ROLLUP: Ukraine Crypto Donations | Russia SWIFT Sanctions | EBay Accepting ETH | Pixelmon NFT Fail

Transcript

crypto just got real. Yeah. Like it got real on the geopolitical stage. Hey, Bankless Nation, it is the first week of March. David, what time is it? Oh, it's the Friday Bankless Weekly Roll-Up Time, Ryan, where we cover what just happened in the last week of crypto, which I say it every single week was an insane week, but this one is an insane week for the first reasons of the first time. Sanction week, I think, is what we're going to be, is going to be the theme of this week. But it's also documentary week, Ryan, because behind me, you actually can't see it, but there's two cameras coming out of the Infinite Garden Ethereum documentary. So this particular weekly rollup is going to be, components of it will be put into the Ethereum documentary, which everyone is super excited about when it finally comes out. That's crazy. I can't believe they're interested in this little podcast that we

do every week, David. But man, I feel like the theme is pretty fitting. You said Sanction Week, and I think the theme is as well as crypto just got real. Yeah. Like it got real on the geopolitical stage. People have asked us not to talk about geopolitics on Bankless, but like how can we not? Nonsensical. Nonsensical. We have to. We have to. At least we have to view all of this through the crypto lens. So that's what we're going to do. Because who is in the middle of all of this? It's crypto. Crypto is straight in the middle of all of these sanctions, all of these bank freezes that are going on, and I think will continue to be for the rest of the 2020s. That has always been the promise of crypto, is that it will one day enter the geopolitics stage. And so

now that crypto has indeed done that, Bankless is now a geopolitics podcast. That's a little scary. It's a little scary. When you say it like that, now I'm scared. Okay, forget everything I just said. This is just about crypto, not politics. Anyway. We're going back to NFTs. We're going to talk about some NFTs, but first we got to talk about weaponized banks, what that means. Some of the financial sanctions, the fallout from the Russian invasion of Ukraine, all the economic sanctions. We're going to talk about governments trying to make crypto exchanges comply to this. Shiver up my back. A little bit of a shiver. But all of this is also a decentralization stress test. There's reports of MetaMask blocking users from Venezuela this morning.

Not quite true, but we'll talk about what is true as a result of this OpenSea as well. And then some good news, because we've got to throw in the good news. eBay talking about accepting crypto. That's a big deal. Crypto raising more in donations to Ukraine than the UN, the United Nations. Wow. That's pretty impressive. Also, this Pixelmon phenomenon. David, you got to catch me up on this. There's like this NFT meme character named Kevin. Yeah, we have a new meme. We have a new meme out of a complete just flop of an NFT project. And now we have a meme called Kevin about it. We'll have to talk about that. It gets weird. All right. Before we do, got to talk about our friends at Opelous. They're doing something really cool for the crypto space. So

you know how we say on Bankless, get a job in crypto, right? Well, sometimes that's hard. If you're working for a DAO, do they have health? Do they have benefits? Can they process payroll? Opelous can do all of those things for you. They are set up to work with the Web3 employer, the self-sovereign contractor, and they provide health benefits. They provide payroll. David, what did I miss? What else do these guys do? That's largely it. It's basically a collective, a DAO collective helping workers work a self-sovereign life. And so this is like sharing and getting better and better health care rates, the larger the collective grows. And if you sign up and get your payroll served to you by Opolis before May 1st, you get a thousand bank tokens and a thousand work tokens, which is the Opolis token. So, you know,

a nice little carrot to get you to sign up for Opolis. Nice incentives to come work in crypto. Pretty cool. All right, David, let's get to the markets, man. Bitcoin. Bitcoin. Bitcoin this week. Yeah. So listeners will remember the last time we were talking about markets, it was right during the depths of- We were red. Yeah, it was red, because Russia had just invaded Ukraine. And so there's fear spooked the market. So that is where we started last week at the low price of $36,000 Bitcoins. We have since climbed up to 42,200. We hit a high of 45,000 and now we're back down to 42,200. So up 14-ish percent on the week for Bitcoin. It's kind of recovered, all right? So look at this dip.

This is kind of the, you know, Putin invades Ukraine news, massive dip, you know, the next day. And now we're back up, back up to where we started. Is that the case? Yeah. So like no one could really know exactly why or what the markets do. But like, you know, the dip happened right at the Russian invasion. So people got spooked about, you know, the potential of World War III. But I think the market turned around on the fact that like, global geopolitical currency tensions is probably a good thing for crypto. So that's kind of, I think, what's been happening in the last seven days. As sad as that is, there's definitely some truth to it. We're going to get to that in the news section. But how about ETH? Did ETH have that kind of a recovery? Yeah, definitely. Started the week at $2,450 right at the dip. The Ukraine dip hit a high of $3,050, but

could not sustain, it could not keep its head above water. Currently at $2,815. It's funny this week, and I think as a result of the bounce from the Ukraine dip, Bitcoin gained more than Ether. And I think this will show up when we take a look at the ETH to Bitcoin ratio. You could probably see it a little bit there. It's a little down on the week. Is that the case? Yeah, it's down about 4% on the week. I think we were at 0.68 last week, and now we're at 0.066. So down roughly 4%. So Bitcoin received a bit more, I guess, tailwinds from the Ukraine bounce. Do you think there's a reason for that? It's just Bitcoin, people are... fleeing their banking systems in Bitcoin a bit more than Ether at this point in time? Yeah, one of my favorite quotes that I've heard

