Pod Insights Bankless ROLLUP: The SBF & FTX Aftermath | ETH Goes Ultra Sound | NEW Ethereum Roadmap | OpenSea Royalties About this episode 2nd Week of November
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Timestamps:
0:00 Intro
4:29 BTC Price
5:50 ETH Price
6:10 ETH/BTC
6:33 Total Crypto Market Cap
7:43 ECONOMY
7:50 Inflation drops to 7.7% from 8.2% in September
https://twitter.com/WatcherGuru/status/1590698393260609536
8:15 CPI Chart
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/11/10/business/inflation-cpi-report
10:08 U. S. Election
12:10 Layoff SZN
14:20 UltraSoundMoney - 5000 ETH Burnt
https://ultrasound.money/
21:58 Surreal week….
https://twitter.com/RyanSAdams/status/1590474030263730176
https://twitter.com/SBF_FTX/status/1590709200665333762
https://unusualwhales.com/news/ftx-faces-liquidity-shortfall-of-up-to-8-billion-sam-bankman-fried-told-investors
https://www.wsj.com/articles/ftx-tapped-into-customer-accounts-to-fund-risky-bets-setting-up-its-downfall-11668093732
https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/11/09/sam-bankman-fried-no-longer-a-billionaire-after-146b-overnight-wipe-out/
39:30 Tether freezes FTX USDT
https://twitter.com/Pentosh1/status/1590711432378621952
40:18 Gensler and the SEC
https://twitter.com/colinwilhelm/status/1590694062490734593
41:00 Captain hindsight
https://twitter.com/collins_belton/status/1590686389511028737
42:25 Tom Emmer
https://twitter.com/RepTomEmmer/status/1590717374801809409
44:25 Brian Armstrong take & ratio’ing sen warren
https://twitter.com/brian_armstrong/status/1590511022104010753
45:45 Dogetoshi
https://twitter.com/Dogetoshi/status/1590736426068766721
46:20 Larry
https://twitter.com/lawmaster/status/1590750976298090496
47:00 Employee chatter
https://twitter.com/tackettzane/status/1590541872212357120
52:20 THIS KEEPS HAPPENING
https://twitter.com/RichardHeartWin/status/1590689840068448257
1:04:36 ETH
1:04:40 New Ethereum Roadmap
https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/1588669782471368704
1:06:30 NFTs
1:06:35 OpenSea Royalties
https://www.theblock.co/post/183518/opensea-creates-tool-to-help-nft-collections-enforce-royalties-on-chain
1:07:50 Peaster take
https://metaversal.banklesshq.com/p/the-future-of-nft-royalties
1:08:05 SuperRare RarePass
https://twitter.com/SuperRare/status/1588173906241736704
https://twitter.com/BanklessHQ/status/1589641261685915650
1:08:50 Regulation
1:11:45 SEC subpoena HEX influencers
https://cointelegraph.com/news/sec-issues-subpoena-to-influencers-promoting-hex-pulsechain-and-pulsex
1:13:18 While all this was happening…LBRY ruling takes
https://twitter.com/lbrycom/status/1589645453091827712
https://twitter.com/lex_node/status/1589655558029643777
https://twitter.com/lbrycom/status/1589718365924634624
1:15:45 Misc
Polkadot’s Native Token DOT
https://twitter.com/Web3foundation/status/1588593793519210497
1:18:00 UK Bank Santander NGMI
https://decrypt.co/113702/uk-bank-santander-will-block-payments-to-crypto-exchanges
1:18:19 Releases
Zerion to take on MetaMask
https://www.theblock.co/post/183304/zerion-prepares-to-take-on-metamask-with-in-browser-wallet
1:19:05 Raises
WalletConnect - $12.5M
https://twitter.com/WalletConnect/status/1588154492465418240
1:19:20 JOBS
https://pallet.xyz/list/bankless/jobs
Be like Tim
https://twitter.com/timgarth/status/1588269857920925705
1:24:34 TAKES
Future of Crypto
https://twitter.com/HHorsley/status/1590463556902096897
Worst events in crypto history
https://twitter.com/thedefiedge/status/1590131252056756226
No one wants to hear it
https://twitter.com/TrustlessState/status/1590760792877862913
Thanks Gary
https://twitter.com/TrustlessState/status/1590721196957761537
1:36:44 MEME of the Week
https://twitter.com/BanklessHQ/status/1590447780132450306
1:37:20 Moment of Zen
https://twitter.com/netcapgirl/status/1590431481385857024
Transcript 17,399 words · 3 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Ryan Sean Adams? Some good news, too. We'll get into the macro markets, of course. Inflation, a little bit lower than expected this month, maybe a bit of a silver lining. Hey, it's only, it's only 7.9%. Only 7.9%.
0:14 Ryan Sean Adams? Bagels Nation, happy 2nd Friday of November. Maybe I should have said unhappy, David. I see you've got the Wojak meme. Yeah, sad boy. Covering your face. You're feeling pretty sad today. Yeah, it's not, it's not a good week. It's been a rough week in crypto, probably the worst I've seen in terms of sentiment, in terms of feeling. Walking into this roll up, I mean, how many live streams have we been doing over the last few days? One, one per day since Tuesday, so this will be number three. Yeah, well, this isn't a live stream, but still, same, feels the same. You and I were up late last night with Kobe and Luger up only having a therapy session. Yep.
0:57 Ryan Sean Adams? I mean, but there's just so much to cover, so much to talk about, and the way this event has unfolded. For those of you not familiar, of course, we're talking about FTX, SBF, how SBF, Sam Bankman-Fried wrecked this for everyone. I mean, he really screwed us over, and we're gonna talk about how we feel about that. What's, what's been happening since, I guess, yesterday? Give you the summary of what's happened this week and talk about picking up the pieces. I guess grab your morning coffee, or maybe something a little stronger if you need it today. Put some Baileys in that coffee, for sure. Are you a Baileys plus coffee? No, you, hey, you told me if you put anything in your coffee, it becomes a beverage.
1:39 Ryan Sean Adams? Yo, the people need a beverage this, this week, this Friday. David makes exception for Baileys. We're gonna talk about that. That's gonna be a big, big subject, I think. Get you guys up to speed, and even a lot's happened since the last time we livestreamed. Got off the livestream at like 1 a.m. last night. Also, we are 1 year anniversary from all-time highs. Isn't that ironic? Hooray. Like, are we supposed to be happy about that, too? How far are we down from all time highs?
2:10 David Hoffman? 76% crypto market cap is down 76% from 365 days ago. So, congrats. It is worth noting that it was, it's about one year of time from the 2017 top to the 2018 bottom. That was also about one year. And then we had a two-year bear market where we touched that same bottom two more times. And then it was DeFi summer.
2:33 Ryan Sean Adams? Some good news too. We get into the macro markets, of course, inflation a little bit lower than expected this month, maybe a bit of a silver lining. Hey, it's only, it's only 7.9%.
2:43 David Hoffman? Only 7.9%. All right.
2:46 Ryan Sean Adams? Happy, happy days. Okay, guys, of course, if you enjoy the rollups, if you enjoy the work that David and I put into the podcast, everyone behind the scenes, making this happen, make sure you like and subscribe, rate and review. That's how we get the top of the charts.
3:00 David Hoffman? That's how you get me the dopamine hits to keep on doing this.
3:04 Ryan Sean Adams? Because weeks like this, it's kind of hard.
3:07 David Hoffman? It's rough. It was a rough week.
3:09 Ryan Sean Adams? I mean, just, we'll get into more of that later, but, but first, some good news from our friends and sponsors at Earnify. If you're feeling down, why don't you plug in your wallet, your crypto wallet, your Ethereum address, the space where you can maybe find some unclaimed airdrops. I had a friend last week text me and be like, oh, I listened to that Earnify. I plugged some of my dresses in and I walked away with 3K.
3:34 David Hoffman? Oh, he got some dopamine? Good.
3:35 Ryan Sean Adams? Yeah.
3:35 David Hoffman? Good. It's a little dopamine finder.
3:37 Ryan Sean Adams? Not just dopamine, David.
3:39 David Hoffman? Money.
3:39 Ryan Sean Adams? I mean, this is cold, hard cash.
3:40 David Hoffman? Yeah.
3:41 Ryan Sean Adams? At the end of this, what does Earnify do?
3:43 David Hoffman? Yeah, Earnify takes your Ethereum address and then it scans the whole library of airdrops, Po apps, NFT mints that you may or may have not gotten. And so it's just like the, it's a little robot to make sure that it, it goes and checks all of your pants pockets for the $20 bill that you left in your pants pockets. But airdrops tend to be worth a lot more than $20. So all you have to do, it's free to use, but you can sign up to get some, some extra perks and privileges. It's free to use, you can just put in your Ethereum address and it will go scan the blockchain to make sure that you haven't left any money in any corner of Ethereum or any other blockchain, for that matter.
4:19 Ryan Sean Adams? Good to go find your money right now on a week, a week like this. Go to banklist.cc/earnify. That's E-A-R-N-I-F-I to find out more about that. All right, David, let's get into the markets. Deep breath, you ready? Okay, Bitcoin, what's it looking like?
4:35 David Hoffman? Bitcoin, start of the week at $20,275, down 14.5%. Congrats Bitcoin for setting a new low for the year, a new low in this bear market. We've ticked the bottom at $15,513. We are currently at $17,300. So hit a low of $15,500, the new low for the year, but back up to $17,300.
5:01 Ryan Sean Adams? David, I'm gonna be honest, I wasn't sure we'd ever see 15K Bitcoin, but now 10K Bitcoin and under is in sight, right? I mean, we're like 50% off of that. And what's crazy is this is 365 days of down, right?
5:17 David Hoffman? To the day, yeah. Tomorrow will be 366. But yeah, we are at the one-year anniversary of the Bitcoin all-time high, where the high was $69,000, nice, at $44 for Bitcoin. Down about 74% from the all-time high.
5:34 Ryan Sean Adams? Pretty brutal. I mean, I've seen worse, though.
5:40 Ryan Sean Adams? I mean, last cycle, Bitcoin get down to 83% from all-time high, 85%, something like this. Of course, Ether got to 94% all-time high. Speaking of Ether, what's that looking like on the week?
5:51 David Hoffman? Started the week at 1550, down 17.8% to where it is currently at 1270. It got up to as high as like 1330 earlier, but down to 1270 right now, so down 18% on the week.
6:06 Ryan Sean Adams? And what's this chart showing us here?
6:08 David Hoffman? There is the ratio. We are down 0.076, where we were last week to 0.073. Again, for what it is, if it was last cycle, Ether would be wrecked during a week like this. It's holding up okay.
6:21 Ryan Sean Adams? It's holding up okay. Ratio's holding up okay, but down, down bad. So 14% for Bitcoin and then 18% for Ether. Pretty crazy. How about the crypto market cap as a whole?
6:35 David Hoffman? Hit a new low of $830 billion total market cap. We are bounced back a little bit to $910 billion. That lower-than-expected CPI print has saved us a little bit, created a little bottom.
6:51 Ryan Sean Adams? A bottom. How about crypto punks? You wanted to put some NFT news in here and there was a flippanting that happened. It wasn't the ETH Bitcoin flippanting, but it was a NFT flippanting.
7:00 David Hoffman? Yeah, I am a biased punk holder, so take that with a grain of salt, but punks are now, once again, above apes. So the OG NFT now has a higher floor price than the apes. One ape, a floor ape will cost you about 60 ETH. A floor punk will cost you about 66 ETH.
7:18 Ryan Sean Adams? Just a stronger holder community. Is that what's happening? Basically, it's kind of the, you know, the tourists leave, the settlers stay. People with less conviction on other assets. I mean, punks are an older project as well.
7:31 David Hoffman? They are the oldest NFT project. They are the OG. They are the Bitcoin of NFTs, yeah.
7:36 Ryan Sean Adams? So that is like the NFT of last resort, I guess, for this, for this entire market. So, yeah, that's interesting to see. Well, let's talk a little bit about the economy. Well, we're talking about, and then we'll get to crypto, but inflation has officially dropped to 7.7%.
7:53 David Hoffman? Dropped to 7.7%.
