Rollup: bitcoin's crash, ETH FUD, BlackRock fund on Ethereum and memecoin presales

Transcript

is it the end of the Bull Run many were wondering after the week started with major dips across crypto and then BTC eth and soul rallied all this despite the latest bombshell from the SEC as news broke that the ethereum foundation is facing questions from a state Authority we now know this is the SEC which is looking to classify eth as a security what does this mean for the eth ETF and the rest of the C crypto ecosystem keep listening to find out gmgm welcome to web3 Academy your one trusted source to capitalize on the next big phase of the internet we are here to make sense of an onchain World in constant transformation I'm jird along

with my co-host Kyle reidhead and we believe that eth is a commodity and it's going to change the world oh I like that one I definitely agree with you there Jay yeah we got a lot to talk about today markets is a big part of it as Jay said we had a big dip honestly I've been kind of calling a dip for the last few weeks not saying it was coming but like putting it out there finally we had it wasn't that big though kind of a dip for ants I would call it which is what pomp called it on think CNBC or whatever the other day so we'll talk about what's going on on the market side of things we're going to talk a lot about eth not just the fud that Jay just mentioned but also some big big big things happening one of the biggest things probably ever

happened on ethereum which we'll cover and yes it has to do with black rock and no it is not about an ETF although we will touch on some ETF stuff as well also get you up to speed on what's happened over the last week in terms of layer twos with the denin upgrade that we talked about last week meme coins we will definitely touch on them again although if you were holding any over this week you probably got really wrecked and I feel bad for you maybe you listened to J maybe it didn't and then the last thing we're going to touch on before we get into aird drops and the agree disagrees is one of Jay's biggest calls and predictions which was Starbucks onboarding Millions is it going away is it done did you lose your prediction on already and we're only what in March well we'll talk about that

as well it's going to be a good episode oh I love it all right well before we jump in as always please take a minute to give us a review or a comment on whatever platform you're listening to and also we want to know how likely you think the E ETF is to happen do you think the ET ETF is going to happen by May 23rd yes or no that's our poll question for this week let us know what you think in the comments on YouTube or in the poll on Spotify let's jump into the market watch the last week Kai what's going on in Bitcoin yeah it's been a a wild little week so Bitcoin currently sits at 66,000 it topped out earlier this week

at 73,000 and then went down about 15% so on the day we're down 2.36% on the week we are down 99.39% but we did hit a dip of about 15% so like I said not a massive dip by any means but a dip nonetheless and one that was actually quite necessary I think for us to continue forward so I'm pleased to BU the dip I remember you bugging me on Friday to get paid earlier so you could buy the dip so I know you were pumped about it let's go to eth what's going on in eth eth currently sits at 3480 at the time of this recording it actually went down about 25% so hit a high of almost 41 what I'm seeing here and then um

currently since at it went down as low as 331 and uh it's down just 89% 89% on the week and or sorry on the day and 133% on the week it had a wild little ride yesterday because of some big news which made it pump once again so we'll talk about what that is throughout the episode all right let's go over to salana what's going on with soul salana sitting at 184 currently still up 133% on the week which is wild because everything else is down it is down 4% on the day but salus just had a wild swing it went up to 207 and then $270 and then um within a day and a half it was all the way down to about $160 and now it's back up to14 so this thing is just a wild ride but obviously

doing quite well when you zoom out and you don't look at the daily numbers and then Jay we'll finish it off with the crypto total market cap who's currently sitting at $2.4 trillion do down almost 10% on the week and 1.69% on the day so Jay let's start with a little bit of talk about Bitcoin then I want to talk about what I actually did for the dip on ethereum we'll touch on that and then um there's actually some macro news finally which we can discuss just a little bit of there's not much but we'll cover that so first of all on this dip that was only 15% for Bitcoin on the exchange bitmex I guess there was a bunch of selling on bitmex specifically and the Bitcoin price went down to $110,000 and someone for whatever reason had an old bid like a a

market at 10K and they got it so someone bought Bitcoin two days ago at 10,000 and then within a second it went back up to 65,000 or whatever it was at so like 6X in like a second so kudos to whoever that person is they must be just celebrating that was literally happens in seconds it's not like Bitcoin actually went down that low it's just because a bunch of [ __ ] happened on the bitmex exchange for whatever reason so kudos to that human or bot whoever that was but part of the reason why all this happened I mean there's a few reasons one I had talked for the last couple weeks we were definitely getting over levered and probably overhyped I mean mcoin Mania which we'll touched on again was just getting absolutely ridiculous we had the fundraise for whiff to go on

the Vegas sphere these are all typically like top signals and not necessarily top of the whole cycle so the Bull Run is not over as Jay asked the question at the beginning at least I don't think it is but these are generally times where like okay we need to take a break everyone's getting a bit ridiculous Even in our Discord we had people especially even on our team that were like what should I buy next how can I 10 next blah blah blah like stop talking about just Ethan Soul we need to go farther down the wrist curve and then boom they all get wrecked and it's like those are signals when you need to just chill the heck out but part of it was the over Leverage The Mania and then we actually had our first day in a long time of outflows so gptc and the egfs I'm

talking about but gptc gray scale had $643 million of outflows on the I think it was the 18th or the 17 yeah the 18th so pretty we're actually negative overall on that one 154 million on the negative that day we had another negative day to follow up so ETF taking a bit of a breather I guess but of course we might have had $643 million of outflows in the ETS who came in and bought the dip well bought it before the dip even happened Michael sailor we talked last week he was Raising 600 million or so for to buy some more Bitcoin well he did it and he bought another 9,243 Bitcoin and um interestingly Michael sailor buys on the same day of

the ETF outflows of 643 million Michael sailor buys 623 Million worth bit Bitcoin so all is good Michael sailor's here to fill the Gap and save the day for all the Bitcoin holders so thank you to micro strategy and Michael he's always here to save the day for all of us just wild I bet next week do you think by next week he's gonna raise again because it's been three weeks in a row now we've talked about this you think he does it again for sure for sure I think he's got extreme conviction at this current price he's excited about this that fast we we're doing a pro report right now actually on the supply shock of Bitcoin so we were running some numbers around the ETFs and around Michael sailor and he's currently buying I think it's

