ROLLUP: ETH Merge Soon | Yuga Labs Acquisition | ApeCoin | Raises & NEW Releases Galore

Transcript

this is this is definitely the biggest event uh the biggest crypto event of 2022. maybe the other day ever right other than the the genesis block of ethereum itself this is the most significant event since that and so this is now now we've got uh bullish david back i think for for the plus one to the bullish side we got three for the bear we got one for the bull hey bankless nation happy third week of march david what time is it oh it's the friday bankless weekly roll-up time ryan where we covered the entire news that happened in the last week in crypto which is always an ambitious endeavor and this week is no exception uh and this one is a little bit different this week i'd say just because you know it

feels like uh merge week ryan i don't know why it feels like merge week but it does merge week okay that's the theory of merge you're talking about it's funny because that's still months away but suddenly it was like everyone was talking about the merge again mm-hmm yeah i do people it was us yeah guilty guilty people have decided that the next thing to focus on is the merge who knows we we have like three plus months until the merge actually comes so you know maybe this is just one week and then the topic of next week will be a different topic but this week the topic of crypto twitter was definitely the merge yeah so we're going to talk about that ethereum merge week also the biggest nft m a deal ever apes buy punks i'm gonna talk i'm gonna interview a punk holder

and see uh how he feels about that one on today's episode sure talk about you dude all right and then they released a coin too so i don't know what that means we're gonna talk about the apecoin as well zuckerberg that's mark zuckerberg also said nfts are coming to instagram big surprise not really we knew he was going to do it how is he going to do it we'll talk about that later also stripe the payment platform fintech platform jumping into crypto huge with both fees yeah i think this is hugely underrated and probably the biggest thing that happened this week and uh we'll have to talk about that too uh david before we get in we should talk about our friends at xerion guys i've loved xereon since it launched this is the way a bank user

interface should be except banks can't pull it off because banks are not connected to decentralized finance you can bring your own assets to xerion you cannot bring them to your wells fargo bank account and this is what it looks like david they've just added a whole bunch of multi-chain features some bridging features tell them what's going on in xerion these days well yeah especially as we get into this layer two world which we have plenty to talk about this week in the weekly rollup it's going to require infrastructure to help manage your assets not not just the many many more assets that you have in your ethereum wallet versus what you have in your bank but also in the many many more chains that you engage with much more than just

the ethereum l1 so not only is the ethereum ol1 obviously available but all of the ethereum layer two is like arbitrary optimism and also the alternative evm compatible layer ones like avalanche and the other ones and so depending on whatever chain that you are on or whatever asset that you prefer xerion's the place for you to go and manage all of your crypto finance uh it's just you know things that your bank could never do xerion does for you really cool too as well being able to bridge from one chain to another if you want to go to eat to polygon in a hurry you can do that in uh zurion you can also view all of your nfts lots of cool stuff going on xerion so guys check that out there is a link in the show notes

where you can connect your wallet to xerion and get started all right david this couldn't be your wallet ryan that's way too sophisticated at nft oh this is sophisticated huh these are really good no this is not my wallet by the way this is a demo wallet uh but uh yeah maybe we'll get to some of my nfts a little bit later yeah you noticed a little something behind me today just a little bit yeah yeah i've noticed that it's a great looking cat it's got a little bit more shine than my punk and i'm a little bit upset by it it you know it starts as a cat and who knows what other animal could turn into maybe something with a shell i don't know we'll see a little bit later today mine started with turtles graduated to mfers and now is that cass he's starting

to get into the blue chips folks yeah i'm working my way up here um i'm learning okay let's let's talk about the market what's the market teaching us what is the market telling us let's start with bitcoin what's the price this week david yeah we got a happy bitcoin this week ryan it started at 39 000. went down and touched the low of 38 000 very briefly and then recovered right back up and started climbing out of that hole to where it is now at forty thousand seven hundred dollars hit a high of over four thousand one hundred forty one thousand dollars so overall up five percent on the week uh so happy week could also just be a recovery off of a very bearish week the last week so you know who knows i'm a little surprised about that are

you surprised that we're actually going up this week um i am conflicted that we are going up this week okay because it was all it was all about bearish i want to know whether whether bearish david has has returned again this week or whether it's uh a more neutral david or or maybe the bull david is back no it's not voldemort is not back it's it's bill david full throughout the markets where just macro has not changed at all and in fact has even i would say gotten worse uh meanwhile like the merge is such so bullish like how do you how do i square these things i just don't know you just buy more eat that's what you do

but speaking of which tell us what the eath price is doing this week yeah eth started the week at 2600 hit a low of 2500 ish dollars and then climbed right back up out of that to where it is now at two thousand eight hundred dollars uh especially in the last 24 hours at the time of recording this is we always record these as thursday morning by the way um uh so where it is now is is up from 2500 basically just 24 hours ago or 2600 to 2800 kind of climbing out of that hole that it's set uh and then if you kind of just zoom out ryan there's there's another chart that we have uh available i don't know if you pulled it up yeah this is the the creator of the of these charts who drew these lines would like us to inform you that these

are just meme lines and that's really all ta is it's meme lines but if you let no if you know bank list we know that memes are real uh there's a there's a triangle there's a triangle here and uh the 2 800 level of eth price is poking through that triangle and that has been a descending uh lin descending line from where it was at the start of the year for like three to four months of the eth price just descending on this line uh and it's poking through spoken through saying hey what's up on the on the upside of this line um so who knows it's it's it's trying to figure out what merge week means for the price of each i mean that's what what's going on but how about the e to bitcoin ratio because this is our bull market bear market

indicator when ratio goes up we're generally more bullish when ratio goes down more bearish uh and it's up this week yeah it's up this week and you can see that line that i was talking about that basically started towards the end of december where the merge hit the high of excuse me the merge the eth btc ratio hit the high of like what looks like .086 in december and then it has had that linear line down setting lower highs and uh just basically for the last like four months so start at point like zero eight eight in like january is at point zero eight two in february is that point zero like seven five to where it bottomed at basically point zero six four but since hitting that bottom at point zero six four we have climbed back out to

point zero six eight so you know like there there's a shape being formed here and we actually got some charty chart stuff to look at with that too uh so this is uh what was called a channel uh and so we touched the bottom of that channel in earlier last week uh and we have bounced off of it and so if you are perhaps a traitor you are looking at how ether is in the bottom of this channel heading heading back towards the top of his channel so if it continues that uh you know bullish bullish how about this one oh and this is a triangle we all we love the shapes we love the triangles uh and so again it's another the concept here is that as this triangle converges something happens at the end of this triangle like it's got

to go up or it's got to go down this is what traders look at when they look at these things uh and this is a wedge i believe uh and and if you'll notice ryan that the wedge comes to a close right around july right around when the merge would happen uh and so things are lining up like i don't pay attention to ta too much but i do know that there are real reasons to look at it and when you see an inflection point happening around the same time as something very very fundamental that is interesting that's an interesting thing to look at okay so so we're looking at ta all right we almost never do that on bankless so i i feel like we're looking at ta in this episode because

you're you're feeling like conflicted it's revealing what's going to happen next this is what this is when you pull out the like the horoscopes i'm sorry the ta right is when you're like what's the future going to hold let me look at the charts let me look at ta when you you don't really know and it could fall one one way or the other so what is uh what is it about this market that's so you know conflicting right now is is it the fundamentals of the eth merge happening in 2022 yet in the backdrop we have all of this macro bad news we've got obviously you know war in ukraine commodities price increases shortages everywhere still the tail end of covid economy uh like inflation the fed just raised

rates which you're going to talk to is all that macro stuff you're contending with mixed with the bullish otherwise bullish uh specifically ethereum news is that what's going on in your mind here yeah that's that's a pretty good summary uh i talked about this on last week where there's so many things about the current crypto markets talking just about crypto right now that are reminiscent of the end of the cycle last year like last last gasps of the mania for people to just grab their last amount of hype and attention so they can exit you said last year do you do you mean like like 28 20 20 right yeah like super cringy icos and people were just participating in them because that was just like the leftover energy and like now we're seeing we'll talk about this when we talk about the

apecoin but like people when people run out of ideas what do they do they issue tokens because that's the only idea that they have left and ultimately that just becomes dilution and that's bearish and so like like we're seeing just the attention just leave out of the the whole play to earn gaming side of crypto we're seeing attention leave out of the nft side of crypto we're seeing people just hanging on on these desperate attempts for attention and so so much of the crypto industry just feels like it has lost the tailwinds uh and on top of that there's just all of the macro bearishness there's the commodity markets that just suck right now we're going to look at uh the like an index of equities charts and

just kind of looks looks bad meanwhile like like putin is scared and in a corner and like that's volatile and so like you know that you know that meme ryan of like that that the building that's toppling over and there are like three steel beams that are holding it up like that feels like the world and the beams that are holding it up are is the merge and so like there's an infinity number of like bearish things going on but the merge is so bullish and i don't know what to do about it well uh maybe we'll find it out by the end of this episode once we go through the merge how you're feeling at the end of this david but yeah i i understand the conflict here um let's talk about the bed index because this is a nice blend d5 bitcoin and eth what are we

looking at on the week yeah start of the week at 101 ending the week at 103.78 dollars so up like four or five percent on the week three or four percent in the week um modestly honestly up let's let's let's switch to some of this macro stuff for a minute and our and i guess our fed watch uh segment so powell came out this week turns out he is more hawkish than the market expected i don't know what i expected i kind of expected him to be hawkish in the face of inflation hawkish means looking to raise rates looking to um get a bit tighter on monetary policy these days so the big news is they are increasing the fed is increasing

its interest rate by 25 basis points a quarter of a percent i believe that's happening sometime in march i'm not sure exactly there's some other things we can get into but what do you think this means high level i thought this was expected i thought the fed the fed raising by 0.25 percent was like viewable from a long way off so i kind of been confused as to how the hawkishness interpretation came about yeah i guess maybe some people thought that given events in ukraine that the fed might sort of change their their position worried about like the r word has been used recently with commodity prices uh increasing the recession work and of course they have to balance inflation with the the threat and fear uh uh of recession so this is the this is also

the first increase since 2018. i'd forgotten it's been that long so that's a big deal yeah so we were just the fred was just getting into raising interest rates post i believe 2008 or something uh and started doing that in 18 and then boom coved and then they just grab those plans and then now they're they were about to start to raise interest rates and then boom russia invades ukraine uh but now this time it looks like they are not stopping the raising of interest rates because of the invasion so maybe that's the hawkishness it's like oh they didn't give us another free ride i guess that's the take so far apparently his languages um they outlined seven more hikes this year so seven more hikes this year and then

four hikes interest rate hikes in 2023 so next year they're also planning to run down their balance sheet a little bit so that's kind of equivalent to another hike um discharging some assets from the balance sheet so discharging assets from the balance sheet was one of the reasons why the whole entire market turned over in december and january and and we've been bearish ever since because people were like oh that's actually way more aggressive in terms of interest rates increases than we ever kind of accounted for and the markets have been bearish ever since exactly and you know people are look people are asking the fed to do something about inflation like that's that's coming from politicians now too um but powell also hinted that if they did

