So if you're looking on the screen, you can see all of the different ways that you can get some extra yield on your yield. Yo dog, I heard you liked yield. So if you are supplying stablecoins, get yield on your year. If you're supplying stablecoins, take a look at Kyber's new Rainmaker liquidity mining program. There's a link in the show notes below where you can find out how to get some extra KNC and some extra Matic tokens if you are bullish on those particular two assets.

• 2:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  Guys, 25 million in rewards over the next three months, not a small amount. So, check that out. Make sure you check that out. Alright, David, you ready to get to markets?

• 2:34David Hoffman?

  Let's do it, Ryan.

• 2:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  Let's talk Bitcoin first. What's going on with Bitcoin price since last week?

• 2:40David Hoffman?

  Bitcoin started the week at $34,000, dropped all the way down to $30,000, jumped up to $36,500, and is currently at the level of $33.3000. That's what happened with Bitcoin last week.

• 2:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is crab season? Just a little back and forth sideways?

• 2:57David Hoffman?

  Feels like crab season, yeah. We go up a little bit, people get bullish, we go down a little bit, people get bearish. At the end of the week, we're at the same level we started with. Crab season.

• 3:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  Crab season, crab summer. Okay, what about ETH? Same story. Dude, these charts look similar.

• 3:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  Actually, that's because it's the same chart. Never mind, I have Bitcoin price twice.

• 3:16David Hoffman?

  The story is gonna be pretty much the same. Ether started the week at $2,000, fell down to the low, low price of $1,700, spooked some people, and then it jumped to $2,300, got people excited again. Now it's at $2,100, and then once again, started how, or ended the week how we started it, roughly at the same price. Crab season, yo.

• 3:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  Let's see if we're seeing any story in the ETH-Bitcoin ratio. What's this ratio showing? Are we up or down on the week?

• 3:44David Hoffman?

  We are up on the week. We tapped a new local low of .055, but Ether seems to really be allergic to anything below that, and so we jumped from .055 to .0, almost .066, so almost up 10% versus Bitcoin on the week. I tweeted out, there was a day where Ether really jumped up versus Bitcoin, I think it was like two days ago, and I tweeted out, "ETH BTC up 8%, resume flippanting talk", and clearly that tweet had product-market fit because it got over like 700 likes in like a day and a half.

• 4:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Have you seen some flipping talk yet, though? I haven't seen as much.

• 4:24David Hoffman?

  I told people to resume it, so I guess we'll see.

• 4:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, so now after the roll up, guys, you can resume flipping talk. You know what? I want to take some credit for this tweet, David, because I said this in December 2020. This may be hard for some of you to hear, but ETH will outperform Bitcoin again in 2021. Quote me, I said, I threw that out there, David. And you know what? At the time, it was really Bitcoin maximalism season very much. Like Bitcoin was just like wrecking everything else. And here we are, six month in. Bitcoin is up 16% year to date. ETH is up 188%.

• 5:03David Hoffman?

  This was right after DeFi season. This was right after DeFi season, right after everyone was bearish on Ether because all the DeFi tokens mooned and Ether just lagged behind. And then you tweeted this and then it was like, oh yeah, Ether took the reins for the next like six months. But Ryan, question to you. Do you think, is it going to happen again? What about the, for the next six months?

• 5:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like, you mean the next six months?

• 5:25David Hoffman?

  Outperform?

• 5:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  I want to say yes, but I'm not pulling, putting my full weight into that prediction, David. Where I'm putting my full weight is I think by end of the year, if you look year to date, ETH will still have outperformed Bitcoin. I feel really comfortable with that prediction. I'm not sure what the next six months will bring. I still feel like it's probably true. Although, look at this, man. ETH is already up 188%, whereas Bitcoin is up 16%. It's like, it just has to kind of hold that. And the prediction comes true. So I'm being sort of conservative. I, I think it'll happen, but I'm not too sure. We'll see what that ratio does.

• 6:00David Hoffman?

  Granted, Bitcoiners said very similar things about Bitcoin versus Ether throughout 2019 and 2020 because Bitcoin really outperformed Ether. And really, it was just kind of signals like, well, maybe I should rotate then. Because if you sold Bitcoin for Ether while Bitcoiners were talking about how Bitcoin has outperformed, that was the right move.

• 6:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Or just don't worry about it and hold both, you know? That's a, that's a secret. Okay, let's talk about DeFi Pulse. What's going on with total locked value in DeFi? We're at 52 billion down from the highs. Still haven't hit that, like that 100 billion mark seems kind of far away at this point. But what's happening here? Just crabbing?

• 6:40David Hoffman?

  We're just crabbing, staying, keeping the head above $50 billion locked in at DeFi. Ave staying around 15% dominance, not really too much churn going on right now, I would say.

• 6:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, how about DPI? These, this is our index of DeFi tokens. Looks like that's kind of also flat on the week-ish.

• 6:58David Hoffman?

  Shocker, crab season. How many times are we gonna say it in the market section?

• 7:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Not, not another time. Well, let's talk about the DPI index to Ether. So this, this is a different seasonal benchmark. Aw, man, we're below 13%, David.

• 7:13David Hoffman?

  We are below, we are below, below 0.13. Yet, I am still feeling good about the DPI bottom. It's still proximate to 0.13. I didn't get the specific number, but I'm feeling good about it being the bottom. And I remember when we had Ledger on the State of the Nation, fantastic episode, you should go watch it. He talked about how like the 0.13 level could be like a good entrance and it might like dip below it and then, and then kind of zoom back up for hopefully a DPI bull market, maybe, but like, I'm still feeling good about the bottom. Like the 0.13 wasn't the perfect call, but like if this is actually the bottom, the 0.13 call will be great entrance if of course, it doesn't go any lower.

• 7:57David Hoffman?

  But I guess I'm just kind of like biting my own tail here.

• 8:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Guys, we know that's important to David, so buy some DeFi tokens and support David's cause. He doesn't want to miss that one.

• 8:05David Hoffman?

  Please, I'm buying DPI right now for sure.

• 8:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  What's this? This is L2 Beat. I know you guys looked at this last week, but this, this feels like the DeFi Pulse of Layer 2. It's, it's like total locked value in Ethereum's Layer 2 platforms. What is this showing us?

• 8:21David Hoffman?

  Right, so just like DeFi Pulse, it shows you all of the value that is deposited into all these various Layer 2s. There is $322 million in Last week it was 340 something million dollars, so down on the week. But this is something that we are going to track moving forward. This is very reminiscent to very early DeFi post pages where, you know, when we were initially looking at the value locked in DeFi, we were looking at the tens and maybe even the hundreds of millions of dollars. Whereas now we're looking at the billions of dollars. And so I'm pretty sure this story is going to be one to follow, which is why we're going to come back to L2 beat frequently, just to track the growth of layer two on Ethereum.

• 9:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's kind of cool that it's pure layer twos. It doesn't include Polygon, for example.

• 9:08David Hoffman?

  If it did, it would just like drown out literally everything else.

• 9:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh my God, Polygon's got many billions now.

• 9:14David Hoffman?

  Billions and billions, yeah. Which is why, which is why we know that there's, this is coming, right? Like optimism and Arbitrum are going to open up in July. That's really where this game is going to start going.

• 9:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, guys, we are going to be back with the hot releases for the week. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible.

• 9:32David Hoffman?

  The Aave protocol is a decentralized liquidity protocol on Ethereum, which allows users to supply and borrow certain crypto assets. Aave version two has a ton of cool features that makes using the Aave protocol even more powerful. With Aave, you can leverage the full power of DeFi money legos, yield and composability all in one application. On Aave, there are a ton of assets that you can supply to the protocol in order to gain yield. And all of those same assets can also be borrowed from the protocol if you have supplied collateral. One of my favorite Aave features is the ability to select a stable interest rate. Once I've selected a stable interest rate, I'm protected against any interest rate volatility that may happen in DeFi and allows me to plan my DeFi finances for the long term.

• 10:16David Hoffman?

  V2 also features the ability for users to swap collateral without having to withdraw your assets, trade them on Uniswap and then deposit them back into Aave. With Aave, users can do this in one seamless transaction, saving you time and gas costs. Check out the power of Aave at ave.com. That's A-A-V-E dot com. Balancer is a powerful platform for flexible automated market makers. Typical AMMs just have two. Two tokens inside of one liquidity pool, which can lead to fractured liquidity across the many pairs in DeFi. With Balancer, you can access the full power of multiple tokens inside of one single AMM, which unlocks an entirely new playing field of possibility. This makes Balancer an awesome building block for so many different use cases. Balancer pools can make asset indices,

• 11:00David Hoffman?

  but instead of paying fees to portfolio managers, Balancer lets you collect the fees from traders who use your portfolio for liquidity. Additionally, Balancer smart pools can be programmed to have properties that change according to predetermined rules, such as changing the swap fees based on market conditions. Or even liquidity bootstrapping pools, which can help you launch and distribute your token with day one liquidity. At Bankless, we use a liquidity bootstrapping pool to sell our BAP t-shirts to much success. V2 brings powerful new features that makes your money work even harder for you. In V2, idle tokens are capable of generating yield in DeFi without sacrificing liquidity in the pool using asset managers. Balancer's Vault architecture lets you trade between Balancer pools at a fraction of the cost versus other platforms.

• 11:45David Hoffman?