is Bitcoin in times of war and Ethereum in times of peace. Bitcoin has global liquidity and global recognition. And so when Ukrainians and also Russians who are trying to escape the ruble or Ukrainians are trying to escape an invasion, they don't really go down the rabbit hole of like, which crypto do I buy? They just buy Bitcoin. Like that's what they do. It's got the brand recognition. That's what they do. Although I do I do feel like ether is underrated as a, I guess we put it this way, a wartime coin because of DeFi. Right. Right. I mean, you could trade with it. You can lend with it. You can borrow with it. You can't do all of that with Bitcoin. I feel like it's underrated, but it doesn't have the brand recognition right now that Bitcoin does. So maybe that accounts for all of

this. Oh, gosh. Well, looking at that chart, the ETH BTC chart, Ryan, man, it is. You have that since like December for the last three months. That is just down and to the right for three months in a row. Yeah. Yeah. It's going down. I don't like that. But I mean, historically, it's still looking pretty good on the what? Let's see, the five year. It's looking pretty good. Don't want it to go down anymore, though. There's a floor coming. We'll see. It's still early in 2022. And this year is totally surprised, I think, all of us. How about the BED index? That's a little bit more stable because you get Bitcoin, ETH, and DeFi, a third, a third, a third, all together. What does that look like on the week?

Yeah, it's roughly flat on the week. Started at $99 currently. at $101, so up about 2%. Remove some of that volatility. It's nice. David, you know what? Coinbase had a record revenue quarter that they reported last week. The numbers even surprised analysts. Take a look at this. $2.5 billion in revenue last quarter in Q4. Monthly active users swelled to $11.4 million. Analysts thought they were only going to hit $2 billion. They come in at $2.5 billion. Quite a surprise. Coinbase really chugging in the fourth quarter of last year. And these stats do not include the signups that they got from the Super Bowl. So those stats are coming next quarter. So it's going to be interesting to see how

they can follow through on this. And also what also kind of happens from just crypto tailwinds from this whole like sanction conversation, like crypto for better or for worse is in the news. And so that's generally good for signups. I would also say like they haven't even released their NFT platform, which they're planning to do at some point too. And they've got five, six, 7 million. Early signups to that already too. So a lot of a lot of good things ahead for them Also a lot of good things ahead for the Ethereum network because we just hit a major milestone 10 million ETH locked in the beacon chain. That's ETH staked This is crazy to me. It's a huge number. 10 million ETH. We're just over a year later a year from launch aren't we and we already have 10 million ETH

locked up in this thing. It's just under 10% What are your thoughts here? Yeah, count it at 10% at the rate that it's currently climbing with more and more ether locked. Yeah, 10.1 million. I think 10% will be 11.8 million-ish. And that's just crazy. Like 10% of the network in proof of stake, that is what you call a secure network. Like 10% of the total supply of ether is protecting the network. That's a lot. Especially when it's worth how many billions? Right, yeah, exactly. Which is 10% worth. Yeah, and that's only at the pre-MEV level of ETH APR. So when the merge finally happens, all of the gas fees end up going to the stakers, and it's gonna juice that APR up to something like,

I think, modestly 12 to 16%. Justin Drake, when we had his show with us modeling ether ultrasound money, predicted something as high as 22%. 2% depending, but that was when gas fees were like 300 guay, so things change. But like the point is, is when the merge happens, the incentive to stake is gonna go from where it is at now at 5%, 4.9% APR to something like 12 to 15%. So like we are not even getting started yet with the reservation demand of ether to stake to the proof of stake network. Do you know what? That's so important. I think it warrants repeating. All right. What David just said there is the current APR when you stake your ETH is 4.9%. It's already got 10 in ETH terms.

And you can't, by the way, you can't withdraw it right now. So it's a one-way ticket. All right. And people are doing this. 10 million ETH worth of individuals and stakers are doing this at a 4.9% rate. Post-merge, maybe this summer, pretty soon, months away. This is gonna shoot up to like 12 to 15%. In ETH terms. In ETH terms. And I do think that's conservative. So what's gonna happen? It's gonna, you're gonna, big slurping effect. Cause it's gonna slurp out all of the ETH that was like, oh, I don't know if I want a one-way ticket to stake my ETH. I don't know if 4.9% APR is worth it, but like is 10% worth it? Is 12% worth it? Like post-merge? where there's a

lot less risk, oh yeah. And so that's gonna just suck in a whole bunch of ETH supply. And when there is limited supply, but demand stays constant, what happens, David? Price goes up, Ryan. That's what happens. You said it, not me. Demand number goes up. There's not much, floating supply of ether on the secondary markets. And so like, imagine all this, the yield farmers out there, the stable coin yield farmers that are scraping tooth and nail to dry and break through 20% APY on their dollars. All of a sudden they're gonna be able to get like 15% on their ETH in a risk-free rug pull free way. Where are all those dollar farmer yield farmers? Like the game changes

when you can get ETH risk-free ETH 15% APY. All those yield farmers are going to take their dollars and they're going to buy ETH and they're just going to yield farm the Ethereum network at a risk-free rate of 15% on your Ether. Don't say your friends at Bankless didn't tell you because we've been telling you. Definitely. And the other thing about that is I just think a lot of people aren't aware. They see that, well, okay, David Ryan, people should know about this. How come ETH price is down this year? you know, so much like that is macro related. All right. That has nothing to do with the fundamentals of Ethereum at this point in time. The fundamentals are only getting stronger. We are

getting closer and closer to that execution date where the proof of work is going to go away and the proof of stake network is going to be dominant and the merge is going to happen. So the risk is being boiled out of this asset class. The fundamentals are strong. Just because price is going down has nothing to do with the fundamentals of Ethereum. It's more to do with the macro landscape and buying opportunity. I don't know. You guys decide. The whole entire crypto industry just prices Ether alongside all the other things in the crypto industry. Bitcoin, Solana, Avalanche, Cardano, all these things are relatively priced to each other when none of these networks have this coming for them. And this is the main difference between a smart contract proof of stake network with actual blocks based demand and literally everything else in

