ROLLUP: Standing with Ukraine & All Those Affected | Macro Analyses & More

Transcript

we're really thinking about the people of ukraine from the bankless community our heart goes out to everyone impacted by what's going on hey bankless nation this is the fourth week of february it's time for the weekly roll up david i feel like we've got a bit of a somber episode today not a lot of good news right now and i'm not talking about the markets i'm talking about uh the russian invasion of ukraine and i think at the top of this episode david we should just spare a moment and think about our ukrainian brothers and sisters our friends those in the crypto space those outside it because um they're going through a really difficult

time to say the least and i feel heartbroken at the situation i know you do as well and a lot of us are looking at this this our screens and the images that are coming across and we're just feeling helpless at this moment uh we're going to talk about the ukraine invasion and some of the the issues around that uh and how it affects markets how it's affecting crypto how it's affecting the world but i want to start the episode and just you know set the tone we're really thinking about the people of ukraine from the backless community our heart goes out to everyone impacted by what's going on uh there there's one thing that i learned during covet is that during big times of crises

the distances and connections between humans just collapse um and like that's kind of the cool thing of the internet these days is that we actually get to see what's going on um everywhere for good for better or for worse um so there's a lot of [ __ ] out there um and we have this one rogue guy who's not really aligned with the rest of us taking his ego across borders and now we're gonna talk about it it very much does feel like it's uh it's happening in our backyard because the world is so much smaller and the internet has brought us together when i see um reddit users and twitter uh people on twitter that i know posting things from the ukraine i don't see like you know another nationality i see someone like in my

neighborhood on my block you know uh and a part of my community and so i do think maybe that is hopefully part of the the bright side of all of this is the world is a lot smaller we have instant communication um the the borders the national borders uh aren't aren't as strong and uh the world is you know in the best of times one big family so this feels like it's happening to our friends and family members right now um we're going to talk about markets we're going to talk about all of the regular things we do talk about uh but um you know obviously with with the undertone that um even when we're talking about prices you know there are things people are losing lives right now you know like when price goes

down you're losing money but people are actually like losing their life right now and uh that is far more serious obviously so going to this episode with uh with a lot of gravity uh on that but we are going to talk about these things we're also going to talk about canada freezing bank accounts and where that leads um we started the story last week we're going to continue that story we also crypto found out who the dow hacker is that's the story that's emerging all the way from 2017. um also there's some good news mixed in all right so uh you know between the heavy issues there's some good news for crypto some other things that we're going to be talking about uh i guess one piece of good news a little bit of good news

is we have a new way to go bankless with the ledger wallet this is an announcement from our friends at ledger um feels like we need bankless money systems now more than ever they are issuing a crypto life debit card all right so you can load this up directly from your ledger wallet your backless ledger wallet you can join the waitlist i'm on the waitlist i think you should be too if you don't have a ledger uh hardware wallet you probably should have one of those as we enter the 2020s and connect this this debit card to it and becomes much more powerful so go ahead and check that out get on the wait list i'm going to be on the waitlist can't wait for this to come out david um let's get to the markets man markets we're

gonna talk about price as i said price is not the most important thing that's going on in the world today but it is something that we have to talk about because it is market monday and uh prices are down a bit why don't you talk about bitcoin for us today yeah bitcoin started the week at about 42 thousand dollars and it hit a low last night wednesday night thursday morning at uh 30 uh 34 500. so really just plummeted through that forty thousand dollar level um since the low it hit last night as a result of the news that uh indeed russia has began begun the bombing of ukraine we've resurged uh from the bottom of 34 and a half up to 37.2 um so a little a little bounce off the

bottom there but overall down about 15 on the week as you would expect and of course all of this is driven by um the putin war on ukraine that's going on right now uh a lot of liquidations of course coming in too so this is a headline crypto sees 242 million in liquidations within hours amid russia uk ukraine crisis whenever we see a sharp price drop like this we always see liquidations so this is somewhat to be expected you have any thoughts on this in particular david yeah yeah it wasn't it wasn't just generalized this i think this is talking about centralized finance liquidations um but there's also d5 liquidations as well um

but broader broaderly the markets are kind of in this weird spot where there's been so much selling we've had three months of selling not just in crypto but also with traditional stock markets as well so like damn when does the selling stop right uh and of course um the uncertainty of what's going on right now certainly compounds to that to compounds to the market jitters and the down the down plunges what are we seeing with each more the same yeah ether start of the week at three thousand dollars hit a low last night of 2350 which is marginally higher a little bit higher than like the lows it printed uh about a month a month or so ago a little bit more than a month um and then like bitcoin it has actually resurged since i actually wrote my notes uh i wrote the

notes about an hour ago that was at 2450 but now we're at 2560 so down again about 15 on the week um again bouncing off of the the liquidation lows that happened um just last night a lot of um liquidations as well below 2100 we could see this in d5 markets as well here's a headline eath market faces 500 million dollars worth of liquidations if the price drops below 2 100. how can we see that where are these numbers coming from david yeah i believe this is triggered by a very significant maker vault uh which will be the impetus for in theory in the current state if no if no positions get covered that if we dropped below 2100 there would be 50 500

million dollars worth of ether that would go up for auction uh and you know could potentially cause a cascading liquidations and so that's bad uh the beauty the beautiful thing about defy and transparency is that we can see that uh and so as we get closer and closer to that 2100 price if we do end up going there things will need to be covered or else we will see a significant amount of ether sold on the markets to cover the cover the liquidations this reminds me of chasing some of those liquidations back in in march of 2020 when we first heard about sort of the pandemic news and when the markets were grappling with all of that something similar going on here uh what about the s p 500 we don't usually talk about the traditional

finance market but they're so correlated these days bitcoin is at an all-time high correlation with the s p 500 and of course so is ether so are many of the crypto ascets they're they're all in the risk on category so what's happening with the s p right now yeah i think if you just zoom out and go back for three months we've had three months of down prices uh at the start of the year but right around january first or second was the high for the s p at uh 480 on this index i'm not sure of how standard this index is that we're looking at but this is a tracker of the s p 480 was where we are we hit a low of 410 which is i think they're down about 15 percent which is a big move for the s p this is the the aggregate stock market

like basically all equities when we lost 15 percent of value inside of three months uh and like if you zoom out ryan go out to like the five year or something you can see like it's actually it's the big the biggest down move since covet basically uh since covert has just been up into the right uh and now we're back uh a little bit about almost a year in prices back to like april and may of 2021 to where we were at these prices uh so that yeah this is the first first down move since since the march liquidations of 2000 and uh what was that 2020.

i saw this uh this graph too so this is a chart of major market shock events many of these uh are wars or you know you know violent actions of of some kind so one is uh september 11th so 911 11 2001. the s p drawdown in the one day was about five percent for that and the total drawdown was about 11.6 percent that took uh 11 days to bottom and 31 days to recover another example i suppose uh is pearl harbor attack was one day down 3.8 percent uh total drawdown of about 20 percent it took 143 days to bottom of course that was a much more protracted war yeah that

was that was a bigger war yeah it was a big that was a very big deal and then it took 307 days to recover and there all sorts of other events you can see how these market shocks really impact some of them bounce back faster than others and it just depends really what happens from here on out which we're going to try to analyze a little bit uh here are some other wars dave why don't you talk about this one yeah this is a graph of six uh five different wars vietnam the gulf war the afghanistan war iraq and korean war except for the case of the afghanistan war even but even in the afghanistan war uh basically it's it's lining up when the invasion actually happened and then what the markets did afterwards uh and every single war it was up afterwards

afghanistan it was up for a little bit but then it was down uh a year or two later or i know a couple yeah a year or two later but every single other market it's showing that like well when the invasion happens like markets go down because they don't like uncertainty but generally uh it's been up and to the right at least i don't know maybe these are cherry picked i did not pick these i just saw these on twitter but uh the the thing is saying is like well the the invasion itself is usually around the bottom i think the the market tends to overshoot things is obviously one of the lessons and people are definitely panicking as they grapple and try to figure out what to do from here right so if you are panicking right now like take into account that the market might have

already made the move or at least at least a healthy chunk of it already at least the events that have played out so far with the events that we know so far yes at this point been priced in right so now it's a matter of forecasting what happens in the future here and david i i know we were going to save this for news originally but we may as well include it before we get to the the rest of the market items let's just talk about the russian invading ukraine incident because this is going to affect not only crypto for a while it's going to affect the entire world and it's hard to talk about crypto without this without having some context here so um i feel like today we really woke up in a different world like things have changed okay this is a this is a