7:55 Ryan Sean Adams? Yes, and we're happy about that. And the reason why we're happy is because last month it was 8.2%. And it came in a little bit lower than expectations. I think 0.2% below expectations. So you can see the chart here. This is like all the way from 1965 to 2023. And so you could say, maybe we've peaked. It's kind of looking like maybe we peaked sometime this summer from an inflation perspective and we're on our way down. And I guess that would make sense because we're going to get to more things later, but there's layoffs. It's like the economy is turning. Interest rates, of course, have been hiked right up. How could inflation continue to rise if we are spinning towards recession?
8:40 Ryan Sean Adams? It really, it really can't unless we get some, some situation like stagflation should be even worse. So this is an expected drop. Maybe, maybe the good news is the Fed starts to relent on their policy. The good news, at least for markets. And what are we looking at here, David?
8:58 David Hoffman? Yeah, this is the SPY. So SPY jumped four and a half percent on this news. So the index, the SPY index goes from 374 to 390, up four and a half percent because of the drop in inflation. So markets happy, markets happy. I'm kind of worried about the whiplash of CPI. Like what happens if CPI just like plummets to zero while we're laying off people? That would be called a deflation, which I mean, we like it in Ether, but we don't like it in the dollar. That's what I'm worried about. But still, inflation coming down is good.
9:30 Ryan Sean Adams? Well, we've, we've got a long ways to go. I mean, I think the Fed is hopeful it can get to like the three to four percent range. If that's even possible, but markets like that, risk on assets up on that news and so is crypto. Although it had a much worse week.
9:44 David Hoffman? After, after being down bigly, we had the positive CPI print. Well, the lower CPI print, which was positive news and then the markets, including the crypto markets, did like that. But I mean, FTX collapse, inflation half a percent lower than expected.
10:02 Ryan Sean Adams? Band-aid on a bullet wound. Yeah. Well, it's not helping us much this week. Uh, let's just touch on the elections.
10:08 David Hoffman? Yeah, let's, let's not talk about crypto as much as possible. We'll punt on that conversation.
10:13 Ryan Sean Adams? This has turned into a political podcast, election results for 2022 Senate. So the, it's still undecided. I get, this is the US election, of course. Still undecided election results. Majority is unknown. Apparently each party needs to win two of three more races that are still in dispute. Georgia, Arizona, Nevada and Georgia, the runoff will actually happen in December. So we won't know who controls the Senate until then. Also in the House, Republicans gained six seats, Democrats lost seven. That was expected, but actually is, I think it's kind of expected the Republicans would, there'd be some kind of a red wave.
10:56 David Hoffman? Yes, which has not materialized, which is just the news that I've heard.
11:01 Ryan Sean Adams? Yes, has not has not materialized, but yeah, I mean, it's kind of still the way it was before almost. I mean, no real changes. We'll see who controls the Senate past December.
11:12 David Hoffman? But no change is considered an L for the Republicans. They wanted they wanted the red wave. They didn't get it. So the same is a loss for the Republicans. That's what I've heard.
11:22 Ryan Sean Adams? What's interesting about this is crypto had a role to play, a minor role, of course, but if you add up the numbers about, according to the Wall Street Journal, $73 million went into the 2022 elections from crypto. I think SBF was like 70 million of that.
11:40 David Hoffman? Oh, sick. So it was.
11:41 Ryan Sean Adams? A lot. It was a lot, which, right, we'll get we'll get to a little bit later. What does this mean for crypto is the question, election results? And the answer, I think, David, is what? Probably nothing.
11:54 David Hoffman? Probably probably nothing. Yeah.
11:56 Ryan Sean Adams? I mean, I don't think this impacts it. I think the SBF events of this week and FTX meltdown of this week impact crypto in a big way, which we'll talk about. David, it's also layoff season. What headline are we looking at?
12:10 David Hoffman? Yeah, so Silicon Valley kind of down bad. Meta, the parent company of Facebook, laying off more than 11,000 employees, but they are not the only one. Silicon Valley overall has got a collective layoffs of tens of thousands. So Twitter laid off 3,700 people. I don't know if that was like economics related or Elon Musk related. Definitely Elon Musk related.
12:33 Ryan Sean Adams? Definitely Musk related. And that's 50% of the workforce, right?
12:36 David Hoffman? Yeah. Oh, wow.
12:37 Ryan Sean Adams? I mean, a combo, but lots of Musk in that.
12:40 David Hoffman? Stripe laid off 1,000 people. Robinhood laid off 1,000 people. Lyft laid off 700 people. Open Door, 550. Netflix, 450. It goes on. Yeah. So collectively, like, tens of thousands of people laid off across the tech sector in just the Bay Area, just San Francisco.
12:57 Ryan Sean Adams? That's crazy. I mean, tech just really expanded during COVID over the past two years, and now they're they're completely contracting.
13:04 David Hoffman? Yep.
13:05 Ryan Sean Adams? It's starting to happen in crypto a little bit, too, David.
13:08 David Hoffman? Yeah, Dapper Labs cutting 22% of staff. Because NFT markets not not great, not great.
13:16 Ryan Sean Adams? Yeah. When's the last time you heard about NBA Top Shot?
13:19 David Hoffman? Oh, I have not. The headline here says, "Sales volumes for Dapper Labs NBA Top Shot has declined to $2.6 million from 20 or from $224 million in February of 2021." That is a 99% reduction in revenue.
13:37 Ryan Sean Adams? Wow.
13:37 David Hoffman? That's that's bad.
13:39 Ryan Sean Adams? Uh, yeah, that's very bad. I mean, that 22% might uh might ratchet up throughout all of this. You know, one thing, the last time I think I've heard of NBA Top Shots in the context of people actually starting their crypto journey through NBA Top Shots.
13:55 David Hoffman? Yeah.
13:55 Ryan Sean Adams? They no longer do it. They no longer, maybe they have some some old NFTs from NBA.
13:59 David Hoffman? Yeah, they got into the harder stuff.
14:01 Ryan Sean Adams? It brought a lot of people into crypto, brought a lot of people like I talked to Ethereum and DeFi. It's like, uh, when I talk to them, I'm like, oh, so what brought you into crypto? And you're gonna laugh at this NBA Top Shots. That was the thing. I guess, let's try to look for some bright spots here and the big bright spot, maybe the only this week. I mean, there are some other things that are positive that have gone on, but um is uh is Ethereum. And the the the burn rate, I mean, it sucks that this was the week that Ethereum finally went ultrasound. Cause that was a milestone we had planned to actually celebrate. I mean, the very beginning of the uh, when is the Justin Drake episode? Almost like two years ago now?
14:46 David Hoffman? Not almost a year and a half ago. Yeah.
14:48 Ryan Sean Adams? A year and a half ago, uh, where he coined the phrase on Bankless Podcast, "ultrasound money", to describe Ethereum's monetary policy. And this is the week it actually went ultrasound, at least ultrasound since the merge. What are we looking at here, David?
15:04 David Hoffman? Yeah, this is of course the ultrasound money website. Supply change since the merge negative 5,400 ether. Ryan, we have burned about 6,000 ish ether, maybe, maybe 7,000 in the last two, three days. 6,000 ether burnt in the last three days, bringing us a negative 5,400 ether. And like the, this is the through line, the message here I want to convey is that this is a anti, anti fragile mechanism. Crypto broke this week. Liquidation's happened, prices go down, FTX is insolvent. And all of that volatility creates the ether burn.
15:46 David Hoffman? And that ether burn overall makes Ethereum more secure. And so the why this is like, if the, if you're anti ETH maxi, you're like, oh, these people are just like circle jerking about the burn like they always do. Maybe. I am here to say that this is while there is chaos, at least ether becomes more anti fragile because its security gets cheaper as we burn ether. And so while there's destruction everywhere, at least Ethereum is a little bit more anti fragile and that is because of the burn. And we are now since the merge negative point 03% on yearly issuance and we continue to decline.
16:28 David Hoffman? So this is the bright, the one bright shining star that I have that's making me a little bit happy this week, Ryan.
16:34 Ryan Sean Adams? Yeah, I mean, and I think that's a big one in the, in the context of crypto, right? Ethereum performed very well this week. I know you're talking in some of the streams you did earlier this week about this, the sense that for a lot of people who are in kind of the, the Ethereum bankless DeFi world and didn't keep their money in kind of the, the SAM coins, as Kobe calls them, you know, FTXs of the world, but also in, or the Solanas and some of these other assets and in FTX. I like, I felt somewhat like unaffected personally by this, right? Of course crypto prices are down, but we've already seen lower crypto prices.
17:14 David Hoffman? Right.
17:14 Ryan Sean Adams? Even even of the summer, even recently.
17:17 David Hoffman? Yeah.
17:18 Ryan Sean Adams? So it was it was sort of weird to feel like another case of the DeFi Ethereum community. We're not insulated from this because obviously FTX is.
17:29 David Hoffman? We're down 15% in prices on the week.
17:31 Ryan Sean Adams? Yeah, massive down, and this is terrible for everyone, yet not as drastically affected as those that were maybe a little closer to the FTX community, for instance, who can't withdraw their money at this point in time. And certainly, our hearts go out to people who who've gotten wrecked in that way. But it sort of reminds me of Luna and Terra as well. It's just like, I wasn't personally affected by that because fortunately, we were able to stay away from that catastrophe completely. There are some things that smelled bad about that.
18:05 David Hoffman? Right. There's like, there's this core of crypto that has a ton of activity. It's Uniswap, it's Aave, it's Maker, it's Compound, it's a few other applications, too. And being like a power user of those applications while not having an FTX account, never touching Terra Luna, like if you have been in OG DeFi 1.0 Ethereum applications, you have been in this like tiny little like bubble of protection while it seems the whole rest of the industry has just like blown up around you. That's kind of how it's felt like for me lately.
18:41 Ryan Sean Adams? Yeah, it totally is like that scene of like somebody leaving an explosion and there's like, you know, everything behind them is blowing up and there's fire.
18:49 David Hoffman? Mortars going off, bullets whizzing by, and like, if you're if you're just tinkering with just Aave, Uniswap, you know, some layer twos, you're you're fine.
18:57 Ryan Sean Adams? I do think, look, I don't want to discount the role luck plays into all of that.
19:03 David Hoffman? Yes.
19:03 Ryan Sean Adams? Because, look, one of these, one of these smart contracts, something could happen in Ethereum at any point in time. What do we always say? This is risky, it's not for everyone, you could lose everything. And yet, I think some of the bankless principles have held up pretty well through the storm that is 2022, right? Even just the idea of going bankless. The idea of making sure that you don't have funds on a public exchange, that you're taking custody of your own keys, right? That thing would have saved people from Voyager, from Celsius, and even from FTX. And that's what we're going to get into next, because FTX was the bank, the crypto bank, that people thought was secure, people thought was safe.
19:45 David Hoffman? Honestly, I did. I thought it was fine.
19:47 Ryan Sean Adams? I did too. If someone asked me, here's the test, right? If someone asked you, "Hey David, I'm thinking of getting into crypto, Coinbase, FTX, do you think one's riskier than the other? Like, I know you have a preference, but is FTX okay?" What would you say?
20:00 David Hoffman? I would say, yeah. I think I've been asked this question before, and I think I've said, yeah, Coinbase, FTX, they're fine.
20:06 Ryan Sean Adams? So have I. It was definitely not fine. Guys, we're gonna be right back with that, the story of SBF and FTX, the final day, the judgment day, I guess, where all of this has come to light. We'll be right back, but before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible.
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21:58 Ryan Sean Adams? The downfall of FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried, the owner of FTX, irresponsible with depositors' money. That is the story. Brought total wreckage to the crypto industry this week. David, could you just give us a quick recap of what happened? I know we have episodes about this already, if people want the full story. But what's the 92nd version?
22:22 David Hoffman? 92nd version. SBF rose to fame through this trading fund called Alameda Research, which he is, I believe, like the 90% owner over. Alameda Research just would trade in crypto, do a lot of positions, like hedge fund, like head trading, all this stuff, made a ton of money. He was a great trader. And that's where SBF made a lot of his initial money. And that's where Alameda grew a lot of its capital. And then he slowly passed off responsibility to others. Meanwhile, he makes FTX exchange. Seemingly, Sam Bankman-Fried is a great builder, great operator. FTX, the exchange, rose to fame in a time where no one really thought it was possible to make another exchange.