250 Bitcoin per day on average over the last year and he's actually picking up steam currently so it's a bit wild and so like just for context right now there's only 900 Bitcoin that's mined every single day by mid April it'll be just 450 and so Michael seller own is almost buying about a little over half of all the Bitcoin mined every single day come April 15th so and then you you count you know the ETFs and El Salvador and everyone else that's buying it's a little bit wild okay let's talk about the dip and what happens when the Dip's occurring what can you look at well sometimes Jay charts or lines on a chart can actually be very useful a lot of people don't like technical analysis and it's definitely not a perfect science

I'm not saying like you need to use it always but interesting up on the screen here I have a um the chart of eth and I've shared this one in our Pro Discord a few times so Pro members have seen this and I actually shared this on Friday I think when the dip occurred and just said look guys I think we've hit the bottom I'm buying right now and it was the perfect bottom and the reason I thought that was well I have a chart here which basically the lines in here are resistance and support lines that go back from the good old days of the last cycle of ethereum so we're looking at what happened when ethereum was at these prices so around three and 4,000 and 5,000 and the last cycle where did it have sort of some resistance and support and so I drew some lines here at the

sort of top line which would be some resistance at about 4,000 okay and then we also had some this was weeks ago at 3,100 or 3200 I guess it is and 3400 and so interestingly as we passed 3,400 a couple weeks ago we actually had a quick dip if you remember a couple weeks ago it was really fast it was in the within a couple days and it touched that 3200 Mark right where that line was and then it shot back up it rocketed all the way up to that 4,000 mark that I have lined on there then that signaled the top came all the way down where did it hit again that 3150 3200 Mark which to me I was like and it did go past it just a little bit but super brief and super quick and again just shot up from

there and now we're back up to like 3500 so and I mean you could just watch it happen I shared it on Friday said guys we just touched the bottom I think we're going to jump from here and boom We exactly did that so interestingly as it was about halfway down from this dip that's when payday was and Jay Jay shot me over some money I put it onto my quest trade because I'm not buying on Chene at the moment I'm buying in a tax for savings account and I was ready to buy and so was my girlfriend I said you know what let's wait I got a feeling it's going to hit the bottom of this line here and so we waited two days hit it we got up in the morning we bought it and she and I both basically bought the low on this one it was a beautiful we

were celebrating and it was nice this is like her first time ever buying the dip so she was excited she also bought some some coins so that was nice too but um yeah nice celebratory date Jay any questions on that before I move on to the last piece of news here no I'm feeling the Good Vibes I did the exact same thing I didn't hit the exact dip I came I came very close nice work nice work last one yeah yeah so one of the reasons why we jumped back so heavy yesterday was because the fomc meeting came out this is the meeting that we have on a basically monthly basis where drone pal and the boys tell us what they're going to do with the money is it going to be expensive money is it going to be cheap money is it going to cost a lot for my

mortgage or not they're going to decide basically our life and um just to kind of I guess short summary here interest rates staying the same they're not cutting they still want to wait for 2% inflation which we're currently around like 3% or so so they're still sort of waiting for that but what they did announce is they basically confirmed that they will be cutting this year likely cutting three times this year and they're planning to start slowing down quantitative tightening so that means lowering interest rates and likely printing more money so this was like overall pretty bullish there was no changes like obviously once they lower interest rates that's what we want to hear but based off like the way unemployment is going and things it looks like they're going to have to stop

tightening as what he said just the date we don't yet know but so most basically what happened was people took this as very bullish it's a good outlook for the rest of the year and so as soon as this meeting was done it ended the bare Market we just had or the dip we just had in crypto and we went nuts I think ethereum went up like 10% right after this Salon of 10% Bitcoin was like 9% in the day it was a beast of a day on everything tech stocks as well so that's sort of where we're sitting right now but continue to just be stuck at I think it's 5.5% interest rates but likely going to go down in the near future all good news on the market watch despite an early dip in this week things rebounded quickly shows you we're in for

volatility folks so get ready this is not the first we're going to see this will be happening many more times over the next 12 to 18 months of this Bow Cycle and it's going to become more and more frequent but the thing is you got to understand for those that are new here these dips are very very good they're very healthy we cannot keep going up 10% a day like we were the other week you have to pull back and the pullback is because we need to shake out the weak hands we need to get the coins and the assets into the long-term holders right which as we just said we all buy the dips and those that like just came in they sell it out real quick and it gets put into long-term holders Jay and I are not selling our crypto right in the next little bit so this is

what builds a foundation to take the next leg up these dips are very good it also washes out Leverage The like RSI the fear and greed index all the stuff that like shows Market sentiment they kind of get reset and it allows us to climb up to the next level of prices at a more fundamental or like stronger level right if you just fly from you know 30,000 Bitcoin up to like a 100,000 there's a good chance you're going to come all the way back down to 30,000 but if you slowly gradually work your way up you have kind of you build support is basically what it is when I talked about those lines earlier and you need those things to build like a healthy Market structure so these are good don't be scared by these obviously when we get to the topish part then you need to be

worried because that's the point at which you might want to take the some profits because well you're never gonna you're just gonna be buying the dip for the next two years but we're nowhere near that yet so things look good and so long as you keep listening we will let you know when we think you should start selling so yes just and just want to add one more thing this whole strategy of like dips are good and healthy this makes sense for fundamentally strong assets Your Meme coins probably aren't H back after this dip okay Geo Bowden or I mean that one probably will actually because just it's politically year but like a bunch of the [ __ ] that came out that stuff got wiped out and probably doesn't come back but real assets they will just continue to climb and climb

throughout the entire cycle let's jump into what's going on with the ethereum found foundation and them being investigated Kai bring this up to speed on all the news that actually just came out yesterday or on Wednesday since you guys are listening to this on Friday yeah so yesterday there was some sort of some rumors that came out in the morning that the ethereum foundation was subpoenaed for its first time in its history by the way if thean Foundation was subpoenaed by a like State Authority but we didn't really know who we didn't really know why the only reason that this rumor came out was I guess there's like this um warrant Canary that is on their site and when it exists on there it means they've never been subpoena and when that thing is removed it means that they've been