it's almost a time to readjust but we also have to recalibrate and figure out what the hell is going on so as we get into this i i just say to bankless listeners neither david nor myself are geopolitical experts all right we could talk about crypto politics and cryptosystems all day long and are happy to do that now we're getting into a space where we are uh synthesizing things and i think we're good at to distill them which which we we definitely uh have some strengths at so we may not get everything a hundred percent correct and we don't view us as experts in this in the space we're trying to give you enough information to be dangerous and to understand how that affects uh the world your life and crypto writ large um so let's talk about

this david what's what's just happened the news yeah this and a significant amount of our sources with regards to this comes to kyla ganlon and twitter uh if you guys listened to our episode with kyla she did a a break great breakdown of so many different things a lot of it had to do with the european energy crisis and putin's amassing of troops at the border around ukraine and that was like three-ish weeks ago ryan that we released that that episode so like it definitely if you want some some recap some i guess already outdated recap still helpful though uh the three-week that i would just tune into her latest things too yeah she's gonna put out some content around that so we'll include some links to our blog so so last night uh we got we got word

that that uh russia had indeed begun bombing ukraine and actually crossing over the border uh we wake up this morning to an advisor to ukraine's president saying about 40 people had been killed so far in the russian attack on the country actually when i woke up and saw that number i was like wow that is a lot lower than i expected it to be um the other issue is and we'll talk about this the other issue is actually we just don't there's a massive fog of war going on with ukraine there we actually just don't know what's going on inside of ukraine and that is strategic that is specifically caused by russia's disinformation and obfuscation campaign but bombs artillery's missiles have all been reported uh videos are being shared on twitter about this uh airports have been bombed and now seized by the

russian military uh and and really what the impetus for this uh the playbook comes right out of world war ii where in in in uh poland in germany germany invaded poland on the uh on the um as a result of poland allegedly attacking a german radio tower it turns out it was completely fabricated by the germans as an excuse to go into poland this is the exact same playbook that putin is using with russia where there's this donbass region which is a small region in eastern ukraine that's right next to the russian border and it has probably the most amount of pro-russia support in all of ukraine and all of ukraine is very much we don't they all

wanted to be independent from russia so ukraine as a country wants independence from russia but there's this very small region right next to russia that has pro like pro-russia separatists and putin has been making the claim that these separatists are being oppressed by by ukraine that there there's a holocaust going on he taught he talked about how the the jewish president of ukraine is a nazi because he's oppressing these uh his pro-russia separatists in dunbas basically as an excuse to invade um the thing is the dumbass region is very very small uh and it's just yeah right there just to the right very very and that's not even all of the dumbass region is is pro russia just like the corners of it that are

very close to russia and so russia has invaded ukraine on the on the precipice of uh or on the on the presumption of freeing these people but the thing is like they all of rus putin has bombed all of uh all of ukraine like they're they're i think if uh so we're straight to kiev already right yeah we're the russian forces have you can you can see these little red indication marks as as where they've been reported as bombs it's universally around all of ukraine so while the the verbiage the wordage out of putin in russia is that they want to free the pro russia separatists they have actually straight up bombed the entire country in strategic points airports um subway stations uh and they are now actually

surrounding the capital of kiev uh this is a picture of the capital of kiev which has smoke pouring out of it there's a number of these photos um all around you see this one david um i saw this uh from reddit earlier this morning this is from kiev a fleet of military helicopters flying over yeah looks like it's taken from someone's balcony and gives you kind of the the citizen view of what's going on yeah there there's a thread that has all of these types of videos that we're able to actually get out into the internet sphere from uh ukraine uh that we'll put a link to that in the show notes there's literally just too many of them to share um but their collection of missiles destroyed helicopters tanks convoys um basically everything that you would

expect to see in a war um so there's a link yeah look at lots of lots of destruction um so that's sick okay so uh moving into and so yeah so the the worry here is is russia just claiming parts of ukraine and then eventually just kind of folding it into all of ukraine or uh this is a text from alexi alexey navalny who says uh should we perhaps replace ukraine with in putin's speeches with kazakhstan with belarus with baltic countries with azerbaijan with uzbekistan maybe finland he proposes this as a thought experiment um well we'll get into like why putin feels like he can do this at the moment

but basically people are worried that like first ukraine then the rest of the fractured parts of europe that are all small countries uh because no one really seems to be physically stopping putin from doing what he wants and so will that just continue uh beyond beyond ukraine it seems like one of his goals the question of like why why is putin doing this and that's complicated and probably no one really knows aside from putin but it looks like it's an attempt at uh reunifying the ussr basically and uh you know maybe in his world returning it to it's it's its former glory uh and um that's what we're doing here and i and i do think that um this is important to emphasize that this is really the first major

conventional warfare europe has seen of this type since world war ii yep and so this this is why this is um so concerning not for for the entire world obviously for the people of ukraine who are suffering in this moment but also for europeans for americans for you know citizens in asia the entire world needs to be looking at this and trying to figure out what happens next let's talk a little bit about some of the the disinformation campaign the propaganda that we've seen i think we've seen some of this on social media already but what's happening with the the disinformation campaigns yeah there's been a consistent um theme of reporters

and people that are showing uh the attacks from russia into ukraine videos um and these accounts and the the news reporters that are in are in ukraine and others uh have been very consistently blocked and and banned from twitter so this is a tweet from one of these individuals that says i am back again after having been locked out twice in the last 24 hours first uh time for a proposed debunking the foiled sabotage gas attack and the second time for a post debunking the ukrainian attack on russia twitter needs to do something against these locks now i'm not sure what the content was that got him blocked but it's my opinion my take on this is it's not obviously not twitter blocking these people it's spots it's bots blanket reporting

blanket uh like you can ban anyone on twitter if you get enough people to report that person fast enough yeah this is this is an aspect of social media cyber warfare right we're seeing kind of how it plays out where all you have to do is block some of the images and videos and voices getting out for for some period of time right in order to kind of increase the fog of war and you can do that very easily if you have a bot army that just reports on various tweets and says you know and then the twitter algorithms it's automated we'll flag it it's completely automated and that's what's going on right now too yeah and with stuff like this um putin and russia's strategy has really been to uh distort time so they are making recordings we'll talk about this

later we're making recordings that they say are at specific times but they actually made them like hours and hours prior there's just a great fantastic effort of psyops and internet cyber warfare going on and it's it's just obfuscating our data and our information about what's actually going on inside of ukraine so like this this report about only 40 people have been reported dead um who knows who knows and i i know the at least the us intelligence agency expects to see uh tens of thousands of lives lost as a result i think i saw an estimate from the biden administration saying fifty thousand it is interesting that um 50 000 lives not now not now projected oh god

projected uh and i think that um i um you know one thing that's been interesting is that that western intelligence sources have been actually pretty spot on about uh predicting this so far which uh you know was difficult to foresee so so maybe that's a source of signal so far it's very difficult to tell but i think a larger point because um we've been we've been talking about you know russia and putin and don't want people to get the sense that these two things are you know going hand in hand because the russian people largely i think from from what uh what we could tell what many can tell uh they don't want this to happen either okay this is there's an element of this

is putin and putin's government war not necessarily a war uh inflicted by the russian people and what are we looking at here david yeah this is a protest in moscow uh which is a brave place to protest of people protesting against the war in ukraine um it's hard to quantify the number of people in this protest but it looks like a lot um they're all wearing masks maybe because of covid but maybe also strategically um interesting time that we're having this with simultaneously with masks being abundant um apparently uh i saw a tweet that said anything from the russia tv uh is is talking about the constant assurances that russia is only doing this to protect and that ukraine is provoking them again like trying to

fight that disinformation basically what they're doing is they're trying to silence all the information coming out of ukraine so they can kind of fill the void with their own narratives um i mean where everyone's calling him out for it but like sometimes sometimes it just works anyways there are there's like graffiti no war graffiti being spotted all around moscow from russian citizens and you know keep in mind how dangerous these sorts of uh acts of protest actually are in uh in russia right now you know obviously um you know jail sentences and far worse can happen people who do this um can we talk about what happens next because i feel like that this is all emerging as we're recording this on on a thursday the big question is what is the

world's response going to be uh i think there's some context here that we should go over is the world largely still needs things from russia particularly europe but also america is very dependent on russia for uh resources uh here's a list of raw resources palladium platinum gold oil gas nickel wheat oil and gas being the big one yeah and 30 to 40 percent of europe's natural gas supply is actually coming from from russia right now 30 to 40 percent so sanctions against russia um hurt the rest of the world as well and this is this is something to to you know way as well i mean we've had inflation

recently it's been going up and oil prices and gas prices continue to increase for average everyday citizens around the world and now we have this sort of supply shock if um if the eu and the us stops purchasing russia's russian supplies what does that do to a barrel of oil or energy costs in a place like germany yeah there's there's the conversation the germany has a plan plans to create a pipeline between them and russia which are now being cancelled i believe um meanwhile russia or most of europe is going through a mar pretty i don't know how big to call it but an energy crisis uh the winter in europe is mild at the moment thank god for that