23:07 David Hoffman? FTX just made a great product, a good exchange, good services, good financial tools. Everyone seemed to be really impressed by Sam. And Sam, as a figure, grew in prominence for these two massive successes. He slowly passed off all this responsibility of Alameda Research to somebody else, a team of people, and totally focused and doubled down on the FTX empire, which grew in a crazy fashion.
23:34 David Hoffman? There was always this loose association between Alameda Research and FTX, where Alameda would market make on the FTX exchange, making FTX extremely liquid and a great place to just have liquidity beyond just the basics. And so there were the symbiosis between Alameda Research and FTX helped FTX rise in fame. We saw FTX buy naming rights for the Miami Heat Stadium. We saw FTX like sign deals with like Tom Brady and just like a huge success story out of 2021 and, you know, raise billions of dollars in capital. Then a report out of CoinDesk from a leaked financial document about Alameda's balance
24:18 David Hoffman? sheet reported that a lot of Alameda's balance sheet, basically all their assets were the FTX exchange's token FTT, and it had a ton of FTT as collateral backing a bunch of loans. And so Alameda had loans that were backed by FTT. It was in a precarious position, and that alerted CZ. And now Binance was an early investor in FTX.
24:43 Ryan Sean Adams? CZ, of course, is the co-founder of Binance, a different kind of exchange empire that he's built and the rival to SDF.
24:50 David Hoffman? Much bigger exchange empire.
24:50 Ryan Sean Adams? Yes.
24:51 David Hoffman? Yeah. And so Binance invested in FTX equity, and as a result, they had $2.1 billion of FTT. And CZ says, "Due to recent revelations that have come to light, we have decided to liquidate any remaining FTT on our books. This is largely a result of the precarious nature of FTT because it was such strong, it was a huge position of Alameda's books." It was basically all of Alameda's assets were basically FTT tokens. People are like, "How did Alameda have such, I thought they were trading like Bitcoin and Ether. Why are so much of their assets all denominated in FTT?" That was a big question mark. And so CZ was like, "Okay, that's not good. We're going to start selling our FTT because of
25:29 David Hoffman? this precarious nature," which starts to first plummet the price of FTT, scaring Alameda, but then also trigger fears that there is some sort of contagion between Alameda and FTX. Because people always knew that there was a link between these two firms from SBF. And these were loosely correlated somehow. And people were worried that somehow there was going to be a run on the bank on FTX because of the shared asset, the shared balance books between FTX and Alameda, which was hypothesized. That turned out, Ryan, to be true. That there was co-mingling of assets between Alameda and FTX.
26:11 David Hoffman? So moving forward in this story, the next morning after Cece said he's going to dump all this FTT, FTX appeared to stop processing user withdrawals. So they ran out of money. And that's basically where it was revealed that FTX was insolvent. How insolvent was FTX? We didn't really know at the time. We still don't know. But we initially hypothesized something like $1 to $5 billion of insolvency, which is already a big hole. It's now coming to be somewhere around in the $8 to $10 billion that is missing from the FTX balance sheet, which is largely coming out of user deposits.
26:49 Ryan Sean Adams? So what we're talking about is we've got a somebody who operated an exchange and a hedge fund. And in order to bolster the books of the hedge fund, he used depositors' money in the exchange to basically do that. He gambled away depositors' money in the exchange. I mean, that would be a super simple explanation of what happened. And so now there's a hole.
27:14 David Hoffman? It's important to know that Alameda probably was wrecked along with everyone else during the Three Arrows Capital contagion back in May.
27:23 Ryan Sean Adams? Yes.
27:23 David Hoffman? The reason why they weren't is because they had this relationship with FTX. And so they were able to have to not be wrecked because they FTX sent them a bailout, a secret, under-the-table bailout.
27:36 Ryan Sean Adams? And it was a bailout with like backed by depositors' funds.
27:41 David Hoffman? Whatever money that they had, including depositors' funds.
27:44 Ryan Sean Adams? Absolutely insane. I mean, where he said in our podcast is like you go to a bank and you go to exchange, right? You deposit your funds. It's not Theirs to go like play with and gamble with and use in their side hedge fund. It's it's supposed to stay there. Right, it's supposed to. When the user comes back and says, okay, now I'd like to withdraw my funds. Those funds can just be withdrawn. And so the balance sheet should be very simple deposits and withdrawals. Deposits and withdrawals, all user user funds are deposited and then withdrawn. Uh, and that completely broke. And so I guess, you know, one of my takes about all of this is because
28:27 Ryan Sean Adams? um, we're still seeing what the fallout might be in crypto. And um, it's absolutely massive. I think this is the big biggest single event that's occurred in crypto. Maybe since Mt. Gox. In some ways, it's sort of exceeded this because uh, this is somebody who is supposed to be trusted, trusted in Wall Street. Sort of somebody. He was in lobbying in DC. He represented us. He had the ears of senators and and uh, folks in Congress. Uh, he represented us as kind of like the the cleaned up version of crypto without all of the the crypto anarchists, the shenanigans. Yes, I mean, he kind of didn't for the different mystique, but yes, he would wear a tie. In fact, we've we've seen him in front of Congress, uh, kind of like talking about crypto.
29:12 Ryan Sean Adams? Anyway, all of this just really sunk in with me last night. Um, and uh, this was yesterday evening and I was just thinking, David, like how surreal the last 48 hours had been as this story has has developed. Because like, I just, I don't know how to overstate how big a figure Sam was. Like crypto trading god, exchange god, like rock of um, I don't know um, how to how to last and how to persist and how to do things right in crypto. It just, his exchange he built was just a phenomenal product. Yeah, which is sad because that product's gone now. And what's crazy to me is uh, as of yesterday, it was 11 days ago
29:55 Ryan Sean Adams? that we hosted this debate between. Between SBF and Eric Voorhees. Sam Bank Benfried and Eric Voorhees. And uh, you remember that? This is a screenshot from from that debate. And Sam.
30:08 Ryan Sean Adams? Was lecturing us and talking to us about the merits of crypto regulation. We were having this debate about crypto values. And in the background, David, this guy had maybe an eight to 10 billion dollar hole that was developing on his balance sheet. He was talking about crypto values and discussing the merits and costs of like DeFi, talking about ways to regulate DeFi front ends. Meanwhile, he's like playing with depositor money. He's gambling it away. He's been, it's gotta be the most irresponsible figure that's done the most damage to crypto that I've ever seen, that this industry has ever seen.
30:53 Ryan Sean Adams? And this was 11 days ago. We were having a conversation with this guy. I don't understand. Like, it's even hard for me to believe that we had this conversation. Like, you were there, right? Like, this happened.
31:09 David Hoffman? He was so frazzled. He was more frazzled and inarticulate than I had ever seen him before. Like, I've seen him give his talks at Capitol Hill, and he's like decently articulate. That call, he was a different person. And it's, it's just interesting that 11 days later, we discover an eight billion, 10 billion dollar hole in FTX.
31:31 Ryan Sean Adams? Well, let's talk about what's developed, and this is as of Thursday morning.
31:33 David Hoffman? So yeah, that was all the recap.
31:35 Ryan Sean Adams? Yeah, that was just the recap. This is the apology that's just come out. This is a tweet thread from SBF. Do you want to read a few of these?
31:44 David Hoffman? Yeah, SBF goes, "I'm sorry. That's the biggest thing. I effed up and should have done better. I also should have been communicating more very recently. Transparency, my hands were tied during the duration of the possible bid and steal. I wasn't particularly allowed to say much publicly. But of course, it's on me that we ended up there in the first place. So here is an update on where things are. FTX International currently has a total market value of assets at collateral higher than client deposits, moves with prices. But that's different from liquidity for delivery. As you can tell from the state of withdrawals, the liquidity varies widely from very little, from very to very little."
32:18 Ryan Sean Adams? What does that mean here? He's saying that the...
32:21 David Hoffman? He has, he's saying that the value of the assets and collateral that FTX has is more, is higher than what their client deposits are.
32:32 Ryan Sean Adams? Based on what? Like, what's the value of these assets if you actually can't sell them and no one will buy them?
32:37 David Hoffman? Yeah, but he's saying that that's different from liquidity. So they have the assets, but they don't have them liquid.
32:41 Ryan Sean Adams? They have some paper value, is what you're saying.
32:43 David Hoffman? Yeah, paper value, yeah. SPF continues, it goes, "The story here is one I'm still fleshing out every detail of, but at a very high level, I effed up twice. The first time, a poor internal labeling of bank-related accounts meant I was substantially off from my sense of users' margin. I thought it was way lower. My sense before: leverage, zero. US liquidity, ready to deliver 24x the average daily withdrawal. Actual, 1.7x leverage and liquidity, 80% of Sunday's worth of withdrawals. But of course, when it rains the pours, we saw roughly $5 billion of withdrawals on Sunday, the largest by a huge margin. That was the thing that CZ triggered."
33:24 Ryan Sean Adams? He basically precipitated a bank run.
33:26 David Hoffman? Yes.
33:27 Ryan Sean Adams? With some of these things. And that's what he's talking about. The 5 billion of withdrawals on just one day alone.
33:35 David Hoffman? Right. And so SPF says, "And so I was off twice, which tells me a lot of things, both specifically and generally, that I was shit at. And a third time, I'm not communicating enough. And just a reminder, a third time, I'm not communicating enough. I should have said more. I'm sorry, I was slammed with things to do and didn't give you updates at all."
33:54 Ryan Sean Adams? David, why would a bank run actually matter if like, I mean, if Coinbase got a bank run and everyone withdrew all of their ETH and all of their Bitcoin, right? Like, why would that be a problem? Because all of the ETH and all of the Bitcoin is there. It's not a fractional reserve system.
34:14 David Hoffman? It is a fractional reserve system. It shouldn't be a fractional reserve system. It was a fractional reserve system.
34:19 Ryan Sean Adams? Very fractional.
34:20 David Hoffman? Yeah. And like, the whole like line, his whole tweet, like, "Mislabeled bank accounts."
34:28 Ryan Sean Adams? Clerical error.
34:29 David Hoffman? That, that caused an $8 billion hole?
34:34 David Hoffman? Like, that's what did it? I don't think so. Anyways, so he finishes off. Anyways, my number one priority by far is doing right by users and I'm going to do everything I can to do that, to take responsibility and do what I can. So, right now, we're spending the week doing everything we can to raise liquidity. I can't make any promises around that, but I'm going to try and give everything I have to make that work. There are a number of players we are in talks with, letters of intent, term sheets, etc. We'll see how that ends up. Every penny of that and the existing collateral will go straight to users unless or until we've done right by them. After that, investors, old and new, and employees who have fought for what's right for their career and who weren't responsible for any of the fuck-ups. Because at the end of the day, I was CEO, which means I was responsible for making sure that things went well.
35:16 David Hoffman? I ultimately should be, have been on top of everything. I clearly failed in that. I'm sorry.
35:22 David Hoffman? So, what does this mean going forward? I'm not sure. He loves to say, "I'm not sure." First, Alameda Research is winding down. They are probably liquidated. They aren't doing any of the weird things that I see on Twitter and nothing large anymore. One way or another, soon they won't be trading on FTX at all. Second, in any scenario in which FTX continues operating, its first priority will be radical transparency. Transparency probably all we should have been giving, giving exactly, giving as close to on-chain transparency as I can so that people know exactly what is happening on it.
35:53 Ryan Sean Adams? Kind of like DeFi?
35:54 David Hoffman? Kind of like DeFi.
35:55 Ryan Sean Adams? The transparency of DeFi?
35:56 David Hoffman? Yeah.
35:58 David Hoffman? Yeah, I mean, I feel like that's, that's a good.
36:00 Ryan Sean Adams? He goes on. But there was, there was one thing he said. A lot of sorrys, of course, with this tweet number 20. "At some point, I might have more to say about a particular sparring partner, so to speak." He's talking about CZ. But you know, glass houses. So, for now, all I'll say is, "Well played. You won." Heavily implying that CZ was his downfall. And of course, there was that CZ tweet on Sunday that precipitated part of this. But if he wasn't running a fractional reserve system where he's lending out depositors' money, it wouldn't have been a problem, right? So CZ kind of poked some holes in the structure and the whole rotting thing fell down. And it's his fault.