this industry. Like it is not priced in. What more can we say? Well, speaking of opportunities. Talk about the job opportunity in crypto. Because our friend here, LogicBeach.eth tweeted this out. Okay, David and Ryan, I did it. I got a job in crypto. Please stop yelling at me now. Okay, Logic Beach, we will stop yelling at you. This is not for you, Logic Beach, anymore. You can feel free to tune this part out. But let's yell to everyone else. What do we want them to do, David? We want them to get a job in crypto, is what we want them to do, which is why we have the Bankless Jobs Board, where we post all the best jobs in crypto. Should I start reading these off so Ryan can start dancing? No, no, no, I'm reading them off. Stop, stop. You dance. Senior Product Manager at SuperRare. This is a feature job. That's a cool and super rare

NFT platform. Senior product engineer at Moment Ranks. Community manager, a contractor at DYDX Foundation. A governance growth lead DYDX Foundation. Business operations and finance associate DYDX. Marketing associate DYDX. We got a head of marketing at status.im. Operations manager at MakerDAO. Lead financial analyst. Strategic finance. I could go on, but we don't have time in the show to read all of these fantastic jobs. Do yourself a favor. Get a job in crypto. Stay tuned into the Bankless job boards at bankless.palette.com slash jobs where you can find all that. We're not going to stop yelling at you until you get a job. All right. This is not for Logic Beach because he did the work. Nice job. But for everyone else, we'll be back next week. I wonder if they're going to put that in the documentary. I hope they do. All right,

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countries worldwide. So if you're looking to upgrade your crypto exchange, sign up at Gemini with Gemini.com slash gobankless and get $15 of Bitcoin after you trade $100 or more within the first 30 days. That's Gemini.com slash gobankless. Hey guys, we are back with the news of the week. We got to talk about weaponized banks. But before just setting the context, this is crypto. I feel like this week crypto just entered the world stage of geopolitics. Okay. It had the world stage from a brand recognition perspective. I think the awareness of crypto really popped off in 2021, but now we're entering a different arena. We're entering the world stage. And I think this tweet from Eric wall sums it up. Why don't you read it out, David?

Yeah. Eric says, this is the moment crypto leaves the basement and clashes with the real world. This is it. right here today. We'll put this link in the show notes, but he just goes and puts all of the thread, the tweets from just major leaders of the world and just aggregates them. So Elizabeth Warren tweeting about how cryptocurrencies risk undermining the sanctions against Russia. Bloomberg talking about how the Biden administration is calling on some of the biggest digital currency exchanges to help ensure that Russian individuals and entities targeted by US sanctions aren't using crypto markets to get around them. And a tweet from somebody from Ukraine receiving how, or somebody from Russia about how the accounts of users were frozen in their Russian Federation and Belarus.

We have an individual, a Ukrainian individual, a tweet that we covered this Monday in the newsletter about how he says that he is physically safe in Kazakhstan, but his savings are gone and says that crypto is the only money that I still have. Today, I can safely say that without the crypto, Bitcoin, Ether and NFTs, it's going to save my life when he gets back home. So crypto is an influence in the global current events. And we've seen it dabble in this before, but this is the moment where everyone is looking at how crypto would be involved if this happened closer to home, closer to crypto. Russia didn't have crypto assets, and it's not using crypto assets to escape sanctions, but people are treating crypto as if they are. And that is the conversation that's being had right now. Yeah, and so we're about to

break that down. I think the conversation really starts with, with number one, this, this weaponization of banks. And this is nothing new. Banks have been weaponized in the past. But I think this is the first time we've seen it weaponized on a geopolitical scale in the way that it has been recently with Russia. And of course, last week we talked about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. So we won't talk much more about that right now. I think we should pick up the story with the sanctioning of Russia because the EU EU, the US, many, many countries around the world are fairly unified in the sanctioning, the economic sanctioning of Russia for its actions in Ukraine right now. And the first thing that they did was they swifted

Russia. Swifted. What does this term swifted mean? Yeah, the SWIFT network is a payments network, a communications network between banks that allows the passaging of messages that ultimately relates, ultimately concludes in the settling of money across banks. I think it's more or less like the last line of defense of bank connected networks. And so it's a global monetary payments network system. And if you're not connected to SWIFT, you're basically not connected to anything. It's like Ethereum for TradFi. More or less. The existing banking system. Yeah. what they used to settle, it connects all of them. And so what did they do here? I love this quote.

In an unprecedented act of global sanctions coordination, the United States, the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Canada, and the European Commission, which is basically the executive branch of the EU, have all agreed to expel Russian banks from the swift payment networks, except for a few Russian banks that receive money to pay for energy supplies towards Europe. Because Europe still needs Russian energy because they're kind of cold without it. So most Russian banks have gotten swifted, which means that the money inside of Russia is locked inside of Russia, can't get out. And the value of your money goes down when you can do less with it. And so money that's stuck in Russia can't do stuff in the global stage. So that money has become devalued, which is a conversation we're about to get to. So they no longer have a transmission network to pay for things

to send funds, everything like that. The second action I think is almost maybe bigger than the first. A one-two punch where the second punch hits way harder. Yeah. So the second punch was this asset, Frasier. So the central bank of Russia apparently had assets in US and European banks, over $600 billion worth of assets, their money. These are foreign currency reserves. So a central bank has all sorts of different reserves. Uh, they keep gold on their balance sheet and fresh is no exception. Uh, but they also keep, you know, like the majority of their money is in foreign reserves. So they might have, you know, us treasuries, they might have dollars, they might have euros, they might have yen. Well, all of a huge chunk of these funds are actually in the, uh, us banking system

or within reach of it. And, uh, The US and the EU just shut it down. They didn't take it. They just froze it at this point in time. $640 billion of the Russian Russian Central Bank frozen. That's huge. Yeah, and they did this with a statement saying that any individual or business or entity is no longer allowed to engage with the Central Bank of Russia. Once again, isolating the Russian financial system, the Russian money system to basically only work inside of Russia and also Belarus. You've got to think like they probably Putin expected to be swifted, but I'm not sure that he expected this. I don't think he did. Oh, swifted probably. This definitely not. But like the second thing,

