Coinbase vs SEC, Cancun EIPs and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #576 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone welcome to another episode of daily gray refuel where I recap the latest news need fear maker system I'm your host and the Nissan 29th of April 2023. right everyone let's get into it so uh it's a Saturday it's not a weekday but this is a special episode going out on the Saturday because I missed yesterday's episode and I also missed Monday's episode last week so I didn't want to leave you guys hanging until Monday so apologies for missing yesterday's episode it was due to my microphone not working I thought my microphone died but turns out uh it was some issue with my computer I spent like an hour getting it to work and fixing it by the time I got it to work it was too late to record an episode yesterday so I'm recording one today for you all and there's a bit of news to get through so

let's get right into it so uh you guys will remember that coinbase had received a Wells noticed from the SEC a little while ago now I think a few weeks ago um and it was obviously a kind of a surprise to coinbase because they had been working with the SEC for quite a while I think uh I think two years and they also were given the go ahead to go public obviously two years ago uh and and coinbase is a publicly traded company now well uh the the chief legal officer Paul greville here who I've talked about before and Brian Armstrong basically made a I think 10 to 15 minute long video uh accompanied by I believe there's a there's a blog post as well uh while the video has the meat of the information but basically what the video does is

it's got Brian and Paul basically speaking to all the stuff that they have done personally and at what coinbase has done with the SEC in order to be compliant in order to uh kind of play by the rules so to speak and they're basically get repeated throughout the video that they've done everything they can and yet the SEC is still treating them like like this basically sending them Wells notices and not playing ball with them uh and I just thought it was a really really strong kind of message that's being sent not just to the SEC but to to everyone that hey you know coinbase uh the biggest us-based crypto company publicly traded has tried and tried and tried tried many many times to work at the SEC and the SEC is just

putting up a brick wall basically and has apparently especially since FTX collapsed in November has turned completely uh sour on the the crypto industry and is basically Waging War on it now you guys will know that Gary Gensler had actually cozied up to SPF the um the uh the founder of of uh of ftxer so you have to wonder if SP if Gary Gensler isn't trying to repair his reputation by going after every other crypto company because he missed SBF and and FTX that seems like an obvious thing to me but I think there's more to it than that I obviously think that not only is Gary trying to repair his reputation but he is also uh trying to get a promotion basically he wants to go to the treasury right he's he's looking

after himself and himself only and crypto is just collateral damage in that he doesn't care about crypto I mean it's kind of funny how his opinions have changed so dramatically over the years as well because a few years ago he was lecturing on crypto and I believe that at Stanford or MIT one of those one of those colleges and he was talking about it as if like you and I would talk about it he was excited about it he was educating on it accurately he wasn't calling everything a security or or just saying really dumb things and gaslighting everyone he was being quite genuine and he was being I mean his courses uh I I've gotten payback from people that said that they enjoyed the courses because they're available online but today's Gary gensland today's SEC does not play nice with crypto at all we

all know that uh and they're actively going out of their way to try and Stonewall crypto at least in the US as much as they can or wherever they can now as I've mentioned before this has forced a companies overseas coinbase is going to launch their derivative exchange offshore now I believe in Bermuda which is just ridiculous because coinbase is as I said the one of the biggest uh companies in the US definitely the biggest crypto company in the US is publicly traded uh generates a lot of economic activity for the us and is now being forced to launch products overseas because the regulatory environment in the US is too harsh for them which is just insane but anyway I highly recommend you go watch the video for yourselves I'll link that in the