11 hikes uh this year that that would not cause a recession he used the words no recession because he said aggregate demand is strong tight labor market there's a tight labor market and household balance sheets are strong so he doesn't think that these rate hikes and this more like a aggressive monetary policy contraction will actually lead to a recession that's an interesting take and of course look the fed can change its mind at any time like between this meeting and next meeting could be a totally different story but this is a new message coming out of the fed do you remember six months ago uh or so the the big story on the roll-ups about the fed's action was like completely ignoring inflation

right like it's um it's only temporary transitory inflation and now this is a complete direction change which is like oh inflation's here and we have to fight it and not less than six six months later this is the new message coming out of the fed so that's interesting in and of itself well i mean it sounds like they've done their research they've certainly done more research than i have because i didn't measure like the average like cash on hand for the average american household but at the same time like the the the game of controlling inflation and interest rates is such a game of game theory so like the fed's like oh yeah we're going to raise interest rates like seven more times in 2022 but in the back office they could be like all right guys we're going to tell everyone that we're gonna raise

interest rates seven times in 2022 and maybe we're actually only going to do it four times and so the market is actually also playing the game theory game is like all right so that's what they said but what do you think they're really gonna do and like it just throws everything into a ridiculous mess and that is why people should not be in charge of the value of money anyways yeah well another story there but uh this is what equities are doing i think this is an interesting chart from uh from a macro perspective but what are you seeing in this chart this is i believe this is a composite index uh from from the nasdaq basically looks like uh you know i don't know 20 year or something long long very very long time horizons yeah so every single candle is one month so very very

long time horizon i think we actually accidentally cut out the bottom of the the the chart but you can see when covid happened uh and then you can kind of see when the 2008 crash happened uh yeah bad uh and as you look very very recently like there are three maybe four examples of like a bunch of red on this chart and one of them is in the last like four months uh we've had like i think i see four three or four monthly red candles in the last four months and when you look at how fast this is a this is a nasdaq composite index when you look how fast it's gone up in the last like two years you can i see that i'm like pretty fearful about how much room there is to go down uh and when like we've we've

noticed crypto be super correlated to traditional stock markets and the rest of the macro markets and so if that does like turn over as it's looking like it's currently doing without any sort of recovery like that's makes me scared that makes me scared especially when there's a war in europe yeah equities could have a ways to drop is what you're saying yes that's exactly what i'm saying um well speaking of dropping this is a chart we don't often look at we used to here's why we don't look at this chart anymore absolute demolishing so we are looking at is we are looking at the dpi eth chart the d5 the value of d5 aggregate in each terms we used to look at this chart a lot but it kept on going down every single week and so it stopped

being alpha and started being depressing i think the last time the last time we reported it was something in like 0.065 dpi per each and now we are down to zero five five uh so this is really since like d5 summer yeah basically um let me see if i can max this out well you know i had some recovery i suppose earlier in the year a little bit of recovery and this is this is kind of the fake out like you thought d5 was was back on the rise again but it didn't happen at least relative to eth and uh it's just bleeding it's just completely bleeding out uh as compared to eth right now and ethan's retaining sucking in more value what do you think like do you think this

ever changes i mean now people go to the opposite end of the spectrum 18 months ago the narrative was it's all about defa all you need is bitcoin and d5 tokens and no eth those are the things that are going to accrue value now it's kind of flipped a little bit where people are saying eth is forever i don't even need bitcoin gain value well and you don't need defy tokens right and like there's this fear almost that eth has become so deflationary that it could suck out all of the value from the greater ethereum economy and all of the defy tokens what do you think yeah i think that's right i think having justifying like having your ethereum exposure in d5 tokens never made any sense to me because every time you add a token to ethereum you benefit ether

because of eip1559 like the economic activity that you create by having a new token flows back into eip1559 via transaction fees that doesn't work the other way like the value of ether going up doesn't benefit your token it's only it's only one way tokens benefit eth eth doesn't benefit tokens and so you get exposure to every single token on ethereum by just holding eth and so like when you look at the d5 bleed versus eth it's kind of what you would expect especially when a lot of defy has high issuance from yield farming versus ether which is quote unquote deflationary not not in practice but in theory and later in practice this is kind of what you would expect this is what happens when when your base money

is deflationary everything else kind of goes to zero in relation to it but do you think this will happen forever like surely d5 tokens will have a resurgence won't they yeah they can have a resurgence but then it can continue to still happen forever ryan like like we could have a bullish year for defy tokens and then once again it can resume its towards zero trend versus ether i think personally i think that what's going to shake out is somewhat in the middle right it's like i think that now we're now we're on the other side i just think i just think that like um we're like we go overboard on on narratives right so in one direction it was like ethan is going to have no value and is all d5 tokens now we're probably

on the other side of that pendulum swing where everyone's like well ethe is going to slurp out all of the value of d5 there won't ever be like d5 tokens that are occurring value relative to eve and i kind of think that's the time you want to start looking at d5 a bit more aggressively right um it's it's hard when you are denominating your returns in eth to do that right but i do think there are going to be some real winners and some real champions on the d5 side that that gain relative to eth but there's one i think compounding factor here that we have to figure out and we haven't figured this out yet uh and i think it's going to be an important i guess part of the investment thesis to figure out in 2022 which is like will the the new d5 token winners

be the winners from the past right right like there was this idea that we'd have a bunch of blue chip uh defy tokens that would continue to grow and expand but what if what if the turnover is a lot tighter like what if the the winners on ethereum are not going to be the same as like the winners in the l2 ecosystem or the winners on alternative chains what if they're all of these new separate winners and how do you like bake that into the calculation because even the dpi it's just really the ethereum blue chip tokens and the biggest uh tokens by um by value there so that's another piece of the puzzle i think to sort out and i don't think the market has figured that out either which is why the prices are

uh are so depressed too yeah yeah and i i have similar thoughts about the nft ecosystem is that like nfts as a whole can be bullish but that's just because people are rotating from one nft to another to another and this like the nfc ecosystem is really just this shelling point game as to which is the next nft that's going to be hot all right and we leave all the other previous ones behind and like the the aggregate defy market cap could certainly grow and perhaps it can even grow faster than the eath market cap but that doesn't actually mean that that's instantiated into a single asset that you can purchase because the growth happens even a single index yeah right it's hard to capture it all right and you know it's not capturing at all that's what

you know dpi is not captured and that's why there's always alpha on the margins of d5 because not even the the indices are going to be able to capture the upsides from these new tokens because for every good winner of a token there's going to be a hundred negative like bad tokens that the indexes like you can't just accept all of them and so like that's always why there's going to be investment into d fires because there's alpha at the margins uh and then by the time it gets into the indices like you probably probably the alpha is probably already taken yeah absolutely well there's more work to do here to do yeah that is the simplest approach we need to get an index of exposure to everything speaking of eth prices one price that like in ethereum economy that is down is ethereum gas prices this is a

fantastic uh dashboard on dune analytics created by uh hildo no dobby hill dobby yeah and so this is showing us um gas costs we'll include this as a resource for you so you can kind of see gas costs over time recently they've spiked by recently i mean like in the past few hours yeah i believe yeah i was looking at this chart earlier 24 hours i was looking at this chart earlier and the prices to move um like eth were like you know a dollar or something like this now they're up to five dollars on ethereum um but what is this showing us uh overall david with the pr gas prices well it's definitely showing us over the last few months or so that gas prices have kind of hit new

lows i think over the last like three months or so the median gas price was 22 gray which we have not seen in a very long time um but you can also this is just a very useful gas board because it shows you time of day and where the spikes happen time of day and also on days of the week uh and so it's just actually it's a really useful resource i think we're going to be keeping this in the roll up all the time but like here here it is over the last day week and months blue blue is in month over the past over the past month the average guy price if you take the like the peak of that chart i think is something like 30 gray and over the last week it was something like 22 way for the for your average uh gas

prices super low super low super low um uh but then like the the market movements today as long along with the board apes uh token which we'll talk about later uh we definitely saw a spike above 175 grey so you know there's always life somewhere um but uh generally depressed depressed gas prices which is a plus one to the bear side of the argument by the way depressed gas prices are now a bear market indicator um and i guess they always have been although people have been saying that high eth gas prices are bearish for eth as well yeah haters will say anything's bearish for you visa versus ethereum volume look at this

in 2021 visa moved 10.4 trillion in payments volume ethereum moved 11.6 trillion dollars i think we've talked about this before but it just warrants repeating that last year ethereum moved more in payments volume than the visa network that's aggregate of ether and eth tokens and stable coins and everything else on ethereum that's a pretty big milestone to cross in my mind yeah and i think this is just taking into account stable coins i think that's what payments volume must mean is stable coin transfers uh which means it's it's apples to apples folks this isn't like erc20 defy token transfers versus visas settlement networks for dollars this is

dollars to dollars uh so uh you know apple's apple's comparison and ether ethereum one so yeah nice job ethereum uh let's talk about this um oh air drops that's what the the topic is right now so do you hold or sell air drops let me ask you what's your personal strategy the air drops you received last year did you hold it to yourself or did it depend almost all of them i sold except for all of the almost all of them almost all of them except for ens yes i still i still have well i claimed it yet if like that is the profitable move uh and maybe this is obviously people have

been paying attention to airdrops over the past year or so but um like look at these look at these charts fair drops oof what are we seeing here the uni uni swap going and spiking from where it got claimed at three dollars up to 40 and then down to ten dollars but ten dollars what oh that's where it is now um so actually you know technically it's still winner um depending on when you sold it but the what we're really looking at is like it's claimed it goes up then it goes down um you know and it usually goes up first and then down later um so yeah things but this this is just another articulation of what we were talking about earlier with the d5 first versus eth um but i guess this is actually versus dollars now isn't it which is

even worse yeah yeah so i guess the message here is when you get an airdrop sell it immediately no no i think i think usually it's safe to wait like between like eight and 24 hours like usually it pumps and then you sell it i feel like that's fairly immediate though that's right selling the first few days of the first week is has been the profitable move thus have your finger over the sell button yeah for self i wonder if that ever reverses or ever changes if air drops will become see the thing is maybe that's just the nature of dropping our issuance and issuance is inflationary and inflationary is dilutive and that's all