subpoena and it's never been removed before and yesterday it was removed and so obviously people went to Twitter and started kind of speculating what the heck is going on here we still don't have like clear Direction on like what this is or who exactly this is but then a couple hours later all of a sudden it came out that the SEC was probing crypto companies and basically doing an investigation to essentially prove that ethereum is a sec which is um a bit insane at this point like we've gone through so much and the SEC has already approved an ether e future ztf so if they are right that eth is security then SEC broke the law so like I don't even know how they're fighting this it's very odd but we'll

dive into it but anyway that sort of came out yesterday as well that they're basically launching this big campaign and so it's a bit misleading I would say I don't really know where this like campaign thing kind of came from ultimately all it was is that the SEC has subpoenaed a few companies in ethereum ecosystem since the merge which was like two years ago because they're saying now that ethereum is proof of stake instead of proof of work it's more likely a security than previously but like this happened a while ago the companies it's already been dealt with it's not really like a big campaign now I think this is actually a little bit more headline news and not as much of a reality as we think though I think there is something here it's not all like fake or something just don't think it's this

like big campaign like they said so anyway it's still sort of unfolding the news so we'll kind of we'll learn more as we go here but there's a few really important tweets that were put out one from coinbase's lawyer and one from the um EXC commissioner of the cftc which governs the Commodities so Brian quintes first says reminder when the SEC allowed eth Futures ETFs to trade on its regulated security exchanges it explicitly acknowledged the status of the underlying eth as being a non-security and outside of its jurisdiction important this ETF approval decision October 2023 occurred well after ethereum change to proof of stake in September of 2022 meaning that to the SEC eth in its present State as of October 2023 was not a security so

basically saying like they they don't have really any grounds here and it would actually be illegal for them to do this and technically because it's not a security they actually don't really have any jurisdiction to say anything else because it is deemed a commodity and so the C FTC is the one that actually has jurisdiction over this asset so it's a weird situation going on and then you had the coinbase lawyer come out as well and he just goes sigh again with the eth misinformation as we await a decision on the eth etps which he means ETFs okay let's talk about some basic facts about ethereum millions of Americans hold eth it has been vital to crypto since the 2015 launch and eth is a commodity not a security basically what he's saying is the AC the SEC has already taken this

position so it does not make sense for for them to now go against this so there must be something going on in the background here I don't know if it's like um Banks lobbying or who could be lobbying here or what's going on but the coinbase laer here laid out a bunch of different court cases that have proven that eth is not a security or at least have plenty of evidence to support this case so basically the summary of all this is don't really know exactly why or what's happening the assumption is this is occurring right now because the ETFs are basically they have to make a decision by May 23rd and they can't just say no they actually have to have a reason to deny it's not a delay like we've seen over the last few months it is a yes or no and I have to give a

reason or I can get sued and so my assumption is this is the SEC trying to build a case it just feels like they're doing this a little too late and in a topic around security that just like no longer really is relevant or makes sense so it doesn't seem like they're going to win this one and the SEC has just lost I if they couldn't prove that xrp was a security how the heck are they going to prove that ethereum is security so I think we're going to see a lot of volatility and a lot of wildness over the next two months because the SEC obviously is trying to do something maybe they're getting paid or there's lobbing or something in the background we're not really sure but thankfully we have people like uh the cftc ex commissioner and the coinbase lawyers who are like G to fight for this there's

speculation that coinbase is going to sue the SEC if they don't approve this because again there's no reason that they don't so we'll see what happens but things are going to get very interesting over the next couple weeks I think oh baby grab your popcorn and buckle up we're on for a ride let's go I think it's the wild stuff about this is just how you step back and you realize how much government authorities are impacted by lobbyists and that is I think your spot on that is what is happening in the background here we'll never know we'll never understand why they did this cuz doesn't make any real sense it's not a fight that the SEC really needs to take like why are they making this fight

they've lost so many we've lost so many times like and from everything as we go go into an election year in America or S we're in an election year I should say at the start the election comes in the fall if you're Gary gendler you're in a position where your head could roll if you're not on the right side of where this election goes and so it would be the last time that you would want to pick a fight with the public and cause anybody to say hey you know what Gary you're not the one you're out it's just bizarre to me because when you look at the political side crypto's not really a big deal to them like most of the politicians are done yes there's bigger issues to the voters let me put it that way and so

when you have bigger issues to the voters you sort of say why does the SEC keep picking this fight I don't know I don't know yeah they also they had a better case in the bare Market because once you lost money so like voters would be happy that they were trying to like regulate and and whatever but now that everyone's making money it's kind of swung the other way and it's like if you fight this stuff that everyone's making money on which I think coinbase said there's tens of millions of Americans that hold ethereum and hold crypto assets right so like these people all want this thing to get go through right like they're pumped about this and so it is not a good political stance anymore it maybe it was like I don't know six months ago a year ago but it is not

anymore so again there's got to be something going on in the back obviously we don't know what that is but what's funny is it's basically Gary Gensler against who Larry thinkink and the boys over at Black Rock because Black Rock doesn't give a [ __ ] what Gary has to say they've got their ETF that they have launched and they also are launching aund million fund on top of ethereum this was also announced yesterday which is hilarious you've got this like SEC saying that they're going after ethereum because it's security and blah blah blah BL blah and then you've got Larry f and the boy the biggest institution in terms of assets under management in the entire world that goes oh you want to try to go after ethereum well we're actually going to launch $100

million doll on top of ethereum right now launch a fund and so Black Rock partnered with securitize which is like a fairly well like rwa company in crypto so they partner with them along with coinbase fire blocks Anchorage in bitgo to launch a fund called bid which is basically build but the D and the switch similar to hold and the D and the yell switch so that's interesting is Black Rock getting a little bit more D gen it seems and it stands for Black Rock USD institutional digital liquidity fund like it actually stands for something too it's not just a ticker right like it does they were very did very well in the marketing of this yeah quite quite

impress it's interesting what they've done here so basically what this is is bidle seeks to offer a stable value of $1 per token so it's a stable coin essentially uh but in the version of a fund but what it does is it's a yield bearing stable coin so it pays daily ACR dividends directly to investors and I I don't know if this is completely permissionless is anyone can buy it that one I'm not completely clear on yet but basically they'll Dividends are going to Auto accre to investors wallet so you'll hold this onchain a dollar stable coin and like it'll just come to you you can trade it 247 365 but basically what they're doing is they're taking the money they they put $100 million in year in usdc and the fund is investing it all in cash us treasury bills and repurchase