YouTube description below as well as Paul's tweet thread here for you to check out all right we had another all chord Dev School number 160 happened uh what was this like yesterday or the day before uh and as usual Tim biker has a uh thread recap out for you to peruse I'll link that in the YouTube description below but there's also a TL DL too long didn't watch uh here uh that he screenshotted it this got a message that he put put out so what was discussed in this all call Deb score well the scope of Cancun the next ethereum upgrade and of course you can watch the stream for yourself but I believe the eips that are going to be included have been decided now I spoke the other day about how Erp 4844 is the driver of this upgrade whereas

these other eips are passengers so right now we have 4844 included we have 6780 1153 and 64.75 uh which are all going to uh be included uh in Cancun at this stage now as I mentioned the other day these things except 4844 are passengers so they could still be removed up until you know pretty close to it going on mainnet so just because because that they are approved for inclusion doesn't mean that they will 100 be included it just means that they've gotten to that that point and they can still be removed later on now there are other erps that are cfi'd or considered for inclusion as well so Erp 4788 and 64.93 are considered for considered for inclusion

but the decision was also made to remove uh the eof erps which were the ones that were meant to actually go in the chappella upgrade but then got pushed to Cancun and has have now um been pushed uh uh for Prague which is the upgrade that's going to be happening after Cancun so next year now uh and they'll be discussing uh 64.93 more on the 4844 call next Monday and next all call devs call I don't know what each of these erps match to by the way except 4844 uh so you'll have to look up the numbers for yourself or read Tim's thread to to see but I believe 1153 was the EIP that uni Swap and just D5 teams in general were trying to get in uh it didn't go in with chappella but he's now going to be included with Cancun so that's great to

see uh and other related updates with uh were that the 48 44 devnet 5 was launched with 1 000 validators and six clients tooling is available at that URL there uh and they expect more clients uh joining soon as well as fuzzing and and testing and all that good stuff there so yeah as I said you can go check out timbaiko's thread on this for all the relevant details and links to everything you need but great to see that planning for Cancun is well underway and we already have four eips that are included we already knew that 4844 was I was pretty much 100 going to be included I mean I've been discussing that for months now it was just a matter of would it be ready in time like everyone wants it right it is a massive upgrade for ethereum scalability uh so that's that's

happening obviously and the other eips here as I said they're included right now they could be removed later they could be other eops that get included because there are still two here that are considered for inclusion uh which uh you can find more details about in this thread which I'll link below uh and there was also a tldr tweet of what you what each of these things are as well which I'll link uh in in the description below for you all right so Trend fan apps from the a few different places you you'll know him from the protocol Guild you'll know him from uh the kzg ceremony well he put out a blog post a detailing if you wanted to start something like the protocol Guild so he says yeah check out my newest piece uh for Primitives that fight that funding mechanisms depend on why the

guild is shaped like it is and things to consider for your domain so if you are someone that is considering spinning up something similar to the protocol Guild for your own domain or Community whatever else it is who better to get advice and guidance from than Trent himself who is I guess one half of the protocol Guild Tim baiko is the other big champion of it I mean it's not just Trent and Tim there are other people involved but I believe Trent and Tim are like the I guess the main stewards of the protocol Guild so definitely there is no one probably no one better than Trent uh and uh or or Tim to get the information from in starting something like this yourself so the blog post itself isn't too long if you want to read about it even if you just want to

read about it to get more context around the protocol Gilda thinking that went into it um then it's it's a highly recommended raid I really enjoyed it uh and definitely you can reach out uh to Trent on Twitter if you're interested in learning more about these sorts of things and you can join the guilds Discord channel for further discussions yeah so just something I wanted to highlight for you guys the link is in the YouTube description below all right so the kcg ceremony is still ongoing and I mentioned a few days ago that the nonce requirement had been dropped to 64 from 128 and you can see here that the lobby size over time is much much smoother than it has traditionally been and I believe uh actually I was looking at this the other day we are approaching 100 000 unique contributions so you can see at the top

here we're at almost 92 000 and I think I remember saying on the refuel when the kzg ceremony first began that I would like I thought we were going to easily hit 50k and there was a chance that we would hit 100K total contributions as well it seems like we're going to get there I mean there's still 78 days left of this new round here uh there's not many people in the lobby there's only 19 people in the lobby right now so if you haven't contributed yet or you feel like you want to contribute again uh with uh with a new source of kind of entropy you can do it and it should be a lot easier to get included than it traditionally has been as long as you have an address that has a nunce of 64 or more so yeah I'll link uh the link in the YouTube