because if it wasn't mild we would have even more demand for russia's oil they would have an even stronger stranglehold so it's one of those things well while we're watching russia invade ukraine we're also buying oil from them because europe needs to stay warm uh and so but also like russia needs money too so like it works both ways these supply chains are codependent so it's we have these very like important relationships for resources and while we just watched russia invade ukraine so kind of very delicate situation and on the economic sanctions list of course you can start sanctioning various commodities and supplies coming from russia you can also if you're the u.s or it's western powers try to lock russia out of the existing

swift financial system so you can try to freeze assets and bank accounts uh you can try to cut off russia as a whole towards swift and i think on swift which are sort of the the payment uh and settlement rails that the world generally uses outside of crypto and i think that the us uh and european countries will probably explore these sorts of things as of now i don't really know what's happening david because this is all emerging so quickly what the us's response is going to be as far as you know sanctions what your response is going to be as far as sanctions um and it's hard to know what exactly to do in this case i mean do you do you go extreme and sanction very hard

or um do you sort of not sanction and appear weak a period that you don't care uh but you're getting the resources that that your citizens your and your country needs from russia it's there's no clear decision in these types of situations we right before we started recording we were coming off the heels of biden's first um speech and he talked about uh making very strong economic sanctions against russia the strongest version of the strongest economic sanctions inc including swift uh sanctions as an as an answer to like why we aren't actually why won't we be using military force and biden says well because we're going to sanction the [ __ ] out of them basically the thing is uh and again

unreported i just saw a tweet about this i'm i'm just just reporting what i see is that uh swift sanctions cutting off russia from the swift network is actually not something that nato has full alignment with so when biden says that we are going to sanction them via swift that's not something that that all nato nations are an approval of uh like that's how i'm pretty sure that's how energy is being bought from russia right and so like there's cracks in like the the coherence of the of the uh or nato right now uh and so and i'm sure russia russia has already game theoretically like working this out yeah plan this out and they're kind of calling the west bluff like now you you need our resources too much

uh or if you do sanction then we know workarounds are our route around so i think they're definitely putin is calling calling the west's bluff on this um russia always has a very strong ally maybe isn't the right word but like uh china will buy all of russia's oil off of them if they need to so they have like a backup buyer of their resources if russia needs needs that to happen like china is pretty damn close to russia yeah and that that's a whole another uh thing to talk about which maybe we will so but those are those are the facts as we know them right now that's what's going on uh david do you have any takes on this i mean what so my time takes right takes yeah my interpretations are like well the question we want to ask is like

why is this happening right now because this is an unprovoked just impromptu invasion of another sovereign nation like why is this happening i think understanding a little bit of the context it might be good to do as we go forth into this again increase i think we've been saying this on bagless since we started this 2020s are going to be chaotic and they're only getting more and more chaotic and this is another example of that so why is this happening right now like well america itself is politically divided like we just had the most contentious presidency of all time followed up by was another contentious presidency more or less uh and so there's a war at home like we're distracted and meanwhile we just got embarrassed by afghanistan and so america's influence abroad has

not shown to be either of interest by his own constituency or are we we're not even competent to have outside influence abroad so there's that uh meanwhile boris johnson is in a critical position in the uk trudeau is dealing with crisis in canada merkel angela merkel out of germany's recently gone macron is facing strong opposition at home so we have all these other world leaders that are busy that are dealing with their own messes uh and so like and also at the same time like russia has a defense of they got nuclear nuclear bombs it's like well we're all dealing with our own internal crises russia with their big swing and whatever comes in it's like oh we could probably take ukraine because they're all like in their own

conflicts they don't have a spine to stand on uh and so putin's like well now is the opportunity uh and putin from his perspective if you listen to his speech like he talks about like how you the ethnic purity of the ukrainian people and how they are truly a people of russia and this is this is straight up us like in my opinion putin is like the last big imperialist that own that controls a country he is an imperialist he is a barbarian i guess he's somebody who wants power in a world that has moved on from that except since he's the only one that is aggressive enough to actually fight with weapons and violence no one else wants

to fight with weapons and violence these days so putin's like well i'll be the one that does that because no one's gonna stop me he's that he actually truly wants like the ethnic purity of russian people to be cohered again and so he's using military to do that and know what like we as a society as a global population we've all moved on from that we stopped that in after end of world war ii but apparently not putin and so like no there's no one with like a taste for violence these days that's willing to go up and fight him uh so so that that's my that's my take on that um yeah i i guess my take on that is um like i yeah i some i somewhat agree i think i think that's worth also uh zooming out a minute uh a bit so naval

wrote this tweet and he said this is the end of pax americana right the peace of the american empire i'm reading a fantastic book right now called the principles for dealing with a chain changing world order ray dalio which um he he basically zooms out and looks at these things in in cycles and his general like his overall thesis is that the us as an empire from a power perspective and you can measure that by a number of different metrics and he does is on the decline and there are other empires so-called that are on the rise and so this is other opponents other adversaries kind of testing u.s power and

i guess the the bear case for all of this or or the sad case and the reason for a tumultuous you know 2020s is um the world tends to go in these kinds of cycles right yeah you know we go from a period of of peace time and that traditionally happens after some major event after a war let's say and a new world order is established with an undisputed winner and we have this this period of peace for a time until that power diminishes and leaves a vacuum for others to come take in one thing that i think is important for us all to be watching is how china reacts china of course more so than russia is uh the emerging power and uh just one

bit of info maybe to get in um it seems like there could be some chinese aircraft in the air defense zone over taiwan right now hard to know if that's that's normal or that's new i've also heard some reports of ships chinese ships crossing taiwan borders so the question of tai what does what does china do do they try to pull a ukraine and go the route that putin is going and forcibly take taiwan is is the next question and this this alliance or so-called kind of quiet alliance between russia and china is uh is very concerning but they also they all seem like tests on the west power yeah it's one of those one of these

things where like the united states how how can we justify going and putting our resources to defend taiwan while we didn't do that for ukraine like maybe before uh putin invaded ukraine like we before that happened if china had invaded taiwan we would have just like sailed our ships right over and gotten them out of there but now that this ukraine mess is happening china's like well like i guess we're doing this i guess we're taking over the local land areas that we've always wanted to uh and since they're not doing anything i guess like they were just in a context of sitting on our hands so i guess i'll just go and take taiwan like you can see how the ball can start to roll here yeah this this is what this could be building up towards it doesn't have to

and um i i think ray dalio in his book you know also makes the point that some of these transitions of power could be peaceful um they don't always have to be contentious they don't always have to result in war there's some reason for optimism we have things like the internet so we sort of see the humans side of the story uh far quicker we're all in communication you know we have fewer borders so there's definitely some hope here um but yeah it's something we're all going to have to watch and i think is the reason why this is uh this is a pretty major event not just for europe but but for the world um and we'll have to see what happens next any other thoughts on this david yeah so this is coming off of your tweet that you referenced about

naval who said uh pax end of pax americana this is that that 80-year cycle in different words uh where this is the we've talked about the fourth turning a few times on bank list before but apparently every 80 years there's a grand reorganizing of how society works and this is that theory distilled uh it's too much to go into but there's a link in the show notes where and also a fantastic book called the fourth turning and this is just on par with when we say the 20s is going to be a chaotic decade it's because if this model of the how the world works these 80-year cycles works this way well we're at the end of one and so we're currently going through what this uh infographic labels a millennial crisis uh

so that's us yeah sweet feels like it's it's that time for humanity you know um time for something new time for something new this is why crypto people always talk about like you yo we okay get on the ark get on crypto because like institutions are going to break down and we need to build up new ones and crypto is that new institution and we talk about going being your own bank and having your own private keys we don't know what the crisis is but at least you have your control over your own money like having your own money in your own private keys gives you optionality on the future when we do not know what the future is having the strongest ownership over your money and assets possible allows you to weather storms that's what i do and i i don't i don't like to get

dark but even when it comes to if you're you're talking like a period of time like the 1930s the 1940s fleeing a country with with your assets right um how do you do that yeah when you're your assets are cash and gold which are physical assets you can't um crypto provides a way to do that uh things are getting dark we've got some uh some other news we have to get to uh talk a bit more about the markets and of course the releases of the week but before we do we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible living a bankless life requires taking control of your own private keys not your keys not your crypto that's why so many in the bank list nation already have their ledger hardware wallet but the ledger ecosystem is much more than just a secure hardware wallet ledger is