  And you can even take advantage of dynamic fees, which automatically adapt to changing market conditions. Balancer's mission is to become the primary source of liquidity in DeFi by providing the most flexible and powerful platform for asset management and decentralized exchange. Dive into the Balancer pools at app-balancer.fi.

• 12:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, guys, we are back with releases. David, we got to start here. Compound is doing some cool things. They launched the Compound Treasury, which it seems like provides institutions the ability to earn 4% APR. That's like 30x what you receive in a traditional savings account. So not insignificant. I think the difference is they're offering this to like a different audience. It's not the DeFi natives and crypto natives. It's institutions. Any thoughts on this?

• 12:31David Hoffman?

  Yeah, these feel like the base hair follicles of the DeFi mullet. This is where the DeFi mullet grows out of. Here's a, there's a super weird metaphor for you.

• 12:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  Beautiful.

• 12:42David Hoffman?

  Yeah, this feels like a Compound just advertising, "Hey, just use us for your yield. Figure out how to attract capital." Your guys' problem, but come to us for yield and we'll solve that yield problem for you. So Compound, opening up surface area for the DeFi mullet. More hair follicles.

• 12:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Do you want to see some DeFi mullet? David?

• 12:59David Hoffman?

  Sure.

• 13:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Check this out, man.

• 13:00David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 13:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Current. Already. Do you know what current is?

• 13:03David Hoffman?

  Now I do.

• 13:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. They say they're not a bank, but they kind of are a bank, right? They've got like bank connectivity, but look at this.

• 13:10David Hoffman?

  Improvement upon a bank, sure.

• 13:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, but look at this. We're excited to work with Compound Treasury to be able to offer our members access to the protocol's interest rate through a simple unified experience. DeFi mullet, fintech on the front, Compound on the back. It's really cool to see.

• 13:24David Hoffman?

  A single solid hair growing out of current, out of Compound's hair follicles? All right, how long should I take this metaphor for?

• 13:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Keep going, all episode. I'm really digging this. I'm really digging this. Okay.

• 13:35David Hoffman?

  10,000 word article coming in.

• 13:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  The dissection of the mullet. All right, Polygon launches Avail. Avail, what is Avail, David?

• 13:44David Hoffman?

  Yeah, Avail is a data availability layer on Polygon. So for those that are familiar with the project of Lazy Ledger, this is a similar data availability structure for the Polygon layer two. So if you're into the world of cryptography and blockchain and consensus, you kind of know what I'm talking about. If you're not, then you're probably really confused, which is actually kind of closer to where I am. But basically there's this data availability problem and there's a number of different ways to solve it. And Avail is trying to solve it for the Polygon ecosystem.

• 14:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Rollups have this limitation too, right? Storing data on chain is one of their limitations. So this is really an effort to like further scale L2s and rollups by offering a data availability layer on top of Ethereum. I haven't dug into the details. I'm sure this means even more to some of our listeners, but this is another scalability tech being based on Ethereum that's going to really propel the rollup roadmap, which is super cool, super exciting.

• 14:38David Hoffman?

  And this is one of the bull cases for Polygon is that any chain that Nick can and needs to be built will be built. And so that's kind of why Matic Token is so highly valued, at least in my opinion.

• 14:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's kind of cool too. It's, I think it's bullish for Polygon too. It's like they're not stopping with just a chain, right? And I know they've said they're coming out with rollups and ZK rollup like tech and that sort of thing. But also a whole data availability solution? I was not expecting that. It's kind of cool. All right, Cream Finance announcing integration with Polygon too. So what is Cream? They're deploying on Polygon, another protocol, part of the theme here. But like, what are they?

• 15:15David Hoffman?

  Cream is a money market, just like Compound and Ave. I put them on, there's a different risk spectrum that every single money market really likes to take on. Compound is kind of known as the conservative risk-off money market. That's why they have such few assets on there.

• 15:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's why they can do the DeFi mullet.

• 15:31David Hoffman?

  That's why they can do the DeFi mullet. Yep, Protocol Sync Thesis. Ave is kind of more in the liberal camp of risk, but still pretty good, right in the middle ground. Cream is like, yeah, let's open up the floodgates of all the assets. Let's list all the assets, a little bit more risky, but you know, to some degree, you can only get liquidity on many different assets using Cream. And now Cream is on Polygon.

• 15:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  There you go. Very cool. All right, let's talk about Perpetual Protocol. So they have launched a cross-margin trading, limit order, multi-collateral protocol. This is basically on Arbitrum that they're launching as well. It's called Curie. What's special about this data?

• 16:15David Hoffman?

  There's just a number of different use cases for financial activity that really can only work on Layer 2. And Perpetual Swaps is definitely one of them. Just high-frequency trading, or just people that want to be really active with their trades. And anyone who's day trading, really, it works a lot better on Layer 2. So Perpetual Protocol, I'm actually doing a Meet the Nation with them. I'm recording with them today, so that will probably be out sometime early next week, if you guys want a deeper dive into Perpetual Protocol. But overall, it's just a suite of trading activities, and now it can be done on Layer 2.

• 16:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  Speaking of Meet the Nations, and actually, I think State of the Nation, we had Element Protocol not too long ago. Their founder is on will, and now it looks like they have finally deployed to mainnet, which is super exciting. What is Element Protocol, David? What's the TLDR?

• 17:04David Hoffman?

  Yeah, Element Finance takes one asset and splits it into two. And so you have the principal asset and the yield asset. And it allows people to kind of break apart the different properties of a single asset and allows people to express their opinions about what they want in more granular ways. Do you want really the yield side of an asset, or do you want the principal? Side of an asset and allows you to express your financial opinions about the future in in different ways. Go check out the state of the nation for for more details. One of the really exciting things about element is the the team, a bunch of Ethereum OGs, both on the team itself, as well as the advisors, just core Ethereum consensus, like Ethereum one builders,

• 17:46David Hoffman?

  along with just Ethereum L2 advisors as well. Eric Connor is on the advisor, Danny Ryan is an advisor. So just an all star team with an all star product.

• 17:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Very cool. All right. We also have more yields happening this time on Coinbase. So this is super interesting to me. Coinbase is now going to start offering 4% APY on USDC coin inside of Coinbase. So previously, I think they have sort of a savings light type product. But if you have USDC on Coinbase, it offers like something like 0.15%.

• 18:21David Hoffman?

  I thought it was like 1.5% when the last I checked.

• 18:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  It was at one time, but then it dropped all the way back down. So it's not really, it's more like a bank savings rate, a little bit higher, but not much. This is something different. This is where Coinbase is actually lending out your USDC, similar to how a BlockFi might lend it out and is providing that that higher APY, that 4% rate. So kind of interesting. It's unclear where they're getting the interest. It's kind of like like BlockFi. It's sort of like a black box, David.

• 18:54David Hoffman?

  It's a little bit coincidental that you get 4% on Coinbase and Compound gets gives you 4% with their feature.

• 19:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  I was gonna say this same week, kind of interesting. I mean, they could get 4% from Compound, right? That would be protocol sync thesis. Absolutely. But anyway, interesting that they are offering this certainly competing with with the BlockFi's of the world, maybe doing some protocol sync, getting into Compound, we're not sure. But we're actually going to have Robert Leschner on State of the Nation on Monday. So he's been very involved. He's a founder of the Compound Protocol to talk about Compound Treasury.

• 19:30David Hoffman?

  Very involved.

• 19:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  He is very involved. Without Robert, it wouldn't have happened. Very involved.

• 19:37David Hoffman?

  Very active contributor.

• 19:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I may have downplayed that a little bit. He's he does some work for Compound. Kind of a big deal there. Anyway, he's going to tell us, hopefully, maybe about maybe have comments on this Coinbase 4% APY.

• 19:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  Because I know Coinbase and Compound have been close in the past too. So there you go. Sort of interesting. It's going on here. David, we gotta, we gotta end releases with this. We have a couple of raises to talk about, but a new crypto comedy show has been released.

• 20:05David Hoffman?

  By who?

• 20:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  Dude, I watched it. It was fantastic.

• 20:08David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 20:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  I love not having to like, do the work to produce it, by the way.

• 20:12David Hoffman?

  And just consume it.

• 20:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  I could just enjoy it. So what is this? What'd you guys put out there?

• 20:17David Hoffman?

  Yeah, this is Top Signal, the newest show out of the Bankless ecosystem with Bankless's newest anchor, newest co-host, Michael Wong. One of my, actually the person that hired me for my first crypto job ever. And so we go way back. It was an ICO advisory company back in 2018. And that actually kind of led into our first gag that we did where we presented the three guests. It was DeFi Dad, Kevin Awaki, and Anthony Sazana. We presented them with two ICOs. One of them was real, one of them was fake, and they had to pick the real or the fake one. All three of them got it right. So it sounds like we need to become, get more creative on our ICOs. But we also did a crypto, anon crypto Twitter fantasy draft. And so each person had to draft their favorite anon crypto Twitter personalities.

• 21:00David Hoffman?

  And so we got to like, kind of, you know, jostle for who wants to pick what crypto anon. And then pitch our team and how our team's better than the rest. And we did some around the horn, just quick takes on different topics. It was, it was super fun. The through line or the, kind of the tagline for Top Signal is that it is in a superposition of a complete psyops, or the best alpha you've ever seen, or just a normal factual statement. It could be any of those three. We don't know, because we don't do, we don't do any fact checking on Top Signal.