description below for you to check out uh and as I said if you have had trouble participating in the ceremony before you shouldn't have any trouble now all right so Christine Kim here from uh the research desk at galaxy has put out a tweet saying or a tweet with a chart saying since the Genesis of ethereum the network has undergone 18 hard Fork upgrades 15 on the execution layer and three on the consensus layer on average ethereum core developers have shipped two and a half hard Forks per year over the last seven years uh I really like this chart it's a really great way of visualizing ethereum hard Forks the only thing I would say is that I think taking the average here doesn't really make sense because there has been long periods of time as you can see on the

chart where there wasn't really any upgrades you can see here that there was actually no upgrades in 2018 uh and then we had an upgrade we had uh two upgrades in 2019 one of them was only uh uh sorry I should say uh one of them in 2020 uh was only to push back the um uh the uh what was it the uh the difficulty bomb the Ice Age and then we had uh the beacon chain launch which wasn't on the Ethan side of things so you can see it's not really something that you can average out and you can see that it's actually gotten a lot faster so it's kind of funny how they started out this chart was really interesting to me when you look at the start of ethereum when ethereum went live in July of 2015 there were lots of forks and there were like

obviously the Dow Fork which happened uh wasn't a planned Fork ride and then there was a tangerine whistle which also wasn't a planned Fork it was done to address the Shanghai dos attacks and then spurious dragon and bison uh Byzantium before 2018. so it seemed to be much faster in the beginning and then we kind of had this lull period from basically I guess you could say mid 2017 or like October 2017 till really the beacon chain launched we had this period where not much happened as I said Istanbul was just uh sorry Mia Glacier was just the hard Fork uh uh to push back the ice age uh Istanbul I remember exactly the naming here of which one I think Istanbul was that was the third inning so he basically

um reduced each Supply by a third or eight new issuance by a third but then when the beacon chain launched we started having a lot more hard Forks obviously because we had the consensus layer to Fork as well but generally the Cadence has gotten a lot quicker and I think it's going to get a lot quicker going forward as well I mean we just had chappella in April and early April or early in mid-april and then we're going to have Cancun probably by the end of the year so if we can get at least two hard Forks Network upgrades a year that is Miles better than what we've had in the past and it really speaks to just how well oiled of a machine that the ethereum core development process and research process is right now it is a night and day difference between what it

was I guess in the last bear Market in in 2019 uh 2018 2019 and even most of 2020 it was very different and very very very different landscape than it than it is today I mean for anyone who's around back then you know what I mean but if you joined maybe late 2020 2021 you probably don't have any context around just how different it was back then it was it was I mean to put it to put it into some perspective for you just so you can understand what I'm what I'm talking about here there were a lot of worries about how to fund core development right because there was a massive bear Market eath was down 94 from its all-time high the ethereum foundation uh I believe didn't didn't cash out as much as they should of they

had cash but it was kind of like okay we don't know when this bear Market's going to end we don't even know if it's going to go up again and the ethereum foundation's treasury was mostly eth so for them they were they were kind of thinking okay well we need to make this money last so the the pay was kind of mad there wasn't much work being done because not many people were being hired the client diversity wasn't that great especially on the execution layer side of things but then things started slowly coming together we started having more and more teams join uh the market started recovering obviously uh in in 2020 uh and then it just kind of like went on from there and then we had like things like the protocol Guild spin up for core development and it just snowballed from there and now it's in

the best position it's been in by far I mean it's it's just a hundred times at least 100 times better which is just amazing to see and it kind of happened over a long period of time so sometimes I have to reflect and see how far we've come because you may miss it if you've just been so involved with this ecosystem because it moves so fast you may have missed just how much things evolved but reflecting now and reflecting back on how it was is uh is is pretty cool to see how far ethereum Court of element has become all right just one other tweet from Christine Kim here today as well she says excluding partial withdrawals the cumulated number of new eats steak deposits has surpassed the number of full withdrawals by 72 as of April 27 2023 indicating that more validators