bearish bearishness airdrops are also a fantastic way to get your coin into every like crypto media publication onto everyone's radar in like 10 twitter you know reddit it's yes one week of the detention right so you see these like they're almost like attention spikes particularly for some of these really small uh market cap tokens like i'm not sure what this is but like uh i think that happened like sos do you remember that one that happened in december just a quick spike and then it's gone or whatever talks attention spikes wow i'm gonna i think we should log that one because so many charts in crypto are not just charts of the price but actually are just proxies for people's attention but they really

are aren't they um three hours capital is putting some attention on eth yeah right now right what's this uh transaction yeah because because three hours capital is so large it's very easy to figure out which addresses are there so they have basically everyone has their addresses tagged and one of their addresses added 40 500 ether about 112 million dollars uh about uh at 2 a.m last night so it'll be a little bit more than 24 hours ago from the from the listeners perspective when they are listening to this on friday uh so three hours capital the rotators rotating into e ahead of the merge here we go oh man how long ago was it the ethereum's abandoning its user's tweet

like four months ago four months ago four or five months ago go back in yeah right back in on unabandoners uh let's talk about this so a few things on um his list number one is he is buying uh tara is planning to buy 10 billion dollars worth of bitcoin for its reserves 10 which is billion what pretty impressive how much does michael saylor have i don't think he has 10 billion no there's no way he has 10 billion i mean that's that's absolutely massive and how are they how are they doing this of course it's the value of luna right uh so

like on one side it's like you're taking your your luna token proceeds and you're diversifying into into bitcoin and using that as a reserve dokuan says this is uh going to open a new monetary era of the bitcoin standard and it's you know what this kind of reminds me of a little bit is actually um what eos did and people are gonna like hate that i just compared eos to luna and i'm not comparing them in all respects but in this respect eos did they raised a whole bunch of bitcoin and eth um they sold the vast majority of their eth they kept their bitcoin it's like billions of dollars worth of bitcoin on reserve for eos and i'm not i have no idea what they're

actually doing with that right now but um it's kind of like a way to get cheap bitcoin how the issuance of eos they sold it when eos was much higher than it is today i'm not saying that's exactly what's happening here but it feels a little similar what's your take on this david so i'm not an expert in the dynamics between behind the terra ecosystem but they have like the terra usd which they are saying that this this 10 billion in bitcoin is going to be like the backstop for it like kind of like how the federal reserve has gold and other foreign reserve assets to shore up the value of the us dollar if the time ever comes to it right like they can use their treasuries to protect the protect the peg or protect the value of the currency well in my mind uh this is just

signaling a lack of confidence on the nature of your own asset like why can't you use your own money to to back to back your stable coin but if if you have confidence on the long-term sustainability of your own ecosystem why do you need an alternative store of value to shore to backstop the value of your stablecoin and plus like if the value of ust of tara usd depends on something external to the luna protocol that's an external dependency that is not cryptographic that is trust you have to have the security of your own network solved inside of your own network you can't have an external money be the thing that props up the value of your stablecoin so to me this just shows a lack of confidence in the value of of

luna because they have to go elsewhere to have their store of value and that's exactly so it you know what you know what it it it um i guess it seems like to me is it feels a bit more like you sold stocks to buy some money right it's like this is why i've always thought that that luna and the tarot ecosystem is a bit more on the like fintech side of the spectrum right than than like an ethereum or or bitcoin are on kind of the the hard sound money end of the spectrum right and i guess from terra's perspective if you don't think the luna luna coin is actually like money a monetary asset then what you're doing is you're taking some of your

equity almost like some of your stock and you're exchanging that for a real money like a much harder money and and you're kind of doing the the fintech play too because you're like sort of holding that to backstop your your assets so i guess maybe it makes sense from from that perspective but that perspective itself doesn't make sense [Laughter] i mean we're not here for like new fintech um you're here for the cryptographic futures with no external dependencies oh that's that's the bankless take uh this is also interesting de quana in the news so there was a a wager of some sort a bet of some sort what uh what was this bat david this was

a bet created on twitter uh and so do kwan you know the founder of tara luna and this scentsy algod which is like a crypto trader twitter account um going we're going at it about the future value of of luna uh and so uh dokwan proposes a one million dollar u.s tether bets ust bets so basically dollars between sensei algod and dokwan himself saying that uh in one year's time from march 14th if the price of luna is higher than 88 dollars dokuan pockets the million dollars or and if it's lower then sensei god pockets a million dollars uh you know it's just always a great popcorn season to see the

founders of of layer ones bet about the future price of their layer one asset like especially after it just flips solana right and so like some big big like cockiness going on on twitter right now uh and then actually actually it got raised right uh not raised by that particular person but a second person came in with another 10 million dollar offer to take the same bet which dokwan also accepted so dokwan has 11 million dollars in exposure in the bet against 88 luna on march 14th 2023 um so you know again going back to the whole fintech thing this kind of feels like elon musk when he tweeted out don't short tesla

yeah like i'll wreck you yes yeah and so like you would never ever see vitalik making a statement like this can you imagine could you imagine jesus it's just a completely different culture yeah like culture and founder dna there and it does feel a bit more elon musk and it feels a lot less satoshi it feels a lot less vital yes very much so is what it is i'm sorry but when you when i see l1 founders making 11 million dollar bets against the value of their assets in one year i am don't tell me it makes you better the whole industry that is a bearish signal we are plus two to the bare side of the equation today well we looked at that chart to the luna

chart in the uh in our conversation with um ledger earlier in the week it's just an absolute massive chart right it's like from 30 cents all the way up to what is tara right now or what is luna right now uh it is i was looking at a second ago it is at uh is that eighty seven dollars is eighty seven dollars thirty billion dollar market cap versus salon at 29 billion dollar market cap how do you buy 10 billion dollars of bitcoin on a 32 billion dollar market cap how much are you gonna have to liquidate you're gonna send that thing down to zero you do that you do that very slowly i think is uh is how you do it i'm sorry i wouldn't win maybe quickly as well montero was like 30 cents like a year ago and now it's at 87

and now the founder is saying oh we're going to market by 10 billion dollars worth of bitcoin how much bigger of a red flag do you need like where do you think that money is coming from he's going to market dump tara to buy bitcoin like fact check me on this listeners like maybe i'm wrong maybe it's coming from elsewhere but like wow i'm i'm i'm sure we we will get fact checked but uh yes some of these definitely send the uh the senses the spidey sense is tingling a little bit guys we will be right back with the raises of the week the releases of the week and of course merge week first week but before we do we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible living a bankless life requires taking control over your own private keys and that's why so many

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right into the ledger live app right next to all the device apps and services that you're already used to doing like swapping tokens and staking so if you don't have a ledger hardware wallet go to ledger.com grab a ledger and take control over your crypto so you've got some money but how are you going to use it you want to spend me shopping now bro when you know you should be saving you'll never buy a house at this rate but what if you could spend and save at the same time for the enlightened kind with inquiring minds a new world awaits [Music] set yourself free with completely flexible self-repaying loan technology supported on desktop and mobile

seize the power of alchemix allowing you to spend and save at the same time leverage your wealth without risk of liquidation take out a loan that repays itself by using yield from your deposit to pay off your balance you're only dead his time what was once inconceivable is now within your grasp [Music] bankless is proud to be sponsored by unit swap unit swap is a new paradigm in asset exchange infrastructure instead of a cumbersome order book system where trades are matched with other humans uniswap is an autonomous piece of software on ethereum that lets you trade

any token at the current market price no human counterparties or centralized intermediaries just autonomous code on ethereum input the token you want to sell and receive the token you want to buy the uniswap grants program is accepting applications for grants do you have something of value that you think you want to contribute to the uniswap ecosystem no matter how big or small your idea is you can apply it for a unique grant at uniswopgrants.org and help steer uniswap in the direction that you think it should go thank you uniswap for sponsoring bankless all right guys we are back with the releases of the week we got to start here stripe now supports crypto this is a really big deal stripe is a payment processing company provide a whole bunch of apis basically the traditional

banking system we use stripe on bankless it's a pretty fantastic product overall i think these guys are doing eight billion dollars in revenue they have 4 000 employees and they are launching support for crypto businesses of all kinds all sorts of things they're doing here a crypto powered fiat payment api i think what they're doing is basically connecting crypto rails to their existing set of payment apis so it's like crypto to bank bridge if you will an on-ramp if you will uh really cool stuff here yeah when ryan said stripe is supporting crypto very like high-level nebulous statement right like

what does that even mean they are supporting crypto in like every single way kyc fiat on ramps exchange like feel like stable coin exchanges taste like uh you know credit card to stable coin transfers like native wallets they're doing it all they're doing it and this is not just a little bit this is a lot of it this is the full they feel like it it came out of nowhere suddenly bam stripes here and then they like all of these products they just released even nft marketplace right yeah with an identity type of solution yeah so in payments and kyc baked in like this is the type of release that gets a lot of like institutions and and you know you know businesses who are

crypto scared to start being crypto enabled and start being crypto curious so they go we can like stripe i'm familiar with stripe i'm familiar with their brand they're they are big on compliance they're big like heavily regulated uh and they're letting me do crypto things uh so i expect us to get a ton of adoption from a lot of businesses that maybe we're crypto curious but didn't know how to do it well totally and i i think even an example is for us david so we use a platform for our newsletter called substack and it you know if if you want to pay in fiat you pay stripe is basically the platform that powers all of substack we've been asking substack forever ever to take crypto payments forever it's so simple can you take your 620s like can you integrate that and

it's always just like it's too much work nope like we just use stripe nope nope nope somebody who's integrated crypto payments into a web app before it's not that hard it's not yeah well so they didn't want to for whatever reason it was regulatory maybe it was some addition but now if it's incorporated if it's part of stripe you can guess that's going to be a feature that substance is going to add and under the covers of probably so many of the services used today like the shopifys where you like you you buy you know clothes all the retail stuff like ecommerce online your software the service subscriptions stripe is behind the scenes there and so now what you're going to see over the next few weeks and months is another like pay via crypto type button and so just as you check out with stripe you

can just pay via crypto like that's what's happening so this is a this is a massive move because it's happening at kind of the like the base back end layer of the internet and how payments work on the internet for all sorts of different websites and this is just i we call it the d5 mullet thesis right this is just crypto like getting in the back there and having fintech that you know the stripes of the world be be the front end for them so it's really cool to see yeah we are having uh the crypto lead at stripe on the podcast later in the month after they said we wanted to get them on for this coming tuesday state of the nation and they were like no we still have a number of announcements and releases to get out the door so let's come in about in

in one month's time after those get released so there's more coming out of stripe there there is your bankless alpha more coming out of stripe that's super impressive uh speaking of impressive ave v3 they just launched what is included in aves yeah that deserves applause guys ave v3 is here what's it include david oh it's got so much stuff ryan a bunch of just like quality of life features and upgrades i would say uh so it's not like anything it's still a money market that didn't change but like basically everything under the hood has gotten an improvement so you can do cross-chain transactions so ave is going to be on basically every