agreements and so basically it's a yield bearing stable coin but in the way of sort of like a fund or instead of yield bearing stable coin it's basically a a tokenized treasury I guess is what you could call it but regardless of what it is it's super super cool that black rock is doing this and it's on the ethereum L1 currently but coinbase is involved and so you wonder is the next step here to put this onto base at some point right right now I think this is for bigger investors so doesn't matter if it's on the L1 interesting fact for them to mint the 100 million usdc cost them five bucks so like look I know we say ethereum L1 costs a lot but in terms of like comparing that to the trafi world

that is insanely cheap so that's pretty cool and then one other interesting thing and I don't know if we have the Tweet up here Jay to show but we have the wallet that black rock has used to to M their usdc so we can see onchain black Rock's wallet and what they're holding and so they have 100 million usdc on there and then they also have like was it mug coin or something I don't even know what they have MOG a whole bunch of wallets have sent meme coins to the Black Rock wallet because they want to be seen the Black Rock wallet is holding their mean coin so Black Rock wallet has like over $100,000 that it's gained in free money yeah so someone was like basically they earn a yield on their on

their usdc just by holding it in their wallet because people are sending them like over $100,000 worth of of tokens like mainly Bean coins and shitcoins and whatever but it's pretty hilarious that black rock is coming in and they just get thrown into the [ __ ] storm of crypto right off the bat it's pretty funny but anyway this is massive news don't know that anyone expected this to come especially from Black Rock right like the biggest thing I see from this is like look it's $100 million it's not super massive although it's a pretty decent amount I would say more it's the signal that sends to every other financial institution in the world which is hey we're the biggest we're the best and we're on chain and so what do you think everyone else is going to do everyone is now yeah I mean I'm sure

many of them were already in meetings to like already do this but everyone is now taking this real seriously because this is a really big deal so really really cool exciting stuff one more exciting piece of news that came out of ethereum this week was that grayscale announced that they are looking to add staking for their proposed ethereum ETF this is following Fidelity actually LED this making this announcement last week so basically Fidelity and grayscale are updating their eth ETF application to add staking abilities within the ETF now it does not look like this would be if you invest like let's say I invested in Fidelity or Grace scales e ETF I

wouldn't be able to do staking within that ET ETF it's more that Fidelity and grayscale since they are going to be holding so much eth as part of operating this ETF they want to stake that eth in order to gain yield and make extra money along the way and so they are proposing to the that they should be allowed to stake that eth as part of managing and operating this ETF will they be allowed to do this I don't know it's kind of a stretch I think like I could see the SEC not being down with it but hey look it's showing the Trad world what is possible with these assets and it's funny because we talk about

lobbying you know sure I'm sure there's a bunch of banks that are lobbying against the ET EF but here is Fidelity which is a massive American institution and bank and really leans towards the trafi side not the crypto New Age Tech side and they see the benefits of eth as a commodity to get them way more potential yield than they would get from holding a lot of other assets that they would typically use in their funds for the average American here's the really cool thing so first I think you're right it probably doesn't get approved at this in part some people were saying like maybe they're doing this so that they have some negotiation they'll be like the is struggling to approve it like

well we'll take out staking and at least give us that you know what I mean so they have some like negotiation parameters but anyway the end result one day is that maybe they can pass that yield off to the ETF holders so like you hold an ETF and you get dividends that would be like insane but if you think about this if they got approved F Deli and gray scale I think Arc also has this in their F but not 100% sure if they got approved for this they could charge zero fees right because they make 4% over on staking four that is like you don't ever make that kind of yield on any ETF and now they could make 4% that is next level um and so that would be really really really cool to see it doesn't get approved I don't know I hope so but I

mean the thing is I don't even know if the ETFs will get approved if we look at the pred predictions now since all this happened yesterday it's gone down to 26% chance now this is just a predictions Market that I think is a web 3 specific predictions Market that's showing a 26% chance so this isn't like necessarily experts that are trying to guess this but it is a free market nonetheless and so it can be useful though I would say remember black rock is like 5 whatever 81 approvals to one disapproval in terms of their ETF applications and remember they have an ETF application as well for eth so is this going to be their second loss I don't know the weird thing is still crickets from the SEC so we just haven't heard anything yet that the longer that we don't hear anything the

worse it gets so I don't know hopefully Black Rock does something we'll see all right let's move on to an update on what's happened with l2s since the Denon upgrade which happened last week we talked about it on the roll up last week if you guys listened to that super super exciting we talked about blobs and how this upgrade is scaling ethereum to new levels we're one week in so Kai let's look at where are we actually did this upgrade work what is the scaling impact of this yeah so if we look at that chart we brought up last week uh and you can see that almost all the l2s are in the pennies are less than a penny to transact on top of an L2 right now so that's amazing you can see a pink line up here we have the chart up of all the

top l2s Linea still has not upgraded to the denan upgrade for whatever reason seems like a terrible idea I don't know why they're waiting but is what it is and so they're still at like 50 cents of transaction like 30 to 40 cents of transaction I guess which is just makes no sense now because everyone else is basically under a penny so I don't know what they're doing but they need to figure that [ __ ] out interestingly though you look at base which was also under a penny has skyrocketed up to over a dollar in fees dollar and a half fees just two days ago we'll talk a little bit what's going on in the bass World in just a second but ultimately it has worked for the most part there's still lots to go as we just saw BAS is getting a ton of congestion and unfortunately

their fees have gone up from under a penny to over a dollar but ultimately if we look at all the l2s right now and we look at their transactions per second versus ethereum all the l2s combined in one are now 10x the throughput of ethereum so we have scaled ethereum to 10x just so far and remember this was the first upgrade to really do this and there's plenty of more to go plus plenty of more l2s to go plus like not all the l2s are out of like inventory yet there's still plenty of block space available on these l2s so we're already 10x which is um is pretty cool to see so ethereum is essentially processing close to one 150 transactions per second currently and we are at all-time highs