• 21:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it's just kind of fun. And I don't know what you guys have in store for the future, but maybe some rap battles? That's a rumor?

• 21:38David Hoffman?

  Hayden Adams and Carl Florsch, we guys, we want you guys as a rap battle duo on, on Top Signal. It's gonna happen at some point in time.

• 21:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  That would be amazing. It's just a fun show. I can't wait for the next one. It sounds like there's no real like schedule like when's the next one gonna be, David?

• 21:53David Hoffman?

  As soon as we can, as soon as we corral the guests and get them on to the show. It's gonna be different every single time. We have Alexandra Botes, the chess streamer, and she's gonna come on with her co-host because she's actually also producing Ethereum content as well. And I'm gonna try and find the four best chess players.

• 22:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Are you gonna try to beat them in chess?

• 22:10David Hoffman?

  Yeah, we're gonna try and 4v2 them and see how far we can get, but overall, it's just gonna be a fun time.

• 22:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's awesome. Alright, guys, let's switch to some of the raises really quick. So one is Nansen. So Nansen is kind of like a blockchain data analytics provider.

• 22:27David Hoffman?

  Big data consumer, right?

• 22:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, and they provide a lot of Ethereum data. So they just received a funding from A16Z, $12 million, not an insignificant amount. Any other takes on this?

• 22:39David Hoffman?

  Yeah, no, I think this is really important infrastructure for just people who want to view the chain for data. And the Ethereum blockchain has an insane amount of data, and so you need systems to parse and consume and like digest that data. That's what Nansen does. And so this is gonna just be really important infrastructure moving forward.

• 22:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  Also with layer twos, man, all this data needs to be digested and consumed, so super important there. Also, the Tracer DAO closed $4.5 million in a raise. Some pretty pretty solid VCs were behind this. So one is Framework Ventures, who we've had on the podcast, but also some also some angels like Mariano Conti were part of this. And what is this protocol? It seems like it's perpetuals again, so it's another story, and they're deploying on Arbitrum as well. So it's another layer two first deployment, not main chain, which is kind of interesting. We're seeing that trend. Anything else to add about Tracer DAO, David?

• 23:37David Hoffman?

  Yeah, the DAO tagline makes me think that it doesn't at all stop with perpetuals. I think it's going to be kind of something similar to a DX DAO where they're just making a suite of financial services that's owned and operated by the DAO. And those suite of financial services makes the DAO money. And there's really positive statements by basically everyone involved. Mariano Conti is somebody I definitely trust for Signal, so when he says that he's excited about something, I pay attention. So Tracer DAO, I'm gonna be looking at you guys.

• 24:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  Mariano Conti, the Maker Mafia, maybe that's a thing now. All right, David, let's talk news, man. First is some Ethereum stuff. This deserves our attention. A DeFi education fund was proposed in Uniswap governance. Of course, we've talked about before, Uniswap has an absolutely massive treasury. It's mostly in uni tokens.

• 24:26David Hoffman?

  You hear it every single time in the Bankless ad.

• 24:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  Billions, exactly, that's right. So, but now this is a governance proposal to actually create a DeFi education fund, in quotes. This is a nonprofit, so a 501(c)(4) nonprofit based in the US. And it's, it's trying to fund all of the following: policymaker education. Oh, interesting lobby type stuff. Thought leadership and research, legal firepower, messaging, grassroots advocacy and best practices. It has people like Jake Chervinsky on, has people in the, in the DeFi space as well.

• 25:05David Hoffman?

  A lot of Dow experts here as well.

• 25:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  A lot of Dow experts, a lot of legal minds in DeFi. And this is, I feel like, David, this is DeFi starting to flex its muscle and saying, hey, we want a voice in legislation and, and we want to expand into hearts and minds. And we have the money and funds to do that, so we're going to go deploy them. What are your thoughts here?

• 25:26David Hoffman?

  Yeah, they are asking for 1 million uni tokens, which is a lot.

• 25:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  How much is that?

• 25:31David Hoffman?

  That is 15, 18 million dollars, depending on the state of the market. Let me go check the price of uni right now, 17.7 dollars per uni token. So 17.7 million dollars at the time of recording is what they are requesting, which is a large amount of money. But also, like, what the hell is the, is the treasury for if you're not going to open up the purse strings, right? And so, these are absolutely the right people to ask for this amount of money. And so I'm kind of pretty excited to see what they can get done with this. There is definitely some opportunities available for people to go and capture this. So kind of think, I'm pretty sure, think of this as like its own like micro uni grants, right?

• 26:12David Hoffman?

  They are, they are taking Uniswap money and then they are going to also give out grants. With it. So it's a grant giving grant and they have definitely goals and objectives that they want to reach. And there's a decent amount of things that the listener of this show could go and and produce. If for for money. And so they are looking for my eyes go to the thought, leadership and research. Posts where they say, we need more written and video content explaining DeFi. And its benefits in a medium that positively impacts the public perception of DeFi. Yo, like, right, you and I can do that. And so. We might be going after this bankless Dow. I challenge you guys to go after this bankless listeners. I also challenge you guys to go after this money. This money is for you.

• 26:56David Hoffman?

  So long as you can produce what these guys want you to produce.

• 26:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. And what this really speaks to is I think DeFi is now fighting for hearts and minds. And it's deploying capital to fight for hearts and minds. And this is not just like.

• 27:08David Hoffman?

  Going on the offensive.

• 27:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  The narrative. Exactly. Going on the offensive, but also like regulatory, which is really good to hear because guess what? Banks have this kind of regulatory firepower. Even crypto banks have it. We're going to talk about some FTX news where they're deploying capital and, you know, all sorts of ways. So DeFi needs a voice in our legislative halls, and I think this is a step towards that. So kind of cool. David, let's talk about this. So Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase. Put out a post called embracing decentralization at Coinbase. And the headline here is basically talking about Coinbase creating kind of an Apple App Store experience, right? But treating DeFi protocols as first class citizens. So DeFi protocols being kind of the apps and Coinbase custody being sort of the.

• 27:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like the custodian solutions being sort of the user inner like the, the, I guess, UI and the bridge to all of these apps. Kind of cool, David, because I think this is the protocol sync thesis in action. Coinbase is recognizing, hey, we don't have to build all of the apps. We don't even have to have maybe the most liquid trading markets in the world. We could just provide an interface to Uniswap and charge a fee on top of that. This, to me, is the future of banks. Now we'll have to see how they. enact this, but I do think it's going to be good for DeFi protocols overall. Not everybody's ready to to hold their own private keys. They need some handholding, at least at first, to get into this space. Any thoughts here?

• 28:36David Hoffman?

  Yeah, they really advertised the crypto app store, which gives me flashbacks to 2017 and 2018, where people were like, oh, yeah, we we used to have apps in the traditional app stores, Google, iOS. Now we have these D apps. And so we're going to fundraise $100 million to build the D app store, not realizing that D apps don't actually exist as something that you can download. Like, imagine going to your phone and downloading Uniswap. That's like a nonsensical thing to do. But that was like the vision back in 2017. But now this this can make a little bit more sense now. I think if people are, people are looking for familiarity when they come into crypto. They are straight up looking for like the DeFi tab in their Coinbase wallet. Or like, where's all the DeFi things?

• 29:19David Hoffman?

  And so maybe it's actually a really power play to put all of DeFi into one single UI and really make that available as a consumer in the ways that they are used to when it comes to the app store. So they can literally tap on Uniswap and then they open up Uniswap.

• 29:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I was never a fan of the 2017 like DAP thing, like we're creating an app store. And like, that was just such a, because it was very unfocused. But I am a fan of this because I think money apps are the thing. That is the thing that we are producing in crypto. It's a better banking system, a better financial system for the world. And so this seems much more focused. Remember the D apps of yesteryear could be anything. Like, it could be like a decentralized social media thing, or it could be like

• 30:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  all of these weird things that no one was actually using. But like, hey, if I can get 4% on my my USDC, on my stablecoin, by using a an app through Coinbase, I don't have to figure out DeFi, then cool. You know, sign me up. So, Dave, let's talk about this. Coin, Canes, Glorious Return. So Kane of the Synthetix product, he co-founded that. He has now returned to save the project? What's going on here? What? I didn't know Synthetix needed saving. Was it in trouble?

• 30:36David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so Kane likes to joke how he had taken a step back from the benevolent dictator to kind of just the guy that writes blogs over at Synthetix. Because like, to some degree, like, he is the Vitalik of Ethereum for Synthetix, he is the Satoshi for Bitcoin for Synthetix. And if we like decentralized apps, we want our applications to have leaders. But there's a friction there, because, you know, to some degree, leaders are leaders for a reason. And it sounds like after Kane stepped away, there was a bit of an unfilled power vacuum that never really got filled by the DAO. And so it sounds like Kane's coming back in to really just kind of be that guide that Synthetix needs.

• 31:17David Hoffman?

  DAOing is hard, and so maybe we do still need to, you know, come to terms with the fact that while DAOs are cool, they do need like, maybe some one single person kind of calling the shots until these things really grow out and mature.

• 31:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it seems like it's going to oscillate back and forth between that and the DAO structure, where you like, you decentralize and then you maybe do it too much, and you need to like, you know, re-centralize or create some more structure, and then maybe do that too much, and you kind of ebb and flow until you get the exact combination. Maybe that's how this is working. It seems like it's the next ebb and flow of Synthetix, though. David, let's talk NFT stuff, man. We gotta start here. Axie Infinity, who's a gaming platform, is absolutely booming. I was amazed when I saw this. So this is William Peaster, who writes the Bankless Metaverseal newsletter. He just put this post out today. Look at this, dude. Last 30 days, Axie Infinity has provided $11 million to its players.