single evm chain whether it's a roll-up or another l1 and you can go from ave to ave to ave directly through the web app through this thing called portal they also have what they are calling high efficiency mode which just unlocks more capital efficiency efficiency more borrowing power uh isolation mode which allows assets to get listed that doesn't have uh second or third order consequences to the rest of the ave marks markets so maybe some high risk token comes in but they don't want the the uh the collateral backing that thing to have contagion risk to the rest of the market uh so they have kind of like you know compartmentalized markets that's cool more gas optimizations which they say are reducing gas by twenty to five to twenty to twenty five percent um

and uh additional like risk management tools and uh various things like that so you can read more in their blog uh and or just go ahead and use ave v3 on on any or your preferred layer twos it's actually not on ethereum main net yet though that's kind of the last they're getting to so they're it their their deployment approach is super interesting they they hit all of the alternative uh layer ones that have evm support so the phantoms and the avalanches and harmonies of the world and then also the layer twos like arbitram and optimism and uh and polygon but they've not yet deployed on ethereum internet they're almost using these these other um side chains and layer twos as a kind of a

not quite a test environment but their their initial release environment before they deployed to ethereum but the cool thing about this too is right out of the gate you can access ave v3 on a one inch paraswap xerion which you talked about earlier zapper dbank any other interface you use and uh wallet you use so it's like a quick roll up and a rollout and deployment here which is really awesome to see but they weren't the only ones that just released a point upgrade so alcomix v2 is here yes we like it we like it should we go into alchemix v2 v2 it's cool tell us because there's just more vaults i would say i think is the big upgrade like uh there you have different

uh possibilities with the collaterals that you want to put into alchemics so v2 allows for the arbitrary number of collateral tokens and also new yield strategies so you get to pick your own collateral and you get to pick your own yield strategy so you can kind of custom fit how the alchemix protocol works from you token adapters are written and audited for v2 and they can add an ever-increasing selection of yield providers for your deposits on alchemy so alcox uses yearn to get yield but now they are also opening up direct markets into ave or into compound so you can source your yield from a specific part of defy with a specific stablecoin and so just a lot more composability and a lot more um just user power and that's what these applications are supposed to

do is bestow power upon the users and that's what alchemist v2 is all about what's the high level for what alchemix does for people who aren't familiar with it yeah so it is a a loan it's a it's like you can get your interest payments paid to you up front so you can advance you put stable coins in and then you can borrow stable coins against your stable coins and the stable coins that you deposited earn yield and they just like it's kind of like a proxy for urine right so like right now like you're like three percent you put like ten thousand dollars into into alchemics uh and you get that three percent because it's yield farming your stable coins in yearn but then alchemix lets you borrow up to 50 of your deposited stable coins and so you put it to put like ten thousand

dollars in you can uh borrow five thousand dollars and go do whatever with it while that ten thousand dollars is earning yield and defy what you can also do is you can take that five thousand dollars that you borrowed from alcomix and you can put it back into alcomix so you can get off of ten thousand dollars of deposits you can get like fifteen thousand dollars worth of stable coin yield so it's a way to juice up your yield you can also do this with eth but it's basically a way to get your your so that like five thousand dollars that you borrowed uh i mean you you'd lock up you lock up ten thousand dollars but that's like technically five thousand dollars of interest payments that are paid to you up front that you can go to stuff it's something you can't do in the

real world right because like it's the ability to pull forward all of these interest payments and receive it in one lump sum and then go do whatever you what whatever you want in that lump sum um it's pretty wild pretty cool okay so uh coinbase they are also testing uh fee free trading this is actually kind of a big deal yeah yeah so what's this uh this subtitle here i think is important trading fees have historic historically made up the bulk of coinbase's revenue but they're trying to diversify it their business lines so no longer being dependent on fees for trading and switching out their their business model a little bit what do you think this means trading fees transaction fees on exchanges has always been the dominant

source of revenue for everything ftx coinbase gemini like like basis points of fees on the trade uh but i mean this the crypto industry is so hyper competitive that these fees have compressed especially as more and more exchanges have come online and really competed with each other and so like what is the ultimate form of compression is going to zero but then instead the way that you get revenue is by charging a subscription model so this is a subscription model you can now subscribe to coinbase in order to get fee free trading this has actually been in the works for a while and they finally released it but i bet you this is not going to be the last time that we see a subscription model for exchanges so you can get fee fee free trading that's kind of a hard thing to say i hope i don't have it it

was hard to say man yeah fee free trading um this is something new as well the crypto sleuthing firm chain alice's thing you've heard us talk about them before that's a good term for what they are is basically they they look at the blockchain all of these transactions they try to de-anonymize it and yeah they basically they sell it to government agencies or exchanges whoever else needs to know they are launching sanctioned screening tools for defy for dowels sanctions screening tools this headline makes me very uncomfortable yeah i do not love this headline okay so there's two products that they've released one is on chain one's off chain uh so the off chain one is an api designed for web and mobile

apps and web services users can receive an api key which they can check if an address of interest is on the sanctions list or not so basically you get to automate like hey this ethereum address just signed up for my web app is it on the sanctions list and coinbase or chain analysis can come back and say yes or no you can also they also are offering an on-chain oracle for smart contracts so smart contracts can basically have the same check it's like smart contract like money just gets deposited into a smart contract that's marked contract pings the chain analysis uh uh on chain oracle and says hey is this is this address on the ap at the the sanctions list and the the smart contract oracle on ethereum we'll ping you yes or no um how do you feel about that ryan

i feel terrible i think it's terrible i i hate this yeah i hate that this exists now of course like protocols can you know uh protocols aren't necessarily integrating this right um and there can be wallets that integrate it or choose not to but i feel like this gives the uh surveillance state and like the sanction state another way to basically mandate things in defy so what if you can't really have a non-custodial uh crypto wallet service like a metamask located in the us unless it is doing this you know sanction checking with chain analysis unless it has that feature and then it's

very easy for like third parties government states to create a list of eth addresses that are blacklisted for whatever reason right maybe it's for a good reason maybe it's not for a good reason uh and once they do that then that can like be pushed out into some of the d5 tools that that we have today of course they can't get this at the base layer they can't get this into the smart contract code of a uniswap for example they can't get this into ethereum um but it's not it's not great i i you know and it's not surprising to me that chain analysis would see this as a massive opportunity but um i guess aml

d5 is coming this year like it's probably here sick i'm looking forward to it uh yeah i'm joking obviously uh take for for listeners who want a hypothetical scenario take for example how uh people were asking uh crypto exchanges to de-platform russian uh customers uh in compliance with sanctions uh and then uh coinbase and others actually ended up doing it like in theory you could see that same thing where uh all russian users coming from russian ip address or have russian kyc uh get added to a sanctions list and like parts of defy are like oh are do you have a russian address because we know of that because how you

signed up for this centralized service uh well now you're on the sanctions list so any sort of defy app that integrates with chain analysis is now giving over powers towards nation like nation state governance and so like the only way the only way around this i see david is privacy like on the base layer it's like privacy services or l2 privacy like it's the only way around this because if chain analysis can derive the identity of certain addresses they will and then they will propagate that into the rest of defy infrastructure yeah and i've always been conflicted about chain analysis just because like well it's basically like the teacher's pet of the government it's like the the the the narc in the room that asks for the reminds the teacher that they forgot

to collect the homework uh like and but also at the same time like if not chain analysis like it would just be another different surveillance company like the the value of who's going to be be the snoop of the blockchain is going to be captured by someone so this like inevitable you have public blockchains somebody's going to make a business around breaking everyone else's privacy about it um but that doesn't necessarily mean that we have to like it yeah and uh i i think that is the next battle that crypto will have to fight it's privacy on the base layer and different different uh solutions for that so which we have plenty of so i have no long-term fears yeah aztec for one i think a lot of this will be built out on layer two maybe that's

some more content we'll have to put together in the future david but uh enough of that for now let's talk about uh volts what are they doing with the uniswap community yeah volts is a is a d5 primitive that is trying to bring interest rate swaps to defy um kind of similar to element finance uh but with a very different um construction but inside of the volts architecture is the need for something like uniswap v3 concentrated liquidity uh but unit swap v3 has a license and so they have offered 1.1 percent of volts tokens to access uniswap v3 code inside of the volts architecture to which unit swap governance gave an overwhelming support of yes so uh volts

requested permission from unit swap to use the unisop v3 license code for one percent of volts tokens and that got approved which is kind of cool kind of cool that's kind of an interesting collaboration uh for sure uh all right david let's switch gears let's talk about raises this week the first one coinbase they just raised 450 million dollars on a seven billion dollar valuation this is mostly on the back of metamask which just topped 30 million users uh pretty big valuation for consensus though what are your thoughts uh i i thought that's like the third raise of the year for consensus like they are just like pulling it in like coming out of the depths of the bear market like really turned it around because for those that weren't around during the bear market the consensus laid off a ton of people because

basically joe lubin was selling 20 or something right that's it i thought it was more than that 20 30 something yeah a lot yeah uh well i thought it was interesting that like in one of their tweets they said like in this race uh a lot of some of this money is going to be uh saved to specifically buy ultra sound money is what they call it all proceeds from this round will be converted to eth to further build consensus's ultrasound money position as a rebalance to rebalance itself to fiat ratio in lines with consensus's treasury strategy so they drained their eth treasury in 2018 trying to fund the company and now they're buying it back uh so like they were kind of the reason why eath went is 80 um but now they're buying it back at

whatever the price is now 2 800 yeah and they're doing some great work too with uh obviously with metamask and some of these things so i'm glad they continued to be to be well funded uh all right speaking of well-funded raises here's another one optimism they just raised at a uh over one billion dollar valuation i'm not sure how much the valuation is here david but optimism of course a evm compatible layer two pretty awesome that they're getting funded as well oh not just evm compatible ryan but evm equivalent uh six 1.65 billion dollar valuation paradigm an a16z uh an optimism uh uh is a

like i said the evm equivalent version of an optimistic rollup which has a bunch of tailwind effects because you get to strap into the network effects of ethereum itself because the difference between optimism and ethereum is trying to be reduced down to the bare minimum and they're also having a very uh public goods ethos aligned culture with ethereum itself so here's a quote from jing the ceo we are making revenue out of the sequencing for for the optimism layer 2. we're giving all that revenue back towards funding public goods on ethereum we don't want to say that we want to uh want to be decentralized we also want to show the community that we're setting up our own incentives to be compatible with that so they are innovating on this thing called retroactive public goods funding uh and if you want to learn more about that we