144 I guess is what is at all-time highs so really really cool to see that I would imagine that just continues to go up and up and up as we go here but back to the base world since the upgrade happened and it was like a penny a bunch of people that were on salana where it's obviously very cheap there jumped ship and went over to Bas and Bas also has some mcoin stuff going on and they have a bunch of apps that people go screw around with and whatever and um out of nowhere Bas just went nuts and if you scroll down you can see that their fees went parabolic I guess the base fee was actually up to $4 at one point which is just nuts and this all happened within about 24 hours and again just a bunch of degens and speculators coming in and

playing around mem coins unfortunately what that ended up happening is coin had to put out a I guess like a warning on their app saying hey the base network is is congested transactions are going to probably have failures so like we didn't achieve the scalability we necessarily wanted and so I bet you a bunch of those DG went back to salanta we're like all right let's keep doing whatever we do over there but what was crazy is base went from under 200,000 close to like 120,000 users on a weekly basis to over 800,000 just in the last couple days so they basically like close to 8X their user base in like 24 hours uh Unfortunately they need to make some adjustments and continue to improve because the gas fees did not remain low

but um this is what we need we need stress tests we need these kind of things to keep making improvements and Jesse from coinbase came out and said hey we still got a lot of work to do we're working on it but the data side of things has improved the fees of the data availability now we've got to work on the execution sides this is where we get to like parallelization and things like that which will will be coming in the in the next little while last thing on the l2s we've achieved scalability to an extent we are not perfectly scalable but we've we've achieved it right there's a a picture we have up on screen here of all the l2s you can see they're all under one cent uh per transaction or under 10 cents per transaction I guess for those that have switched over and so

one of the guys from ZK sync one of the um more popular l2s he came out and said you know with 4844 we've figured out scalability for the most part at least we're on the right track and now it's time to put our undivided attention into decentralization so the thing with l2s is over the last couple years they weren't very scalable and they also aren't very decentralized so they actually haven't been the greatest solution in the world right I would say salana has done a much better job on both decentralization and scalability because most the l2s use training wheels so they're not decentralized sequencers and I won't get deal with technical stuff but a lot of what they do in terms of how the transactions get executed are actually done in a very centralized way much more than basically every other L1 but they have a path to getting decentralized

they have a road map for it they just need to build it and it takes time and a lot of their focus recently was like well let's make sure that we can at least be scalable some people will use this in the meantime so ZK sing says okay our focus is now on fully going decentralization and then we had announcement yesterday from optimism who obviously has fixed its scalability issue and now they've come out and said okay they've launched their upgrade to become the first open source informationless feature complete fault proof system in the etherum system this is like taking the uh training wheels off their L2 to become fully permissionless and much more decentralized now this is just on the test net but it is soon coming to main net and if they execute this in time

like they say they will be the first one to do this this is one of those things without getting into all the details where everyone has been waiting for fault proofs and LTS without fault proofs these things are not that great and so it's kind of been a race on who's going to get there first and again everyone had to focus on this this recent upgrade but ism is saying hey now we're ready and so very soon I think we're going to have a race for decentralization of all these l2s and so we're going to start to have over the next year or so l2s that are very scalable you know less than a penny and are now fully decentralized or meaningfully decentralized so this is really really big and again we need this before the black rocks and those start to build on l2s so probably the reason

Black Rock doesn't go to base yet because it's not doesn't have fault proofs it's not fully decentralized whereas ethereum is but once these things get there that's when you start to get the adoption of the big institutions so that's what these LTS are continue to push for and that's very exciting news you know this always this makes me think of is just our perception of time is so different whether you're in the space or out of the space and if you're in the space especially with new technology and you can look back at any technological Revolution or Evolution such as the internet it always feels like it's so slow when you're in the space you're like hey we've been talking about this for so long why is it taking so long it's so slow if you're out of

the space you're like whoa that happened really fast right but the truth is that technology does take time so it's very easy for everybody here to be like well we we've been talking about scaling we've been talking about decentralization why haven't we achieved this but you got to realize that building a technology that is scalable to hundreds of millions of people and is decentralized to millions or possibly also hundreds of millions of people is an incredibly difficult thing to do and it is going to take a lot of time and so we are progressing towards all of these objectives but I think we need to step

back and realize just how difficult a lot of these things are and how it will take time to get there and we're on the right track and this is also why we have these crazy Cycles because people's expectations get so high that oh this is going to change the world today and then it doesn't change the world today because it's not quite ready and then so prices come all the way back down and they're like oh wait this is way undervalued now oh wait the price is going up oh this thing's going to change the world it's like oh no didn't do it yet and it's like we keep going back and forth over years and So eventually we'll get there but it takes time well and also what we are seeing and we've talked a lot about on today's episode is the trafi world and the money Revolution

that is happening within crypto and that is in full force in this cycle you can really see that it's been in full force in past Cycles but you can really feel like this is the cycle because the Bitcoin ETF got approved who knows what happened was with the eth ETF but there's a lot of Tailwinds behind that movement happening in this cycle the onchain revolution of bringing identity onchain and bringing ownership of digital assets on J we're not quite there yet we all talked about in the last because of nfts but it kind of feels like this it might not even be you and I have kind of gone back and forth K whether we think that will happen in this cycle or the N will come back but

the tech will not be ready there's no way I don't think so yeah yet either yeah okay let's go to mcoin Mania there's a new meta within the mcoin space and that is mcoin pre-sales so let me explain this to in a simple way basically the way this works is uh a crypto influencer comes on and says hey you send some crypto to this random wallet and if you deposit into this wallet then you're going to get huge returns as a reward in an airdrop because I'm going to take that wallet and I'm going to use that money to invest into a token before the air drop which usually gets you a large return

assuming that that token does well after the airdrop and so a whole bunch of degens love this stuff I mean we've seen it before so many DG's giving money to blast when blast was just a multisig wallet and it wasn't even an L2 yet there's a lot of trust in this space that maybe doesn't deserve to be there and so what do you think happens when a whole bunch of people are transferring money to random wallets well rugs are going to happen not a surprise here I've got a tweet up by Zack xbt who looked into this and he found that over $150 million uh was transferred into 33 different pre-sales in the last this is only in

like the last like week or two and what do you think happened well a bunch of rugs happened so he's got a few examples up here of a few different things there was 7,000 sold it was sent to one wallet and then that person secretly took 62% of that and did not fully distribute the tokens there's another one that was 21 soul that was sent to a fake Jared eth address and they rugs for 440,000 and then another one and another one and another one and so the list goes on and it's not even just it's influencers that are going to put your money in a certain project it's influencers saying I'm going to launch a meme coin and if you