36:44 Ryan Sean Adams? It was a rotting structure to begin with, and then a few little pokes would-
36:48 David Hoffman? If a few tweets can collapse your empire.
36:51 Ryan Sean Adams? You're not, you gotta, you might have a problem.
36:54 David Hoffman? You might have a problem.
36:55 Ryan Sean Adams? By the way, did you see this? This is a tweet from Kobe that's kind of related to SBF's thread. But there is some similarities in-
37:07 David Hoffman? Chef Nomi and Sam Bankman-Fried, yeah.
37:09 Ryan Sean Adams? Yeah, and Chef Nomi, of course, was a sushi swap founder that-
37:13 David Hoffman? The OG sushi swap founder who did the OG sushi swap rug, which kind of gave this sushi swap curse in the first place. And after rugging the treasury out of sushi swap, Chef Nomi tweeted to everyone, "I fucked up and I am sorry." Which is kind of the same language.
37:30 Ryan Sean Adams? Look at this.
37:30 David Hoffman? Which is what Kobe's poking at. "I'm sorry, that's the biggest thing. I fucked up and should have done better."
37:33 Ryan Sean Adams? Interesting, interesting. Anyway, there were some ties.
37:35 David Hoffman? That wasn't the only association between sushi swap and Sam Bankman-Fried. That was, there's been more, there's been relations-
37:44 Ryan Sean Adams? I mean, at this point, David, I would not be surprised. This would not surprise me in the least.
37:48 David Hoffman? We saw Do Kwon behind those Algo stablecoins as an Anon and then start-
37:55 Ryan Sean Adams? Rick Sanchez, he telegrammed me and told me about Basis Cash was his original Ethereum Algo stablecoin. Would not surprise me in the least. So, I don't know, what do you make of that? Was it an apology? Is it just a nothing burger? Like, what is he doing here? What is he trying to accomplish?
38:17 David Hoffman? I don't know, man. I don't know.
38:19 Ryan Sean Adams? The big question, I think, is where he's going to find the $8 to $10 billion to fill that hole of depositors' money, because-
38:27 David Hoffman? Right, so right now, FTX is worth $1. It is on the market to anyone who wants to buy it for $1. If you buy FTX for $1, you are taking on somewhere between $8-ish billion of liabilities. You get the FTX empire, which it comes with-
38:46 David Hoffman? The low, low price of $8 billion of liabilities.
38:49 Ryan Sean Adams? Absolutely brutal. And of course, CZ looked at this, apparently, and then completely walked away from it.
38:55 David Hoffman? Was like, hell, no.
38:56 Ryan Sean Adams? Yeah.
38:56 David Hoffman? Took him about 24 hours to reject that deal.
38:59 Ryan Sean Adams? This is also cost SBF from a net worth perspective, of course, like at his peak, I don't know, he was in the twenties of billions, something like this. I've heard close to 30 billion. But he lost an estimated $15 billion, which at the time is nearly 94% of his total wealth. I bet that's even more now. Like, I mean, who knows?
39:20 David Hoffman? Right.
39:20 Ryan Sean Adams? Where he's gonna end up.
39:21 David Hoffman? He could be at zero, yeah.
39:23 Ryan Sean Adams? Definitely cost him a lot. What is this tweet, David?
39:26 David Hoffman? Yeah, so this is, okay, so at this point, we are on the frontier of the story. So things are now developing. But Tether has frozen FTX's USD address. So Tether, or FTX, all the tether that FTX has, about $46 million of it is now frozen. You could only imagine that regulators came knocking on Tether's door. I said, hey, go freeze FTX's tether supply. And Tether was like, sure.
39:55 Ryan Sean Adams? Happy to do that.
39:56 David Hoffman? Yeah, happy to.
39:57 Ryan Sean Adams? And of course, I mean, USDT is just kind of an IOU. It's not like actually money. So, I mean, they can do this sort of thing whenever they want to. There's, hopefully, there's assets backing this money. The money wasn't really lost. Gary Gensler has entered the picture a little bit here.
40:19 David Hoffman? Right.
40:19 Ryan Sean Adams? You could imagine he'd have some things to say. So he went on CNBC earlier this morning at our time of recording. And what did he say?
40:27 David Hoffman? He said that he, Gary, was hoodwinked by FTX after meeting with them in March. And says he is now building the evidence, building the facts, which often takes time, as to an answer as to what he is doing with FTX.
40:40 Ryan Sean Adams? Gary was hoodwinked. A lot of us were, to be fair.
40:44 David Hoffman? Yes.
40:44 Ryan Sean Adams? But Gary in particular. This is another follow up.
40:47 David Hoffman? It's his job to not be.
40:49 Ryan Sean Adams? It's true.
40:50 David Hoffman? So Gary also tweeted out, I'll be joining Squawk CNBC at 8 a.m. Eastern. So that was this morning to discuss recent developments in the crypto markets. And Collins Beltin, he's a lawyer, actually interviewed about the tornado cash stuff. He replies to this tweet out of Gary and says, ideally, you'll spend some time to explain how, once again, the commission's enforcement priorities focused on entities trying to deploy technology to prevent these market failures and asymmetries while you are meeting with the perpetrators or overlooking their malfeasance. And so this is just a tweet of a picture of Gary's Tuesday, March 29th schedule, which was a meeting with like eight different FTX representatives, executives.
41:32 David Hoffman? So it's interesting that Gary Gensler and FTX had met and.
41:36 Ryan Sean Adams? But did you see this move? Gensler is definitely distancing himself from SBF and FTX. And a lot of politicians who receive political donations and have been in conversation with SBF are doing the same thing. You've got to imagine, I mean, SBF is just like toxic at this point. It's crypto's biggest, it's not a Ponzi scheme, but it's like, it's a scheme of that type, right? And so no one wants to be associated in DC with that. This is part of why this is going to cost crypto so much is we've taken a major black eye here and lost a whole lot of legitimacy from the serious adults, I think, you know, the regulators, DC, Wall Street, institutions, that sort of thing.
42:21 David Hoffman? Ryan, this is developing. We have an email with Tom Emmer's staff to try and get him on the show to talk more about this, but he retweets Gary Gensler's tweet about joining Squawk CNBC. And Tom Emmer, Representative Tom Emmer says, interesting. Gary Gensler runs to the media while reports to my office allege he was helping SBF and FTX work on legal loopholes to obtain a regulatory monopoly. We are looking into this. That is all we know at this time. It was the fear of the crypto industry that SBF's work in DC was to. Specifically produce regulatory oper- operage for FTX by closing the door behind them after making sure that whatever they were doing was legal.
43:04 Ryan Sean Adams? Even closing the door on all of DeFi.
43:06 David Hoffman? Right, on De- on DeFi, right. And so, uh, Tom Emmer says that they had reports that Gary Gensler and SBF were working to create legal loopholes to create a regulatory monopoly. I, I hope we can get Tom Emmer on the show to talk about this soon. Um, that is interesting.
43:25 Ryan Sean Adams? More, more developing too. Of course, Elizabeth Warren weighed in on this and said, "The collapse of one of the largest crypto platforms shows how much of the industry appears to be smoke and mirrors. We need more aggressive enforcement and I'll keep pushing the SEC to enforce the law to protect consumers and financial stability." So Elizabeth.
43:41 David Hoffman? At face value, I love that tweet. I don't have any problem with that tweet. "The collapse of one of the largest crypto platforms show how much of the industry appears to be smoke and mirrors." That's what FTX was. It was smoke and mirrors. Uh, and so I do not have a problem with that. Uh, we need to be more aggressive enforcement and keep pushing the SEC to enforce laws to protect, like, I would, if this means that we are forcing the SEC to do more, great, fine.
44:04 Ryan Sean Adams? To do more, that's helpful. To do more that prevents, uh, the actual problem. Like, it's, it's, it's definitely a problem if, if Gary Gensler is kind of setting up a monopoly for crypto bankers like SBF, uh, and using regulatory power to do that. Brian Armstrong's response to, uh, Elizabeth Warren right under this tweet, I thought was good too. Uh, he says, "FTX was an offshore exchange, not even regulated by the SEC." Elizabeth, "The problem is that the SEC failed to create regulatory clarity here in the US, so many American investors and 95% of trading activity went offshore."
44:44 Ryan Sean Adams? Punishing US companies for making this, uh, for this makes no sense. And that is actually the facts of the case.
44:51 David Hoffman? Yeah.
44:52 Ryan Sean Adams? It wasn't FTX.us, which was more regulated in the US.
44:55 David Hoffman? Which is fine. If you have assets in FTX US, you are fine.
44:59 Ryan Sean Adams? So if you're an American and you're using FTX US, you're totally fine.
45:03 David Hoffman? Yep.
45:04 Ryan Sean Adams? All, all deposits are, are. There withdrawals are enabled and that's like 1% of all of FTX's assets.
45:12 David Hoffman? It's the minority of the business because they could.
45:16 Ryan Sean Adams? It was pushed out.
45:17 David Hoffman? It was pushed out, but also because, you know, they could actually take customer deposits and go gamble them if they were not inside of the United States.
45:25 Ryan Sean Adams? Right. So Brian's making the case, hey, you have to work to make it easier for retail to have safe access to these products. And you're not doing that with the current regulatory regime. David, there's also some talk of maybe some FTX transactions appear to be processing. So of course, no one can get their funds out of FTX. That's locked. That is a one-way ticket. They no longer exist. They're not there. But we're looking on chain and some things do seem to be withdrawing. What's this?
46:01 David Hoffman? Yeah. So this is Steven out of The Block who's done some great research and snooping, on-chain snooping. But just noticed that funds were coming out of FTX and going into various accounts. No one knows how or why, but that is what we are able to see on chain. This is Larry Sirmak, says the withdrawals from FTX seem to be really weird. Some of them actually go to the Binance deposit addresses and some of them appear to be fresh wallets, which could indicate a consolidation, pretty large $100,000 processing as well. What all of this is, I don't think we know.
46:34 Ryan Sean Adams? So I think one of the biggest pieces of this story is everyone, a lot of people trusted Sam and a lot of people were wrong about Sam. A lot of people were duped. I think myself and you included, not fully trusting Sam, not ever trusting fully a centralized exchange, but to think that FTX could just evaporate, that they were like gambling away their depositors' money, that was unthinkable to me. This is a tweet thread from some of the people that were sticking up for FTX and SBF in the beginning. And there was a lot of this chatter as the rumors persisted that, hey, maybe something's going on at FTX and Alameda, you should look into it. This is somebody, an account austerity side.
47:16 Ryan Sean Adams? I don't delete tweets, so I'm not going to delete this, even as people laugh and troll and mock me. Yes, I was wrong. The tweet stays up. Kudos for keeping the tweet up. But on November 6th, this was the tweet that the the the poster posted. Imagine thinking Alameda is the next Three Ours Capital. Side effect of the increased counterparty due diligence process, he goes on. Anyway, it was this conversation like, they're not going to go Three Ours Capital. Everything's fine. It's Alameda.
47:43 David Hoffman? They're fine. They're so responsible.
47:45 Ryan Sean Adams? Yeah, I mean, look at Sam. He's like
47:47 David Hoffman? Right.
47:47 Ryan Sean Adams? the pinnacle of responsible exchange operator. He's kind of a a younger, faster moving Brian Armstrong. This is actually from some of the employees that that respond to this thread. And this is an employee named Zane Tackett. Many people internally and externally were fooled. I'll leave my tweets up as well and take all the heat I deserve for defending something I didn't have all the details on. Somebody says, I can't believe this is real, Zane. You're not the only one, man. But in a state of complete shock, he goes on to say, I don't want to speak for others. Remember, this is an employee of FTX. I don't want to speak for others, but just complete disbelief and feelings of betrayal. What bothers me the most is that I went out and defended FTX and Sam in public. Said the news was FUD.
48:33 Ryan Sean Adams? We're fine. When they knew that wasn't true and they didn't have the decency to warn me. Employees as well, feeling betrayed by this. What do we do about this, David? I mean, I I guess I have kind of two questions for you. It's like, first, how long do you think this is going to take to recover? I mean, this is clearly a wound in the crypto industry. And then I want to ask you where we go from here. But time to recovery. How long is it going to take this one to heal? I mean, we've had wounds in the past. We've definitely had damage before. This isn't the first time. But how about this? How long will it take for us to get out of this one?