actually did a show i did a show with um with austin griffith where we unpacked public goods funding so there's more details all about that there everyone's really hyped about optimism really nice to see them getting get the funding to take their project for the rest of the way because it's super super ambitious and they deserve it all uh starkware next uh at six billion dollar evaluation they just raised a um let's see 100 million dollars after just receiving a 50 a 50 million dollar valuation that was just a few months ago at a 2 billion evaluation series c that was in november so layer twos continue to be well-funded um solana based nft an nft marketplace on solana

called eden just raised a 27 million dollar series a this feels kind of like the the open sea of solana uh yeah filling that niche they've got like 90 percent of market share of nfts on solana what's interesting about this i think is the question of will every single independent uh chain and ecosystem maybe layer two will they have their own category winners and sets of apps well they have their own open seas their own you know unit swaps automated market makers their own aves that are separate and distinct from the ones that have won out on ethereum what do you think about that uh well i know for a fact that opencv shall be integrating solana in the future uh and so

maybe there's like the the niche nft marketplaces like the the indie nft marketplaces that are specific to the chain that like the chain loyalists like and then there's going to be open so you're predicting some kind of a convergence there then it's like basically the category winners on ethereum the evm ecosystems will go tackle all of these other chains one by one and go to war with these uh you know these these local winners in every single chain yeah yeah interesting to see probably some consolidation there too as uh as that all plays out uh a new layer one has just been funded as well a 200 million dollar strategic investment led by a16z katie hahn multicoin of course

three euros capital ftx ventures coinbase ventures all in a new layer one called aptos this layer one is actually spun out of some of the initiatives the early days of um the the libra and dm project from from facebook now called meta they were talking about releasing an entirely separate chain and they actually uh developed a whole bunch like put together a whole bunch of work there's a whole project open source projects about this a whole tech stack that project is now kind of end of life but this team this aptos team is sort of picking that up up where facebook left off and they're trying to bring another layer one to market um how many times do you think this play can work

david another layer one like are we just gonna have new layer ones pop up every every couple of years or so what's what's happening here uh this once again reminds me of when people were still issuing icos like three quarters into 2018 after it was so obvious that it was the ico mania was over so ryan this is three now around three points towards the bear market thesis it's too late in the cycle to be raising money for an l for a new l1 especially one that came out of libra dm which never even got off the ground in the first place uh and so i think they're just raising money off that branding but that is just my anti-l new l1 take i guess i uh i read

kyle simani's post on multicoin about this and it was it it just well look man it reminded me a lot of his uh the pieces he's written about solana and the virtues of solana which is interesting to me and the one thing i will say is i don't think any of these vcs or investors have a lot of chain loyalty you know what i mean i think that they are buying block space buying l1 narratives buying things that that will pump um but all i would say is like retail beware and of course retail can't get in on this coin right now but in the future i don't know some of these supply lot like coin lockups and stuff some of the i don't i don't know how sustainable

this is and we can't just have like layer one after layer one after layer one unless we get some real traction now i don't i don't know so um seems to be just something we've we've we we see like a new layer one launches a bunch of vcs pile in it's going to be the future um although i will say in 2021 some of those some of those chains did take off in some you know in big ways so who knows maybe chain loyalty and vcs can those go together i don't think so i i think that like they're not aligned it's not compatible um let's talk about this hex trust they just raised 88 million dollars what is hex trust uh hex trust 88 million

dollars for a gaming ecosystem uh 88 million dollars for brand new uh ecosystems not not a small number um founder was co-led by anna mccaw brands and liberty city ventures and never heard of them before series b will use to scale to europe and middle east to obtain additional licenses in gaming hex trust currently has over 100 employees across offices in hong kong singapore and vietnam uh and yeah haven't heard of any of this yeah neither have i moving on um jobs time drops it's our time to tell to ask you whether you've gotten a job in crypto yet and to remind you if you haven't there's a fantastic jobs board i'm going to read out some jobs for you

the first is wow a bankless web developer whoa we are looking for a web developer as well how crazy is this there's some we don't have a website ryan we have a website i actually put it together and it's terrible aside from the newsletter we have like a really ugly terrible website and we need a new one and we need a web developer to help we also need an editor of the bankless newsletter a senior product manager bankless academy a senior product manager for super rare we've got a quantitative analyst of risk at maker dow a risk analyst at maker dow as well full stack engineer at kazilla a product manager at godzilla as well a whole bunch more at the bankless jobs website look if you're not into any of those

specific jobs the other thing you can do is go check out the bankless talent collective and submit your resume so you just fill out a talent profile and you get connected with companies if you're a company looking for talent there's already 200 plus resumes web 3 resumes on the bank list talent collective you can tap into that as well if you are looking for talent and and subscribe this is a pretty cool new initiative that we've just spun up recently yeah banquet's got both sides of the job market we've got the supply and the demand coming up next out of the bankless ecosystem the bank is dating out no never uh i don't know how much demand there will be there might be a lot of supply

though let's talk news david merged it's worked week it's it's the moment you've been waiting for uh don't sleep on the merge this is a post you wrote so people are predicting the merge in three months we we didn't necessarily fully double down on a june date right but we're pretty excited we're pretty bullish that june could be the month that the merge comes part of this was a a set of reasons given by superfiz who's very plugged into the east staking community and that world what are the reasons why a merge could happen the ethereum merge could happen in uh in june and maybe david should we back up and just explain what the merge is for people who haven't been listening to

recent bangles episodes yeah sure okay ethereum currently proof of work has also 100 always committed to eventually transition to proof of stake we have the proof of stake chain that's what the beacon chain is that's been running since early 2021 and that i think has been chugging along making sure that's totally fine and one day we will swap out the proof of work and plug in the beacon chain which is the proof of stake chain to the current execution environment of ethereum and proof of work will go away and proof of stake will replace it that's the merge we're merging the chains and stripping out proof of work and so when this actually happens is completely unknown because it's only going to happen when it's ready it's ready when it's ready but we get to also observe because this

is an open environment we get to observe the ethereum developers and kind of hype hypothesize about when it might be ready so that's what super fizz did he's pulled in five different tidbits of information that indicate the strong likelihood of a june merge date the first one being there's a planned difficulty bomb coming in mid-june difficulty bomb is something that's always been an ethereum basically we we plan in the destruction of the chain because it forces us to make progress every now and then we have to kick it back actually that's been basically ethereum culture since the beginning of time is we just kick it back by having a hard fork it gives us an opportunity to add in new eips and stuff like that and kick back the difficulty bomb there's a difficulty bomb coming in june which means we will be hard forking sometime

by the by mid-june regardless of the merge or not because we need to kick back the difficulty bomb ryan danny ryan who's coordinating the the east to uh not eth2 the uh transition from proof of state work ethereum to proof of sacred theorem has signaled that a delay in the bomb is not needed which means that perhaps this the merge can happen before the bomb happens which happens in the mid-june there's also the merge readiness checklist is getting more and more checkboxes in it and also there was a conversation in the all-core devs call about potentially kicking back uh some development in the in the merge by 10 days and a lot of devs got really picky about that they didn't like the delay at all and so devs are getting picky about the date and

last but definitely not least the kiln test net is actually testing the merge so we are having test environments for pr we are practicing the merge the merge is being practiced actively and so barring any significant unforeseen issues with all of these little tidbits of data june looks like the most likely candidate for the merge which i'm really excited about well that's super cool and uh yeah yeah i mean stop doing that what would the merge mean david so like what what does it mean you talked about the disappearance of proof of work but what does it mean for issuance as well i think that's part of the story here yeah so people who are staking their eath on the beacon chain they're earning a very

respectable four point eight percent in eastern nominated yield not even stable coin yield but each yield and then once this uh roughly 10.5 million each out of the roughly 118 million total supply of eth once that uh staked east merges with a proof of work chain that yield goes from where it is now at 4.8 percent to somewhere between 10 to 15 depending on gas fees so as a 2 to 3x in yield on ether and so that's a two to three x incentives stronger incentive to stake more eath and so there's going to be a demand to take your eath perhaps out of the secondary market and to stake it to get that 10 to 15 percent east denominated yield and at the same time the new issuance of ether this is one of the one of the best features about proof

of stake the new issuance of ether is dropping by 90 percent so currently uh 12 000 ether is minted per day to spit to spend towards proof of work mining proof of work very very capital intensive it takes a lot of money to fund security and proof of work but post merge that goes from 12 000 down to 1280 so a 90 reduction in the ether issuance but not only a 90 reduction ryan but also a hundred percent reduction in operational costs because each staking and proof of stake costs nothing after you have an internet connection and a consumer hardware laptop computer a normal computer so we're basically we're going from 12 ether to uh in daily issuance to 1280 and thousands and thousands of ether in

daily cell pressure to cover the operational cost of proof of work down to zero so the big questions that i asked the bankless nation how much more ether will be staked as a result of the increase in yield the two to three x in yield where will that ether come from since a lot of the regular selling pressure is going to be eliminated and what is the price going to do as a result and all of these answers are likely coming in june because we all get to experience it for ourselves yeah this is this is definitely the biggest event uh the biggest crypto event of 2022 maybe the house ever right i would say ever it's like it's like um it's a triple happening other than the the genesis block of ethereum itself this is the

most significant event since that right and so this is now now we've got uh bullish david back i think for for the month to the bullish side we got three for the bear we got one for the bull well i mean this is in incredibly bullish but there was something that uh that happened in the test net as well there was a block proposal failure some bug in the kiln test net so that could set things back possibly that's a question to you what happened with this bug and um you know what what does that mean for the merge date yeah at the start of the the article i said barring any significant unforeseen issue it's increasingly likely that we see the merge in june and then three days later there was a bug in the test net

what happened was that the prism client uh the way the way that the merge works is that people have to run both an ethereum proof of work chain client and an ethereum beacon chain client so prism is the proof of stake beacon chain client and then prism plus geth and and prism plus nethermine these combinations stopped producing blocks which accounted for 15 to 20 of the total block supply uh because ethereum has a multi-client architecture this actually did not impact the test net but if it had been more than 33 it would have so 15 to 20 kind of dangerously close also prism in its current implementation on the beacon chain has more than 66 percent of total uh uh total supply of the new blocks so

the client that's responsible for more than 66 percent of the blocks so that is a concern we need to get prism dominance in the beacon chain down for that to be safe um the bug was relatively trivially identified and fixed but it perhaps was indicative of more time and research needed to to understand that this thing is going to be stable uh the significance is going to be unpacked and talked about during the ethereum all-court devs call which is happening tomorrow which is today for the listener friday and so if you want to tune in to whether or not this actually does impact the merge you can turn into the all core devs call another um i guess reason why we need multiple clients because this sort of saved the test net in this case but it's also a reason why we need client

diversity on on mainnet as well and staking diversity across multiple clients hey ryan can you name me a different blockchain other than ethereum that has multiple clients well david i think there's probably none besides which is ridiculous we're supposed to be decentralized we've got some more trivia here too and this is maybe a question for you even though you probably may you probably already know the answer to this how much newly minted eath will validators be able to sell after the merge but before the withdrawals hard fork so just to set up that question newly minted eath okay not existing