want in first send me random send me your money to this random address and there is nothing to say that they are going to launch this token there's not even a website there's not anything and somehow people send 15 Mill million like how could you be so mentally ill to do such a thing it actually makes no sense and so hopefully our listeners don't ever do this this is actually insane and so of course there's going to be tons and tons of rugs you send someone millions of dollars what do you think they're going to do they don't need to launch a token anymore they got the money right like how obvious is that now this has happened in every cycle by the way this was a clear signal to me when this started happening last week I was like okay we're definitely hitting a top

because this happened last year or last cycle with nfts it happened with icos when people get this like euphoric that they think they can just send money to random people and like they'll make a bunch of money from it yeah like it's Absolut Ridiculousness and so obvious that a pullback was coming from that so there was one funny story that came out of this I mean I hate to say this is funny because people losing money isn't funny but one of these mean coins was slurf which is just a hilarious name I think it's it's meant to be a sloth a play on the word sloth so slurf was a meme coin that came out and the dev behind slurf accidentally burned all of the proceeds received in

the pre-sale so they got 10 million in this pre-sale $10 million deposited into a wallet and then they accidentally burned it and he came out he tweeted he said guys I [ __ ] up I burned the lp and the tokens that were set aside for the airdrop mint Authority is already revoked so I can't cannot mint them there's nothing I do to fix this I am so [ __ ] sorry so you would think slurf is dead right like this guy [ __ ] up he admitted it he doesn't seem like he was actually trying to rug it was all burned you can see that this was burned he was not he did not steal this or anything but crypto is crazy it makes zero sense so what happened next slurf became one of the highest traded tokens in a 24 in 24-hour period it actually passed

usdc in a 24-hour period it traded $3 billion do in 24 hours despite him [ __ ] up and burning the 10 million so had he not burned that those tokens those people would have gotten a 100x within a few days but instead they got zero because all their tokens were burned so so then you wonder would that actually have happened if he didn't burn it so you never know but anyway because wild why did this get why did this get so much ition because he burned this and everybody was talking about it and laughing at him right wild just a crazy story makes no sense okay let's go to something that did make a lot of sense

to me which is the Starbucks loyalty program on chain called Starbucks Odyssey now unfortunately as Kyle said earlier in the show I made a prediction I made this prediction last year that Starbucks would on board 5 million people on chain and then I doubled down and made the prediction again this year because last year Starbucks was still in beta and I said you know what okay they didn't get out of beta last year they're going to get out of beta this year I believe in onchain loyalty and then on Friday Starbucks broke my heart when they sent out an email and post in their Discord that the Starbucks Odyssey program is shutting down and W W what the heck is going on so there is two

sides to this because we don't quite know if this means they're shutting the program down for good or if this means they're shutting down the beta in order to launch a onchain program within their wider web 2 loyalty program which has over 25 million people in it which was my hope that they would do so look let's break down the two possibilities here to see what we think could be going on first my belief is that they are shutting down the program for good for now I don't think this is a forever thing but I think for now and the main reason I think that is because I think that what Starbucks learned through this

program is that there isn't enough people with wallets and with an understanding of why you need to own Loyalty Rewards or own loyalty points in the form of an nft there's not enough knowledge or understanding of a Normy person to say oh yeah there's value in me owning my loyalty points also Starbucks got a $4 million Grant from polygon to start the Starbucks Odyssey program I would bet that that funding is done now because they would have put in a ton of effort into this program ton of Staff they were running a Discord and their Discord only

had about 12,000 people in it so this was still very small and in beta so you can imagine a meeting where all the Starbucks people are sitting around and they're saying okay great we've launched this loyalty program on chain you need to 100x that program this year or we're shutting it down because if you don't achieve 100x then at this level of a public company they're sitting there saying well we might as well put these millions of dollars into our regular loyalty program where if we get a .1% increase in our conversion rate that has a multi-million dollar impact on our bottom line and there is no Playbook to 100x a loyalty program yet on chain it just does not exist we don't know how to

do that yet I think we will figure out how to do that in the future but we're just not quite there so I think that there that's the realistic side The Optimist take is that they shut this down because they are going to switch over their loyalty program into their web 2 loyalty program and that might be the next stage and you can sort of see that I can see the the case for that so in their email which they sent out to all their Odyssey program members they said a few things they said the journey continues they said be on the lookout for an exciting new member experience coming your way in April and they said we are shutting down the beta because we are preparing for what comes next so

those might indicate that there is something coming next but I am not so optimistic I believe that they've realized that just nfts for loyalty it's too early I think it makes sense long term but until we have millions of people with wallets and understanding onchain activity I don't think people want it or care about it yet I'm more optimistic than you this was not a thing about wallets I don't you didn't need a wallet right like you just you create account was an embedded wallet so like you don't need anyone with wallet to do this now I get people don't really understand it but the whole idea was to make it in a way where you don't even know it's web 3 and I do remember last month maybe was two months ago was when I was in buos series it was in January

they opened up the beta program and they put it into the main app for a few countries and I remember looking we didn't have access but I know they put it in there and so I wonder if that was a test to do this for everyone so I don't know I'm a little bit more optimistic if it's not if they do shed this down then like polygon has really struck out because they paid millions and millions of dollars for freaking every one to come and play with nfts on polygon and basically all of them have shut down except for like Nike although there's also speculation that Nike is going to shut down artifact as well I don't think they will they have big plans they have Partnerships with EA games like there's things going on with Nike I think so I think that continues with the Air Force Ones and all that I

think that actually does continue I still think Starbucks continues on this too the only reason I think it is because Starbucks has the best loyalty program in the world pretty much one of the biggest and so like they about research and development staying on the Forefront and so I think that they continue this but I don't know let's see what happened when do we know by was it April I think was the date they said April they said in April something to come April I think we'll learn soon I think the thing that we are all learning here is for existing large Enterprises to get on chain is it's difficult because you have very high cost and very low impact to show right now and you got

to remember the way these large Enterprises public companies work is you got to prove results sure maybe you fit into R&D and maybe that gives you Runway but for how long and how easy is it for you know a seite person to be like yo shut that down that's just costing us money it's not giving us immediate results I have other ideas and that's what happens in these large Enterprises so Facebook Facebook shut down their their thing on Instagram and it was on as well Reddit shut down their tokens Twitter shut down the profile pictures so like a lot of in are shutting down and it and it doesn't mean that this stuff is never going to happen it just means that they thought the timing was now but we're not quite there yet so I