I don't think. Russia has engaged in what Putin has been calling becoming sanction proof. And that means having these foreign reserves. This was a part of Putin's plan to become sanction proof, except it wasn't. You forgot. They could just press buttons on the keyboard and just be like, oh, sorry, you can no longer access this money. Yeah. The details of how this works are kind of beyond me. But as it turns out, there was a huge Achilles heel in Putin's plan to become sanction proof. And now $640 billion, which which in context is one third of the total crypto market cap. So one third of the entire crypto market cap is worth of value is being frozen away where Russia can't get it. And in addition to that, other Russian oligarchs are having their mega yachts, which is basically a

way preserve wealth, being frozen, seized. It's their NFTs. Yeah. They're being seized in whatever port they reside in. So I heard a couple stories of Germany freezing Russian, or not freezing, seizing Russian oligarchs mega yachts because it's basically like a store of value for them. Right. So those two things happened, the one-two combo punch. And what were the results of this? First, we got to talk about Russia's currency. What happened there, David? Yeah, kind of like how I was alluding to earlier, when the Russian ruble, the currency of Russia that's getting locked inside of the Russian border, it can now no longer be used to buy stuff in the rest of the world. Therefore, its utility value as money goes down. It's literally worth less. It can do less things. And so we saw at its peak a devaluation of 40%

in the Russian ruble inside of one day. So in real terms, all the Russian citizens that had savings in the Russian ruble lost 40% of their savings and wealth in one day just because of all the sanctions. And there's a lot of frustration out there because the sanctions are targeting Russian individuals, Russian citizens, when we're trying to sanction Putin. And so people are saying, why are we harming Russian individuals? An answer for that, regardless of whether you think it's a good answer or a bad answer, is that causing social unrest in Russia is bad for Putin. Causing the people of Russia to be mad at their leadership is a sanction on Putin. So ultimately, it impacts Putin's choices at the end of the day, because his leadership ultimately

comes down to do the oligarchs support him, do the people of Russia support him, and if everyone is not supporting Putin, and we can influence that choice by devaluing the Russian ruble, then this is what And yet at the same time, there is a lot of pain on Russian citizens who aren't responsible for some of these actions as well. And, you know, we see actually that in the market as well with the Bitcoin Ripple daily volume going up. You're going to have to scroll over to see that last bar, Ryan. Okay, let's see the last bar. There you go. Boom!

Ooh, for effect. Wow. What's happening, it seems like, is the Russian people are trying to escape the ruble. They're trying to escape the collapse of their currency. And the currency is not just going down, I think, because of SWIFT sanctions. That's definitely part of it. It no longer has much backing from the Russian Central Bank. You know, $640 billion in assets just kind of frozen in time. And so that is resulting in the ruble going down. But people are buying Bitcoin. They're fleeing their currency and they're buying Bitcoin as a result. And you can see this in the charts. Yeah, that was the volume chart of the volume between the Russian ruble and the Bitcoin. A huge spike in volume right as people started to flee the ruble. Another reason why the ruble is going down in value

is because everybody Everyone's selling it. Everyone's selling the ruble and they're buying Bitcoin at an insane premium. We saw Bitcoin being priced up to $20,000 higher than it is in the rest of the world because that's how badly people who own the Russian ruble are selling their ruble to pay for super expensive Bitcoins because they want to get out. They need the Bitcoin escape hatch. And so they're paying an insane premium because they are fleeing the ruble. It's not only Russians either. It's also Ukrainians that are fleeing their local currencies to buy cryptocurrency as well. So this headline is Ukrainians buy record sums of Bitcoin on Binance after the Russian invasion. So what's happening on the Ukrainian side, David? It seems like the

same thing. Yeah, well, that's because this isn't sides, right? This is the Russian invasion. nation state, this is Putin invading another nation state, Ukraine. And then we have the individuals of both Russia and Ukraine exhibiting the same behaviors, kind of showing the differences between large institutions and small individuals. Small individuals are being scared about the value of their fiat currencies, and so they are buying Bitcoin, regardless of whether it's a Ukrainian citizen or a Russian citizen, people are being scared out of their fiat currencies and they're using Bitcoin as a way to escape the choices that nation states are making. I do want to get back to this tweet that we were alluding to from a Ukrainian who says this, my Ukrainian credit cards don't work anymore. So picture

yourself, you're a citizen of Ukraine. Things are falling apart, obviously. You've left your home. You've left your home. You're looking for somewhere safe, potentially. That's the position this individual finds himself in. He says, my Ukrainian credit cards don't work anymore. I'm safe physically in Kazakhstan. Must have gotten over the border. But all my savings are gone. Anything you kept in your bank account, gone. Crypto is the only money I still have. And today I can say without exaggeration that Bitcoin, Ether, and NFTs are going to save my life while I can't come back home. individual fleeing his country with his crypto assets. Can't take anything else with him except his crypto assets. This is why crypto is a technology and is a money system