steak because i i'm fairly uh certain people know that once they stake their eat they can't withdraw it right now until there's a hard fork that adds some withdrawal functionality but we're talking about newly issued eath so that's after you stake your eath you get some return to nominate and eat that newly issued eath when will you actually be able to sell that newly issued eath david no no they answer that wait no actually not when will you be able to sell it but uh how much excuse me newly minted eath will validators be able to sell post the merge so let's say the merge happens in june after that date in june and july and august they're receiving new issuance of

eth how much will they be able to sell of that eth david uh the answer is zero rhyme yes uh the answer is you are correct okay ding so ding so just just to unpack that a little bit right now you can go stake your ether on the beacon chain you send your ether to the beacon chain contract new that ether on the current chain is burned more in that in ether on the beacon chain is minted you stake that ether you start earning that ether yield on the beacon chain then the merge happens and then that beacon chain is then securing the ethereum chain proof of work is stripped out but withdrawals are not yet enabled yet there is a new there's another hard fork that needs to happen to enable withdrawals and that's hypothesized to be roughly six months after so after the

merge the eth issuance into the validators won't be withdrawal withdrawable for six months which means zero new ether will be introduced into the market for like six months after the merge zero what we're saying what you're saying is to be clear each issuance doesn't just drop by ninety percent it drops to a hundred percent temporarily for some period of time for some period and that that like additional ten 10 issuance is almost like it's it's almost like vested it's locked up yeah it cannot be sold cannot be spent so we're actually going from like 4.25 4.5 issuance to 0 issuance right for at least six months plus plus the burden

plus the burn okay but then but then oh wow talking about this well devil's advocate though because like we're just we're just locking locking up the rewards for six months while we just make sure that everything's okay and eventually it'll get unlocked and then and then you might say like well then there's just pent up demand to sell because they've just been earning all this eth for six months and they're just gonna sell it all at once but the thing is eat staking goes up to ten to 15 percent and so all of the people that are have their ether on the main ethereum chain that never decided to bridge over to the beacon chain and they because they never wanted to spin up an eth1 validator that 10 to 15 is going to cause a huge influx of more stake for people to get that

yield and so not only is the zero net new ether going to come into existence the gravitational pull of ten to fifteen percent each denominated yield is going to pull in so much more eighth so even when the hard the withdrawals hard fork is enabled the incentive to still be staking is going to be so strong i could totally see that that just becoming a non-event in terms of the east price and dumping on the secondary supply look uh supply crunch this means a massive supply crunch is happening this year and uh i'm uh i'm really shocked that more people aren't talking about it um i heard it for you you heard it here now that's gonna happen potentially in the midst of this like crab sideways crypto bear

market world war three right like who knows so it's going to happen in in that context is not necessarily going to happen during like hype season of uh you know early spring 2021 so we will see how that plays out rocketpool continuing to add more features and functionality here they have a new staking interface with a bunch of improvements including a wallet panel transaction estimates more intuitive exchange rates on the r eth and a lot more so go check that out there's all sorts of great staking services uh as well if you don't want to run your own validator rocket pool being probably one of the the most decentralized

lido being another one that's a little less uh decentralized but is still doing better than than staking in exchange and you you gave this tweet you put out this tweet david the drum wolf role for the merge has begun is that what you heard this week was it the drum roll yeah especially in the second half of the week it's just like people are just the merge is getting a bunch of engagement on twitter that seems to be in my mind like the thing that has captured the attention of people as the end of the attention from the nfts and gaming and all that stuff is gone people have refocused on the fundamentals of this industry which are is the merge uh so the drum roll is i mean we're three plus months out but like the merge is here

the merge is the drum roll's happening and when you say when you say people we're talk we're talking primarily about crypto people like crypto twitter people none of this is broken outside into mainstream yet i mean honestly most of the crypto industry doesn't even understand this i i totally agree with that at least they're talking about it now the drum roll for the merge is definitely started at least with the inner circle of ethereum people who really really pay attention to the stuff and and then also the people that pay attention to that but we got three months to go there's going to be a lot of conversations there's going to be a lot of content we're bankless is going to report on all of it and it's just i think it's going to be a very very fun time ryan because uh i think i think it's east season i think

e-season has started once again uh and it's been it's my favorite season uh and we're going to talk about it every step of the way until the merge yeah well we didn't tell you it's not only merge uh week but this week lasts many months right the next few months we're going to be talking about the merge it's just a huge deal and inevitability and most people in crypto do not appreciate this i think this is a massive alpha for you whether it's a bear market or a bull market in crypto this is a massive event to watch um let's talk about l2s for a minute and the path to roll-up decentralization so something that not everyone knows uh is that every major layer two project

right now anyway in its current state has a trusted party which can execute protocol upgrades right and that is intentional there is a back door to upgrade these layer twos in the event of a bug and some layer twos have already used this to patch things before like uh before there was a catastrophic issue and so this is sort of a feature at this stage not a bug but if it persists into the future forever then it becomes a bug because as long as there is a trusted third party that can execute protocol updates the layer two is not completely decentralized so the optimism team wrote a fantastic post about how rollups move forward how they decentralize over

time how they get rid of these access keys they um they use the analogy of like throwing the ring into mountain dew throwing the keys into mount doom so it'll be burnt up and and no one could access it before uh any longer and the chain would be fully decentralized um what would you say is the path not just for optimism here but like optimism summary on what roll-ups need to do in order to get rid of this security hole in the future after they harden their chain what's the path to making the roll-ups fully decentralized with no you know upgrade access for the core team yeah no trust no centralization right earlier i talked about uh how

optimism strategy has always been evm equivalents not just avm compatibility but evm equivalents uh and there's also been like the narrative just like evm is kind of the center of the universe you know avalanche all these evm compatible chains they're not ethereum but they are the evm uh and so avm equivalents is really really important and so basically optimism i think is going to take a leaf out of ethereum's book of which it is a fractal off of and kind of follow the ethereum roadmap for decentralization and that involves uh rather than having one canonical client for optimism having many many clients for optimism and then and then after enough uh sufficient multi-client uh architecture gets built out then it's just a matter of handing

over like first off calcifying in the same way that ethereum is slowly slowly having longer and longer hard force and longer and longer updates uh the same kind of thing needs to happen with optimism l2s where just like things need to change less and less and less over time and give more and more power back to the community i think it's going to be interesting to see if like optimism or optimistic l2s retain some sort of upgradeable path via the token via on-chain governance in ways that ethereum does not but each the nice thing is is that you could spin up an optimism layer two and have one with on-chain governance and one without but the idea is that ethereum itself has kind of laid out the road map to how you decentralize uh and layer twos probably

are going to just have to take a leap out of ethereum's book and follow in that path yeah there's no shortcuts to this i think it's the main message but there is there is a pattern right it's like you have to ossify the underlying protocol you have to have multiple clients make it decentralized you have to create sort of a you know specification that other teams can build towards so that's one not just one unified team and once these things are in place then you can toss those private keys into mount doom into the into the lava and burn them forever but doing it before then is um not a good idea right we need that flexibility we need that upgrade path so that we can solve these processes like all of these layer twos are basically in a beta version uh until that time um let's talk a bit more about

optimism so they are releasing canon canon which is a next-gen fraud proof architecture that's coming soon what is uh what does that mean next-gen fraud proof architecture yeah the the fault-proof uh architecture is is one of the optimism's big missing components which is no longer missing because they released canon and this particular fault-proof implementation the way that it's designed is a reflection of the optimism's design philosophy and i talked about this design philosophy kind of summarized in a tweet where i say optimism's design philosophy has always been reduce reduce reduce and what i really mean by that is reduce complexity reduce the number of codes and that

optimizes optionality when you reduce complexity you can actually push complexity elsewhere and so kind of like ethereum itself optimism is very modular as in this canon uh fault proof is a modular component of the greater optimism layer two uh and so this simplicity optimizes for modularity and efficiency which ultimately creates security uh and uh one of the hotlines in this article is oh it also enables the theoretical minimum of call data gas costs uh which you just you know music to my ears when it comes to speed and and gas efficiency on layer two uh and so if you are if you are technically minded and wanna hear more about optimism's fault proof canon

architecture uh you can go click the link in the show notes for more details reduce reduce reduce this is also a leaf out of ethereum's book where there's you know so many efforts to reduce the the beacon chain specification to the minimum amount of code necessary it's definitely important on this journey as well uh so is getting exchanges to on-ramp and off-ramp to your layer two and hubei global they just added optimism withdrawal functionality and features so this is a path that all roll-ups are going to take uh and uh it's cool to see uh optimism like leading the way down that path too all right david let's talk about the biggest acquisition in nft history the

apes bot the punks david i don't know how you feel about that i'm looking at a punk in your background right now but hugo labs purchased all of the intellectual property i believe from um from the crypto punx holders uh larva labs yuga and larva they purchased all the intellectual property from larval labs tell us what this means so what is this purchase what's the significance of it and uh what does it mean for the nft ecosystem and for the the punx and the board apes community yeah carly riley over at overpriced jpegs tweeted out a few months ago i wonder when uh nft

companies or nft studios are going to start buying the ip from other nft companies or other nft studios and i'm pretty sure when she tweeted that she meant like you know some of the b-less nfts not necessarily the board ape yacht club founders buying crypto punks the og nft so the magnitude of this is absolutely crazy uh and not not just crypto punks but also me bits which also came out of larva labs uh and so for every nft project there is ip associated with it uh there's the licenses uh and the crypto punks again the one i have in the back my back my living room here the the ip for crypto punk was actually not owned by the owners of the crypto punks it was still owned by larva lab so

like commercial licenses was not something that you could do with crypto punks that was actually one of the reasons there's always always been the case behind board apes is that the board ape holders had the rights to use their own board ape commercially if they so choose this is this is creative commons open or cco i believe is what that's called uh but double check me on that um and so now yuga labs which are the founders behind board apes and mutant apes and that whole ecosystem uh struck a deal with larva labs to acquire the ip and when they did they gave the punk holders the rights to their own commercial licenses for their punk so i can start start going out and making merch and branding out of my crypto punk if i so choose like i already have a

brand around me and my crypto punk because i put my crypto punk as my profile picture on twitter but now i could go and start making like i don't know a movie where my crypto punk is featured if i so choose and i would have my own commercial rights to that why didn't larval labs do that larval has been holding it that's a good question i don't larval labs has always been uh builders and not necessarily marketers they like on-chain experiments they like fooling around on the blockchain doing cool innovative new things like i said they weren't just the founders of crypto punks they also did mevits they also did autoglyphs they are tinkerers and innovators at the chain level where you labs are brand experts and and just like experts in growing the