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defy without giving up custody over your private keys metamask is both a secure in-browser wallet and also a secure bridge for your hardware wallet you can now trade tokens on any decks or aggregator metamatic swap gathers real-time pricing information across all the defy exchanges allowing you to select your best price while getting all the metamask benefits of self-custody lower gas costs and increased transaction success rates metamask also has a fantastic mobile wallet that i use when i'm out and about which i use to collect poaps nfts and do all my defy things while i'm away from home if you haven't downloaded metamask you gotta try it out web3 wouldn't be the same without it download mentimaps for desktop and mobile at metamask.io and load up your trezor ledger lattice or keystone hardware wallets so that

they too can get into the world of web3 polygon is ethereum's largest and most vibrant scaling solution to date with millions of monthly users and all of the biggest defy apps the polygon ecosystem has turned into a blossoming metropolis of defy activity transactions on polygon are quick and cheap allowing users the freedom to achieve their d5 goals all while being economically anchored to ethereum but polygon isn't just the proof of stake sidechain the polygon team is building a suite of scaling solutions including polygon hermes maiden nightfall and xero all with different design choices in order to be optimized for all possible crypto use cases if you're a developer who wants to build on the polygon ecosystem go to the link in the show notes to check out their fantastic documentation and if

you're a user who just wants to experience fast and cheap defy you can bridge over your eth or other tokens and start playing around with any of the thousands of applications that are available on polygon hey guys we are back still in the theme of markets we we took a quick uh detour there because we had to talk about the russia stuff but david as we're recording this and while we went to to break uh eath price just shot up which is interesting i this is absolutely crazy just like 12 hours ago we were at 24.50 coming off the lows and right now we're up basically at 2700.

uh same with btc is that 39 000 so some very strong bounces back to almost before pre-invasion levels yeah look at that's crazy that's crazy that's nice i haven't seen one of these bars in a very long time that is vertical that's vertical i'm looking for news but i'm not finding anything we'll have to see how this develops yeah absolutely well let's talk about some other things while we're talking about uh markets um this is something we haven't looked at in a while was worth looking at you know the wrapped bitcoin supply on ethereum is at an all-time high 1.4 of all bitcoin is actually in tokenized form on ethereum in wrapped btc this is somewhat banked so you know i don't love it because it's custodied with um

bitco i believe but it's really interesting to see bitcoin as a monetary unit being used on the ethereum network yeah we've always said that ethereum is a settlement network for all types of assets and if people want those assets on ethereum to be useful then that number is going to go up um i'm expecting the sum to go up further yeah same here um let's also talk about a number that's gone up is the uniswap market share i didn't realize uniswap now has 80 of the decentralized exchange market share on ethereum and that's up 30 percent uh i believe 30 this year maybe over the last year or so so not only are they growing they're

also eating up market share in the deck space any thoughts on this um no no no thoughts nice job you just swap yeah you just swap just crushing it with their vt release uh also decreasing fees which i think uh helps with that um rocketpool is crushing it as well now they have one percent of ethereum validators uh that's been over a three month time period when when they launched so great to see some progress on that rocket pool of course is a much more decentralized staking as a service provider uh which uh which we always support at bankless uh any any takes on this yeah one percent is a fantastic number especially for such a young protocol uh and there are there's been some ethereum client diversity

issues as in too much stake is happening on on the same clients which has some negative impact repercussions if bad events happen but rocket pool has been a force to help balance that out uh and so more and more stake inside of rocket bullet helps the theorem become more and more decentralized so we like that yeah doing the right thing for the network absolutely um let's talk about this too so i think everyone is looking for yields these days david especially in this high inflation environment and i saw this from um yeah the coinstack blog newsletter which i uh which i read um if you look at yield where can you get yield your bank savings account mine pays zero point zero one percent okay at best you might be getting half a percent

i don't know anyone who's getting half a percent number okay if you want to get into treasuries they're paying out nine percent this is nominal yield uh municipal bonds one point six percent corporate bonds three point three percent you go into something super high risk like high yield debt uh big risk of default that pays out five point six percent okay that's all nominative nominal yield that's not adjusted for inflation now factor in a 7.5 percent annual inflation here these so-called savings accounts uh look terrible bank savings account you're making negative seven percent per year negative six point four percent on treasuries the safe asset doesn't look so safe municipal bonds negative five

point nine percent corporate bonds negative four point two percent your real return on these products actually sucks uh so where do investors go to get returns uh you know this coinstack article he talks about defy and uh i i think that's actually a great place to talk about notional who wanted us to get this message out anyway this week but they are offering a fixed apy interest account effectively in d5 so you can do it all without a bank and you can get 7.8 fixed apy on your usdc i think it's upwards of 9 on dye and these aren't variables so they don't change by the day but you could just lock that in not only notional there are some other fantastic d5 products of course that offer these

types of returns but i think this is why people are going to come to d5 they're going to come to crypto for the returns for things that they can't get inside of their bank account uh so it's pretty cool of course we'll include a link in the show notes to notional so you can go check that out they also have eth and bitcoin you want to stake some of your tokenized bitcoin as well um yeah how ironic is it that the the you can actually beat inflation on dollar yields but the only place that you can do that is indeed that's so awesome it's awesome and also silly and terrible at the same time so is this decade ryan yeah exactly it's exactly best of times worst of times

kind of decade i guess humanity's seen those before let's get to the releases of the week all right so this is a big one uh zk roll ups on ethereum zk sync has just released an evm compatible zk roll up for people who don't understand anything that i just said david what is this and why is it significant so previous people generally think that zk evms will be the end state of ethereum just because zk is like a compression algorithm uh roll ups another compression algorithm so super super compressed data which means super super cheap and fast transactions uh and out of matter labs out of zk sync they have made their first ever zk evm public

test net that's live so we can start to actually build out uh ethereum defy apps on layer twos but layer twos that are like an another order of magnitude faster than the layer twos that we previously uh are used to like the traditional optimistic roll-ups like arbitrary optimism uh there's definitely zke evms are definitely a hard mode uh building out tooling building out infrastructure building out composability is an order of magnitude more difficult so while we're getting more an order of magnitude more speed it's also in order about into more difficult but uh if there's one thing i've learned is you do not bet against the ethereum ecosystem on innovating and being able to solve hard problems and this is the first step the actual building out the

foundation for experimenting and iterating and improving zk apps zk defy so really congratulations to the matter labs team zk sync 2.0 public testnet is live and so the developers of the world can go and start building out the super fast okay this you know you know the meme about vitalik saying the internet money needs to be less than five cents this is that this is that solution this is what that is getting towards yes yeah absolutely and we're going to have alex from the zk sync the matter labs team on the podcast hopefully next week to talk about this and uh what it all includes because i think the big story here david is people thought this would be years away now here it is we're in february and we already have something on testnet for this so it seems to be happening

quicker than than we thought we'll have to ask alex about that when he comes on um this is pretty big too opera has about it has millions of users so it is a popular web browser they are integrating layer two ethereum's layer two through diversify which is also a zk powered technology this this stuff by starkware um but the cool thing about this is it's all behind the scenes so where do you see it well it's integrated into uh opera's android wallet their android crypto wallet behind the scenes it's connecting to liquidity if you want to trade something from diversify which is a layer to you know technology built on starkware right so not users don't really they're not going to hear about starkware or zk or any of this thing they'll just click on a transaction

it'll be completely sensor resistant and trust minimized and bankless and able to make it happen with minimal to no gas fees that's the future here and that's getting integrated in the app layer by a pop like not a super popular browser but a browser nonetheless you know opera has millions of users at this point in time so it's super exciting to see yeah if anyone wants the world where you click your buttons and the crypto things happen and it's cheap and free and instant and obviously is also obfuscated away from you that's what we're talking about that's what opera is doing right now that's also the power of zk of rollups ckevms just like you press the button and then the thing happens and that's the only thing that you think about this is the ui and ux that consumers expect these days uh and so zk

stuff being built into browsers directly is like probably the gold the holy grail of just like uh defy ui ux absolutely uh arbitrarium continuing to to punch it forward of course that's a another roll-up solution um and uh urine has just wire and has just launched on arbitrary which is cool to see in fact i think we should include a list of all sorts of cool new apps that have been developed on arbitrum in the show notes uh for you guys we don't have time to go into it but there's a really long list somebody uh who is this oh this is lidoco and from hop protocol uh just put a list together of everything that you can do on optimism or an arbitrary and it's literally too long for us to read in the with the weekly roll up so go ahead and just check it