• 32:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like, that means you're playing Axie, and you're making money while you're playing video games. My god, that was my dream as a 12-year-old boy growing up. Like, it's here. I can literally like-

• 32:27David Hoffman?

  There's a generation too late, Ryan.

• 32:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right, I know, man. Like, I can play video games for a living, and not just stream it, like, you know, the Twitch streamers these days, but like, the items I'm mining and the skills I have in this game, I can actually, these are real items with real world power. It's like, man, it's all my childhood fantasies are like happening now, David. I'm a kid again.

• 32:47David Hoffman?

  Dude, imagine if Diablo, if you could have made money from Diablo 2. Imagine how much money like a bail run would have gotten you.

• 32:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh my god, imagine how addicted I would be though.

• 32:57David Hoffman?

  Yeah, right. Yeah, maybe Bankless wouldn't have been exist, and you'd still be playing. It's crazy that Axie Infinity is making a substantial amount of more money, at least, again, at least in the last 30 days. 30 days is not a short amount of time than Maker Dow. Axie Infinity pulled in $11 million in revenue versus Maker Dow's $8.4 million. I'm not, I'm not sure if that 11 million revenue for Axie Infinity goes to like the Axie team, or is that's more like going to the players who are playing?

• 33:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  My understanding, it's going to the players, because it's like, you earn these things called like love potions, and there's a market for love potions, and then you can sell the love potions that you're earning on like Uniswap for, for money. So this is like, again, the intersection of like gaming, NFTs, and DeFi, all mashed together.

• 33:41David Hoffman?

  Totally. And this is actually not the first time that we've seen the story of people generating more income than their minimum wage in their home country. We saw this with Gazan Chain, there was a story of some Brazilian player who was making like 2 to 3 times the minimum wage just playing Gazan Chain and collecting scarce assets. I think this is the signs of things to come.

• 34:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, look at this. Axie Infinity, this is Linda, talking about Axie Infinity players in the Philippines earning a living wage through this. Really cool how global this is as well. Alright, David, on the NFT subject, Twitter is dropping its own NFTs on Rarible. That seems like a big deal. What's going on?

• 34:22David Hoffman?

  Yeah, Jack Dorsey is on one side of things telling us that Lightning Network is coming to Twitter, yet Twitter seems to be coming to Rarible to issue NFTs first. That's an interesting little juxtaposition right there. I don't know why these NFTs are valuable. They don't, I think, I don't really think they're-

• 34:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  It seems like they're testing?

• 34:40David Hoffman?

  It seems like, yeah, it seems like a test, right? Like, these aren't historical Twitter moments. It's not like Jack's tweet where he actually did sell that. These are kind of just random little Twitter creative drawings, so it's kind of the fact that the verified Twitter account is selling these things, that's really the big thing. It's not necessarily NFTs themselves.

• 34:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Back to your comment about Dorsey, though, somebody asked him, or somebody said this, I've talked shit about Jack being a maxi in the past, a Bitcoin maxi that is, but ever since following somebody, he's looking into it more, only a matter of time before he buys into ETH. Jack Dorsey buying ETH, and then Jack Dorsey comes in this thread, he was tagged on and says, "No, no, he is not buying ETH." And I love this follow-up, I think this is the follow-up. Chainlink God says, "How'd you pay the gas fees to mint these NFTs then, Jack?" Must somebody bust him out ETH, somebody Twitter, somebody...

• 35:33David Hoffman?

  Somebody is buying ETH, either it's Jack or Twitter itself.

• 35:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  Is this cognitive dissonance? Like, why does, why?

• 35:39David Hoffman?

  Just capitulate, Jack, it's okay.

• 35:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Just come on bankless, let's have a talk about it.

• 35:44David Hoffman?

  We will be really nice.

• 35:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  There can be more than one coin, there can be more than one store value. Okay, a couple more things going on in NFT world, the first is, Tim Berners-Lee has sold an NFT. This guy was one of the main people behind the internet that we know and love today. He sold some original code in NFT form for 5.4 million. This is another piece of crypto culture, or, excuse me, internet culture, getting preserved and valued as an NFT. Any thoughts here?

• 36:13David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I really think this is one of the core legitimate purposes behind NFTs, not people just like spinning up some 3D animations and graphics and selling and that, that's cool too, but NFTs are art, and art is partly historical, and if you want to own a piece of history, that's kind of the role that art serves, and if you want to own a piece of internet history, that's product market fit for NFTs. And so this going for 5.4 million dollars, that's actually kind of where I see NFTs, kind of like planting a flag and saying, "This is what we are for." There's many, many other things, there was an NFT mania that happened, but the high-priced one-of-ones of deep internet culture that

• 36:56David Hoffman?

  happened before NFTs were even a thing, I think that's, that kind of phenomenon is here to stay. So, congratulations for Tim Berners-Lee, created something open source for free, and then got 5.4 million dollars like 30 years later.

• 37:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  Do we know who bought it? Did Pleaser Dow get it, or somebody else?

• 37:13David Hoffman?

  Pleaser Dow did not buy it, I think they voted against buying it.

• 37:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, interesting. Well, you know what, it's super cool. Every, every time this happens, though, David... It makes CNN, you know, like, and that in itself is cool. That's a great thing for crypto. All right, let's talk about more things.

• 37:29David Hoffman?

  CNN has issued some NFTs last week, not apparently.

• 37:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  What?

• 37:31David Hoffman?

  Fun fact. Yeah, we don't have to go into it because they were a bunch of BS, but they're also in the NFT game.

• 37:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, can't, can't not be in that NFT game, I guess. Even if you're Jay-Z, this is crazy, dude. This is DeFi Dad tweet. Never thought I'd see Jay-Z with a CryptoPunk in his profile. So Jay-Z bought a CryptoPunk? And turned his profile into a punk? Is that right?

• 37:52David Hoffman?

  Well, we, we don't know the first part, but we don't know if he actually bought the CryptoPunk, but yes, his avatar is a CryptoPunk. It would be weird. It would be a transgression if you didn't own the CryptoPunk that is your Twitter avatar.

• 38:07David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 38:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's a hot CryptoPunk, too, man.

• 38:09David Hoffman?

  Yeah, that's simple features, looks like Jay-Z, you know, uh, black eye, funny hair, gold necklace, like, looks like Jay-Z. Yeah, that's the right CryptoPunk for him.

• 38:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  So we don't know if Jay-Z bought that or like somebody on his team bought that, but somebody knows what they're doing with respect to like NFT culture and crypto culture to do that.

• 38:28David Hoffman?

  Good branding.

• 38:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  I guess was that because he's minting an NFT? So he minted this NFT and maybe could talk about it, but he also looks like has uh, HOV dot ETH.

• 38:39David Hoffman?

  Hove, yeah.

• 38:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  As an DNS address, hove dot ETH. Um, he's got 99 problems, but minting ain't one. I love that, man. What's going on here?

• 38:46David Hoffman?

  Yeah. So he minted an NFT contract and if you are paying attention to the ceremonious event of minting a token, people like to put in ASIC art into their token contract just because it's free space, why not? And so they put in this big ASIC art Jay-Z into the token contracts that they minted for whatever this NFT that Jay-Z is issuing. I don't think that Jay-Z is knowledgeable about CryptoPunks or ASIC art in token minting contracts himself. I think that he hired a very well-informed, just like assistant or somebody to help guide or advisor. And that advisor is doing a great job. So, uh, Jay-Z, nice pick on your advisor, bro.

• 39:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  It looks like somebody from the Ethereum community got him Hove.ETH too, which is really cool. Alright, so this is the actual auction. So he's releasing this NFT on Sotheby's. So again, mainstream like artist rapper, cultural figure meets mainstream art distributor meets crypto NFTs. Another pretty big event. I don't know, man. Doesn't seem like NFTs are dead to me. Seems like stuff is still happening.

• 39:50David Hoffman?

  No, I think NFTs are just becoming more precise. That's what's going on is a lot the sheer number of NFTs being issued is definitely going down, but like the NFTs that are left behind are going up, up, up in value. Right?

• 40:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, that's super cool. Rumor is Katy Perry, Katy Perry NFT next?

• 40:09David Hoffman?

  Katy Perry NFT.

• 40:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right. It's crazy. California girls. Here we go. Bitcoin stuff. Bitcoin miner migration, man. That's been a big story. So like, what's happening? Bottom line is all the Bitcoin miners are leaving China right now due to oppressive China state regulation, essentially. As they're doing that, hash rate going down, down, down, down, down, down. Of course, this adjusts algorithmically every couple of weeks or so, but.

• 40:36David Hoffman?

  The hash rate does not. The Bitcoin or the difficulty adjustments adjust to accommodate changes in hash rate.

• 40:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right. So what, what, what's happening here? Are we just seeing the, the results of the migration going on in hash rate and difficulty adjustment?

• 40:50David Hoffman?

  People turning off their ASIC units to put them in boxes and ship them elsewhere. And anywhere else. I think there's a lot of, that's a, is a really important thing to find out. Each different farm.

• 41:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  Texas?

• 41:03David Hoffman?