think this stuff is going to happen I just think we're too early now the one thing that is interesting is that there is loyalty programs that are succeeding on chain but they're not from large Enterprises they're from small startups we've talked about Blackbird on the show before which is a web three loyalty program that is built around restaurants and that is succeeding and growing constantly at quite a good Pace right now but they are a startup they don't have to prove these large metrics they have the runway to build something so I think that's more where we're going to see the webs re loyalty play out in the next in this cycle is more from the small businesses or the other prediction is later in this cycle when you know

same thing as last cycle when did we see the major Enterprises jump in the web through World sort of towards top right like exactly so maybe we start you know what is Jay people don't care about loyalty programs they just want air drops that's what everyone wants now because that's the real meta so let's cycle us into aird drops which most of you actually many of you I saw at least from our Discord received this aird drop last week that we've been talking about which is ethery it was dropped on was it Monday Monday I think the token came anyway whenever it was March 18th was when the token dropped yeah it came out at around $4 little over $4 and then um it dropped around the same time as this dip happened so it obviously went down

right off that as well which is pretty typical a lot of people on Discord asking what do I do do I sell it do I buy it I said I was going to hold it which I did so it went down to like under $3 so people were getting a little bit scared but it actually held stronger than like eth did and sold did for that matter during that dip and so I was like definitely holding I think it's going to go and it jumped back up to like $4.3 it's now sitting at about 380 but many people got hundreds of tokens so and many people on Discord got you know hundreds of dollars thousands of dollars even I got a few thousand so pretty cool to see that they're actually continuing their points program so if you continue to hold your e they have a second season

now I think it's about 10 weeks long and as long as you don't sell any your current e then you jump right into like level two and then there's like weekly things you got to do and if you hold throughout each week then you you grow and you'll get more points and they're going to drop another I think it's five or so percent of the allocation which would be about two months from now so I'm actually just going to continue to hold my e and play on this one as well I might transfer some over to a different one but congrats to everyone who got that that was a pretty cool one plus what's interesting is you also got a bunch of IG layer points and that one has not dropped yet now the next meta the next one I'm going to which I've talked about a bit which is mode you can

bridge to mode if you we talked about this before so if you had any activity on n2s or on ethereum there's already points sitting there waiting for you you just need to bridge unfortunately for this one you'd have to bridge from the e L1 so there was some gas fees for that but once you've done that and you've activated you can Bridge from any other L2 and it costs you like a penny to move onto this mode L2 and if you hold any assets on it you earn points now what's really cool about this is there are a couple assets that if you hold you earn 1.2x the so it's like a boost on these points and by the way this token's coming in April so it's a short thing you just put your money on it now and you're going to get some money come

April so like go do this don't wait it's an easy easy easy one to do there's a you need a referral so there is a link in the show notes on on getting that if you're not already signed up but then you can Bridge everything from your l2s if you have any eth on optimism on arbitrum on whatever base you can move it over you'll get points but what they also have is one you can move your ethi there or sorry your e which is from the ethi one you can bridge that to there and you can continue to farm the eii second season while farming this mode one or you can buy a new one called Renzo this is the the token is e eth this one is basically the same thing as ethi is a a reaking liquid reaking token and it's fairly new though and so they

also have a points program so you can swap your eth on mode you can also do this on ethereum I think arbitrum blast as well is this redzo anyway I'm doing on mode because you there's a points program for this uh it's all done in L2 so the fees cost you nothing to switch over to it which is super cool and uh there's a link in the show notes as well to get to Renzo if you want to learn how to do it is referral code so that would be great but this one is really cool because you farm Renzo airdrop you farm the mode airdrop and you farm the igen layer airdrop all in one and there's essentially no fees to do it so it's really cool the only thing to be aware of is they have not yet launched the ability to withdraw here easy eth into

eth and so that is coming in the next few weeks they said I I was speaking to them in the Discord but you can go to Kim exchange it's called and you can swap to there no problem so you can get out of it easily you don't actually have to wait for them to launch this it already exists on exchanges so I was waiting for that to really announce this and get a bunch of people to do it I think now is time to do it it's been sort of deris it's now at what 1 Point uh3 billion dollar almost yeah 1.2 1.25 billion in in tvl so it's pretty big at this point it is still beta so like don't put everything into it but I think it'll be it'll be the next next good one and plus you can Farm three all in one

so why not do it that's it the air to agree disagree fave segment of the week starting off we got one that's H quite a hot take here from salana Legend he says by the time 2024 2025 bull market is over it will be pretty clear to people that ethereum is going the way of blackberry or Myspace Solana is Apple I disagree with this wholeheartedly I think I mean this guy one he has a mad Lads as his profile picture his name on Twitter is salana Legend and he's got a backpack like this guy is a soul Maxi to the maximum and I would assume he's just never touched ethereum or like hasn't used anyl TOS is innovating at a level

that basically no one is innovating at I think both ethereum and Sal are doing amazing things building in a brand new space we have no idea who is the apple of this yet but etherum is definitely not going the route of blackberry Myspace right now they are building at such a high level it's insane for anyone to think that but obviously this guy just he doesn't pay attention to the ethereum ecosystem look salana is amazing I'm not saying is doing anything wrong but ethereum is also amazing if you don't recognize that then you you don't really understand what's going on which tells me this guy doesn't really get it all right let's go to a slightly more reasonable take on salana qw says salana is the flag bearer of retail adoption ethereum is the flagbearer of institutional adoption yeah I mean I actually kind of disagree but I think

this is a narrative that will pick up steam the cycle because it's so easy to wrap your head around this salana is definitely the place where people are where degens go and I don't think that degens represent retail right of course degens are retail investors for the most part there are some like traditional Finance people that are DJ as well but I think Deens are on salana because so cheap all the meme coins are there doesn't necessarily mean retail goes that way ethereum yes it is getting institutional adoption especially with black rock as we just talked about it is the more serious Place sort of for this although that's not even necessarily true again that's more of a narrative than anything I think both slot ethereum will attract retail and institutions I don't think get stuck to one or the other now this is flag bear meaning like