out in the show notes so much more um also this is on layer 2 as well this is a hop lira integration talk about that what are we looking at here david yeah so this is a the first of its kind integration that i've ever seen this is hop protocol which is a bridge that allows you to move assets from layer one to layer two and layer two to layer two but also an app lyra which is an options trading protocol on uh optimism and so uh hop is integrated directly into the lyra app or is it leroy is it lyra i don't know lira lyra leader lyra and so you can go and again this is a conversation of ux how just how many how many problems can we just remove away from the users lives uh and if you don't have money on optimism you need to get

money on optimism so you can use lyra but also you don't care about optimism you just want to use lyra and so you can use hop to go straight into lyra inside of the lyra ui ux and so inside of lyra you have the ability to get your money into the app that you need it to because hop is integrated directly and so this is just how we start solving some of these ux issues that make people frustrated about layer twos yeah another example of how seamless this is going to be how the ux problems will be abstracted in the future um this is super cool too whenever ether scan launches something i just i just love it because i use etherscan on a daily basis and they just launched this so this is an nft viewer on etherscan and i think there's a there's a button

so you can see your nfts uh and uh this commenter says it feels like the chat with owner button is going to be a popular feature so i think a few roll-ups ago we talked about this message messenger type app that ether scan was building where you could message from one etherdress to another it looks like they're integrating that here too so you can actually message the owner of this particular nft which you're seeing on etherscan block explorers are are becoming incredibly useful incredibly neat in the future i mean i don't know if these are the like the future googles but they're certainly indexing the chain and doing all sorts of useful things on chain for users and this is a really cool feature to see

i i think a lot of haggling will be going down in this feature i feel like that's what that chat with owner basically just replace chat with owner with just haggle that's what uh all right what's this david so this is a um a chess app yeah i think we're about to see yeah this is dao versus dao chess which is a really interesting concept chess on on a blockchain never mind games will never be on layer one so don't think about that games will only be on layer twos but also there's a problem with like games like chess uh to be have like a smart contract competition because guess chess is such like a computer-dominated world these days you

can't have humans to humans uh playing trustlessly playing chess because one of them could just have a computer engine to the side but this thing is completely different and solves that problem this is dow to dow chess where one dao is black and one dao is white and if you guys remember twitch plays pokemon where there's just like you know 10 000 people all pressing inputs and like the collective intelligence of all of them tried to coordinate on the right move so dows like will come together and they will use snapshot voting to vote on what move to make and then that move will be made on on chain i think on on arbitrary and so we can have dow vs dow chess matches where it's just wisdom of the crowd versus wisdom of the crowd which is insanely cool why are we doing this

it's insanely cool but like it seems like the world's slowest game of chess ever be played i i think it's well i don't know how remember twitch plays pokemon ryan that game lasted a week because of how chaotic it was and like it had tens of thousands of people tuning in to either participate or watch and it's not necessarily about chess although i think this chess use case will take off because crypto people love chess for some reason but it's more about just like dao collective hive mind intelligences becoming instantiated into games so like this is one this is one part of game one part proof of concept as to what could be that's super cool yeah i i i see it when you put it like that wait what's the time before you go on before you walk because you have another chest the thing

about this is like since dallas are open and permission listens like the game of who wins the game of chess actually can move off chain and into discords where like if you're on team white and you need and you want team the black side to make bad moves you can go into the black side dao and start and start psyopsing them it's like well guys i think we should sacrifice our queen i think that'd be a good move uh like and so like the internet warfare like is just this is the friendly kind of internet warfare other than the ugly kind we saw earlier but just like in the psyops of dow versus dow chess i think it's gonna be really fun because it's gonna put the game elsewhere other than the board i do think this is a really interesting primitive that of course you

can only have once you have super fast transaction execution layers like uh zk roll ups that we were talking about earlier um let's get to races though uh sequoia capital they've been a little bit late coming big vc firm but late coming crypto now they are launching a 500 to 6 million 100 million dollar crypto fund to invest in tokens whatever title yeah 2018 no one wanted to invest in tokens now we got big vcs launching 100 million dollar funds 500 million dollar funds uh to do it and uh they've they've done some of their first so the first is a company called maltus which is building a crypto wallet that's based on the the

gnosis multisig completely bankless really cool product if you haven't checked it out um malta's been a been a fan of that product for a while and sequoia just funded them as an example i bet more exciting things in the future but i don't know high level it's great to see all of this capital flowing into crypto projects these are very important projects for the world i i if anyone from sequoia is listening let me know if you want some advice as to which tokens to buy because it's going to be mine that you sell your bags no i'm not going to sell my bags i'm just going to ask them to buy my bags we got some good token suggestions for you guys speaking of great suggestions we have some great job suggestions for you of course and our biggest suggestion

every week is get a job in crypto that's a suggestion it's uh not an imperative it's just something we strongly recommend you to do uh it's a really exciting time to join the space and get hired and there's lots of companies hiring i'm going to read out a few of these the first is the senior product manager at super rare senior product engineer at moment ranks bunch from dydx you got to check out community manager dydx governance growth lead a business operations and finance associate a marketing associate all from dydx an accountant at smart defy a web 3 engineer solidity and react a goldfinch a senior go rust engineer at syndica a bunch of maker roles bunch of deep down rolls bunch of other things on the jobs

board you can find that out at bankless.pallet.com jobs just sign up for it and uh email will automatically reminded you when new listings are listed uh get a job in crypto what more can we say are you ready for this one ryan this one's going to be a mess news yeah what's coming up next yeah what's coming up next are we about to find out who the dow hacker is oh i think we are oh oh yes that's what backpacker actually i i already knew this this is not a surprise because it's in our show notes david but sure you could act surprised surprised um okay so this is uh laura shin who uh has i think started actually the first significant crypto podcast with unchained uh and she uh recently has she's been writing her book the

kryptopians which i have right here it's kind of a gargantuan book actually it looks heavy it's it's thick it's a thick boy and she alleged allegedly has discovered the identity of the dow hacker the 2016 dow hacker uh that is the thing that resulted in the chain split between ethereum and ethereum classic and caused a bunch of drama uh and apparently we know who that person is now according to laura shim i feel like the dow hack is like probably the second biggest crypto hack crypto event in the history of this industry maybe the first is probably mount gox just because it happened a little earlier but this is like a massive a massive event and and somewhat of a mystery like everyone's always been wondering who the

dow hacker actually is uh why did they do this what what were this person's intent so laura's figured it out for us loreshan says in this forbes article who hacked the dow my exclusive investigation built on the reporting for my new book the cryptopians appears to point to toby honesk a 36 year old programmer who grew up in austria and was living in singapore at the time of the hack until now he has been best known for his role as co-founder and ceo of 10x which raised 80 million dollars in a 2017 ico which is by the way now valued at like five million dollars um uh an effort that failed uh excuse me now his house is at 11 million dollars um after being at a valuation of 535 million with that one but anyways that's beside the point

he did an ico as scammers and hackers might do um and apparently uh through the well how she discovered this is way too much for this weekly roll up uh but people are generally looking at the evidence that she has put forth and kind of giving it a soft thumbs up like okay that looks legitimate uh i think we're still gonna be unpacking this thing so far no one has really raised a red flag saying that's not right except for toby himself again of what you would expect um but apparently we found out who the dow hacker was this week that's a big deal so if it was toby the way it the way it might have happened is um the hacker maybe toby allegedly used shapeshift to convert uh ethereum classic to bitcoin and then used wasabi

which is a coin join privacy technique on on bitcoin bitcoin tumbler before this a bitcoin tumbler like tornado cash yeah to mix the bitcoin then withdrew it to four different central exchanges then withdrew it to a another blockchain called grin which is a privacy focused blockchain uh for added privacy and how was this determined through chain analysis uh chain analysis you know the the actual company were the ones who uncovered this and so this this also brings to mind is anything that was mixed through wasabi through coinjoin techniques on bitcoin is that all suspect does chain analysis have a way to crack that and determine who the identities of any individuals are

who have used this in the past or did the hacker toby uh mess this up at some point in the process and and leave some clues that he shouldn't have otherwise so it's calling that into question as well the privacy techniques used by this particular wallet i think the answer is all of the above it was both a combination of you know filling in the sudoku puzzles of the on internet ip address traces that this guy left apparently he had a connection that blabbed and then also wasabi was not a perfect mixer but this is not how he hacked the dao this is how he got how he laundered the funds um but i mean he got guy managed to stay secret for a really long time so we should say we should say that um you know obviously

this is not certain uh i don't know where does this go next does this go to court do people press charges um and who presses charges yeah who's the victim here i you know anyone who lost money in the dow hack but they didn't because they did the the contention or they did the state transition that undid it it's like who who really lost here actually right i i suppose the uh the hacker might say you know code is law and if they were to defend this in court that i was just exercising provided to me and the code itself i don't know if that's a legal defense i don't know where this goes from here but it might be a story that resurfaces and we talk about it again if uh if indeed this this moves to the