49:12 David Hoffman? How long is it going to take to forget the name FTX?
49:16 Ryan Sean Adams? Oh, I don't think we're ever going to forget the name FTX.
49:18 David Hoffman? For normies to forget the name FTX.
49:20 Ryan Sean Adams? I think it's going to be a Mt. Gox. But yes, I guess Mt. Gox is kind of faded, except for the the crypto historians who bring it up.
49:27 David Hoffman? Right. It's, I mean, yeah. We're not, we're gonna be living with this for a while.
49:36 Ryan Sean Adams? I think, my take is years, David.
49:39 David Hoffman? Years.
49:40 Ryan Sean Adams? Yeah, I think it's years and, you know, I'll say it again, I don't think any single individual has ever done more damage to crypto than, than SBF. I mean, it's things like as far as total crypto market cap, we lost more in Mt. Gox than we did in FTX, okay? But there's something different about this and the difference is Mt. Gox was not taken seriously by anybody.
50:03 David Hoffman? Right.
50:03 Ryan Sean Adams? Like crypto was in its infancy.
50:06 David Hoffman? Infancy and like the token distribution of Bitcoin at the time was still so much more concentrated. Mt. Gox had like 6.5% of all Bitcoins.
50:17 Ryan Sean Adams? It was a choke of an exchange, too.
50:18 David Hoffman? It was Magic the Gathering Exchange, that's the name.
50:21 Ryan Sean Adams? Yes.
50:22 David Hoffman? And the Mark Carpelli's, was Mark Carpelli's, he was kinda like this neckbeard guy. He wasn't going to Congress to testify for regulation, rubbing shoulders with Gary Gensler.
50:33 Ryan Sean Adams? 100%. So the thing, the thing that will take a long time to recover, and I'm not necessarily saying actually markets, David. I don't necessarily, I don't necessarily think it'll take two to three years for markets to recover. I'm just talking about the, the black state, like I'm just talking about the legitimacy recovery.
50:52 David Hoffman? Right.
50:52 Ryan Sean Adams? The Ontario Pension Fund was an investor in FTX, one of the first pension funds to do things in crypto, right? When's the next time a pension fund is going to do this? When, when's the next time a senator is going to take a meeting with somebody in the crypto industry?
51:09 David Hoffman? Right.
51:10 Ryan Sean Adams? They're distancing themselves from it.
51:11 David Hoffman? Right.
51:12 Ryan Sean Adams? How much?
51:12 David Hoffman? We have, we have like just such a smaller foundation to stand on.
51:17 Ryan Sean Adams? Yeah.
51:17 David Hoffman? We have made like the, the work for people like Brian Armstrong and Jake Shervinsky and people who we need to have trust. We have made their jobs 10 times harder as a result of this.
51:28 Ryan Sean Adams? Totally dude, I just, I, I can't, I feel like we're coming in the night after a crazy house party, right? And like the kids have been super irrespons, I guess this is, this is Ryan the dad, I guess coming out. The kids have been super irresponsible, like there's furniture broken, computers stolen, like.
51:47 David Hoffman? Dude, there are kids who drove home drunk and crashed and died.
51:51 Ryan Sean Adams? That's what it is, you know, it's even worse than that and, and the cops are, you know, showing up and then
51:56 David Hoffman? Yeah.
51:57 Ryan Sean Adams? we have to pick up the pieces in our community? For like, and why? And like, why? Why did this happen? I mean, FTX was a fantastic exchange.
52:09 David Hoffman? It was a good product.
52:10 Ryan Sean Adams? It worked. You had product.
52:11 David Hoffman? It was good.
52:12 Ryan Sean Adams? You had a product market fit, but you had to be what you had to run hedge fund?
52:17 David Hoffman? You had to run it as a fucking Ponzi scheme, dude.
52:21 Ryan Sean Adams? So where do we go from here is the next question? Like, how do we actually start recovering? I mean, here's the thing, here's the story about 2022 is it's just a story of this keeps happening. And if it was just one thing, if it was just FTX, you know, that would be one thing. But no, we had, we had, uh, Theres Capital, but I mean, before that we had DoKwon, uh, Totally Rec.
52:47 David Hoffman? Celsius.
52:48 Ryan Sean Adams? Celsius. And then I saw you tweet this out, by the way. Okay, answer me this. Uh, Theres Capital liquidated, Alameda liquidated, FTX insolvent. Then who made the money and who shows up? Richard freaking Hart goes, hi there, I made all the money. Okay, this dude is a scammer. He, he runs, he, he's got a coin called Pulse. He's preying on people, making tons of money. And he's actively scamming and I feel like our industry is still full of people like this. For every Vitalik, for every Brian Armstrong, for every, uh, Hayden Adams or Stani from Ave.
53:33 Ryan Sean Adams? We have like a hundred Richard Hearts.
53:38 Ryan Sean Adams? And that just sucks.
53:41 Ryan Sean Adams? So what do we do about this? How do we move forward?
53:45 David Hoffman? I got nothing, man.
53:47 Ryan Sean Adams? How are you feeling about this, David?
53:51 David Hoffman? It's like, we have these like super awesome foundations and that's like, they just keep on enabling the worst.
53:59 Ryan Sean Adams? Do you think that?
54:00 David Hoffman? Like it's hard to justify what the hell we're doing here, man.
54:05 Ryan Sean Adams? Do you think this is a layer zero problem? Is it a problem with kind of the social layer?
54:11 David Hoffman? If we will make these super cool applications and then scammers just can leverage them better.
54:19 David Hoffman? It's like we're running out of ways to explain it to normies.
54:25 Ryan Sean Adams? So when someone asks you about crypto after this week, do you have a different answer for them about why it's important?
54:32 David Hoffman? Don't even want to talk about it.
54:36 Ryan Sean Adams? I mean, I think you're like reflecting how a lot of people feel right now.
54:42 Ryan Sean Adams? We've really just been brutalized by this.
54:47 Ryan Sean Adams? I guess I'll give my take on where we go from here.
54:54 Ryan Sean Adams? And let me know if you have any other thoughts, David. I know this one hit you really hard. Not that you had any funds at risk, right?
55:02 Ryan Sean Adams? It's just what? It's just like
55:06 Ryan Sean Adams? the impact, the social impact.
55:10 Ryan Sean Adams? It's just the... Yeah, what is it? How like, why is this hitting you so hard, do you think, versus the other ones?
55:17 David Hoffman? It just gets worse the more that it happens. It's just like...
55:22 David Hoffman? I don't know, man.
55:25 Ryan Sean Adams? One answer I think for us is
55:29 Ryan Sean Adams? going back.
55:33 Ryan Sean Adams? I think in our livestream last night, Kobe mentioned this to you of like, you know, where do we go after this? And his answer was, I don't know, maybe somewhere like 2016, 2017, something like this.
55:47 Ryan Sean Adams? And I really feel like we need to take a step back and reevaluate kind of why we're here as an industry.
55:57 Ryan Sean Adams? You know that phrase that from the earliest Bankless podcast, we're talking about like protocols, not people? That's where we put our trust in. I feel like crypto believed that at one point in time. And a segment of crypto still does. But we lost a whole bunch of that. With the fast money and the demagogues and the Richard Hearts, like I feel like we lost our way.
56:23 Ryan Sean Adams? And I don't mean everybody. There's still fantastic people building incredible things. But I mean enough that it made a difference. Enough that it enabled the FTXs of the world and the Alamadas and the three hours capitals and
56:39 Ryan Sean Adams? the terras of the world. And I think what we need to do is go back and rediscover the principles and the reasons this industry exists. It's all about, it's code, not kings. That's what we're, that's what we're trusting in. It's protocols, not people. And this is about going bankless, not trusting another banker. Maybe I'll, I'll throw out some, some hope for you, David, because it feels like you're pretty down on this, but like,
57:06 Ryan Sean Adams? DeFi weathered this quite well.
57:10 Ryan Sean Adams? Ethereum weathered this quite well. I mean, the, the problem that we saw was with a centralized exchange is with another bank. And
57:26 Ryan Sean Adams? one of the reasons I think we started this, this podcast and, and this movement, which bankless listener, I'm glad that you're, you're joining us on and you've been on with us is to make sure that crypto didn't replace the old system with a new system of bankers. It's no good if we just swap out Jamie Dimon for SBF. Right? I mean, what, what do we gain? What do we benefit from? And I felt like over the past two years or so, particularly in this, in this bull market, we were starting to veer towards that. Where the bankers were getting more and more control. We, we forgot about first principles
58:09 Ryan Sean Adams? of like, why we're here. And we put trust in the wrong people. And I'm hopeful, David, that this is actually like a
58:20 Ryan Sean Adams? Another wake up call, another cleansing process for us, another reason to go back to those roots. And ultimately, I think we'll end up stronger on the other side. It doesn't feel like that in a week like this, but I'll just remind people Ethereum kept going, DeFi kept going, we had the transparency, we have the crypto economic protocols, we just didn't use them. And the system broke where they weren't in use.
58:56 David Hoffman? I remember that there's one part out of our interview with Palenya, and they said, "I'm so bullish on a human trust that we don't actually need protocols in the future." Like, I think that's what's missing. It's like, I want to be able to trust SBF. I want to be able to hand him my private keys and then get them back later with all the funds intact. I feel like I can do that to Brian Armstrong. But like, at this point, like, well, I don't even know, man. Like, who the hell's left?
59:26 Ryan Sean Adams? This sounds like it's a deeper thing. It's like a faith in humanity, kind of. Or faith in the industry, faith in the people in the industry, faith in the layer zero.
59:36 David Hoffman? Yeah.
59:37 Ryan Sean Adams? Yeah. That's the struggle here.
59:40 David Hoffman? Yes, well, it's like, who are the biggest characters of the last year? Like, we have these cult of personalities. We have like Do Kwon and like Alex Moschinsky tried to make this about him and like Suzu in Three Hours Capital.
59:54 Ryan Sean Adams? Danny Sesta.
59:54 David Hoffman? And Danny Sesta, and then SBF. Like, everyone's got, everyone who's super loud grows this massive cult of personality around them. And they all F it up, every single one of them. And like, that's why I just respect the hell out of Brian Armstrong so much, just because like, he does, it's not about him. It's not about him. And he doesn't want it to be about him. It's one of those, it's where, there's that line of just like, the people that you want to be in power don't want power. And the people that want power, you don't want them to be in power.
1:00:28 Ryan Sean Adams? Yeah, I um, I will say David, a lot of the people that we've that we've met in crypto, though, over the past three years, four years, they are here for the right reasons. So, you know, which point I would quit this industry is if Vitalik Buterin screwed us over.
1:00:52 Ryan Sean Adams? At that point, I'd be like, faith in humanity lost. But there's enough Vitaliks, there's enough Bryans, there's enough people on the blacklist journey that are doing this for the right reasons and who care about these core founding values. And I actually think we're just gonna get back to rediscovering these things and hopefully build, build this thing back stronger.
1:01:18 David Hoffman? Why does it take a pain to learn? Like, we're the most dumb monkeys of all time, dude. Like, we're supposed to be able to learn without having to feel pain. Pain is like the last resort. Like, we're supposed to be smart.
1:01:32 Ryan Sean Adams? I don't know, were you smart the first cycle? How smart were you?
1:01:36 David Hoffman? Uh, I mean, I bought a bunch of ICOs.
1:01:38 Ryan Sean Adams? 2017, how smart was David? Was he, why was he here?
1:01:43 David Hoffman? Now I'm thinking a lot smarter than I was originally letting on.
1:01:48 Ryan Sean Adams? You think you were smarter than?
1:01:50 David Hoffman? Than all the other dumb monkeys in this industry that keep giving bankers their money? Yeah.
1:01:55 Ryan Sean Adams? I mean, I, I think it's just, it's just, every generation has to learn these things.
1:02:02 Ryan Sean Adams? And, yeah, like I said, I mean, the systems that used our crypto economic protocols, that used DeFi, held up in all of this. And the flaws in the system were where we had trusted intermediaries. And isn't that the freaking point of crypto? To remove the trusted intermediaries?