they're the ones leading the charge but I would say like base is probably going to be the one that gets the most retail because it has the most access from coinbase right and you've got Blackbird and all these other apps that will bring retail in that don't even know they're on chain so like I don't think this is true but I think this will be a narrative that picks up and people start to believe that I think it's also why salana is doing so well right now is people are thinking it's the retail chain I've heard of people calling that a lot like L2 Sal they're all going to be retail chains they're all also going to be institutional chains everything is going to be moving on chain so I kind of disagree but I see the narrative okay next up John Wang says blockchains are

cities salana is Miami base is San Fran blast is Vegas arbitrum is New York and BSC is Shanghai I absolutely love this I agree with this wholeheartedly block chains the cities is a wonderful it could be cities could be States could be countries whatever you want to call it but what's interesting about is like they are economics zes right that people want real estate on and they're going to pay to transact in it and they're going to do it in a currency of that state or country or city whatever you want to call it and so like I completely understand that uh when you build your app on top of it it's like building a store on top of the real estate of a country or a city and then the the example they chose is actually is actually really good lot being Miami yeah Bas being San Francisco blast being

Vegas makes so much sense and BSC Shanghai yeah I love this this is great okay next up Jay Peg ZX jpeg says in the next 18 months either the US bans tokens or crypto is going to make the traditional IPO obsolete there is no middle ground I see this point but I disagree I disagree in the time frame for sure like there's no way this decision gets made in the next 18 months 100% crypto is going to make IPOs obsolete like without a doubt is it going to have 18 months 0% chance but will it make it obsolete at some point yes absolutely it is a way better way to facilitate capital and move Capital around globally so like without a doubt

it's so much cheaper for the the company that's actually trying to IPO so much easier for everyone around the world to get involved so like without a doubt that happens but I don't think there's a there's no middle ground I think that's where I disagree like the US isn't going to ban tokens in the TT months and it's also not going to make IPOs obsolete neither of those are going to happen I guess I disagree completely and I think they won't ban tokens because one they can't they can try to ban things just like they Tred to ban drugs and they tried to ban like I mean a better one that makes more sense here is like if you remember Napster and LimeWire when we were like everyone was pirating music they tried to ban that and they would like I remember when you'd go to

download a song on I think it was lime wire because Napster was already sort of shut down through lawsuits they would have these like warnings at saying like oh people have had these like crazy lawsuits and you'd have to pay this much in a fine and blah blah blah and I was like yeah good luck there's zero% chance they're ever going to do it so I kept downloading music and everyone did did and we still download music today and download movies and stream legally and there's just nothing they can really do about it on the internet they can ban things physically although they still can't really do that like the example of drugs but like it's a lot more easy to control things that are like a physical business or a physical product but in the digital world especially one that's like in a decentralized world you can't

do much even the like they slowed down the airdrops and stuff and that's not Banning just out of fear you can just throw on a VPN and a lot of times you can get around the airdrop things not always there are obviously ones that can block that but like I don't think that they ban tokens it just doesn't make any sense I mean the same thing happened with Uber and Airbnb initially a lot a lot of governments tried to ban it and then and this is what happens you usually you start with a very reactive stance of we're going to ban it and then you move towards regulation because you realize that you can't control it when it's digital so you regulate it and if it's something that people want there's just nothing they can do about it right like uber and Airbnb made it because people

were like this is so much freaking better than what exists I'm GNA use this no matter what and so like you know when you get into Ubers in baned cities you got to like sit in the front of the car and like people would just do that they're like Yeah I wanted Uber so bad that like I'll break the law and I'll sit in front of the car to pretend I'm this and same with the drivers the drivers wanted it so badly that they were willing to break the law and they're the ones taking the risk really exactly everybody be same thing like yeah I won't tell the concer that the apartment I'm going into in New York or in Toronto because I want to use Airbnb and so like people just go around and then eventually be like [ __ ] everyone's doing anyway there nothing I can do

about it right so the same thing is going to happen here with crypto in the US unless although I don't even think it gets to that point to be honest okay last one of the week what salana ecosystem is experiencing now is in is extremely similar to what ethereum went through during the 2017 Ico bubble there is massive demand for soul to speculate on a new asset issuance on salana study ethereum Ico bubble during 2017 2018 yeah I mean I agree completely about this it's also happened in 2020 21 for E with nfts right whatever the thing is that people want to play around with and speculate on if there's a token that's needed to do that thing right so in salana if you want to trade mem coins and stuff you need salana for gas right

and if you want to trade nfts on salana you need priced in salana number one and you need salana for gas to do it the nfts in 2020 2021 same thing you needed eth for gas same with the icos you needed eth and so when things are in that and you actually need it that is real utility and it means that that token is going to go absolutely ballistic did it in 2017 eth went nuts eth went nuts in 20 2021 when nfts were going crazy salana is doing it now with mean coins and this will continue throughout the cycle so this is why I think eth and soul are such important assets why I'm so bullish on them is because no matter what else succeeds and gets hype this cycle you still need those two assets to do any of those things and that's why no matter what

happens Ethan soul will do well it does not matter what narrative what app what nft what project does not matter which one succeeds as long as one succeeds eth as long as it's on salana or eth those tokens succeed right that's what I've been trying to explain to people through the whole barer Market I like don't try to guess which one's going to work out right no one a year ago was like meem coins are going to be the thing right I mean some people were of course because they always are but like no one knew it was going to be Joe freaking whatever Bogan or whatever but all you had to do was just buy soul and it worked out and so yeah I completely age with this this is the play of blockchains without a doubt that's a wrap on another week and

another episode of the weekly rollup thanks so much everybody for listening in we hope you are feeling a little bit safer a little bit more confident in your Investments and in your place in this rapidly changing onchain world if you need any more help if you got any questions after the show make a comment on YouTube or jump into our Discord we're here to help you through your journey on chain always here to support you Kai thanks as always have a great weekend everybody thank you for listening to web3 Academy your one trusted source to capitalize on the next big phase of the internet if you enjoyed this episode please share it and subscribe or follow so that you don't

miss the next one while you're at it there's a link in the description for our free newsletter where we provide timely and relevant web 3 insights so you can confidently build and invest in web 3 make sure to subscribe today one final note this podcast is for educational purposes only and nothing we say is financial advice crypto and web3 are risky and you should never invest more then you're willing to lose thank you friends and see you in the next one