next step in the process i feel okay i remember when this happened i got some uh ethereum classic at the time oh you were in the doubt i didn't know you were in the dao no i i wasn't in the dao but i got but you had eth on train i had and so i got the ethereum classic fork and i decided what am i what is this thing and i was just learning at the times like what is this mysterious coin do i keep it a bunch of people are saying it's the next ethereum it's like you know the real ethereum the true ethereum um i just market sold it eventually but i'm proud of you i i didn't feel impacted or hurt by this incident other than the price of ether tanked of course um does that every now and then it does

that it has tended to do that what else happened this week another hack or phishing scam that was pretty big deal over last weekend i think this was an open seat nft related issue what happened here yeah this uh this news rocked the nft world before people realized that it actually wasn't that big of a deal um people people thought that basically somebody hacked openc hacked the openc contract and was therefore able to access everyone's nfts that was not the case but that was people's first impressions when they were trying to figure out what the hell was going on as it turns out there was a very well-crafted phishing email from openc uh that got people to approve their nfts as a request uh because they said you

have until 2 p.m oh i do remember getting this email i got this i remember getting this email i was too busy to even look at it i just i was like oh that's that's there's something i open c tells me i have to go do something i'm gonna go to my discord and see if my friends are doing things and i went to my discord and my friends weren't doing things and i was like oh well i'm not doing anything either this is how i this is how i maintain security it's like i check and see if my other friends are doing stuff the the email says you have until 2 p.m eastern on friday 22 february 25th to migrate your listings after that time any listings you haven't migrated will expire all existing offers will expire at that time uh so basically like a slight slight fear inducing email

saying hey you gotta go and you gotta migrate some buttons hit some buttons on your wallet so some people did that and they went and they hit their buttons and what they were actually doing was they were giving approval to the hacker to access their nfts so this ended up 17 people ended up falling for this uh and uh i think that's basically about it i think 1.7 million dollars worth of nfts were were stolen aboard a couple of azuk azuki's and a few others uh ultimately ended up being just not as big as a deal as people were making it out to be when they first heard about it um but i'm sorry my heart goes out for the 17 people that lost their nfts it was scary it was scary at first people thought it

was like some general issue with uh openc nfts so there was some freak out and you know the communities i was involved in which are like yo go check your wallets see if any any nfts are missing so at first people didn't know how broadly this uh this issue was being there's just reported of nft wallets being drained of their nfts which of course is scary very scary very scary headline i did go to openc and make sure that all my nfts were there i was like oh did he get mine i'm fine not my mf i go back to sleep yeah uh david let's talk let's continue the story from from last week about canada um so we started the story last week you know canada had a trucker protest of course and we talked about canada implementing an

emergency provision that would allow them to freeze protesters bank accounts well they did implement that wrote an article on friday about that called canada needs crypto and it was a really historic event you know first in canadian history that um this particular emergency act was um was uh put in place and the concerning thing you know from bankless perspectives and it's not political at all it's not like pro trucker or anti-trucker it's just anti the ability of a large government to freeze uh your life savings it feels like that should not be a power that governments have over their citizens and i think that's been a consistent uh message from bagless from day one since the

separation of money and state is a good idea for reasons like this uh so anyway i guess moving this the story forward over the weekend canada implemented this emergency act provision started freezing a bunch of people's bank accounts and um this stranded people's money canceled their credit cards stopped their mortgage application no due process there's no judge involved it was just sort of you're on a list we think you're involved in this in this protest we don't have to give you the reasons why we're going to send a message to your bank to cancel your accounts and kick you out of the financial economic system so that happened and then there was some back and forth uh so why don't you read this ontario superior court

of justice uh who's asked to ask a self-custody wallet provider to disclose user information and freeze users bitcoin they actually wanted to freeze your crypto assets on a self-custody wallet on a bankless wallet and this was the team's response yeah this response is so great their response this is the the wallet provider says that dear the ontario superior court of justice nunchuck which is accompanying question it's a self-custodial collaborative multi-sig bitcoin wallet basically a bitcoin wallet multisig we are a software provider not a custodial financial intermediary our software is free to use it allows people to eliminate single points of failure and store bitcoin in the safest way possible while preserving privacy we do not

collect any user identification information beyond email addresses we also do not hold any keys therefore we cannot freeze our users assets we cannot prevent them from being moved we do not have knowledge of the existence nature value and location of users assets this is by design please look up i love this please look up how self-conscious custody and private keys work when the canadian dollar becomes worthless we will be here to serve you too sincerely the na the nunchuck team this is this is an example in my mind of crypto values becoming uh instantiated and the companies that serve them there's a reason why companies did not take home addresses names they took the minimum viable thing which is an email address which is not a good proxy for identity

and that's the only thing they took and that and as a result of the exhibiting the values that are in our crypto cryptosystems they get to draft this awesome email to a top-down government who's requesting them to be ridiculous about how they manage with their clients and they say no we literally cannot do that by design and you know what enables us to do that crypto bitcoin bitcoin enables us to give you the middle finger and here's an email explaining that to you go learn how private keys work because you clearly don't if you're even asking this question right um so that was some of the crypto communities response but i found this particularly unnerving so apparently during uh during the freezes and as a result of this

information the ceo of kraken uh crypto exchange and also brian armstrong the ceo of coinbase started tweeting things like hey just so you know if the canadian government the regulators ask us to freeze accounts when they're in kraken or when they're in coinbase we have to do it and we can do it if you don't want that to happen you should go check out a custodial wallet go look at those solutions we encourage you to evaluate them use them if that's what you want to do well apparently which seems like a totally reasonable position for anyone in the crypto industry to take it's like what's the solution to not having your accounts being frozen by a bank without your permission you take custody of your own keys you take ownership of them

right well apparently what happened as a result of this is the ontario securities commission sent the tweets to the police ridiculous because i believe that the crypto executives were offering advice on how to not store your own private keys but evade the sanctions on funds according to the report absolutely ludicrous yeah ludicrous they just don't get crypto they don't understand how it works uh they don't understand how it works and to think that they could pressure and this is what's concerning is this is a um you know this is a regulator saying this to organizations to companies that they regulate hey brian armstrong hey uh

jessie powell kraken uh you don't tell people about self-custodial crypto wallets don't tell them crypto exists don't don't tell them about this uh very concerning and actually it's like for me it was kind of off-putting um because uh so i tweeted this out brian armstrong jesse powell tweeted support of self-custodia wallets ontario regulators tweets the police for offering advice on evading sanctions there may come a time when writing a bankless art article or recording a podcast becomes illegal to these people we have to be ready for that half of our previous podcasts are already illegal how do you go bankless like

one something we would totally put in the into the bankless newsletter is how to get your crypto assets off of the centralized exchange and on to your ledger we talk about that almost every other rollup and this is the encouragement this is the entire point of the the podcast and everything we do one day ryan we're going to be running an illegal podcast i can't believe that it's insane it's absolutely insane and i you know um i know i think we've we've talked about this abstractly in you know in the past you know what happens if if governments really crack down on on going bank list or the ability to to own your own private keys like what do we do in these cases and it's surreal and scary to see it starting to happen maybe in the west right we're not

talking about china here we're not talking about russia we're talking about canada right oh my god um i guess uh some some other follow-ups on this vitalik buterin what did he say about this it's dangerous says he says on canada blacklisting protesters crypto wallace i do think that having decentralized alternatives to intermediaries is a good way to limit the damage he said this at east denver and during a coindesk interview but also since then trudeau has revoked the emergencies act saying existing laws are enough to deal with the protesters so maybe this is a self-admission that they went too far but still the fact that they went there at all and didn't think twice about that

is insane yeah so what are the learnings or takes coming out of this yeah so my take and there's a bunch of people i i put this tweet further on in the take so we'll come across it later but i made a take about how uh people that uh are anti-trucker convoy are on the side of anti-trucker convoy uh people apparently that's like actually a lot of canada apparently the trucker convoy was very majority for sure the majority of canadians did not like the truckers and were kind of in approval of those people getting removed uh and like i could totally see myself like very frustrated by i don't know how the truckers are messing up the supply chains and messing up the roads and like preventing me from doing anything i could see myself getting mad at them you are allowed you are totally allowed to be mad at the

truckers and also be very concerned that we froze their bank accounts those are two different opinions that you are allowed to hold at the same time those are not mutually exclusive and that is where i don't really have an opinion on the truckers they didn't impact my life i'm generally pro-compliance when it comes to uh covad and whatever like other stuff but i'm also and down for freedom of expression and i'm also down for freedom of money from state and again you you can separate your opinions about who these truckers are and also and also still think that government should not be freezing bank accounts yeah i agree with that and um i was actually disturbed by some of the people who like some of the pushback on that some people don't don't seem to