have entered a theorem that exit exited since the activation of Shanghai what did I say guys what did I say I think I even gave the the time frame that I said within like a couple of weeks we would be back to up only of each stake um uh going forward and it's just I I don't like tooting my own horn I don't like inflating my own ego here but it has been absolutely amazing to see just how prescient uh I guess like my predictions have been but also not just mine I mean I'm not the only one who predicted this there are a lot of people in the ethereum community that deserve credit for predicting stuff like this uh and informing my views on this stuff as well because a lot of My Views especially that I give on the refuel I talk to other people about like I have a

group of friends uh that you know you guys probably know them all but I'm not going to name them I talk to them a lot we we bounce ideas off of each other uh and I just kind of take all those inputs in and distill my own thinking around it so it's not just me that kind of thought of these things there's a lot of different people but it just feels so good to have uh been so right about this not not because of of tooting my own horn but because it feels awesome to see that the ethereum ecosystem uh is so uh is so bullish it it just wants to keep growing there is not many people who actually want to withdraw eth from staking and just leave the ecosystem there are more people wanting to enter the ecosystem and be part of this

amazing experiment that is ethereum now of course there is a downside to this the downside is that operators that are already large such as Lido have continued to grow now this is obviously due as well to the fact that Lido hasn't enabled withdrawals yet so we don't really know how much eth is going to be withdrawing with withdrawn from later until they enable withdrawals but they have gotten a lot of um a lot of inflows but on the other side of things uh Kraken has gotten a lot of outflows because they were forced to um same with I believe binance as well and and then rocketball has gotten a lot of inflows which has been awesome to see but I would love to just see I mean I'm really looking forward to later enabling withdrawals because I want to see how

much eth comes out of that I think that getting Lido below 20 which is what I ideally would like to see because I'm being realistic here getting Lido below like 10 would be at this stage I don't know if I'd call it impossible but it would be very very hard to do so because as I discussed a couple days ago the ethereum staking ecosystem in the landscape is like turning a big ship actually someone meme to me that I shouldn't be using the Titanic as the ship because the Titanic sank okay I don't know any other big ships I I'm not into boats so I'm just gonna say big ship it's steering the ethereum stacking ecosystem as a big ship is going to take a long time right uh so I think that lato can get below 20 maybe like you

know if there is kind of uh the the um the bull market comes back and everyone's trying to do restaking and there are vampire attacks and all this sorts of stuff I think it can happen you know within like 12 to 18 months if there wasn't like a withdrawal queue It Could Happen a lot faster but because of the withdrawal and the deposit queue it can only happen it's basically rate limited we know how fast it can happen and we can give kind of rough estimations about that so that's why I'm saying that it takes a long time and you shouldn't be disheartened by things not changing from day to day or even like month to month because it has to change over longer periods of time we could see for example constant outflows from Lido uh but to get for them to get to 20 so

so let's let's put this in perspective if for example there were only outflows from Lido no news no new eat was staked with Lido from for Lido to get from 32.2 percent that they're at right now to 20 would take more than a year at least because it has to go through the queue and it has to go through the queue with everyone else right and it's not going to all happen at once there's going to be people are withdrawing at different times so even if there is no new inflows to offset those outflows uh it's still not going to change very quickly it's going to take a long time so I think people need to be patient here they need to understand that because it took a long time for it to get to this point to begin with I mean the beginning chain

has been live since December 2020. I don't know how long later has been live for actually I'm I'm not across when they launched as a as a protocol here but it has been quite a while since they've been live I mean it's not a new thing it's not a recent thing I believe they went live in in potentially 2020 uh sorry 2021 um I I think that makes sense to me but I'm not sure someone can correct me or not but even if they went live in 2022 it's been like you know at the beginning of 2022 it's been like what 15 months since then so it's not like this has happened overnight right and again this has also happened because it's been an up only thing because of no withdrawals being enabled so once lighter withdrawals are enabled let's revisit 12 to 18 months if lydo still has their

market share that they have now and if it's grown especially if it's grown then I will concede that my thesis around there not market share coming down was wrong but I'm not going to concede it after like a week or a month because it doesn't make sense from from the way ethereum is taking works now in saying all of that I don't think that we should just pick on lighter I think I'm only picking on later because they're the biggest but right now but I wouldn't like to see any service be this speak even a service like rockapool a decentralized staking service I wouldn't want to see it this big I ideally don't want to see any service over 20 that's my own personal preference here but it doesn't matter what I want it doesn't matter what I would like to see what matters is the reality but what also