the value of an ecosystem and that's just something that larval labs was never really interested in so some punk holders are a little bit concerned because the climate and culture in board apes is nothing like the culture around crypto punks uh the crypto punks kind of think the board apes are kind of cringe and i'm definitely one of those people um but uh but and so like people are worried that yuka labs is gonna give crypto punks the same treatment that they gave the board apes like you know yachts and things of that nature that are kind of against the crypto punk ethos like it's really actually hard to tie down crypto punks they're very very decentralized different cultures different cultures yeah uh and so the some of the punk holders are concerned about that as in

we don't need this company to promote the brand of the crypto punks the crypto punk's brand has always been about promoting itself uh like we don't need help we're crypto punks i mean we don't even want help um but but can i but can i ask you this this this part doesn't make sense to me it's like it feels look i'm a kind of outsider not part of either of these communities i'm just looking at it but it feels a little bit like larval labs is just doing this as a cash grab like why couldn't they have just given crypto punk uh owner's creative common license and like be done with it why do they have to sell to you collabs all of this ip and all of these punks like i'm wondering if some members of the the crypto punk community feel a little bit um i don't know betrayed

is the the right word but maybe rug pulled um well so it wasn't the acquisition of the ip that i think was that's only one part of the story i think actually the bigger part of the acquisition is actually buying the treasury assets of larva labs which was 423 crypto punks and you know with a 60 eighth floor that's a lot of value and seven over 1700 me bits uh and so i it was a package deal right like we'll buy your crypto punks we'll buy your me bits and give us the ip and we'll we'll make a deal i don't know how much like i think i think the larva labs just wants to kind of sunset their responsibility over the crypto punks because they weren't really using that to do anything

to begin with uh and so i don't know i don't i don't think rugpull is is the right descriptor i think it was just like a passing of the baton passing of the torch onto a new a new steward of the brand um and that's kind of where the crypto punk side of the community kind of is like fearful like they don't want a steward of the brand the brand is its own steward it does itself the headless brand and so putting a head on the brand is kind of anti-crypto punk culture i'm optimistic in the mirror post from yuga labs they definitely addressed how they have no intention of just giving the crypto punks the the board apes treatment uh and that they will listen to the community before they take any action so i'm optimistic about the outcome of this i kind of think that the crypto punks

get the best of both worlds they both get to have their headless brand that many many crypto punks will just give the middle finger finger to yuka labs and yugo labs will still have the incentive to promote the crypto punk brand so long as they don't do it in any cringe way like in my like how they kind of did with board apes in my opinion uh then i think we're good here i think we're good here we respect the culture but as a punk holder you feel you're cautiously optimistic about it cautiously optimistic i think that's a great way to put it yeah um there are some takeaways from william pister you guys over now you go labs now has five of the top 20 nft projects crazy they are absolutely massive player and brand holder in the nft space larva labs is going to continue on with

projects he said they're kind of a builder hacker house and looks like they're going to spin up more uh web3 projects in the future um it it does beg the question of whether yooka what they do next will they launch an nft marketplace for instance right then they have the brands do they go like start being vertically integrated and become sort of an open c type of offering get into the exchange business there's also some chatter about acquisitions right so like if if you go labs board apes can basically buy crypto punks then that also means somebody can buy board apes right buy all of that ip so who's next do the corporate behemoths enter the fray does like disney go and buy an nft project

maybe they are the future owners of yuca labs uh they they don't think the board apes is the right culture for disney uh so but maybe it's someone else right it's like like the idea of these things being acquired and purchased is sort of entered the conversation uh as well um when token that's what we'll get to in a second it feels like there's a got the answer opening conversation play to earn games some other things as well but let's talk about the token really quick so there was talk there's an ape token get me up to speed on that david i haven't honestly been paying attention too much to uh to the ape coin what's going on there yeah so yugo labs minted and airdropped apecoin i believe as of this mo

as of this morning and apecoin is according to uh them a token for culture gaming and commerce used to empower a decentralized community building at the forefront of web 3. uh some people have then the negative take on this is like a token for culture gaming and commerce like these things that are supposed to be unlocked by having the token wasn't that what like the apes themselves were supposed to be uh uh but you know to each their own this is com putting a currency into an nft world so now we have the fungible money currency that's paired with the holders of the ape tokens that got all the money so what they're going to be doing with the erc20 token i don't know but you would imagine some sort of just like

economy is growing this is now like the nation of the apes um the world the the planet of the apes if you will they have their their own identity and their own currency and now they have to build out and this is their world ape holders this isn't across all yuca labs properties just for the apes themselves board apes mutant names and kennel kennel dog doggy dog club i don't know the name of that one the dogs that go with the apes so those three projects got the apecoin airdrop in different proportions even more critiques came from uh the supply of the ape token that was given to you larp yuga lab founders because some amount of was reserved for hugo lab founders which is which is typical but

then some amount was also uh reserved for board ape founders which they're the same thing so like a little bit of a double dip right there um but uh we'll see we'll see it's still in early days there's some takes here's one from alexis ohanian who's uh coming on the podcast on monday by the way um what's his take despite how bored my ape looks i'm excited to share that apecoin dao is adopting apecoin and that i'm serving on special counsel that will oversee the decisions of the community so alexis looks like is getting in the fray as a a governor of some sorts um the exchanges are listing apecoin as well they've been very quick to list ftx i got a email from gemini saying we are now listing apecoin so

d good bd from yeah from youtube yeah they can they can execute these brands can execute and what is this tweet that we're looking at here david oh yeah so this was interesting this has less to do with the actual like airdrop out of yugo labs and more with nftx and nftx is like an index for various um nft projects and so nftax has a bunch of board apes in their vaults and all of the board apes that nftx has is claim they're able to claim the the tokens they're able to claim the air dropped but no one actually owns them because it's owned by a pool so what someone did is they took a flash loan to buy the entire vault of all board apes and then since they owned every single board ape uh they claimed every single board apes

from nftx airdrop uh and then and then resupplied and sold back to nf the nsc all of the apes and then paid back their flash loan and was able to claim basically a million dollars of the ape token so i didn't know if i'm mad about that one no this is clever that one this is clever yeah like if nfts didn't think about that then that's on them yeah that's that's pretty clever and some of the downstream effects of these things so summarize this for us overall what do you think about the acquisition of punks by the apes and you go labs moving forward acquisition of punks by apes i am neutral to slightly positive on that uh there's a decent chance that it just becomes a nothing burger and crypto punks or crypto punks forever and

nothing can really change that um so that's my opinion on that with regards to the airdrop of the issuance of new tokens uh to generate excitement and to make money goes back to my thesis of how we are in a 2018 part of the crypto cycle where people are just issuing tokens because it's the last last gasp of opportunity to pocket some money before we go into the bear market there you go that's the take that's what happened this week guys um let's move on to something else that was in the headlines in the nft world which is mark zuckerberg ceo of meta from really facebook just confirmed rumors that instagram will get into the nft game in a matter of months i believe so

nothing specific to announce other than instagram is coming to nfts that's a big deal it's like we all suspected it yeah but i do see this as um some zuckerberg capitulation now i don't know what nft platform he's going to deploy it on but how could he not do something on ethereum he can't at this point in time spin up his own facebook chain and start issuing nfts there right so it's got to be with some of the existing platforms and if that's the case david we're winning man like we got the biggest social media uh conglomerate in the world now using nfts as digi digital property on its social media platform and i think that's fantastic we'll see what

instagram does with it but look we've seen moves with you know tick tock we've seen twitter get into nft space uh we knew instagram was coming and uh it looks like they're they're coming in the next few months zuckerberg has just confirmed it if only dm had worked out they'd be able to do this natively versus their their own blockchain but nope yep that's right uh that's right and bend the knee zuckerberg regulation talk let's talk about a few things we'll be real quick though um okay so we we've said for a while congress has got to do something to reign in the sec and gary gensler in fact we talked to representative tom emmer on the bankruptcy podcast about that we're like come get your boy you know get your boy

gensler is all over the place um unhinged gone a little bit rogue on you know in crypto and it's it's it's unclear how much of like how much actual authority enforcement authority he he actually has in the sec versus what he's actually doing and this is a letter from representative tom emmer and uh to gary gensler and a whole bunch of other representatives it says this my office that's tom emmer speaking has received numerous tips from crypto and blockchain firms that sec chair gary gensler's informational reporting requests and quotations to the crypto community are over burdensome and don't feel particularly voluntary

and they are stifling innovation so representative tom emmer and company queering the sec asking what authority they actually have over the crypto industry and maybe attempting to rein the sec in somewhat uh good job that's what congress should be doing that's what our legislative branch should be doing the executive branch it like the executive branch enforces laws okay they don't make laws and when they get into the the mode of of making laws and crossing boundaries and being authoritarian yeah exercising authority where they don't have it that's when congress needs to pull them

in generally congress hasn't done very much but now here's representative tom emmer starting to do something great to see this is just like uh i think the great a great summary for this is that this is like when the teacher sends a note home with the kid to the parent like you had to get tom emmer to write a note about about gensler in the sec to calm the f down and back off that's really that's really the message and kind of what we want let's not stifle innovation guys um some more good news on the regulatory front the eu just voted down an anti-proof-of-work clause so this was the econ committee of the eu parliament there was uh some legislative action to actually ban proof-of-work

ban proof-of-work didn't even know that that was happening right so this this was happening i'm not sure how enforceable it is i don't know all the details of how this worked but that was kind of on the periphery well it just got voted down 32 against 24 in favor so this is patrick hansen on twitter saying a big relief and political success for the bitcoin and crypto community in the eu proof of work uh it's not being so loud it's allowed as it was before i mean it does indicate the headwinds that proof of work as an industry has um i don't think you're going to see proof-of-stake having to fight these

battles right uh and you understand some of the concerns about energy consumption but um proof of work has been sort of maligned and i don't think given a you know fair treatment either um this is a headline to you saudi arabia considering uh considers accepting the wan instead of dollars for chinese oil sales yeah this is coming on the heels of sanctioning an entire central bank all of a sudden a bunch of countries get scared about having the dollar allowing the dollar to have so much power uh so this is kind of the after effects of the pushback from our sanctioning of russia all of a sudden the rest of the world sees like oh look what accidental powers we gave the united states government and federal

reserve they can freeze all of our money so now they are looking to the digital juan or the one in general instead of dollars to process trade which is bearish for the dollar yeah i do think this is the beginning of the end for the uh the dollar supremacy as the world reserve currency on the back of these sanctions whether you agree with the sanctions or not you you've got to acknowledge that there are some uh some trade-offs here and some downstream effects um let's talk about uh south korea for a second as we're spinning around the world today in the regulatory news yeah let me take this one ron uh two two candidates were running for president of south korea both candidates were pro crypto therefore the pro crypto candidate won uh and apparently both