for the people, regardless of what nation states do, right? Whether you're a Russian citizen or Ukrainian citizen, you're trying to get out of this mess. You need this escape hatch, this pressure release valve. And that's what the Ukrainian people and the Russian people are using crypto for right now. Especially during times of war, the form factor of how you hold crypto assets becomes incredibly important. Like being able to hold a ledger inside of your fist and being able to move around the world like that and having all of your savings go with you is great. You can also memorize the 12 words of your seed phrase in your brain so you don't even have to hold anything. And it doesn't matter where you are in the world, your savings are in your head. This is technology that always enables the individual most, more than it does institutions. It's amazing. You have an internet connection, you have your

assets, that's all there is to it. And you can move them anywhere in the world. Let's talk about maybe the second story. The other half of the story, yeah. All right. So the first part is nation states sanctioning other nation states, in particular Russia, at this point in time. Now, the US Treasury, and I think Western nation states are trying to bring these sanctions to crypto. They want the same banking rules to apply to crypto. So if they can sanction American banks from interacting with Russian citizens or the economy of the Russia's Federation, then they also want it to apply to crypto exchanges as well. So here, the US Treasury is formally asking crypto rules

formally adding crypto rules to Russian sanctions guidance. And they are asking crypto exchanges to block sanctioned individuals, regardless of where they're headquartered. A lot of this practically looks like a block of anyone who has a Russian passport, a passport from Russia. So they're asking the Krakens of the world, the Gemini's of the world, Binance, Coinbase. We have KYC to all their customers. Yes. If you have someone from Russia on your platform, Deactivate it. Get them out of here. Censor them. Stop them. That has been an ask. I don't think it's enforceable yet, but you have to wonder at what point this will become executive order and enforceable. What's happening now, David?

What are the exchanges? How are they reacting from this task of the U.S. government. Yeah, generally the theme is that exchanges have declined to do this. Both Binance and Coinbase have publicly stated that they will not block Russian users or Russian IP addresses, despite the requests of the Ukrainian government and also the United States sanctions. So this is one of the reasons why crypto is in the main stage, is that crypto exchanges are not, they aren't required to comply, they have been asked to comply because they are not regulated under the same format as the United States banking system, because they're not banks. And so it's only a request to comply, and Binance and Coinbase have said that we are not doing that. Coinbase hasn't said that

they will not do that forever. There's a row that Coinbase has given out for itself that it could comply in the future, but as of right now, they are not. You know, and talk about, one of the, but Binance tweeted, we will not be freezing Russian users' bank accounts because it goes against the ethos of cryptocurrency. Yeah, here's the BlockWorks tweet saying this. And I take this point, but also the founding principles of crypto are for the crypto networks, of which Binance is not. Neither is Coinbase. Coinbase is a centralized entity. Binance is a centralized entity. You have to expect these things to receive the regulatory pressures of the United States. And what has the foundational principles of crypto is crypto. And so like the self-sovereign, censorship resistant, seizing resistant crypto assets can

be expressed by individuals by removing their money from Coinbase and Binance and offering and taking self custody. because that is where you get all the beneficial properties of crypto. I don't necessarily think it's the job of these centralized exchanges to exhibit and express the values and properties of the crypto networks themselves, especially when people like Brian Armstrong and people at Coinbase can go to jail for not complying with regulations. And so maybe we're not there yet, but we have to remember that if you're a centralized entity, you are going to become regulated. And so I don't think the banner of just like we get to hide behind the values of crypto works if you have an address with your office addresses on it. Yeah, I think it's very laudable that

the exchanges are resisting this, number one. That's great. I mean, they are embracing crypto values. But you have to ask yourself, how long will they practically be able to resist this? And the answer to that is not long. I mean, the SEC sent Coinbase a stern letter and said, don't release your lend product. And they didn't release their lend product, right? When the full authority of the U.S. government starts to ask you to do something, sanction a particular... set of individuals, for instance, you can bet all of these exchanges will have to do it. They'll have to.

And that puts us in a bad place. But I guess my take on this is similar to yours. I tweet this out, David. I'm grateful some crypto exchanges are trying to resist the shutdown of all Russian citizen accounts. That's noble. But that's not the point of crypto. If we're building a banking system that can be shut down, it will be shut down. We need DeFi, not crypto banks. Bankless. That's what we need. This is the reason for DeFi. This is the reason that Bitcoin and crypto banks aren't enough. This is the reason we need decentralized banking services so that we're not put in this place. Jake Travinsky. All of a sudden, the things that we've just been saying over and over and over again for the last like two years make a lot of sense right now. That's what that's

what I'm saying. What does Jake Travinsky say about this? I haven't read this tweet yet. So this is a really important point. This is Jake Stravinsky, esteemed lawyer in the crypto space, Russia isn't using crypto to evade sanctions. It has shown no interest in trying to use crypto to evade sanctions and couldn't use crypto to evade sanctions even if it wanted. We'll talk about that point later. Russia is using gold to evade sanctions, however. Russia has been stockpiling gold for like a decade now. And then Jake finished saying, but policymakers want to talk about new regulations for crypto. And so this is a really interesting point. This crypto is in the conversation, but not actually in the actions of the world at the present moment, other than the

individuals protecting themselves from the devaluation of nation state currencies. That is the only time we have seen crypto being used that's relevant to Ukraine. There's no actual actions that we see anyone taking to evade sanctions using cryptocurrency. There's zero evidence for this. Yet it's forefront in the conversation. You're saying there's no evidence that Putin is using Aave to take out a loan for himself and try to... I'm going to come back to this point a number of times, but there's a reason why I talked about how the $560 billion of crypto or $630 billion of crypto of assets that were frozen by the banking system by freezing the Central Bank of Russia.