matters is realizing that the reality can take a long time to to play out and we have to wait for that so I'm going to keep monitoring it I'm not going to monitor it a day-to-day week to week But as time goes on as things change I'm going to monitor it as much as I can and report it for the refuel for you guys all right moving on to a blog post TR from Paradigm research that Georgios shared so he said here on Twitter motivated by the recent unbundling attacks against Mev searches I teamed up with the ethereum foundation's mic to investigate the interplay between Mev boost and ethereum proof of stake consensus and enumerate some of the possible paths forward and you can see here this is quite a meaty blog post so if you're interested in all things Mev

this is definitely something that you should read now of course I'm not going to try and give a tldr or a um or a summary of this because it is quite Technical and there are a lot of moving parts to this so I just wanted to highlight it so that you guys could go read it as I said we'll leave a link to the YouTube description below and there's also something else you should read after that uh Tony here from the MAV boost.pics website uh who I've talked about a lot on the refill before has put together a few charts to kind of uh show this uh sorry a chart and a thread to kind of show what was going on and what was talked about in that blog post so these things can be read back to back I highly recommend doing so they'll

both be linked in the YouTube description below for you to do that but generally you know I think that a lot of these kind of posts especially the ones that are more technical I would I've said this before but I don't think people should feel bad if they don't understand what's actually written in these posts I often highlight these things on the refill just because I think they're interesting and I think they're worth reading but I'm not saying that hey you need to understand this on the first read and if you don't you're a complete Noob and you know nothing and you should just delete your account no I'm not saying that at all uh I'm just showcasing interesting things do I understand everything that I showcase on here to like the fullest 100 extent of course I don't I'm not a protocol researcher I'm not a cryptographer I am

someone who reads a lot and tries to keep up with ethereum as much as possible but there are a lot of things that I still don't understand but by reading these things by listening to podcasts by getting exposed to them again and again and again you retain more and more of the information and you can learn these things as time goes on and that's how I'm able to to educate on these things because I just there's a lot of repetition involved I just retain the information and I I formulate my own opinions about it but when it come comes like the super technical cryptography stuff I'm not going to sit here and let you on that because I don't understand that honestly I understand the high level stuff of course I understand how proof of stake works at a higher level and maybe a bit deeper but I couldn't

tell you the details behind the cryptography itself right I couldn't tell you the details behind um some of the bleeding edge mov stuff but I can tell you the high level which is I think what a lot of people want from from the refuel so that's why I do that but if you want to dive deeper there are always these posts to do so and of course I'll link these in the YouTube description below for you to follow it for yourself all right so on April 27th uh oplabs has announced that Bedrock entered consensus plus feature freeze and they say yeah we are committed to achieving two weeks of code stability before announcing the date for op's mainnet upgrade to bedrock for the most up-to-date info on Bedrock see this Mission Control page which is something that I highlighted the other day so I maintained that we may see

bedrocker live on Main Nets in May uh probably late may but it could push to to early mid-june it just depends right depends on a variety of things like if there's bugs or if the team doesn't feel comfortable or whatever else uh but but yeah I expect to see this in mail June no later than that to be honest unless there's some kind of critical bug that that requires them to rewrite a whole uh section of code and test it again anything like that I don't foresee that happening but it could I mean there's always a chance of that happening but yeah be prepared for Bedrock to go live in either May or June and for those of you who need a refresher on what Bedrock is you can visit this link which will be in the YouTube description below but just to give you a towel VR it's

basically optimism's version of arbitrim nitro it's a massive upgrade for the network it brings with it a host of new features and upgrades and you can obviously read all about those in the link that I'll link in the YouTube description below all right our last stop oh second last year Astoria has introduced their closed beta which is now live at astaria.xyz for whitelisted LSD nft holders uh and then they said yeah get ready for an uh revolution in nft lending and that's what Astoria is they are an nft lending protocol which I should disclose I am an investor in and they have uh entered beta here which you can play around with if you have the uh the relevant LSD token uh uh in your wallet here all the