1:02:21 David Hoffman? Right, but we're, we're not even doing that. Like, no one's, a few people are using that stuff.
1:02:28 Ryan Sean Adams? More, more though. I mean, every year, it's a little bit more, a little bit more, a little bit more. And, yeah, I, I think we'll get out of this. Guys, um...
1:02:41 Ryan Sean Adams? We've got more to cover, some Ethereum roadmap stuff. We're going to talk about the seizure of $3.4 billion from some dude's closet in Gainesville, Georgia. It was just crazy. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible.
1:02:56 David Hoffman? In all of my years in crypto, I have never been hacked, scammed, or lost money to a thief. And a lot of that credit goes to my Ledger hardware wallet. The Ledger Nano X and the Ledger Nano S Plus hardware wallets allow users like you and me to secure and manage all of our crypto assets and our NFTs, all with the security of storing users' private keys offline and out of reach from hackers. The Ledger Nano X is the perfect hardware wallet for managing your crypto and NFTs on the go because it connects to your phone with Bluetooth and has a nice big screen for easy transaction readings. Ledger has also upgraded the iconic Ledger Nano S and made the new Ledger Nano S device more DeFi and NFT friendly, making it the perfect hardware wallet for beginners. Ledger has truly maximized for both ease of use and security. So discover which Ledger device is best suited for your journey
1:03:41 David Hoffman? by going and visiting shop-ledger.com. If you've been listening to Bankless, you know that we're fans of the modular blockchain thesis, the idea that blockchains will separate execution from data availability and consensus, allowing all three to become the best versions of themselves. And Fuel has built the fastest modular execution layer in the industry. By supporting parallel transaction execution, Fuel unlocks significantly faster throughput for the web3 world. Fuel also goes beyond the limitations of the EVM with its own Fuel VM, which is more efficient and optimized, opening up the design space for developers. And lastly, Fuel brings a powerful developer experience with its own domain-specific language, Sway, and a supportive tool chain called Fork. With Fuel, you can have the benefits of smart contract languages like Solidity
1:04:25 David Hoffman? while adopting the improvements made by the Rust tooling ecosystem, letting the Fuel development environment go beyond the limitations of the EVM. If you want to learn more, there's a link in the show notes to see how you can get involved with a Fuel network.
1:04:36 Ryan Sean Adams? Alright guys, we're back. David's feeling better, because we are looking at the Ethereum roadmap. The newest version, a new Vitalik Buterin roadmap just dropped. This is Ethereum. It's got all of the stages, David. We're looking at the merge, the surge, the scourge, the verge, the purge, and the splurge.
1:04:52 David Hoffman? And if you were paying attention, you would have noticed there's a new urge. The scourge is new. So we'll walk through the scourge, which is to ensure reliable, incredibly neutral transaction, including inclusion, and avoid centralization amongst MEV risk. So this is, has to do with all of the increased emphasis on censorship resistance of Ethereum. So he's carved out this new urge, and put some things that fit under this category. Things that already existed, but now we have an urge to explain it. And also, Vitalik Buterin would like you to know that all of these things are happening in parallel. This is not a serial order of operations, starting from the merge and ending at the splurge.
1:05:33 David Hoffman? All of these things are being built, worked on in parallel from left to right. And this is the updated state of the Ethereum roadmap.
1:05:43 Ryan Sean Adams? Anything else new here, David? I mean, this is everything that, you know, are there any other major features here? Anything unexpected?
1:05:50 David Hoffman? Nope, everything else is the same. Like, he's just like moved forward the progress bars. I guess, yeah, he's added some new things here, but
1:05:58 David Hoffman? it's more or less, it's more or less what we expect, is there's just updated now.
1:06:02 Ryan Sean Adams? If you want, I think the most recent thing that we've heard from Vitalik on the roadmap, check out our previous episode. We did that, what, six weeks ago? Maybe it was a little longer? With Vitalik, where he goes through some of the roadmap, and I think it's reflected here too. David, we got OpenSea. They are creating new tools to help artists collect royalties on chain. What does this mean?
1:06:23 David Hoffman? Yeah, so there's been this royalty problem in the NFT world, where you have royalties baked into tokens, but they're actually not enforced at the smart contract layer, level, which actually makes sense, right? Because if you own an NFT and you want to transfer it to another wallet address, another, just like go from wallet A to wallet B, just want to send it to someone, yourself, you want to gift it, you don't have to pay the royalty, because it's not a sale. So where do the royalties? royalties actually come in. Well, they come in at the exchange level, but the exchanges have to opt into royalties in order for royalties royalties to be paid.
1:06:55 Ryan Sean Adams? That kind of sucks.
1:06:56 David Hoffman? It does kind of suck. It makes it makes royalties an opt in thing, which kind of ruins the point of a royalty. And so OpenSea, Devin Finzer and OpenSea said that we are making a better system. So they have made a new little widget to help enforce royalties for tokens that have royalties. And so I think the way that this works is that if you want to add this little widget to your NFT, it makes that NFT only saleable on exchanges that opt into this little widget.
1:07:25 Ryan Sean Adams? So you can write that in code, though.
1:07:27 David Hoffman? You can write that in code. Yeah. And so it's a it's a step in the right direction to making sure that we keep royalties into the tokens, which is one of the reasons why NFTs have made the inroads into the artist communities in the first place.
1:07:40 Ryan Sean Adams? Yeah, you can't just be like, I I choose not to pay royalties.
1:07:43 David Hoffman? Right.
1:07:44 Ryan Sean Adams? And that shouldn't be a decision available to you. William Peaster had a whole article on this, about the future of NFT royalties in Metaverse. So if you're not subscribed to Metaverse, by the way, that's a Bankless subnewsletter. If you're into the NFT space, Peaster's got it for you.
1:07:57 David Hoffman? It's by far the most useful NFT newsletter that exists.
1:07:59 Ryan Sean Adams? That's Metaverse. Metaverse dot banklesshq.com, of course. SuperRare doing some NFT stuff, too. They're pulling a Kevin Rose here, it feels like, and creating like a curator pass for art?
1:08:12 David Hoffman? Yeah, it's basically like a a pass that gives you privileged access to the SuperRare ecosystem. So a monthly airdrop from a legendary artist, they claim. Three times opportunities a month to win a one of one unique NFT, an exclusive PAC's passholder community access, and additional benefits to be announced. I think it's just going to be like the the membership passport towards SuperRare. I think this is a business model that many people are going to be experimenting with.
1:08:41 Ryan Sean Adams? Ah, big fan of passports, David. How about you?
1:08:43 David Hoffman? Oh, I love, I love NFT passports, my man.
1:08:45 Ryan Sean Adams? Also experiments.
1:08:46 David Hoffman? Also experiments.
1:08:47 Ryan Sean Adams? This is crazy. Did you catch this story, by the way? It's like, it was just before all the FTX news broke. But the US apparently seized $3.36 billion worth of Bitcoin. They did this a year ago, but they just announced it earlier this week. And this is from a guy who stole 50K of Bitcoin from the Silk Road. So, you know, Silk Road, OG, kind of a drug for crypto marketplace. 10 years ago, somebody stole 50K worth of Bitcoin. And this guy was just hanging out at his house in Gainesville, Georgia. And I guess the Fed knocked on the door one day.
1:09:24 David Hoffman? Gainesville.
1:09:24 Ryan Sean Adams? Yeah. And, you know, it was like, hey, we know you have something. And I'm not sure what the process went like from there. Apparently, he voluntary, in quotes, kind of gave up the crypto to him. I'm sure there's some plea bargains involved. I'm sure there's a lot involved here. But yeah, can you imagine sitting in Georgia with $3 billion in your basement somewhere worth of Bitcoin?
1:09:51 David Hoffman? Not, not in the basement. Do you know where he hid it, Ryan?
1:09:54 Ryan Sean Adams? No.
1:09:56 David Hoffman? So the quote, the quote from the GainesvilleTime.com, I'm reading it right now. The, it was a small computer in a underground floor safe that was submerged under blankets in a popcorn tin in the bathroom closet or something.
1:10:14 Ryan Sean Adams? Oh, my God. Well, sir, he was bankless, though, wasn't he?
1:10:21 Ryan Sean Adams? I mean, didn't have to worry about FTX. Just had to worry about this problem of what to do on-chain.
1:10:27 David Hoffman? If you, if you own your own assets, you can still be in trouble for stealing them.
1:10:31 Ryan Sean Adams? And just, well, just a reminder, on-chain crime is, is also forever. It is also immutable. So what happened was the feds, the authorities, upgraded their on-chain analytics tools and were somehow able to, to find this individual and go request those funds be returned. I'm not sure what happens to it from there, David. That'd be an interesting story. Is that, did the authorities just auction this off?
1:10:55 David Hoffman? Uh, they will. I think that's how they did it last time. And people really, really liked it. What was, what did they auction it from? I can't remember. I think it was, I think it was a Silk Road. It was Ross Ulbricht's Bitcoins from the Silk Road.
1:11:07 Ryan Sean Adams? Adam Draper bought a bunch or something.
1:11:09 David Hoffman? And Adam Draper bought a bunch and everyone wanted them because they assumed that if the government is selling them the Bitcoins, that they are government-approved Bitcoins. And so they went for a premium and Adam Draper paid that premium. I don't think that premium was, has been justified, but.
1:11:24 Ryan Sean Adams? Uh, well, but he paid a lot less for them. I don't know, he'd win the hundreds of dollars per Bitcoin.
1:11:28 David Hoffman? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:11:29 Ryan Sean Adams? Yeah, it's definitely justified.
1:11:30 David Hoffman? He paid a premium at the time.
1:11:31 Ryan Sean Adams? Ah, I see, I see. Uh, yeah, so pretty crazy. And by the way, that's the second-largest, uh, financial seizure in history. Happened to be with Bitcoin, happened to be with crypto. Um, the other thing that's happening, given what we were just talking about, you might be excited about this, David.
1:11:49 David Hoffman? Yeah, I am.
1:11:49 Ryan Sean Adams? The SEC issued a subpoena to influencers promoting Hex, Pulse Chain, and Pulse X. These are all shady scam.
1:11:57 David Hoffman? Yeah.
1:11:58 Ryan Sean Adams? Uh, yeah, Ponzi-type projects promoted by Richard Hart.
1:12:03 David Hoffman? And, and a collection of influencers. We are not going after Richard Hart, sadly. Where does Richard Hart live? And can we go get him?
1:12:09 Ryan Sean Adams? There, I'm sure they're going after. I'm sure it's some, I'm, they can't just go after the influencers and not Richard Hart, right?
1:12:15 David Hoffman? Yes, yeah. Where, I'm Googling this. Where does Richard Hart?
1:12:20 Ryan Sean Adams? Can we just say, can we just say, this is what the SEC should be doing? Thank you.
1:12:24 David Hoffman? Yes.
1:12:25 Ryan Sean Adams? Like, thank you. Thank you, SEC. This is what we want. This is what crypto has always asked for, is your help in identifying and rooting out and, uh, bringing the scammers to justice. Don't stop legitimate entrepreneurs and real businesses, but give clarity to our industry. Help Brian Armstrong with Coinbase so that 95% of trading activity doesn't happen outside of the US. Uh, and then also help us collect some of the scammers. There's a lot of work to do in this space. As you just said, crypto still has a lot of, uh, scammers, shady individuals to go chase after. So you can keep yourself busy there. And that's what's happening with some of these influencers.
1:13:06 David Hoffman? I don't know. He's from America. I don't know where he lives. This article, there's nothing, yeah, I can't imagine. Well, it's not in the US.
1:13:13 Ryan Sean Adams? Not in Gainesville, Georgia, huh?