  Yeah. People are really optimistic that it's coming to America. People and Bitcoiners are really trying to stamp their feet, saying like, hey, like, America is the right place to set up your Bitcoin shop. It's good. It's good for just the PR of Bitcoin if more hash rate is onshore in America where Bitcoin is largely going to be, become regulated. So favorable regulations if hash rate moves onshore. People like that. But also the other conversation is that China's really dirty, really dirty energy, lots of coal. And so anywhere, moving anywhere else out of China is positive towards like the whole green energy narrative that Bitcoin desperately needs.

• 41:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  David, I'm gonna skip ahead this one, but this is Bitcoin mining firm Terra Wolf orders new machines. So $100 million in Bitcoin ASICs, it seems like they just ordered. Actually, I don't know if this is exclusively, yeah, it seems like it's exclusively Bitcoin ASICs. What is going on here? So companies are still investing quite heavily in Bitcoin ASICs, $100 million here? How does this link to the Bitcoin miner migration story? What do you think the lens on this is?

• 42:09David Hoffman?

  Yeah, and this actually isn't the only story of its kind this week. There's actually been a number of stories going around about just mining firms just allocating, like raising a bunch of money to purchase new ASICs. This is something that as a Bitcoin miner, you have to do, you have to always be cycling through ASICs. But like this very high, this is the highest number that I saw, 100 million going to purchase ASICs. What the strategy for Bitcoin mining, and this isn't true for, this is just true for Bitcoin mining across the board, is that you buy like $100 million worth of Bitcoin ASICs, and then you are going to mine Bitcoin at a discount for the next like three to five years. So that $100 million of ASICs turns into somewhere between 200 to 500 million dollars worth of Bitcoin over the next three to five years.

• 42:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's fixed costs that you have to amortize, right?

• 42:53David Hoffman?

  Exactly. The point that I would like to make is that this $100 million going to purchase ASICs, all of that $100 million and all of those ASICs are going to be deprecated probably by the end of five years. And five years is already kind of long, like it's three years.

• 43:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  If you're deprecated, you can no longer mine using them.

• 43:11David Hoffman?

  They're no longer profitably mined.

• 43:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  They're dead, obsolete.

• 43:14David Hoffman?

  And then they can't, like, that's the other problem with ASICs is they can't be repurposed. And so like, to some degree, like, that's, that's nice for security, as in like, there's nothing else for ASICs, for the SHAF256 mining algorithms, computers, to do other than mine Bitcoin. And so when you purchase an ASIC, the only thing it can do is mine Bitcoin. As soon as it's dead, like, you can't repurpose it, you can't plug it into a different system, there's only Bitcoin. And so three to five years, there's $100 million of ASIC waste that happens, because these things are just literally trash. And, and to me, this is, this is why people say... That proof of work is just proof of stake with extra steps. If you are purchasing $100 million worth of ASICs, you are locked into mining Bitcoin.

• 43:59David Hoffman?

  That's the only thing you can do with your $100 million investment. You are locked into these ASICs. You are locked into the value of Bitcoin, the value of the Bitcoin blockchain and the value of BTC. And then you get discounted Bitcoins over time for the next three to five years. But it's not even efficient proof of stake, because you have to keep on spending capital to buy more ASICs. And the ASICs keep on getting burnt and wasted. And so like, this is, this is, uh, just, I wanted to bring this up, just because this is good anecdotes and good lessons for why proof of stake is what it is. It's the same, there's the same similar properties to proof of work. Just, it's just cuts to the chase, which is that proof of work is just proof of stake with, with extra steps involved and a lot of waste.

• 44:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Stake is just tokenized ASICs. We've said that before. I think it's true here. Two other points I want to make on that, David, is, is one, we don't often talk, we talk about the energy consumption of Bitcoin mining, but we don't talk about the hardware energy consumption of Bitcoin mining. All of those machines need to be thrown away. And there's a whole energy ESG debate here that they're totally trash after a few years. But I will say on the flip side, Bitcoiners will say, that's actually an advantage, David, because what it does is it recycles some of the capital, right? So like, it distributes capital in a way like, they'll, they'll say that staking ASICs, if you want to call them that, that the tokens behind, they don't deprecate. They never, so that establishes a ruling oligarchy plutocracy

• 45:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  in the network that, that Bitcoin doesn't have. I think we've had Justin Drake on that kind of debate that. And what's interesting about that debate is like, the actual amount of Bitcoin that gets distributed at, at this point in time from that is like, super small, like. Relatively small compared to the cost to the system to do that distribution. And then the other thing is, I guess, like, who's it getting distributed to? Right? It's definitely not getting distributed to the mom and pops because they can't. They can't afford $100 million to run ASICs in a data center. There, no one's mining out of their homes. So, you know, there is a counterpoint that Bitcoiners would say about this, about it being a good thing.

• 46:06David Hoffman?

  I have my counterpoints to those counterpoints. I don't know if we want to keep on going.

• 46:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  Lay them on me, real quick.

• 46:11David Hoffman?

  Okay, so the whole proof of stake, rich get richer thing is like, you know, it's good that ASICs deprecate because then if you are a mining operation, you keep on having to expend capital to keep up. Interesting take. That doesn't mean that like proof of stake is the complete opposite where like the rich only get richer. If you are staking and you are a $100 million fund, or you're an individual with just like three ether, you are receiving the same rate of return, same rate of return. And so, like, yes.

• 46:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  No economies of scale.

• 46:43David Hoffman?

  The stakers are getting richer as a proportion of the overall e-supply versus non-stakers. But if you want to participate in consensus, the whole reason why proof of stake is so cool is I can do it from my laptop. I can do it from my home and I have the access to the same rate of return as a gargantuan hedge fund. And so, to some degree, like, it's not a distribution problem if everyone can access this stake, right? If everyone can access the upside. And that's a really important point to drive home. The other thing that Bitcoiners often talk about is how like, you know, Bitcoin is going to be green because it's going to incentivize energy production. And Bitcoiners and Bitcoin mining operations are actually going to be the source of energy because they are going to be paired with an energy generation facility. And Bitcoin miners are actually going to get their energy for free.

• 47:27David Hoffman?

  This is a thought, a theory as to the future of Bitcoin miners. This is articulated by Bitcoiners. The problem with that is that once Bitcoin miners get their energy for free, then it's the same critique that they were just critiquing proof of stake about, where the rich get richer because these miners have zero capital cost because they're getting free energy. And so, there's friction, there's tension between these two narratives articulated by Bitcoiners that you can only pick one.

• 47:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, I like, interesting, right? There's definitely both sides to this argument. And it's interesting to see that play out. But wow, a lot of money on Bitcoin mining still happening. While we're on Bitcoin, David, let's talk about Kathy Wood's Ark Invest. They are planning to create a Bitcoin ETF called Arc B. Now, whether they'll be successful, who knows? No one's been successful previously, but this is really interesting. They had been buying grayscale in bulk and they're still doing that. They're buying both grayscale GBDC and the ETH E version of grayscale. This is kind of a departure to kind of cut out the grayscale middleman and apply for an ETF directly. Whether they'll be successful or not, who knows?

• 48:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  Only the SEC knows, only Gary Gensler and crew are in control of that. But it is an interesting move at any rate. It definitely shows bullishness on Bitcoin and crypto writ large.

• 48:43David Hoffman?

  The pile of proposed Bitcoin ETFs just continues to grow. I really feel sorry for the SEC because they are really.

• 48:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  Do you? It's easy, man. I have a way out to the SEC. Just approve them.

• 48:56David Hoffman?

  All of them? And then if you don't approve all of them, how do you select which ones to not like approve?

• 49:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's definitely not credibly neutral.

• 49:05David Hoffman?

  Right, it's not a credibly neutral choice. And they've really backed themselves into a corner on this one. But Kathy Wood, love what you're doing. I really hope that you get your Bitcoin ETF.

• 49:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  And I hope you come on Bankless.

• 49:17David Hoffman?

  Yep, I want to.

• 49:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's been coming soon, hopefully. All right, let's talk about this conclude Bitcoin news. Adults in El Salvador are getting $30 in Bitcoin as El Salvador is unveiling details to make crypto a legal tender. We talked about this a couple of episodes ago. It's big news, right? Making legal tender, making Bitcoin legal tender in El Salvador is big. There's always this question of, okay, how are the people going to benefit from this? This is kind of cool, David.

• 49:44David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 49:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  Looks like the El Salvadorian government is going to give individual citizens up to $30 in order to promote adoption. And they have to buy that Bitcoin from somewhere. They can't just mint it. They can't produce it. This is not a fiat currency, right? They have to buy it in order to get it or mine it, maybe some volcano mining. I don't know, but it's kind of a cool story. And I think it's great for the Bitcoin community and great for Bitcoin adoption.

• 50:07David Hoffman?

  And if you are an El Salvadorian citizen and you are skeptical about El Salvador's usage of Bitcoin, perhaps this

• 50:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  Free money helps.

• 50:15David Hoffman?

  Free money helps, that's literally the purpose of airdrops, right? And also, if you want to generate a Bitcoin native economy inside of El Salvador, you need Bitcoin to be in the hands of people. Like, imagine if you're just like, if your family in El Salvador is talking to this other family in El Salvador and they're like, "Oh, Bitcoin is legal tender now. Do you guys have any? No, no, we don't have any Bitcoin." Oh, well, now you do. Now, everyone just got $30 in Bitcoin. So now you can actually start that Bitcoin native economy inside of El Salvador. I think this is a really good move that really indicates that the president of El Salvador, Nayib, his heart's in the right place, his heart and mind's in the right place. So, good move, good move.