understand that you can have those opinions at the same time and i tweeted this out i'm really disturbed by the amount of people justifying a western democracy using its banking system as a weapon against the people to stifle dissent what canada did is not okay also this is a better advertisement for crypto than a thousand super bowl ads i really think that this message was heard around the world to people who otherwise wouldn't have heard it uh and actually have a you know take about that coming up later but it's it's i mean this is what can happen this is what governments have the ability to do they can freeze the banking system your bank account your money at a whim do you really have

property rights if they can take it away from you with a keystroke and a mouse click that's the question but this i thought was a tweet that just summed it up far better than than i ever could have and this is from an account on twitter six five two nine punk six five two nine he's famous six five two nine let's get into this so where did he start this this uh thread he basically makes the claim that there are no other constitutional rights in substance without the freedom to transact making the claim that the freedom to transact is like the meta rights and then he makes a tweet thread about this uh so skipping into number two um he uh pug six five two nine makes the assumption that we are in agreement that

constitutional democracies are a good form of government or at least better than all the other ones that we've been uh had before and he says he's making the following assumptions that people all listeners believe readers believe that people have the fundamental rights of speech assembly religion and so on people are innocent until proven guilty the state cannot punish people without due process uh and then he goes if you and he says if you disagree with those principles we diverge there so you can stop reading but if you do agree with those principles he makes the claim that freedom of speech might require such activities like a website a pamphlet an advertisement paying a graphic designer traveling to a different location all of which cost money freedom of assembly might require such activities like taking a train to washington dc booking a hotel room hiring a taxi buying a hot

dog while you assemble which costs money freedom of religion might require activities like renting a space for facilities paying the salaries of religious officials buying food and consumables all of which costs money so basically you he's saying that you cannot have any of the rights that western liberal democracies offer you if they're also freezing your bank accounts because if they're freezing your bank accounts they are silencing your ability to express your values upon the world money is a tool of expression of value if i give you money for some reason it's because i valued something that you did for me and that is speech i'm speaking to the world that i value this and punk 6529 says that if you can't transact you don't have speech which is

a great take that's so right without the freedom to transact you have no other constitutional rights i think he's right on about that freedom of speech freedom of assembly freedom of religion they all depend on that and some people might say okay well then if that's true why why weren't these things written in the constitution it's because like the framers of the constitution they didn't have the concept of custodial digital money in the way that we have it now they had no concept of a nation nation-state's ability to freeze funds all the citizens all the populist funds with the click of a button so it didn't need to be protected at that at that time uh it seems like it does now and i think the the example of canada shows us why it needs to be protected exactly

speaking of yeah i'm going to transition your transition that's it let's transition let's get out of this stuff let's get into nfts speaking of punks this is the only transition that we have here there was a massive 104 crypto punk sale going through sotheby's but it got rugged by the owner so 104 crypto punks were about to be auctioned it became a very big deal a lot of people including some of the people that i know actually went to sotheby's to watch this 104 crypto punks get auctioned and then the the uh the person selling the the crypto punks he just tweeted out never mind decided to huddle oh dude was it all a prank from the beginning was this all a rug bull playing drug bull maybe but the punk

floor right now is kind of low at like 65 east so maybe he's like saying i'm going to sell at a difference he's got cold feet maybe he got cold feet he's like well this isn't worth it um it's a pretty big batch that's a that's a big batch of crypto punks so like you know and 104 times the 65 floor 6 700 ether uh and maybe you round up a little bit higher maybe it would have gone for uh 10 000 if you assume some rares are in there but yeah the guy the guy just goes never mind decided to huddle it just rubbed all of sotherby's yeah that's how things can change right uh let's talk about this this is a a new nft on the scene invisible friends yeah invisible friends they're minting uh minting went live not too long ago or as

of very recently um they have not revealed them so people just have like uh their tokens without it being revealed um they were minted there the mint price was a quarter of an east which is insanely high versus other mint prices typical mim prices are somewhere between like 0.2 to 0.8 ish this one's coming at a quarter of an eighth the floor on these things immediately rocketed to 12 which is nuts and there was also a specific golden custom invisible friends they're actually pretty cool as far as nmt's goes i'm not sure if they're 12 e school i'm pretty sure they're not cool as 12 eth um but the they're all just like characters that don't have bodies but only have clothes kind of kind of interesting about the metaverse right because like you can pick your clothes but you can't pick

your buy so you can put your head in there i don't know anyways if you keep on scrolling down there's like this all golden um invisible friend that sold for 1.3 million dollars going to charity 496.69 ether in good fashion uh and that that finished up yesterday so that's all being donated to charity very big drop very big mint drop yeah invisible friends like went from minting to blue chip nft like like that we'll see we'll see if the price if the floor holds was there some controversy about this in the nft community i think i saw some people upset about this was there a lot of marketing that went into this yeah so there's there was this grueling white list that was happening where like people were just grinding in the discord and so apparently the meta for these

nfts drops these days is you have to become a really like ecosystem participant in the discord so you gotta like send chats and engage with others and like level up in the discord and it's super in order to get on the white list and so people are like spending time out of their day to just be active discord members like getting like fake pseudo engagement in discord just so they could climb the white list they're just trying to game the system right well yeah but that's everyone's doing it right they're all just like hey man like i'm in the discord too how's your day going like i'm an active community member like we're all here because we're all friends yeah yeah right like sounds awful all right well speaking of sounds awful um what's going on in china with respect to you cryptocurrency crackdowns is

continuing so one of china's private uh provinces just implemented punitive electricity prices for crypto mining so they already made it illegal there's still some crypto mining going on in in some provinces in china now they're cracking down on it more this also caught my attention david so this is in china china is now sending people to jail at least the threat of jail if you raise funds using crypto sick ico fundraise issue a token raise funds of any kind you could go to jail according to china's legal system small amounts here we're not talking about raising millions of dollars we're talking about raising over eighty

thousand dollars raising over sixteen thousand dollars these are we are going to go to jail for selling our shirts ryan you go directly to jail what sweet sweet what is happening at this point i'm just used to it like can i just just lock me up now just take me away like it's coming look man this is happening so fast like i it's just a whirlwind and of course sometimes when it's in china we can kind of ignore it but then when it blends in and we have events like canada and then remember remember ryan when i got pepper sprayed for protesting in the black lives matter uh riots this last summer and then like when i went back home and i like got the pepper spray off of me i was like oh snap i just got pepper sprayed by nation state police i'm also

a very very pro crypto person those are two things that are anti-nation state uh-oh every single time it's like oh it's getting a little closer to home yeah uh 2020s are going to be interesting guys uh we will be back with the takes and of course what we're excited about gonna be hard hard to find something to be excited about but i got something i've got i got something uh we'll do that right after we talk about the sponsors that made this episode possible the layer two era is upon us ethereum's layer 2 ecosystem is growing every day and we need l2 bridges to be fast and efficient in order to live a layer 2 life a cross is the fastest and cheapest and most secure cross chain bridge with a cross you don't have to worry about the long wait times or high fees to get your assets

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[Music] all right guys we are back with the takes of the week this first one from vitalik what's vitalik saying here david reminder ethereum's neutral but i am not italic is a person with opinions ethereum responds to the world around it these are different things basically this is coming off i'm pretty sure this is in reference to ukraine although it also could have been canada um oh it's definitely ukraine um yeah basically saying that vitalik has opinions about things this is his opinion on uh ukraine and russia you click translate and he is very upset by putin's decision to abandon the possibility of a peaceful solution that is his personal opinion but of course ethereum is neutral to all

of that uh good separation there and a good principle i think um what's this one this steak is completely completely different from anything uh mark bailey says old world model never mix business and friendships new world model make money online with your friends i like the new world way better it's way more fun like that it's like when it's like that zelda meme like uh it's dangerous to go alone take this this being a friend i i do think this is a complete contrast from the old world that would have been good traditional advice say 20 30 years from now but um you're right it's way it's way more fun making money with your friends and that's exactly what crypto allows you to do uh what's this next take okay so is this the line goes up guy yeah okay so this

is the line goes up the line goes up guy we're looking at it so icebergy looks by the way line goes up for people who don't know it's a very anti-nft you know hour and 30 minutes show um basically focusing on the most pessimistic takes you can think of of nft some some accurate but also very one-sided and that the lens was just everything bad i can think of about nfts yes right yeah and it got like four million views on youtube and so all of the anti-nft hater energy got directed into this video to like promote it's like this is why i'm mad okay here's the tweet here's the take uh the anti-nft youtube guy the lion goes up guy has funko pops on his shelf during an interview for those that don't know ryan