details for that are in the blog post uh which will link in the YouTube description below um but you guys know my general view on nfts that I think that the nfts themselves are really really hard to like invest in they're really hard to I guess spend time on because things can be so fleeting there are very very few nft projects that have actually have called that have cultivated a lasting community and even those over time have lost their community so for example if you look back to even a year a year ago there were massive communities around certain nft projects and I'm not going to name them all because honestly I couldn't name them all but over time because those projects either don't do anything because they made enough money

they don't care anymore or people lose interest or whatever else they fade away and they fade away not just in terms of Mind share but also in terms of price now the ones that stick around I mean they're the ones that obviously keep their value and they're the ones that people continue to care about I think that I can name a couple here like crypto punks and even the board Apes but there is no guarantee that in the future those things are still going to be I guess relevant and popular and valuable so for me when I look at investing in the nft ecosystem I like to invest in the infrastructure and I mentioned this before and that's why I've I've really only when it comes to nfts put money into the infrastructure side of things rather than the nfts themselves now that's not investment advice generally

but that's just how I think about these things and Astoria fits the bill on that of course uh in Spades because they're building air infrastructure for nft Lending but there's also been a bunch of other projects that I've invested in as well you guys know like immutable X and uh and uh there's a few others out there I'm not going to name them all because I don't want to chill I don't want to Shell everything but that's how I think about these things and that's why I think that uh the NF taker system is is is very it's very crazy I mean if you don't actually know what you're doing you're gonna get wrecked I mean it's the same is true for any Market but I think in nfts it becomes even more pronounced because the things that you're buying like they don't because they have like

pictures attached to them because they have like a I guess like an ecosystem attached to them it can be very different to just random erc20 tokens that you might buy or unusual or something like that um it's very different because people start attaching their identity to these things they do that with with certain projects in crypto but not to the extent of um of nfts for nfts for example if there's a profile picture nft project you know a lot of the community will change their own profile picture to one of those nfts on Twitter or wherever else whereas with a project say you're a really big fan of a project like for example I'm a really big fan of um of of ethereum obviously I mean that's the understandment of the century I'm not going to change my Twitter profile picture to the logo of eth right because

it's not unique it's the same logo even if you dress it up a little bit it's still the same logo so there's no identity for me to attach there yes there are other ways to attach your identity to projects but that thing I think is very powerful but also very detrimental because people start getting attached to these things like I don't want to sell this thing even though the best thing for them in from an investment perspective was to sell it when they got to the point where everyone was talking about their you know the the thing so I think that the same market dynamics still ring true here but it becomes I guess a bit more uh what's the word I'm looking for a bit more chaotic when you involve getting tied uh with kind of like these things and playing them to your personality so

so yeah anyway you can go check out a star is beta launch for yourself I'll link this in the YouTube description below all right last up here we have an announcement from bankless so bankless is launching a ventures arm which you may have heard about already this was covered I believe a few weeks ago or maybe maybe a month ago now uh this is a 30 million dollar early stage VC fund empowering Pioneers to explore the frontier now why am I mentioning this well because I joined bankless Ventures as an advisor so I'm going to be helping them sift through dealflow reviewing decks doing all the stuff that I already do as an angel investor but in a more formal capacity so there is a big disclosure there that going forward I

will have direct exposure to pretty much everything that Bankers VC invests in as I am compensated for being an advisor here and I've got that website that I need to launch still with all of my disclosures on there but uh but yeah just just wanted to put that out there there so why are bankless launching a venture studio and why did I agree to be an advisor here alongside Justin Drake by the way so he's also an advisor um so they're launching this because thankless for I mean it doesn't matter if you love or hate bankless I think it's irrelevant here I actually don't understand why certain people hate Bankers but but I think that the reason why they're launching this and the reason why I think this is going to be successful is because bankless is the biggest crypto native media brand uh by