• 50:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  I saw Nayib shaking hands or standing next to Peter McCormick, a podcaster. What a crazy world we live in, David. Like, media podcaster shaking hands with the president of a sovereign nation to talk about Bitcoin? Kind of wild stuff. Anyway, we'll be following that as it progresses in the future. Let's talk about Binance and UK regulation. This is our regulatory section. The UK is cracking down on Binance, ordering the exchange to cease operations in the UK. I'm not sure how much they're able to actually restrict Binance's operation, but it seems like they're trying to. Any takes here?

• 51:27David Hoffman?

  Yeah, the longer that Binance continues to exist, the more and more it's going to just come under the purview of nation-states. It's a meat space company that's operating under meat space laws. The meat space is going to come after Binance at some point in time, and it's going to have to bend the knee to nation-states. That is my take.

• 51:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yep, I think it's happy to bend the knee, too. All right, let's talk about the Fed now. So this is a vice chair of the Federal Reserve Board, Randy Quarles, and he authored a paper called "Parachute Pants," an article that is, and "Central Bank Money," which basically he argues the TLDR is, "Our existing banking system is fine. Our payment system works well. It's getting even better all of the time, and we don't really need a CDBC stablecoin at all, or a CDBC strategy to compete with China." He said this, and then he Also said, which I find very interesting, but yes, we should be saying yes to stablecoins, to private stablecoins. So his take is no CBDC. We don't need to create a centralized China

• 52:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  style CBDC. But yes, stablecoins are fine, like private, you know, stablecoins acting as sort of a proxy CBDC. That's okay. So it just shows, David, that there continues to be some division, I think, within the US government and the Fed on what its strategy is, unlike China, which seems like, no, we're full steam ahead. We're doing the CBDC thing. We're going to digitize everything. The Fed is kind of waffling on, should we do one? Or should we not? We're not really sure. And it keeps going back and forth, it seems like.

• 52:56David Hoffman?

  Yeah. On the last weekly roll up with Anthony Cisano, we had a topic about how the Fed is continuing to research and look into central bank digital currencies. Like, oh, great, more research, more, more, more talk. This is interesting that a Fed vice chair is saying, hey, let's let the private market produce the products. I'm aligned with this, actually. That makes more sense to me. I mean, do fix your, your banking system is not what you said it was. If that was actual quote, like, let's be real here. And also, stablecoins are the solution to that. But I also agree with you. We do not need a central bank digital currency for the US dollar.

• 53:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, let's talk crypto banks really quick. So FTX, which is a crypto exchange, crypto bank, as we call them, has just recruited Tom Brady and Gisele, Tom Brady's wife, to be the spokesperson for FTX. I don't know, given them some equity, some investing as well, some money in exchange for this. Really interesting how crypto banks are starting to saturate into mainstream, but we talked about this from a regulatory perspective, but now like mainstream influencers, not on the DeFi bandwagon, but like on the crypto bank bandwagon. I don't love this. I don't hate this. What's your take?

• 54:06David Hoffman?

  Yeah, my question is, do you think Sam Bankman Fried is really all that much of a sports fan?

• 54:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh my god. No.

• 54:14David Hoffman?

  I don't think he is. I don't think he is.

• 54:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  To answer that question is no.

• 54:18David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 54:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  But is he a savvy business person?

• 54:20David Hoffman?

  Yes.

• 54:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Is he a new level banker?

• 54:22David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 54:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  Using all the tools at his disposal to make more money and make FTX bigger? Yes.

• 54:28David Hoffman?

  Yes, that's exactly what's going on.

• 54:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, I don't know how this ends. I guess it's okay for crypto. I don't know long term if it's good for decentralization. I feel like there's some final bosses out there, but there is a mini boss where DeFi might have to fight the crypto banks at some point in time.

• 54:44David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 54:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  I've always thought that.

• 54:45David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 54:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  We'll see how it goes. I like FTX. SBF has me blocked on Twitter, but if I could tweet at you, I'd be like, hey, come on Bankless. Let's talk about what your plans are.

• 54:55David Hoffman?

  Yeah, right.

• 54:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  Let's talk about it. Alright, let's do some drive By's, David.

• 54:58David Hoffman?

  Well.

• 54:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  ICP is not insane con posse. What is ICP? What are they doing?

• 55:03David Hoffman?

  ICP is the internet computer. Is that what that means? I think that's what that means. It's the token for Definity. And Definity has been largely critiqued by its large, high production launch and high media, just overall, just like a ton of marketing, ton of PR, ton of production.

• 55:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Taken forever too.

• 55:23David Hoffman?

  Taken forever to get their product out the door. People who pay attention to Definity say that their code is really interesting. But I think that they have just taken all of the opportunity that they could have had to be a legitimate product and they crumpled it up in a piece of paper and they threw it in the trash. Because the team dumped so much of the tokens into the free market that it just tanked the price. And so the Definity team walked away with, I think, something like, can you go back to the first screenshot, Ryan? Something with 300, they dumped 20 million ICP tokens, Definity tokens. The average price of $300, walked away with $6 billion in the first two weeks of trading.

• 56:05David Hoffman?

  So they said, hey, all you people that are bullish to Definity, that's great. We're gonna dump on you. And there's no way, there's no faster way to just ruin your legitimacy as a project than to dump on the people that are willing to buy into your project on day one. Like, big mistake. Big mistake.

• 56:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's it. Yeah, we'll see how it goes.

• 56:22David Hoffman?

  Well, I mean, how do I say it's a mistake? They made $6 billion, but also you ruined your legitimacy.

• 56:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it depends what their what their intent was. And legitimacy, I think, as a as a currency, as a money.

• 56:34David Hoffman?

  It's gone.

• 56:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  In particular.

• 56:35David Hoffman?

  It's gone.

• 56:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it's that definitely feels gone. Or at least it would take a lot for that to come back. Let's talk about Visa. Visa makes five strategic crypto hires and placements. Dude, Visa is doubling down on crypto. We're going to have the guy behind this, Q Sheffield, on Bankless to talk about what Visa is doing. Hopefully, at some point in the future, they just have to get that cleared by legal. But I want to hear what Visa is doing, man, because it seems like they've got a crypto strategy and they're gearing up. David, this last thing, USDC Stablecoin is now expanding to multiple blockchains, could soon be on 10 networks. So this is not just Ethereum, but it's Tron, it's, I don't know, wherever else can support.

• 57:12David Hoffman?

  L2s?

• 57:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  L2s, I'm sure. Solana, I'm sure. Any thoughts on this expansion? It's just inevitable?

• 57:20David Hoffman?

  Nope. The US dollar owes no allegiance to any blockchain, but I expect the majority of the USDC to stay on Ethereum.

• 57:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, guys, we are going to be back with some hot takes. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible.

• 57:34David Hoffman?

  Bankless is proud to be supported by Uniswap. Uniswap is a new paradigm in asset exchange infrastructure. Instead of a cumbersome order book system where trades are matched with other humans, Uniswap is an autonomous piece of software on Ethereum, which is what Ryan and I call a money robot. No human counterparties or centralized intermediaries, just autonomous code on Ethereum. Input the token you want to sell and receive the token you want to buy. Something brand new in the Uniswap ecosystem is the Uniswap Grants Program is now accepting applications for grants. We have been saying this for a while and we'll say it again. DAOs have money and they are in need of labor. If you think that you have something to contribute to the Uniswap DAO, apply for a grant to Uniswap.

• 58:18David Hoffman?

  Just look at the size of the Uniswap Treasury. It's almost $3 billion. This mountain of capital is looking for labor. Do you have something of value to contribute to the Uniswap DAO? No matter how big or small you're Idea is you can apply for a uni grant at unigrants.org and help steer Uniswap in the direction that you think it should go. That's exactly what we did to get Uniswap to be a sponsor for Bankless and you can do the same for your project. Thank you Uniswap for sponsoring Bankless. Gemini is the world's most trusted cryptocurrency exchange. I've been a customer of Gemini since I first got into crypto in 2017 and it's been my main exchange of choice to make my crypto buys and sells. Gemini is available in all 50 states and in over 50 countries worldwide

• 59:01David Hoffman?

  and on Gemini there are markets for over 30 various different crypto assets, including many of the hot DeFi tokens and it's one of the few exchanges that has liquid die markets. Gemini just launched their earn program where you can earn up to 7.4% interest on 26 various crypto assets. If you're tired of paying fees in DeFi or you don't want to worry about DeFi exploits, but you still want to earn interest on your crypto assets, Gemini earn is the product for you. Another product I'm stoked to get my hands on is the Gemini Crypto Back Credit Card, which gives you 3% cash back on all of your purchases, but paid to you in your preferred crypto asset. When I get my Gemini credit card, I'm going to make sure that I get my cash back in ETH, so whenever I buy something,

• 59:44David Hoffman?

  I get a little bit of ETH bonus back to me at the same time. You can open up a free account in under three minutes at gemini.com/goBankless and if you trade more than $100 within the first 30 days after signup, you'll be gifted a free $15 Bitcoin bonus. Check them out at gemini.com/goBankless.