we might have to go find uh king just like google funko pops yeah so i didn't know what they were so i pulled this up so i had no idea what a funko pop pop is but it looks like it's some kind of like collectible i think i've seen these yeah there's these little like cute little figurine collectibles uh for all physical collectibles physical collectibles nft they're basically beanie babies they're basically they have no verifiability of scarcity they just like they're making for star wars here's one for squid games are they expensive like that to you like i i think so i don't know how much i think maybe the rare ones go for hundreds of dollars they're literally just non not digital nfts and the guy that's had the four million dollar video about how nfcs are bad has funko pops no utility like are they do they have are

they really all that cute he's got one on his shelf during an interview it's like the irony is just off the charts i love it my collectible's good your collectible's bad it's basically what it comes down to it's the same thing but he doesn't even he can't even audit the supply of how many of those of his collectibles exist yeah and we can we just you know right-click and go figure it out on ether scan but this this take is related this is your title i'll read it out and then you explain it uh crypto haters only see where the puck currently is you go on to see to say nft haters don't see the culture it's going to create crypto gamer haters crypto gaming haters don't see how real it's going to make our games canadian convoy haters don't see how it's going to be

them next if there's one thing we know it's that experimentation iteration is extremely rapid in this industry the puck is moving so fast the entire crypto industry face palms when we have to engage with people that don't see it the people in the crypto industry all have an imagination for what the future could be we are not in crypto for what it is right now we are in crypto because we think it can be better and we all want to be stewards of that future and so when people come and say look crypto it's just a bunch of pump and dumping scams and we're like yeah but like it's not it's not what the kernel of it is it's not what the core of it is it's just what the manifestation is of it is at this current point people in crypto have imaginations uh people that hate on

crypto can't figure out how to imagine what it could be or what a future better world uh so that's some dividing line that i've noticed i totally agree it's all about vision and uh a lot of the the arguments are arguments of timeline it's like i'll be the first to admit crypto kind of sucks now oh yeah lots of lots of ways it sucks crypto sucks now but it stuck to worse last year and two years ago it was even worse way harder and like it's just getting better and better is the point so go strap lap extrapolate that 10 years and look at the values embodied in the system look at the end state what it's going to deliver and that's where you start to see the potential but i think people who don't look at it closely just get stuck in the here and now it's like this nf

nfts are all scams we're back in 2017. all icos all tokens are scams remember now we've got sequoia pouring 500 600 million dollars in a token fund um this last one this is from an article you wrote crypto is here to set us free why is it here to set us free david okay so this is taking the longest time horizon possible about crypto and trying to instill the vision of what these whole web 3 things are so yeah this is a great graphic to start where i make the claim that web 2 and tradfy suck value inwards towards the center where web3 and d5 push value out towards the periphery towards the margins the reason why those they have the ability to do that in the first place is because we have private keys as in we actually have a location and address to actually send money to

and when our protocols like twitter facebook they can't send us money because they don't they're not crypto protocols they're just normal protocols they're platforms but crypto protocols have the ability to granularly issue money and assets to the individual users and that makes that's the new vector that our web 3d5 protocols have to compete on like this is this is the new threshold this is the news like how many people get your airdrop that's right has an advantage how many people love your protocol and how do you buy p and how how best and most sustainably can we buy people's love uh and so i make the claim that like you know one once upon a time we domesticated plants and we went from the era of accidentally picking a poisonous mushroom to the agricultural revolution where the where the population exploded

also like i make the line i say the line like so we once domesticated wolves to become dogs and so too will we domesticate our protocols to treat us with love and affection uh and so this is this is the take here it's a longer article i've read it's on the bankless newsletter it's also available on the youtube uh and if you want if you somebody that has imagination and want to see what my imagination looks like when crypto comes to its end game uh it's it's that crypto's not here to make you rich it's not here to support pump and dumps and scams it's here to set you free that's uh that's a great line and you also um talk about how crypto is a multi-stage rocket we're still in phase one which is it's all about financial incentives and that's the negative that

people see it's like it's all kind of scams and pump and dumps and it's just people talking about number go up but phase two is more sovereignty more freedom and that's what you mean i think that's really cool all right david uh can you find something this week to be excited about i know it's a little more challenging than usual but what are you excited about this week tomorrow or actually it might be today actually it might be tomorrow uh elden ring comes out ryan which is uh part of the dark souls video game series and if there's one video game that i really really like it's the dark souls series uh so elden ring comes out tomorrow and it's gonna be uh like it's a perfect timing i need some escapism uh and there ain't no crypto in it so i get to ignore that

too that's exactly right ain't no nfts yet in elden ring uh and so i'm gonna be playing elden ring a lot uh this this coming weekend for sure that's awesome yeah yeah you got to get your mind off things sometimes gotta have some uh relaxation for sure what are you excited about ryan um i'm i'm really excited about a post i saw written by a guy that i've been following for a while david uh hannah meyer-hanson if you're in the developer space you might know him as the creator of ruby on rails anyway he wrote this post he's been he's been very vocally skeptical about crypto i might say a cryptocritic or crypto hater he wrote this post earlier this week called i was wrong we need crypto okay and the reason he

was skeptical about crypto he changed his mind on that but the reason he was skeptical i think a lot of people can relate to outside of crypto he didn't vibe with the culture you know the whole laser eyes thing that wasn't that wasn't his vibe uh the energy consumption around bitcoin right again didn't feel sustainable not his vibe transaction fees the pump and dumps the obvious frauds some of the fake decentralization right there's a whole list of things you could be mad about in the crypto and that's why he stayed away from it he didn't find out it was worth exploring but um he changed his mind and the reason he changed his mind was the canadian the canadian uh actions of the canadian government to freeze bank accounts of protesters and

he said this beyond all these very real problems and challenges my bigger beef was actual uh actually fueled by a lack of imagination he didn't think that in the western world anyway where we weren't under authoritarian regimes that we would actually need a free monetary system kind of like the banking system works good enough where's the 5x improvement where's the 10x improvement but the protests in canada and the bank freezing uh completely changed his mind which is i don't want to say that's cool to see because it's unfortunate that this is what it takes to change people's minds but i do think back to that statement that this is like a thousand super bowl ads when you actually see

when when funds are actually taken away uh from you in your country i mean the people of argentina for instance they don't have to be convinced about crypto or defy like they've lived through eras of banks confiscating their funds now we're starting to see this in in western countries and people are getting it that way anyway exciting for me to kind of read this post and to see someone who is initially resistant to it start to understand why we've been talking about the things we've been talking to and also exciting because i just shot him an email a couple days ago and i was like hey dhh want to come on bank list and talk about this and again he's someone who's writing i followed for a while he's written some books that i've read as well and he's like yeah sure let's talk about it so he's coming on the

podcast next week um so i'm excited about that i'm exciting about hearing the story of a critic crypto critic change his mind and what went into the thought process there we start off that podcast with i told you so right no i wanna i want him to tell himself so which is what he did in this post this is okay this is the same exact thing we were talking about with like people who have imaginations get it like it's easy for them to imagine oh maybe the united states might turn authoritarian one day like that that might be a possibility um this is the exact same energy yeah exactly i totally agree all right david let's close this out meme of the week what are we looking at this is not a funny one but okay this is a little bit funny okay so

this is the unofficial eth denver poap which is a positive covent test oh god uh is that is that what happened to eat denver a lot of people got covered so the arjun bhutani of uh connects he made a poll said did you get coveted at eth denver 13 said yes 20 said no the rest were results so i don't know what's that ratio 13 to 20 it's like you know very roughly almost half like less than half but almost half of people got coveted at youth like i i've taken two covet tests now and both came back negative but i have covid symptoms at this point it's just a [ __ ] common cold excuse my language but also at the same time like uh everyone can especially because you've been like vaccinated multiple times and you've already had it twice yeah uh-huh

uh and but also at the same time we recently had a super bowl that had like a hundred thousand people in the stadium without masks then we had denver with fifteen thousand people who all know covet exists and so like i'm kind of in the pro camp of just like is this over yet or what because like if you look at the behaviors of people they are going to eat denver kind of knowing that they're going to get coveted and then they're coming out with it like no no there's no news stories about this remember in bitcoin miami uh 2021 there was like a massive news cycle story about like how is it it's a super spreader event different time yeah well this had way more people getting covert but no one cares about it anymore and so like can we call this thing like can we

wrap this thing up in my opinion i do think things are changing hey meme of the weeks are supposed to be funny though not all serious david that's pretty funny sorry anyway guys um thanks for hanging with us of course none of this has been financial advice bitcoin is risky or geopolitics advice it's definitely not geopolitics advice um all of these things are risky you could 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

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