far really I think they they are they started off obviously being very very heavily ethereum focused and I would consider David and and Ryan here to be obviously uh hardcore ethereans I don't like using the term Maxi you know if Maxi but they are hardcore ethereans yeah but I think for them they're like okay well you know ethereum isn't the only technology that can lead to to to people going bankless right ethereum isn't the the only solution there um and also there are there are things happening in other ecosystems that are worth covering and also they they want to cover other topics such as AI which I know they've coped a bit of shoot for recently but you know that it's their show they can do what they want right it's their their kind of thing here but I think all of that has culminated in

creating the biggest media brand in crypto and the the bankless brand is extremely well known and it's a great brand I I mean I remember saying this to Ryan before even David joined bankless I said dude this is like an insane brand here I think this is going to go far just because it's such a a memeable thing right everyone memes it at the end of the day and I think it's just such a strong brand here um so so so because of all that because they've got such a big media reach they get a lot of a lot of deal flow everyone knows them right they can get a lot of the uh really great LPS involved with the fund they can get a lot of the the best deals uh and that's that's what makes successful fund at the end of the day right makes both a VC and a hedge

fund here now I do understand that there are some concerns over conflicts of interest for uh David and Ryan here now that there is a bank list VC and by the way it's not just David and Ryan doing this there's Ben lakeoff here who is an awesome dude by the way he's basically um doing doing it alongside them and it's been a huge part of it uh and as basically uh working very hard to get this off the ground but yeah I understand the conflict of interest argument but at the same time Ryan and David have been Angel Investing uh for a long time and this is more just a formalization of it so I think that yes they have a media company to run yes when you have a media company and you're investing in things you may or may not be biased you know there's a conscious

or a subconscious bias but as far as I know bankless has never done any paid for uh for play content and what I mean by that is that you can't pay bankless to cover you right you can't go to them and say Hey I want to be covered um on this date about this topic in this light as far as I know they have never done that now of course they're not a charity they they do monetize the bankless platform through ads and such but that doesn't give you any special privilege on the content side of things their content policy really has been to cover the most interesting things happening in the crypto landscape and to cover them as they happen you know as fast as they happen which I think is is what they've done successfully successfully for years now so I understand the conflict of

interest argument but when you take it all together and take all the facts together you can kind of see that they have actually already been investing for quite a while there are conflicts of interest uh all the time everywhere right no matter how hard you try for there not to be because there's conscious and subconscious bias but I think that uh David and Ryan have done a really great job of uh of threading that needle uh pretty pretty awesomely right and talking to them I mean I talk to to them all the time like they're kind of like my ethereum buddies that we we went through the bear Market together like my war buddies uh basically uh so we chat all the time and we really align on a lot of things and that's why I agreed to be an advisor I mean at the end of the

day I or you know I I I've been Angel Investing um on my own for quite a while now and will continue to do so and I'm not part of any other uh Venture fund or fund as a um as an advisor I I am part of another fund as an LP uh and when that's announced I'll explain my reasoning there but I mean really at the end of the day when when I was a approached about this I was like you know what I've turned down so many funds in the past but like I can't turn down bankless because we just align so much on these things and I and I really uh and that has just kind of like continued to play out as I've sat alongside seen how these guys um do due diligence on things see the discussions that we're having it just

honestly is pretty awesome to to be involved with here but I don't want to show it to you guys uh too much yeah I just wanted to explain the reasoning behind why they're launching it why I joined um but I will do one little chill here uh if you're interested in being an LP for banklessness fund you can reach out to them uh I believe you can reach out to Ben David or Ryan just wanted to shout that out there but you shouldn't feel any pressure to do that or anything like that as I said I am an advisor I'm compensated for my work so technically I'm being paid uh you know to to say that but not really because they didn't tell me to say that right I'm just saying that because I figured it might be something that may be of interest uh

to anyone uh uh to anyone listening so yeah on that note all right I'm gonna stop it there for today I hope you enjoyed this special episode so thank you everyone for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give it a thumbs up subscribe to newsletter join the Discord Channel and I'll catch you all on Monday thanks everyone