• 1:00:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Alright guys, we are back with the takes of the week. Then we're gonna get to memes, so stick with us. The first is from Gajesh, I think. Gajesh.eth.com in the 90s, .eth in the 20s, the 2020s that is kind of a cool take. This is like the new internet, that's what this is saying, .com to .eth. Any thoughts here?

• 1:00:23David Hoffman?

  Yeah, to some degree, I'm also not paying attention to this, but the world of like .eth addresses, like you know, I got David Hoffman.eth, you got RSA.eth, like there's a world of speculation to be had in there and I don't know why that's not a bigger world. Like, you gotta, you gotta claim the ENesto names if you, if you think that this is true.

• 1:00:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  I'd pay a few hundred dollars for David Hoffman dot ETH, like even now.

• 1:00:44David Hoffman?

  Dude, I offered the guy that owned David dot ETH, five ETH for David dot ETH, but he wouldn't, the lowest bid was 13 ETH and I was like, oh no, I like ETH too much.

• 1:00:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  Ooh, that's a lot. You know, funny story, we can't get bankless dot ETH either. Somebody's got that.

• 1:01:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  Actually, no, we did get bankless dot ETH.

• 1:01:04David Hoffman?

  Yeah, we have it. We do have it. You bought it.

• 1:01:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  Sorry.

• 1:01:06David Hoffman?

  You bought it. I was about to say, you told me you got it.

• 1:01:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, no, we spent, I think like $3,000 on that.

• 1:01:15David Hoffman?

  Yeah, we spent some money to claim that. That was a good move.

• 1:01:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Sorry, I was thinking of bankless Dow dot ETH that we can't do.

• 1:01:20David Hoffman?

  Ah, yeah, someone's squatting on that one.

• 1:01:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh my God, I don't even know the E and S names we own. We have bankless dot ETH, guys. Never fear. You know what? Jagesh is also, he's like a 13-year-old kid. Do you know this, David? So he listens to Bankless, he's DMing me before, he's a blockchain developer, he's a kid, he's got almost 20,000 followers.

• 1:01:41David Hoffman?

  And the meme for his header, like, this guy is deep in crypto culture.

• 1:01:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  The godfather?

• 1:01:45David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  I wonder.

• 1:01:48David Hoffman?

  He's with it, man.

• 1:01:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, how many, how many people do you think, like, listen to the show who are like 18 or like under 18?

• 1:01:54David Hoffman?

  I don't know. The InstaDap brothers, who made InstaDap, they were both under 18. When they started working on InstaDap, I think the youngest one was like 15 when he started working on InstaDap. And then they raised some couple million dollars a few years later before one of them hit 18. It was crazy.

• 1:02:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is awesome, man. This is millennials handing the torch over to Zoomers. Like, we kind of started this thing, but like, you guys are going to take to the finish line. So it's awesome to see. All right, let's do this take. So this, I think it starts with Gutenberg. Why don't you read this out, David?

• 1:02:23David Hoffman?

  Yeah, this is a tweet from Greg Eisenberg. He says, "The Gutenberg launched the printing press when 96% of the people in Europe were illiterate. That's how it feels to be building in Web3 slash crypto today. It's just early." And there's an interesting, like, you know, thought experiment to be had where like, imagine you're inventing the Gutenberg machine and somebody, some investor comes up to you and goes, "Why would you invent the printing press when only 4% of the population can read?" That doesn't make any sense. No one's gonna want your products.

• 1:02:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bad UX.

• 1:02:52David Hoffman?

  Bad UX. Turns out it was a printing press that taught people to read and then became the most influential piece of technology of like the next 500 years. So Anthony Sizano quote retweets this tweet and says, "This tweet has been messing with my head since I saw it yesterday." And then friend of the pod Josh Rosenthal, the guy behind the Crypto Renaissance podcast goes, "Saswell is in the know. It's a great point and even more spot on than than the original poster of this tweet." Josh says, "Permissionless communication drove the Renaissance, combined with ledger-based fintech in the 1400s, unraveling hierarchies and empowering communities." Links to a YouTube video. I'm pretty sure that's our podcast. And that's why that podcast was so good. And if you haven't listened to the Crypto Renaissance podcast, you gotta go listen to it.

• 1:03:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  Links to a specific part in this podcast. That's great, dude. I love this tweet. I think it's, I think it is spot on. How like, how many people are learning finance through crypto today?

• 1:03:46David Hoffman?

  Right. Me.

• 1:03:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is how I'm learning finance. Yeah, absolutely. All right. Um, let's talk about this Coinbase. This is Brian Armstrong. Again, he says, "We plan to list every crypto asset where legally viable." This is a departure, I think, but I'm glad they are at least broadcasting this because there was a time and place where Coinbase was seen as sort of a gatekeeper for retail. Like they would help you avoid bad investments, like terrible assets. And I think now that they're saying like, "We're making no statement as to whether these assets are good buys or bad buys or complete scams or not scams. If it's legally viable, we're just gonna list it." It does feel like that is the lowest common denominator for exchanges. Like if Binance is listing it, how can Coinbase not listing it?

• 1:04:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  So I understand this approach and like, I guess I appreciate the clarity there. It's like, just because it's on Coinbase, it doesn't mean you should buy it, guys.

• 1:04:39David Hoffman?

  Totally. They used to have the Coinbase like asset framework to really gauge the quality of an asset and they would score on different, like different scores. And that was kind of like a cover your own ass strategy that they were doing. And I think actually that might've backfired because if you start talking about the different natures of the different properties of the asset, it's centralized, who owns the supply, blah, blah, blah. Well, then you actually start to get into a realm that you maybe didn't want to get into into the first place, which is delving too deep as to the nature of the assets. And so instead of having that like five-part like point level system that there was the original framework, they are just doing a binary one or zero. Like, is it legally viable?

• 1:05:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Is it legal?

• 1:05:17David Hoffman?

  Or is it not? Right? And to some degree, that like, you know, removes responsibility for even commenting on the quality of the token. So as a profit maximalist and a business maximalist perspective, it makes it makes sense. It makes sense.

• 1:05:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it's kind of fun. Is Uniswap doesn't even check for that. It's even more credibly neutral. It doesn't even rely on the legal system. Is it an ERC 20 asset or not? That's the only level of gatekeeping or permission you need for Uniswap, which is a beautiful thing. All right. Let's look at this Vitalik quote, David. This really, this was really cool. And it's a Vitalik quote from a long time ago, actually. But it's held up like a lot of things Vitalik has talked about or done over the years. Whereas most technologies, Vitalik says, tend to automate workers on the periphery doing menial tasks. What blockchains do is automate away the center. So instead of putting the taxi driver out of a job, blockchain puts Uber out of a job

• 1:06:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  and lets the taxi driver work with the customer directly. I think that's a super powerful quote because what he's talking about is like a new architecture for the economy. We just had this conversation with some folks about the creator economy, our panel that we just had yesterday, David, and we talked about this being a more friendly era and economy for individual creators. And I think that's what that's what Vitalik is talking about, that blockchain is actually creating a mechanism for creators to interact directly with the market without having to go through a big web 2.0 middleman or an Uber,

• 1:06:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  for instance. That is kind of the end state goal of this. And super cool if we can make that happen.

• 1:06:58David Hoffman?

  Yeah, this reminds me of another Vitalik quote where he says like the cool thing about Ethereum is it doesn't put the taxi cab driver out of a job. It puts the CEO of Uber out of a job, or it puts the middle management or the bureaucracy out of a job. And bureaucracy by almost definition doesn't add value. It's just an efficiency and, and yeah, it's just like, it's not the value creators. The value creators are the Uber drivers or the content producers or whatever. And this is actually the original version of DAOs. DAOs these days are really kind of just nicknames for digital organizations where people just exist in a Discord and have a plan and a goal. The original vision of DAOs was code at the center and humans at the periphery.

• 1:07:38David Hoffman?

  Where Uber drivers would come interact with like the Uber app, the Uber DAO, the Uber D app. And the Uber D app would autonomously ascribe them like tasks and then they would, the Uber humans would do the tasks. And then the Uber DAO would, you know, award money to them. Code at the center, humans at the periphery. That was the OG version of DAOs and that's still yet being built out. Like stuff like Airbnb and Uber and the sharing economy stuff, really hard to do. But that's the vision that Vitalik is articulating here. And I still think that's the vision for Ethereum. It's just like probably the hardest thing to tackle.

• 1:08:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  And Jesse, our friend Jesse Walden would say this is the ownership economy. So it's not just the Uber driver earning money. The Uber driver is actually earning ownership, which means equity in the network. And so upside, right? Which is super cool and a way to flip capital markets on its head. Let's talk about this. So Cooper Truba, another participant in the DAO panel that we just had. So guys, check that out if you haven't yet. I think that's on YouTube right now. We're probably putting it in the podcast too.

• 1:08:37David Hoffman?

  Oh, it's already out on the podcast.

• 1:08:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's out on the podcast. Wrote a great piece on the DAO landscape, David. What are, what are some of the highlights from this article for you?

• 1:08:45David Hoffman?

  Yeah, Cooper is a great writer and he, he's just paying attention to DAOs at large. And so if you are, we keep on talking about DAOs on Bankless. And if you're trying to get up to speed with DAOs, definitely check out this article from Cooper. He both like just talks about the current state of specific DAOs as well as more high level, broad. Just ideas or thoughts about how DAOs are organized and some good mental models and graphics to go along with it.