I said that that is one third of the crypto market cap. Putin cannot use tornado cash to evade sanctions with $630 billion. You cannot hide or route around sanctions using one third of the crypto market cap. It won't work. I think Chainalysis is gonna figure that one out pretty quick, right? Really, really easily. Well, we're gonna get back on this thread of how crypto and geopolitics and sanctions are affecting the world, but maybe a quick detour here. And some good news, because it's nice to have good news. The good news is the crypto community really rallied around the people of Ukraine who are obviously going through a devastating time right now. Can you talk about a few of the things

that the crypto community is doing right now? We said in the intro that the crypto has now raised more funds than the UN. which is pretty cool. Let's talk about a few of these mechanisms. So what's this first one, Ukraine DAO? Yeah, Ukraine DAO spun up by Nadia from Pussy Riot, who has received her own oppression from Putin by making anti-authoritarian, anti-Putin statements with her band Pussy Riot, has started the Ukraine DAO. And Ukraine DAO, I think, has raised something like, oh gosh, the last I checked, it was $5 million? It might be way more than that, actually. But literally just a single JPEG of the Ukrainian flag It's a square JPEG, blue on top, yellow on the bottom. That JPEG has a party bid, a collective party bid for I think $5 million. Last I checked, it might be

way hard. Can you click that party bid link, Ryan, just to get my numbers right? Which one? Down a little bit, just below the join Discord, there you go. And so party bid is basically a way to collectively bid on a single NFT with all of your friends. And, okay, that just sent you to the Discord. Anyways, last I checked, it was like $5 million. And so, This is on the tailwinds of Constitution DAO, where we figured out that DAOs can just be funneling money into a specific purpose. And so Ukraine DAO spun up really, really fast and collected a bunch of money. By the way, if you want to hear more about this, on Overpriced JPEGs this week, Carly had Nadia from Ukraine DAO and from Pussy Riot on the show. So that's on the Bankless YouTube. You can click on that and

check that out now. Another thing that happened is the actual Ukrainian government put out some links, links to their Bitcoin and Ethereum wallet for fundraising. And they received nearly $10 million in crypto donations at this point in time. That number might be outdated a little bit too. But the crypto community has really rallied around this. This is Hayden from Uniswap tweeting out, There is a new interface, donate.uniswap.org, where you can actually take any ERC token that you have and deposit it and convert it directly into the funds that the Ukrainian government wants to receive. So it's a one-click donation in an interface,

which is pretty cool to see. The Ukraine Dow did raise $6 million from my party bid. That's confirmed. There you go. That's awesome. And this is a tweet from Kyla about the UN thing. David, what's this? Yeah, this is where we got this headline. And again, this was March 1st, so three days ago. And Kyla says, pretty incredible that as of right now, the UN and crypto has pledged the same amount of money towards Ukraine. And that was three days ago where we were matched with $20 million from the UN and $20 million from crypto. And now crypto is up to $50 million. So two and a half times what the United Nations has donated to the Ukraine, crypto has raised in four days. Insane. That's pretty awesome. I'm proud of that. I'm very excited about that. Let's think about the name United Nations.

What about just United People of Planet Earth? Because that's what's going on behind Ukraine DAO. That's what's putting money into Ukraine, is the United People of Planet Earth. Absolutely. Yeah, we don't necessarily need an institution to donate through. Let's talk about this too. So this is the Ukraine tweet. These are the actual wallets, Bitcoin and Ether. It's super cool. So the Ukrainian government has an Ethereum address. You can look up on Etherscan and you can see what they're holding, the donations that have come in. This looks like $2.2 million in Tether, $1 million in DAI.

180K worth of USDC. But most importantly, 1,500 Ether clocking in at $4.2 million. So $4.2 million of Ether and basically $3 million of stablecoins sent directly to the Ukraine DAO. No, not Ukraine DAO. Just straight up the Ukrainian government. Yeah, this is their wallet. It's just amazing. You can look up a government's public wallet. People are sending them NFTs. Look at this. Shiba NFTs. McDonald's NFTs. They have no idea what to do with those. God knows what else is in here. Yeah. Well, there was also, so there's also talk, the story continues of an airdrop. Before we go there, just also $10 million is in Bitcoin, is in the Bitcoin address as well. That's fantastic. So lots of Bitcoin. Lots of Bitcoin. That's fantastic.

So what was with this airdrop though? So I think the Ukrainian government as well tweeted out, airdrop confirmed snapshot will be taken tomorrow, basically implying if you've donated to the Ukrainian wallets so far, they were going to airdrop something, something good, you'd presume. That came out on March 1st, so just a day ago as of recording. And then take us from there, it sounds like people were expecting an airdrop. You say the word airdrop and the crypto community And so you can literally see when the airdrop gets announced and the ETH donations per hour just rockets off the chart.