1:13:14 David Hoffman? Not in Gainesville, yeah. All right, this is a tweet out of Library, Library.com. It says, "We lost. Sorry, everyone." What is this about? Well, Library was going up against the SEC about a securities offering. So the SEC sued them for issuing securities. They say that they violated securities laws by selling the native LBC tokens without registering as a US securities and exchange, with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. And this happened back in March of 2021, so a little bit over a year and a half ago. The SEC alleged that the LBC tokens were securities, that the startup had violated securities laws by selling them without registering, blah, blah, blah. Library pushed back, claiming the LBC tokens were not securities, of course,
1:13:57 David Hoffman? and that the SEC did not give it fair notice that the sale of LBC were subject to securities laws, thus violating the company's rights to due process. But they have lost this legal battle with a specific judge. And the problem with this, and this is coming out of Gabe Shapiro, is that the Library judge reasoned that even if the team is completely silent about efforts, no promises, no promotions, no contracts, but then they premine the token to give themselves some tokens, that alone creates a sufficient expectation of profits from their efforts in a common enterprise to pass the Howey test, a very bad result. Basically, just the mere act of giving oneself tokens is enough to produce a common enterprise
1:14:38 David Hoffman? is the precedent that was just set. And that's bad, because that basically takes care of the whole industry.
1:14:46 Ryan Sean Adams? It means a lot of things. Our tokens, according to, or securities, according to this judge. Now, it's one judge.
1:14:53 David Hoffman? Just one judge.
1:14:55 Ryan Sean Adams? Yeah, this is not the Supreme Court. This is just one case. But yeah, there's going to be some more fights ahead involving this, for sure. Library says, "The most F part about this whole situation is that even after five years of fighting and a court ruling, we still honestly do not know how to legally launch a public blockchain in the US." Does anybody?
1:15:16 Ryan Sean Adams? That's the question. What do we do?
1:15:19 David Hoffman? Nope.
1:15:19 Ryan Sean Adams? I mean, this is an example of, okay, uh, go find kind of the, the scammers and the Richard Hearts of the world. Um, but allow the legitimate entrepreneurs and businesses to legally, compliantly launch a token. Figure out how to do it. What are the bounds? We don't have any clarity still, even after five years and, uh, library's just been, been stifled out. Um, the Web3 Foundation, although Polkadot is claiming a different experience in working with the SEC. So, uh, I don't know if you read this tweet thread. It was sort of a mysterious tweet thread.
1:15:56 David Hoffman? It was weird, dude. It was weird. I didn't really understand it.
1:15:59 Ryan Sean Adams? They tweeted this out. Web3 Foundation, this is Polkadot, um, the foundation that, that guides the Polkadot project, announces Polkadot's native token, dot, has morphed and is software, not a security, exclamation point.
1:16:09 David Hoffman? They're announcing that their native token, dot, has morphed and is software, not a security. They're announcing that it's not a security.
1:16:18 Ryan Sean Adams? It's just like, you can do that? Like, I am not a criminal. We, this is not a security. You could just do that. Um, and so I was like, okay, there must be something here. Um, I actually read the post and, uh, the post doesn't say very much more, David. Um, it basically says they, they took Gary Gensler up on his invitation of come in and talk to us. And after three years of going in and talking to the SEC, ta-da, now they're not a security.
1:16:46 David Hoffman? Wait, Gary Gensler's been around for three years?
1:16:48 Ryan Sean Adams? I don't know. Whoever is.
1:16:50 David Hoffman? Okay, they've been in talks with the SEC for three years.
1:16:51 Ryan Sean Adams? Jay Clayton, whoever, whoever was previous to Gary Gensler. And I don't know that that's how it works. Like, there's no kind of letter produced. You just, it's just to come in and talk to us.
1:17:00 David Hoffman? So somebody went through the dark forest of talking with the SEC and on the other side, we get this announcement that they are not a security and we don't have any sort of details as to that.
1:17:10 Ryan Sean Adams? No corroboration with the SEC saying.
1:17:12 David Hoffman? No, no for A to B. There's just like complete black box between those two steps.
1:17:15 Ryan Sean Adams? Right, and there's not, there's not even the confirmation from the SEC that this is. There's just a post that says, we're not a security.
1:17:24 Ryan Sean Adams? From the project itself.
1:17:26 David Hoffman? Well, actually, you know, maybe this is a little bit of 4D chess. If they are announcing that they have worked with the SEC and they are not a security.
1:17:33 Ryan Sean Adams? Yeah.
1:17:33 David Hoffman? And the SEC is like,
1:17:35 Ryan Sean Adams? That's what this is.
1:17:35 David Hoffman? No, you're not. We didn't say that. Well, are they like forcing them to giving them clarity? I don't know.
1:17:42 Ryan Sean Adams? It's like, me first. Not it. It's that kind of thing?
1:17:44 David Hoffman? Not it.
1:17:47 Ryan Sean Adams? I literally think that's what's happening because there's nothing substantiating this from the SEC. No evidence produced, just that they came in and talked and now suddenly they're not a security. They're just software. Fantastic. Wonderful.
1:18:00 David Hoffman? UK bank Santander will block payments to crypto exchanges. Well, I will block payments to Santander. That's the headline.
1:18:09 Ryan Sean Adams? I don't know that they care, David, but yeah, we'll do what we can. I'm not going to make it. I don't know how banks can do this over the long run. This is cool. On the release aside, what's Zirion cooking up?
1:18:19 David Hoffman? Zirion prepares to take on MetaMask with an in-browser wallet. Somebody who has been suffering the Ledger, MetaMask, Chrome, just Bermuda Triangle.
1:18:29 Ryan Sean Adams? You still have problems with that?
1:18:31 David Hoffman? I don't know how, dude. New computer. I have, I have my laptop.
1:18:35 Ryan Sean Adams? Are you on Windows?
1:18:36 David Hoffman? Well, I'm on Windows now, but it was broken before I was on Windows.
1:18:39 Ryan Sean Adams? I know. It was for a while and then it got fixed. You have to update things.
1:18:43 David Hoffman? I've updated MetaMask. I've updated Chrome. I got a, I built a brand new computer. I've updated the firmware on my Ledger and like I still can't use Chrome in my Ledger. I use Firefox now. Yes.
1:18:55 Ryan Sean Adams? One of, one of those two will eventually work.
1:18:58 David Hoffman? Anyways, Zirion, please fix. Congratulations on the release.
1:19:02 Ryan Sean Adams? Do you know Wallet Connect is trying to fix that too?
1:19:04 David Hoffman? Yep. Wallet Connect raised $12.5 million in an ecosystem round aimed at driving the next evolution of their growth. Congratulations on the raise from Wallet Connect.
1:19:13 Ryan Sean Adams? Is this a weird week to tell people to get a job in crypto? I don't think so, just because we do it every single week. All right. This is our weekly reminder to tell you to get a job in the crypto. David's not in the dancing mood. Okay. And I just don't dance. No one wants to see that. So I'm just going to read a few things out at you. But David, you got to be excited about the script writer. That is the. Number one position bank.
1:19:34 David Hoffman? That's gonna be a fun job if you want to work with me.
1:19:37 Ryan Sean Adams? Swell Network is hiring smart contract engineer as well. This is a staking provider. Swell Network, a senior front-end engineer. Swell Network, a senior back-end engineer. Uniswap Labs, developer relations. Uniswap Labs, a senior front-end engineer, some NFT engineers from Uniswap as well. Uniswap just keeps hiring.
1:19:56 David Hoffman? Open hedge optimism. Swell and optimism just are crushing it on the jobs.
1:20:00 Ryan Sean Adams? But this is the hottest job board on the planet, I think, because these are all companies I would love to to work for.
1:20:07 David Hoffman? You know, all of those people that got laid off from Silicon Valley?
1:20:10 Ryan Sean Adams? You can go check out this.
1:20:11 David Hoffman? Yeah, they should go check out the job board.
1:20:12 Ryan Sean Adams? Yeah, absolutely. All right, guys, we will be right back with some more takes from around crypto. And also talk about what we're bullish on, even in this crazy week that was overly bearish. We'll talk about some bullish things, but before I do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible.
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1:22:18 Ryan Sean Adams? All right, guys, we are back. Didn't get a chance to go through the questions to the nation, so I think I'm just gonna ask a question that's probably on everyone's mind in Bankless right now, which is: is crypto dead? Is crypto dead? People are saying that the collapse of FTX is proving that there's nothing really there in crypto, that it's dead, that it's dying, that it's not ready for mainstream, that it never will be. Once again, crypto, is it dead, David? What do you think?
1:22:49 David Hoffman? The whole point of crypto is that it cannot die. That is why we're here. You know, Ryan, that I just love the intersection of nature and crypto systems, crypto-economic systems, and that's why I'm here. If there wasn't this property of anti-fragility in these crypto systems, I wouldn't be here. The whole point is that this biomimicry of the crypto world means that it cannot die. It can take a punch, it can take a bullet, it can take 10 bullets, it can get its head chopped off, and it will always come back if you just give it enough time. FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried is not crypto. The reason why Bitcoin, Ether, some of these, Uniswap,
1:23:32 David Hoffman? these things cannot die, that's the point. People may forget about them. But eventually, they will return, as they always do, because these are anti-fragile systems, and if you are anti-fragile, you will always come back. It is inevitable that crypto takes over. It's inevitable that Ether goes up in price so long as Ethereum gets built upon. And so crypto cannot die. That's why we are here.
1:23:59 Ryan Sean Adams? Dig in. Let's get some grit here. I mean, do you really think that someone by the name of Sam Bankman-Fried, he literally had bank in his name, and we gave him billions of dollars? What were we doing? Do you think we're going to let Sam Bankman-Fried kill crypto?
1:24:16 David Hoffman? He can't kill crypto. No one has the power to kill crypto. That's the whole point.
1:24:20 Ryan Sean Adams? Yeah. I mean, I think the answer, as it has been in the beginning for this industry, is return to these values of DeFi, Ethereum, and going bankless. Let's get to some takes this week, David. This one from Hunter, Hunter Horsley. He says this, "The future of the crypto industry is two paths. Number one, onshore regulated US platforms and firms, or, number two, fully decentralized. Investors have lost trust for the in-between."
1:24:46 David Hoffman? Love it.
1:24:46 Ryan Sean Adams? Remember the whole C-Defi thing?
1:24:48 David Hoffman? C-Defi? Yeah, get the hell out of here.
1:24:51 Ryan Sean Adams? Remember this whole blend of like, "Yeah, we could have a blockchain, but it's like fintech." It's the space in the middle that is just ripping to shreds. And I think that's what hap- My take was like, the fintech bro, or the finance bro era of crypto is over. I feel like that's what we got a lot of in the last couple of years.
1:25:09 David Hoffman? Get back to being cypherpunks. Yeah.
1:25:11 Ryan Sean Adams? Cypherpunks, or you go full bank. One or the other.
1:25:14 David Hoffman? Cypherpunk or bank. Yes. And this fits into my model of, if you can be regulated, you ought to be regulated. If you can't be regulated, that means you're fully decentralized, and you are regulated by code, which is the whole, again, the point of why we're here.
1:25:29 Ryan Sean Adams? This is some context for us. The worst events in crypto history, the Mt. Gox hack
1:25:35 Ryan Sean Adams? 2014, the Dow hack 2016, the Terra Luna collapse 2022, FTX sells to Binance 2022, Three Arrows Capital collapse 2022. Of course, FTX didn't sell to Binance, but the FTX collapse, we'll call it. Three of the worst events in that list in crypto happened this year. If you survive this year, you've earned your stripes.
1:25:58 David Hoffman? Yeah, this actually really makes me reconsider like last bear market was bad because we all ran out of money, but this bear market is bad because everyone
1:26:07 Ryan Sean Adams? We ran out of legitimacy?
1:26:09 David Hoffman? Yeah, we ran out of legitimacy. Yeah.
1:26:11 Ryan Sean Adams? I, um, yeah.
1:26:12 David Hoffman? I think at the end of this tweet, I really, really like, if you survive this year, you've earned your stripes.
1:26:17 Ryan Sean Adams? Oh, definitely.
1:26:18 David Hoffman? I remember, uh, I think it was when, I think it was like 2020 ish, early 2020, where somebody called me an OG for the first time, a crypto OG.
1:26:28 Ryan Sean Adams? Yeah.
1:26:28 David Hoffman? And I got into crypto in 2017.
1:26:30 Ryan Sean Adams? It's because you survived it.
1:26:31 David Hoffman? I didn't, I didn't feel like an OG, but somebody called me an OG in 2020, and then more people started calling me OGs and more people started calling me an OG. I mean, if you got in in crypto in like maybe early 2020, I think your time to start being considered an OG is pretty damn soon here.