• 1:09:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  David, it's that time of the week. What are you excited about, David Hoffman?

• 1:09:11David Hoffman?

  I got an article coming out on the Bankless News that are next week, and it's been a while since I've written, and it's been a while since I've written to this level of effort. Some of my most recent articles, I've kind of just written it and sent it out. But this one, I've really been taking my time, really going back and editing. It's all about the march of DeFi capital efficiency in the lens of Ether, the asset, right? So DeFi is always in a competition to become more and more and more capitally efficient. Every new successful DeFi protocol is successful because it's a more capitally efficient version of any predecessor. Uniswap V2 is an improvement on the capital efficiency of V1. Uniswap V3 is a capital efficient improvement on V2. Balancer V2 is a capitally efficient improvement upon Balancer.

• 1:09:56David Hoffman?

  It's all about capital efficiency. It's all about capital efficiency. Layer on capital efficiency to how ETH is the native asset of Ethereum and receives all of these capitally efficient tailwinds. And that's completely aside from Ether as ultrasound money. Ether is ultrasound money specifically at the protocol level. Ultrasound comes from the Ethereum protocol. DeFi is doing something completely differently, which is also putting tailwinds behind Ether, the asset, which is allowing Ether to become the most capitally efficient asset of all time. That's what I've been writing about, still in the editing process, really trying to make this as punchy as possible. But I think this article is going to be a good one, and that's what I'm excited about.

• 1:10:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is new for you. You seem oddly bullish ETH, which I've never heard from you before, David.

• 1:10:38David Hoffman?

  I've come around to Ether lately.

• 1:10:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  It sounds like an article from like 2019 or 2020, when like you were writing these big thought pieces on how DeFi protocols were going to kind of consume and eat up Ether as an asset. So, man, I'm super excited to read that. Yeah.

• 1:10:55David Hoffman?

  That's another, that's an interesting way to put it. Yeah, it's always been, the game for DeFi applications has always been to gobble up Ether, right? And the competition for DeFi apps to become more capitally efficient is just incentives, better and better incentives for people to deposit their into, their Ether into these DeFi apps. DeFi apps want your Ether. They're trying, they're trying to eat it. And so they're trying to convince you to put it in there. And they do that by making a better product. It's crazy.

• 1:11:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  Competition. They're competing for your ETH.

• 1:11:22David Hoffman?

  Yes. We always say competition is good for the consumer. In DeFi, competition is good for Ether.

• 1:11:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  Absolutely.

• 1:11:28David Hoffman?

  Ryan, what are you excited about?

• 1:11:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  I'm excited about DAOs, man. I'm feeling that DAO energy. Did a conference about DAOs. I need to get caught up with. We had a Creator Economy panel on DAOs. I'm seeing what's happening in the Bankless DAO.

• 1:11:39David Hoffman?

  We had four hours of DAO content on Bankless yesterday.

• 1:11:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, my God. So much content. And I listened to your Meet the Nation with Coordinate, which was awesome. They talked about at the end about like kind of DAO theory. And I'm just appreciating this DAO energy and seems so simple, right? What are DAOs? They're programmable LLCs. But this is so fundamentally important, like programmable capital coordination tools. You got multi-sigs, which are like the programmable treasuries. You've got tokens, which are like programmable cap tables. You've got this all built on top of Ethereum as a programmable banking system. It's global. It's internet native. It's completely open. Cooper Truppa said this too lately, where he said basically DAOs are where NFTs were a year ago.

• 1:12:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  And I feel the same way about DAOs as I felt a year ago about NFTs, which is like, I knew they were this really exciting, really awesome primitive that we're so early in using. And I know that DAOs are going to be absolutely massive. Jesse Walden said, "We're going to have a DAO sometime in the next couple of decades that is bigger and more important and more complicated and interesting than social media tech like Facebook." Wow, like bigger than the biggest companies in the world. I like, I plus one that. I agree with that. But here's the interesting part, David, is like, I know they're going to be absolutely huge as a primitive, but I'm not sure exactly how. Like, I expect to be surprised, just like NFTs. Last year at this time, we started doing some NFT episodes before

• 1:13:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  they just blew up and became absolutely massive. And that's what's so cool about crypto is like, you know, this stuff is going to be big, but it's so emergent. You don't know when or exactly how. You just know that this is going to be massively impactful. So maybe something in gaming? I don't know. Like, which communities haven't gotten a hold of these DAO primitives in technology before? We'll have to see how it plans out.

• 1:13:39David Hoffman?

  I mean, World of Warcraft guilds feel like the original DAOs, right?

• 1:13:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right.

• 1:13:43David Hoffman?

  People coming together from all over the internet, fighting over scarce resources, sounds like a DAO, right? So we've seen this energy before. I think when Koopa says DAOs are just a year behind NFTs, I think I'll add that it really feels like DAO tooling is really the subject matter that we are currently building right now. DAO tooling is kind of where NFT tooling was a year ago or so. And this is why the people at Coordinap are doing fantastic work. DAOs need tools. DAOs need help. You can't just put people in a Discord and mint a token. You need tools to help facilitate how to DAO. And so I think we are about to embark upon the golden age of DAO tooling.

• 1:14:25David Hoffman?

  And once that gets finished up and once we figure out what are the tools that DAOs really need to DAO, then a thousand DAOs will flourish.

• 1:14:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, and guys, if you're listening to Bankless, you're looking for some alpha, right? I think that this is alpha. Remember when we were talking to the founders of Nifty Gateway? And they're like, "We always believed NFTs would be huge."

• 1:14:47David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 1:14:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  We were saying this in 2018, we're saying it 2019, we're saying it in 2020. And now suddenly, early 2021, the whole world understands it. But we've been building and saying this the entire time. This is what DAOs feel like to me. So if you're looking for opportunities in the space to plug in, to work for, like, maybe work for a DAO, earn some income, maybe invest in some of this underlying infrastructure or some of the DAOs themselves, now is the time. You're still front-running that opportunity, but it's gonna be big. I think it's gonna blow up in a big way. So maybe some alpha there. We'll have to see.

• 1:15:22David Hoffman?

  If Jesse Walden thinks that there's going to be a DAO that becomes bigger than Facebook over the next 10 years, like, if you can find that, like, nine years before, if you can find that one, if you can find it, like, that's your, you can retire.

• 1:15:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  And here's the thing, okay? So Facebook was not open to investor, like, to Main Street investors. Wasn't open to the world. Just a small set of people who are credit investors in the US could invest in Facebook and realize those early gains. Like, Facebook didn't IPO until, like, I don't know, 2008, 2009, something like that, right? With DAOs, you have immediate access to buy...

• 1:16:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Into a DAO and earn some equity from day one. Massive opportunity.

• 1:16:06David Hoffman?

  Yep.

• 1:16:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right.

• 1:16:06David Hoffman?

  Don't miss it.

• 1:16:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Don't miss it. Let's drop something cool really quick and then we'll talk meme of the week. David, what are we looking at here?

• 1:16:13David Hoffman?

  We're looking at a map. A map of the bankless nation. We're actually not looking at anything. You're gonna have to show it, Ryan.

• 1:16:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, sorry.

• 1:16:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  There we go.

• 1:16:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  Are we looking at it now?

• 1:16:26David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:28David Hoffman?

  So this was a cool map made by a member of the bankless DAO Perchi. Shout out Perchi. And there's a link for this in the show notes if you want to go and look at it yourself. But it's just one of those maps that has something in every single corner. And but it's overall the bankless nation, right? We got bankless DAO in the top left, connected to bankless LLC. I think we're, I think we are a radio tower, Ryan. That's kind of sounds, that's kind of cool. We got, we got the charts for the mountain range. We have hard cap hills for Bitcoin. We got the cold storage deep in the mountain range. Got the yield farms, got centralization harbor. There's just a bunch of cool little Easter eggs all over this map. And so it was really just creative work out of, out of the bankless DAO, out of, out of Perchi. And I really enjoyed just going around and seeing what's in here.

• 1:17:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it's really cool. Definitely. It has kind of a like a Lord of the Rings type feel, medieval type feel to it, too. I think this, that citadel, the Bitcoin citadel that looks a little familiar. Maybe Sauron's Tower? Great eye.

• 1:17:22David Hoffman?

  I don't have to say the quiet part.

• 1:17:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  You think that's coincidental?

• 1:17:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Anyway, it's a, it's a super cool drawing. So make sure you check that out. All right, David, meme of the week. Explain this. What are we looking at?

• 1:17:33David Hoffman?

  This is the classic Anakin and Padmé meme. And so Anakin has got laser eyes on in the first panel and he goes, laser eyes until $100,000. So $100,000 Bitcoin. And then Padmé says, you're gonna take them off if there's a bear market, right? And then the next panel is Anakin still with laser eyes, just now with a McDonald's cap on his head. So no, you're not taking it off, even though it's a bear market. And really, this is just a meme about conviction. It's like, I'm going to go to McDonald's and work for McDonald's before I lose my conviction in Bitcoin. So that's a pretty fun meme.

• 1:18:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  McDonald's crypto memes just won't stop. They'll always be here with us when the bear market's on. Good stuff. All right. I think that is it. Bankless Nation, thank you for joining us for another recap. As always, none of this was financial advice. Crypto is risky. ETH is risky. So is DeFi and Bitcoin. You could lose what you put in, but this is the frontier. We are headed west. Thanks for joining us on Bankless.