candidates were using crypto as a way to onboard votes from the younger generations so crypto society growing in south korea you love to see it that's awesome it's all good news on the regulatory front a16z they just appointed a treasury official as their head of regulatory person yep uh what's this coming out of ukraine yeah yeah ukraine signed a new crypto regulation law this new law points that agencies will regulate the markets and establish rules around virtual asset ownership rights among other things uh according to a statement out of ukraine officials ukraine and foreign-based cryptocurrency exchanges will be allowed to operate and banks will be able to open accounts for crypto companies so

crypto giving the big thumbs up out of ukraine um you know when a crypto comes and saves the day for your country you generally tend to be favorable to it absolutely um the last thing is one bad i gotta mention yeah the dex aggregator matcha they just geo-blocked trades coming out of russia this is sanctions you know filtering down into crypto territory this time on the d5 side of things defy aggregator matcha now geo-blocking trades from russia one inch is also geo-blocking everyone in the u.s for example so this isn't new but the aggregator layer seems to be a uh a choke point for sanctions and censorship and i bet we'll see more of

that in the future that's ironic i actually forgot that one inch was geo-blocking in the united states because they're out of russia and matcha is out of the u.s and they're blocking russians everyone's getting blocked oh god i think they i think i think they're blocking the us uh due to sec sorts of concerns that's right um and this is not scc this is just kind of olfact sanctions type of thing but it's right yeah all kind of the same same rhythm guys we will be right back with the takes of the week but before we do we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible if you're going bankless you need metamask this is your tool to unlock the world of defy without giving up custody over your private keys metamask is both a secure in-browser

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design the fair fair launch of a cross if you want to bridge your assets quickly and securely go to across.to to bridge your assets between eth optimism arbitrome or boba networks all right guys we're back with the takes of the week here you go first take some ponzi's are scams others are the basis of human society that's quite a contrast what do you think yeah i mean we we use the ponzi word a lot at times here on bankless and that's because of how this tweet is right in our opinion i think i can speak for you ryan when you totally agree yeah 100 sometimes people are like you guys use the ponzi word way too much no ponzi games you don't use it enough you don't use it enough yeah every everything is based on the fact

that other people value the same thing which is the basis for human shared interest psyche value uh so yeah some ponzis are you somebody's gonna dump on you and then buy the more sustainable ponzi but it's ponzi's hollow way down you know ponzi's are a coordination game and the book that taught me that really more than anything else was evolving sapience yeah it's basically the thesis is all of humanity all of our civilization all of our coordination technology the reason we can do things that the animal kingdom can't is because of shared myths stories stories yep ponzis are an outcome of these shared stories and shared myths in fact the result of it and so ponzi's are

actually our coordination technology that doesn't mean ponzi scheme doesn't mean bernie madoff that's not what we're talking about uh anyway you understand young people a story that's not actually true i just i i feel like this is a fundamental um education block in like in crypto you have to you almost have to understand this before you understand bitcoin and like the rest of the monetary phenomenon and everything that's going on so that's why money is a gigantic ponzi that doesn't pop the good monies are ponzi that don't pop all right next take dc investor take what is he saying here david i am done building identities and brands which corporations can buy and sell without paying me and for me to go to be expected to go along with a ride because my identity is attached to them from now on will only

future art by independent artists and create cco pfps on this account so this is in reaction to yuga labs buying the crypto punk's ip from larva labs and dc investor is saying he only likes nfts where he is the the sole owner of the ip and because he doesn't want you know uh centralized companies buying the ip of an nft profile picture that he he rocks so i will note point out that dc investor now has an mf or as his profile picture uh because sartoshi and the mfers are cco and they give complete ownership rights of the ip towards the owners of the nft so that's pretty so is is dc an example of somebody who is maybe not so

happy uh punk holder is not so happy about this eucalabs initiative he is cautiously pessimistic i will say where i'm cautiously optimistic are there are there some people in the crypto punk community who are just like ballistic angry i'm selling all my punks kind of thing um i saw one tweet about that but no i haven't seen more than that interesting i'm really you know enjoying seeing that uh that play out you know it's just interesting to see that play out he says more on the cco thing should we read that too yeah clarifying my thoughts on cco cco doesn't mean it's a better nft there's lots lots of garbage cco nfts it's also possible some corporate administered nfts outperforms for many reasons i simply put to prefer to participate in

communities where they can't sell my participation to others so dc some takes uh indy he's in the nft holder let's talk about this uh your take the narrative around eth has evolved beyond my wildest dreams that's you and you're saying that you're quote tweeting this consensus tweet that says all proceeds from the round this is the massive round that consensus just raised um yeah 450 million is how much it was to further build consensus uh the the funds from the round will be converted to eth to further build consensus ultrasound money position ultrasound money position you love to see it you love to see it in order to rebalance its eth to fiat ratio in line with consensus's treasury strategy so

consensus picking a new unit of account to measure wealth in and they're naming that unit of account ultrasound money this was infeasible got feasibility where did they get that from well the podcast wasn't even out like at this time last year it just came out so it wasn't feasible does this mean that 450 million dollars of eth by pressure is coming i don't know it should be it's what the tweet says you gotta buy back consensus buy what you sold to 80. um this is my take you want to read it the more you know the less you diversify ryan sean adams yeah that's it that's that's the take man i i feel like um this is true for my own investment

strategy like the more i know about a particular asset the more conviction i have about a particular asset the less i care about diversifying and i do think that conviction holds concentrated portfolio positions are the real way to build long-term wealth i i see so many people uh enter crypto when they don't really know what they're buying and they'll do like a shotgun scatter shot approach was like get a little bit of this a little bit of this and some youtuber recommended this and i'm getting this uh and um i i think that's because they don't know enough i don't think that like it's and i find that in myself too like i don't know very much like i i don't look at individual equities very often so if i ever participate in equities guess

what i'm buying s p 500 right but i don't participate in equities because i know about crypto and the more i know about crypto the less i want to diversify out of crypto as an asset class so it also holds true from an asset class categories like i crypto is going to be the future it's like it's it's so obvious to me why would i hold my wealth in anything other than crypto like i don't feel like i need to diversify i mean have some safety nets for sure but like like have a house have you know some stable coins have some dry powder but like i'm i'm not diversifying at a crypto man it's like all in crypto you know it rhymes with diversification oh what capitulation

exactly right yeah right i guess i mean some people when i tweet this out some people made the point that um you know a whole lot of people delude themselves on this too you get burnt right yeah and you're you're rewarded if you're right and you're punished if you're wrong why not why not live life like that all right so uh you have a take on my take though what is it yeah i think this is a great way to illustrate the difference in our dispositions as individuals where ryan sean adams very politely says the more you know the less you diversify and i just quote tweet him i say here's what he really means he means diversification is for the that is fine folks believe in yourself i i guess that is what i mean david you put it very succinctly as well

all right man what are you excited about this week oh god ryan i am just excited for each season if we indeed are going into the bear market uh then at least it will be east season along the way uh it'll be the one entertaining the one bright spot on the horizon uh of what is just like a crazy crazy macro environment with with you know the potential r word coming or none of that happened and it's still eighth season either way it's easy season so i'm excited either way do you mean you're happy to hold on to eth as if it's going down as long as it's going down um less relative to the rest of crypto sure yeah that would make you fine that's a bad idea yeah but but also just like each season means more than just like price

price action but youth price yeah it's build season it's like let's let's come back to our fundamentals let's come back to what's real let's get rid of the noise uh let's talk about my favorite topic ever which is ultrasound money like that this is when the crypto twitter discourse is talking about the thing that i care about other than some ridiculous nft ponzi scheme or later in game or whatever but yeah i i hear you that'll actually be refreshing no matter what the price is doing at that point in time it's like we're shipping stuff for the future that matters a lot right like the merge is going to be absolutely massive the biggest fundamental event your prices aside who cares about prices i mean this is history so well i care a little bit about prices wow we do we do all right ryan

uh i'm excited about the token frame i have behind me so uh the folks at tokenframe sent me one of these it's pretty awesome i um you know look i'm new to the nft scene okay like i you know i don't know what i'm doing with it but this is a digital frame first one i've ever tried and uh i really like how it works so what's cool about this is um you actually connect metamask and they're verified nfts right so this is not just a jpeg or a screenshot it's actually pulling my cool cat from my portfolio it's also cool is uh i can change it around like right so like i could uh i'm about to get your turtle there or your mf if i want to if i want to change boom wow that actually is pretty cool from cat to turtle that's pretty cool

just like that uh i'm still you know learning i also would like to remove the cord i think i have to like poke a hole in the wall do some more work and like put the cord behind it but uh that's cool man physical meets digital um it's been fun i think it'd be super can you go back to your cat i think it'd be super funny if you dressed up as your cat one day kind of like how we did with halloween yeah but like you know like a red flannel a white t-shirt a bowl cap and what else is there that's that's it that'd be a that'd be a good look it'd be a good look yeah well i'm holding my cat i'm holding my turtles you know i don't know uh do you ever sell nfts david do you flip nfts or are you just

all always buying when i buy sometimes i buy one and the hype just doesn't sustain itself and then i just kind of see it on its trend to zero so i'll sell some of those um but the the ones that i show on twitter i do not sell based off of principal so that includes my crypto punk my mffers um there any others this is the thing i don't know how to make money on the caps on nfts david because like whenever i buy an nft like i don't want to sell it anymore i get attached to it so i'm just like well am i the sucker here right like am i actually buying an asset if i'm never going to sell it for real money you're just buying a noun at that point yeah well like you know at some point though maybe nfts get integrated in the broader

d5 economy right you can lend against it you can borrow against all sorts of things so maybe i won't have to sell and can still still be worth it anyway that's what i'm excited about uh tokenframe thank you guys for uh for that frame it's awesome uh let's get to the meme of the week though even the week this is on theme you ready yep there you go it's merge week this is uh the ultrasound money twitter account saying issuance now 15k ether a day issuance at merge 1.5 k ether day uh and then the meme is they don't know they don't know it's that dude at the party like sitting in the corner right yeah but it happens listen dancing you know because bank was told no i know guys you also know none of this has been financial advice

bitcoin is risky so is eth so is defi you could definitely lose what you put in but we are headed west this is the frontier it's not for everyone but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey thanks a lot hey we hope you enjoyed the video if you did head over to bankless hq right now to develop your crypto investing skills and learn how to free yourself from banks and gain your financial independence we recommend joining our daily newsletter podcast and community as a bankless premium subscriber to get the most out of your bankless experience you'll get access to our market analysis our alpha leaks and exclusive content and even the bankless token for airdrops raffles and unlocks if you're interested in crypto the bankless community is where you want

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