1:26:47 Ryan Sean Adams? You've earned it. Yeah.
1:26:48 David Hoffman? You've earned it.
1:26:48 Ryan Sean Adams? If you're through here on the other side, I, I think that this bear market is no less harsh than the, the, the 2018 bear market.
1:26:57 David Hoffman? 2018 was harsh because we all ran out of money, but we didn't get rug pulled. We didn't get scammed. We didn't have these collapses. We were just poor.
1:27:09 Ryan Sean Adams? And now like Many of us did stupid things with ICOs.
1:27:11 David Hoffman? Yes. Yeah. Uh, this, making it through the gamut of this bear market, I think was maybe minimum twice as hard.
1:27:20 Ryan Sean Adams? You're gonna feel great on the other side.
1:27:22 David Hoffman? You're gonna, you're gonna deserve the hell out of it for sure.
1:27:25 Ryan Sean Adams? You're gonna feel great. Um, this is a take from you, David. I'm gonna read it. The sad part is this week's events proved why we need DeFi, but the DeFi brand has lost meaning. Luna, Sesta, Crony, farming, old school DeFi is the bright shining star keeping me going. Uniswap, Dai, Rye, Ave, Nosis, but we don't even have a name for it. David is sad. You have been sad this episode, David. That's not like you. You're super like, so, um, DeFi as a brand.
1:27:57 David Hoffman? Yeah, we've lost our brand, man. And this is actually, this was in, uh, came out of an inspiration from a conversation with Vitalik I was having in Telegram. So actually, this is basically Vitalik's take, uh, but he didn't tweet it, so I did. Um, but yeah, man, like, what do we even call, like, the good stuff? Because like even the DeFi brand, like Web3, no one takes that name, that name seriously anymore. DeFi is now associated with scams for the outside world. Like, what do we call the good stuff? What do we, what do we call the protocols that are actually anti-fragile? Like, we don't even have a name for that. Or even our name has been stolen from us.
1:28:31 Ryan Sean Adams? Well, we don't. I mean, but this has happened to other names in the past, like blockchain. You remember, you remember blockchain used to mean something, and then it was enterprise blockchain, and then it got kind of diluted and stupid. But yeah, it pains me the most, I think, to, uh, to lose, uh, the term DeFi. Um, remember when we originally wanted to call this whole thing Open Finance?
1:28:51 David Hoffman? Uh, OpFi, ObFi.
1:28:53 Ryan Sean Adams? Never stuck. Uh, I don't know about that. Maybe, maybe Bankless Finance. Maybe there's a future for that.
1:28:57 David Hoffman? Maybe we just, yeah, we just call it Bankless. We'll just do that.
1:29:02 Ryan Sean Adams? We'll do it. See if anyone else does.
1:29:04 David Hoffman? Yeah.
1:29:05 Ryan Sean Adams? This is another take. Thank God Gary Gensler chose to protect us from checks notes. Kim Kardashian! Woo!
1:29:13 David Hoffman? I feel so protected.
1:29:15 Ryan Sean Adams? Gary, uh, what's the background on this? There, I mean, there was a settlement with Kim Kardashian for pumping a token.
1:29:23 David Hoffman? For, for pumping a security, and then they charged Kim Kardashian, and then Gary Gensler went on the speaking tour to say, "Hey, we got Kim Kardashian for promoting..."
1:29:30 Ryan Sean Adams? Got her. Got the bad guy.
1:29:32 David Hoffman? Yeah. Meanwhile, I'm gonna go meet with Sam Bankman-Fried for lunch.
1:29:36 Ryan Sean Adams? Eight billion dollars in the hole later. Uh, very sad. Although, to be fair to Gary, a lot of us missed that one. A lot of people.
1:29:44 David Hoffman? But it's, okay, it's not our job. It's his job. That's his job.
1:29:47 Ryan Sean Adams? All right. All right. Fair enough. All right. Can you find something to be bullish on? Got to ask you that question as we do every week. What are you bullish on?
1:29:55 David Hoffman? So Ryan, I bottom ticked Ether so far is what I'm bullish on. So I don't.
1:30:01 Ryan Sean Adams? People don't know the trading vernacular. What's bottom ticking mean, David?
1:30:05 David Hoffman? Is that you? Are you asking?
1:30:07 Ryan Sean Adams? I know what bottom ticking is.
1:30:10 David Hoffman? So I set two limit orders, one at 1150 Ether and one at 1075. I think the bottom of ETH was like 1038 dollars, 1,038. And so my buys went through like while I was sleeping. I don't usually set limit orders. I usually just hit market buy, but had some cash. Bought on Coinbase, which I don't usually do.
1:30:32 David Hoffman? But I usually use Gemini, but this time I use Coinbase for reasons. And I just feel really good because it's up since then. And so I just feel good about buying at least what is a local bottom. And let me tell you, if I had bought like two days ago and then it dumped, I'd be feeling way worse. But I'm just bullish on ticking the bottom. I've ticked the bottom pretty well so far.
1:30:54 Ryan Sean Adams? You must believe in the future of this whole ecosystem. We're still buying ETH at these prices.
1:30:58 David Hoffman? Yeah, yeah, it's the only thing I really believe in, man.
1:31:02 Ryan Sean Adams? ETH is still the asset you return to?
1:31:05 David Hoffman? Yes.
1:31:05 Ryan Sean Adams? Is this kind of what the Bitcoin maximalists felt in the aftermath of 2018, 2019? Where they're just like?
1:31:12 David Hoffman? Stop venturing out. Stop going to the frontier. Just stick with the thing you know is going to work.
1:31:19 Ryan Sean Adams? Rebuild our base.
1:31:20 David Hoffman? Because go back to the core. Let's go back to the base. ETH is ultrasound money. I bottom ticked it. I'm happy about that.
1:31:27 Ryan Sean Adams? I'll just remind people, bottom so far.
1:31:30 David Hoffman? Well, I bought 897 during the Alameda crash. Or it's not the Alameda. I bought 897 during the Three Arrows Capital crash. And then I bought 1075 to add the Alameda FTX crash. I actually think that like everyone's worried about contagion in the future. Like I'm not one to call bottoms, except so far.
1:31:52 Ryan Sean Adams? You are calling bottoms with your buys, sir.
1:31:54 David Hoffman? Three Arrows Capital, the worst. When everyone was freaking out about Three Arrows Capital about, oh, there's going to be so much more contagion in the future. That was actually the moment to buy. And that's what people are saying right now. There's going to be so much more contagion. We'll have to see the contagion. See how bad the contagion is for Alameda and FTX. That's when I bought. And I'm feeling good about it. That's what I'm bullish on.
1:32:18 Ryan Sean Adams? I'm still waiting for my triple digits, to be honest, but I may not get there.
1:32:22 David Hoffman? You may not get there. Alright, so if that's not what you're bullish on, then what are you bullish on?
1:32:25 Ryan Sean Adams? Uh, David, I'm bullish on the bankless thesis. I, um, you know, I think it's just really struck me that crypto has learned through 2022 that it can't leave its destiny in the hands of the banks, of a bunch of centralized bankers. And I think we veered into that. It's just like, there's something very easy about solutions like FTX. Someone takes custody of your keys and the user experience is better. There's no gas fees and, you know, there's someone with a suit responsible for it, willing to go in front of Congress. There's something very settling about this, right? And we did settle for it. We settled for centralized exchanges and that's been the problem.
1:33:10 Ryan Sean Adams? But I feel like the bankless thesis has held really strong. Like, we have to rebuild the future of crypto, not on centralized exchanges. I mean, like, we could never build them on centralized exchange. We have to rebuild the future on DeFi. So I kind of feel pretty good about the bankless thesis coming out of this. It's just like crypto banks are not going to solve our problems. They're going to cause more problems. It's interesting, you know, a lot of our conversation in the past few months before this debacle, it's been about censorship resistance. And that is one of the benefits of decentralization, right? Censorship resistance and freedom, and that's super important. But here, this was not a failure of, like, Sam was not censoring anyone's transactions.
1:33:55 Ryan Sean Adams? He was stealing the money, okay? Like, he was taking depositors' funds and doing other things with them. It was a trusted intermediary problem. It was a banker problem. We got screwed by the bankers again, David, okay? This is like... 2008, this is like every sort of banker crisis that we've seen where we've been screwed by the bankers. This is why this is not a problem with DeFi, it's not a problem with Ethereum. Like, DeFi didn't do this. Right. DeFi solves this problem and yet here we are in this place. And this is why I understand your sadness and frustration part of this episode is just like, didn't we already know this? Aren't we better than this? Aren't we supposed to be the ones who aren't trusting the Sam Bankman-Frieds of the world?
1:34:41 Ryan Sean Adams? So anyway, I do feel like the bankless thesis has kind of held up even while crypto is suffering. And we're probably going to rebuild this entire space on top of that thesis. And this is why I am ultimately optimistic and bullish that we come out, that we come out stronger. And I'm hopeful, listener, that if you lost some money this week, if you're affected by FTX, I'm sorry, you know, that's really tough. We said in other times this has happened in the past, take some time with family, go for a jog, clear your head, take a break, step away for a bit.
1:35:18 Ryan Sean Adams? We hope you come back because I think that people in crypto need veterans with the type of experience that you've just received. If you didn't have any funds in FTX, you saw what happened to those around you. And crypto needs people with that experience. This is how we make a stronger Layer Zero for next time. Because who's going to warn the class of 2025 or 2026 when they go do something stupid? This is the only reason David and I know enough to kind of talk about this, going bankless. It's just because we've seen it before. And so one generation, it's their responsibility to teach the next generation. So you're developing your battle scars, your veteran skills.
1:36:01 Ryan Sean Adams? And yeah, we need you here and we need you to push the bankless thesis forward.
1:36:07 David Hoffman? Yeah, that's the cool thing about crypto is that it takes about three years to become a veteran. There's not many industries where like usually you need to be 30 years in experience in something to be a veteran. But like this is how human wisdom is passed down from village elders to the young folk. And we actually have the privilege in crypto where it only takes three years to become like a village elder who can be wise.
1:36:32 Ryan Sean Adams? Because every year is like 10. I feel like this week was like 10 years for me, dude. I'm exhausted.
1:36:37 David Hoffman? I'm exhausted, man.
1:36:39 Ryan Sean Adams? I've rarely been this tired. Yeah. All right. Let's end it with a meme of the week. What are we looking at, David?
1:36:45 David Hoffman? Meme of the week, we are looking at FTX Arena in Miami, but it's actually a spirit Halloween store. Because that's where that's where rundown buildings go to die.
1:37:00 Ryan Sean Adams? You gotta laugh or you'd cry. Guys, we hope you've enjoyed Bankless this week. It's been a crazy week and we have a moment of zen for you, so stick around for that. But of course, as always, risks and disclaimers. Crypto is risky. You could lose what you put in, but we're headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the Bankless journey. Thanks a lot.
1:37:21 Speaker 02 Last thing that I'll say is if you look at what precipitated some of the 2008 financial crisis, you saw a number of bilateral bespoke, non-reported transactions happening between financial counterparties, which then got repackaged and releveraged again and again and again. Such that no one knew how much risk was in that system until it all fell apart. If you compare that to what happens on FTX or other major cryptocurrency venues today, there is complete transparency about the full open interest. There is complete transparency about the positions that are held. There is a robust, consistent risk framework applied. And we're excited to work with the CFTC on our US licensed and regulated venue.
1:38:01 David Hoffman? Hey, we hope you enjoyed the video. If you did, head over to Bankless HQ right now to develop your crypto investing skills and learn how to free yourself from banks and gain your financial independence. We recommend joining our daily newsletter, podcast and community as a Bankless Premium subscriber to get the most out of your Bankless experience. You'll get access to our market analysis, our alpha leaks and exclusive content and even the Bankless token for airdrops, raffles and unlocks. If you're interested in crypto, the Bankless community is where you want to be. Click the link in the description to become a Bankless Premium subscriber today. Also, don't forget to subscribe to the channel for in-depth interviews with industry leaders, Ask Me Anything's and weekly rollups where we summarize the week in crypto and other
1:38:46 David Hoffman? fantastic content. Thanks everyone for watching and being on the journey as we build out the Bankless Nation.
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