And so there were some takes about how before the airdrop announcement, all these people were just donating via altruism. And then post the airdrop announcement, people were donating because of greed, like they wanted the airdrop. But I think that's kind of a nihilist take. My take on that is people were donating for altruism before the promise of the airdrop, and then after the promise of the airdrop, The airdrop was just like the nudge, the carrot, to get a lot of people who do care about Ukraine, that's why they were sending them money, so they just need a little bit of a carrot. Just need a carrot to get over the edge. And that's the power of Ethereum and incentives. We can create governance tools, we can create incentives, we can mechanism design our way into the outcomes that we want. And if all that you

need is the promise of an airdrop to donate millions of dollars to Ukraine, airdrops are great. Except it turned out everyone had to be altruistic after all, because then the Ukrainian government tweeted out, after careful consideration, we decided to cancel the airdrop. Every day, there are more and more people willing to help Ukraine to fight back against the aggression. Instead, they're going to do an NFT to support the Ukrainian armed forces soon. Maybe they didn't fully think through the airdrop before they tweeted in the excitement. And now they thought about it. I don't think they have an airdrop roadmap. Right. So they thought about it and there's going to be no airdrop. So everyone turned into altruists after all, David. So that's optimistic, right? The joke I heard is that the SEC came down on Ukraine and said, hey, you guys can't do

an airdrop. Gary Gensler. Wow. Well, you had a take about this too. Why don't you tell us what your take is here? Yeah. So this is me retweeting Eric Conner's $40 million donated to Ukraine on Ethereum thus far. And so like When we usually donate money to crises like this, it's usually done via things like Red Cross or through humanitarian routes. And humanitarian donated money is earmarked to only be for certain things like food, medical supplies, shelter, clothing. This has no such contingencies. We are donating $50 million straight into the hands of the Ukrainian government. They can go buy bombs. That's probably what they're buying with it. So the individuals of the world are now responsible for like weapons financing at the nation state

level. Like there is, the Ukrainian government can do whatever they want with this money. That's scary. Don't you think that's scary? Super scary. Is that kind of sobering to you? Super scary. Yeah, right. Like we talk about how private keys and crypto puts power in the hands of individuals. One of these powers is having to consider the ethics of global privacy. like weapons financing at the nation state level. Like we saw the error that the United States made when we financed and just weaponized, who was it, Saddam Hussein? Before he- Many world governments over the years, I would say it's not a one time thing. Right, and then it comes back to bite us in the ass later. And like now we're putting money in the hands of Ukraine so they can go buy weapons so they can defend themselves. Like this is now something

that individuals have to consider when they send money. Careful with your new power. Careful with your new power, crypto people, for sure. So what's happening with OpenSea? Yeah, well, OpenSea's never pretended to be DeFi, but they call themselves Web 2.5, which I agree with. Somebody on Twitter says, I woke up to my OpenSea trading account being deactivated slash deleted without notice or explanation. Hearing lots of similar reports from other Iranian artists and collectors. What the hell's going on? Is OpenSea straight up purging its users based on their country now? So this is still unfolding. This, again, happened this morning. Interesting timing that this is happening right next to MetaMask, and censoring Venezuela while we're having this global conversation about crypto and sanctions, like weird timing. I think

this, we kind of need to wait for the dust to settle on this one because this is, I don't know how much more other Iranian artists and OpenSea users have reported this, but you know, here's another one. I do feel like there are some lawmakers and those in power and governments who are out for blood and sort of using the sanctions in Russia and these sorts of things as an excuse to tighten things up on the crypto side of things. Here's kind of a question I would pose to everyone. If you're looking at this stuff and you're saying like, oh, wow, there's still centralization vectors in crypto. I just got to say, like, if crypto doesn't work, where else do we go? Like what other option do we have?

I think you're muted, David. I just didn't, I didn't, I don't have an answer for you. You were speechless. Speechless. Yeah, I got nothing. He wasn't muted. He was speechless. Do I have, I just hold my crypto, my crypto, my dollars in my Wells Fargo and I just wait for the government to just bully me around. Right? I mean, you can critique it and say it's not decentralized enough or you can like jump in and help us make this entire space more decentralized. Here's another example. God, this was the worst. The largest crypto exchange in Korea is now stopping the withdrawals to non-custodial wallets and global exchanges after March 25th. All Korean exchanges only allow transacting between Korean exchanges, not MetaMask, not another exchange like Binance. It's just...

closed system if you own a point ether or Bitcoin on a Korean exchange and you can't withdraw it to a self custodial wallet a wallet that you own what's the point you don't actually have it you're just like it's just this paper thing this fake thing that you're trading that allegedly like they could just like send all the ether outbound and you can still trade on the centralized exchange without anything actually being there wouldn't actually matter like if you can't withdraw it it's not crypto This is apparently from resulting from some government regulation. The tweet here is the Korean government says I'm going to prohibit withdrawals from Korean exchanges to non-KYC wallets like MetaMask by March 2022. And that's what they're doing. This is what's happening right now. I need to... to follow the story. It's impossible to follow everything that's going on in every

single country around the world. But it seems like things are getting stress tested to infinity. Go bankless while you still can. Yeah, like get your money off of Extensile Exchange. If you know how to safely and securely store your money in a self-sovereign way and manage your private keys appropriately, you have a hardware wallet, you should probably do it. It's time. It's the right decade to do it. And if you don't know, you should also be figuring that out right now. It's the right decade to have that skill set. All right, let's move on. This is the decentralization stress test. Some happy stuff. eBay talking about taking crypto payments. They already accept NFTs. They want to get in with Gen Zs and millennials. And to do that, they want to take the leap to start accepting NFTs. So I guess this

is an announcement that they're going to be doing this in the future. They haven't started yet. That's pretty big. This is one of the like the OG web 1.0 marketplaces and them accepting cryptocurrency would be a big deal, I think. Yeah, an announcement of an announcement, but, you know, we like it. I wonder what the stock price did. Oh, down 2 percent. Unrelated. Couldn't have been. Couldn't have been related at all. What's this, David? Lido. Yeah. What are they doing? Some staking? Yeah, so Matic Network is a proof of stake network. Lido is a proof of stake delegated staking network. And now you can stake your Matic as if you were a validator inside of Lido and start earning Matic rewards. And so Matic staking via Lido, now a thing. There you go. There's also been some consensus drama this week, David. I

haven't had time to dig into the drama. Have you... touched it a little bit? Yes, I know enough to talk about this. Okay, what's happening? It's an interesting, juicy story. So there are many shareholders of ConsenSys, people that own equity in the company. And ConsenSys owns a lot of things, right? It owns MetaMask. It owns Infira, right? And there is a report going out that under Swiss law, where I think ConsenSys is made, that key assets and IP that ConsenSys owns was sent to a new version of ConsenSys, like a different LLC, a different company. And so MetaMask and Infura were secretly given away to a JP Morgan backed entity via what is claimed to be an illegal transaction.

And so basically ConsenSys sold or gave some of what they own to a new company that is also owned by Joseph Lubin. So Joseph Lubin just spun up another company. So read the, the report to get through all the details on this, spun up another company and like gave MetaMaskin and Fuhrer to that company. And he owns a larger share of that new company along with a few other people from JP Morgan, which has left the rest of ConsenSys and all the shareholders of ConsenSys that have been with ConsenSys since like 2015, feeling very rug pulled. And so they took them to court. And I think from what I've gathered is they're probably gonna win that case. Multi-billion dollar audit. Consensus does not want to be audited because in the early days of Consensus, they played employees with Bitcoin, which they didn't account for. And

so like you actually can't really audit Consensus because it's not, there's nothing there for like the first like two years of its life. Anyways, Consensus is a little bit of a mess. I'm sure it'll get figured out. Yeah, we'll hope, we'll hope. There's got to be some resolution in sight. I don't think there's any resolution for this on the NFT side though. Pixelmon? Yeah, this one is dead. So here's the Pixelmon website, which is a very good looking website with this very awesome pixelated animation 3D character. Pixelmon kind of gives you an allusion to some sort of Pokemon type pixel game. Pretty fun, right? So this is amazing. I want to buy. How do I buy? How do I buy? Well, once a while ago, it's too late, Ryan.

They raised $70 million to build out what is, I'm guessing, some sort of virtual pixel NFT crypto game. kind of like Pokemon Go perhaps, I guess. And they raised $70 million on like this presale to buy these Pixelmons, these characters. And so the game got released. And once again, people are feeling just a little bit rug pulled about what was promised. Wait, it wasn't a $70 million game? It was not, it does not look like a $70 million game. In fact, it looks like a bunch of carbon copies and forks from other games. Oh my God. So here's this, this, this Pixelmon art. The first one that got revealed is so terrible that it's turned into a meme. Heaven is now considered a historical NFT because of how bad it is. This has got to be the worst NFT I've ever seen in my life.

Worse than your turtle? Come on, David. Turtles are cute. There's nothing redeemable about this. I don't know what it is. Is it some kind of a lizard with a pink, like, I don't know, side ponytail? It's a Pixelmon, Ryan. It's a Pixelmon. For the listeners, it's really ugly. Okay, so people were expecting something. Not only were they expecting a world with landscapes and area, they get these very, very shoddy, fake, weird pixel characters that don't look good at all inside of this generic grassland with no indication that these things do anything. Uh, you know, the shame of it. And if you want the full story here, uh, William Pister does a fantastic job on metaverse. We'll include a link in

the show notes. The shame of it. It was, they, they were aggressively hyping this project, the makers of this project, cyber in, in December, 2021, the founder said, pixelmon, pixelmon is the next blue chip. This is financial advice. Don't do your own research. I mean, that's kind of a red flag for me, but, um, when people shill, their thing is like, oh, it's gonna be the next thing, and they put a lot of energy and effort into marketing and promoting, and perhaps they're not putting that same energy into actually developing, that should be a red flag. That's when you know, that's when you know. And the question I think for the community is, was this intentional? Like, was this an intentional rug pull, or was this just

really incompetent execution? I think people have come to the conclusion that it's closer to an intentional rug pull because the Pixelmon characters, there is a Minecraft mod called Pixelmon and they are thinking that they have just taken 3D stock models ripping off of this actual Pixelmon Minecraft mod and then found, allegedly hired somebody from Upwork for a very small price to just do some very basic work. So I think what happened, if this guy has any brains, is he did the minimum amount of work to not be considered a scam, but it's still a scam. Right? Like, he did the work. There is a game. There are pixel mods out there. You can trade them. It is a complete flop. The game did

not meet expectations. Everyone feels scammed, yet technically he delivered. You know what, though? Like, this is the part in time where it's like that one guy ruins it for everybody else. That's right. Because this is going to cause lawsuits, I would imagine, or it could. Rightly so. It will be a case study for Elizabeth Warren to be able to say, this is exactly everything that's wrong with crypto. $70 million investors got ripped off. And this is why we need the SEC to gatekeep everything that you guys do. Giving Elizabeth Warren so much ammo. So much ammo, shadowy, super NF tiers. The guy is Anon, right? His name is Cyber. That can't be his real name. Instead of

returning the funds to Minters, the Pixamom dev wallet spent hundreds of ETH on other NFTs like Bored Apes, Azuki's, and others. Cyber has a history of failed Kickstarters. Kickstarters, like, you can do scams on Kickstarters. Sad. This sounds like a serial scammer. You know, the one thing we get out of it, though, David, is Kevin. We do get Kevin. Wait, do you get Kevin for what that's worth? Some people actually think this meme is like Kevin and this Pixelmon is so bad that it's actually going to be valuable over time because it's become a cultural artifact. What do you think? It's on the trajectory. Congrats, crypto industry. We have a new meme. Would you buy Kevin? I don't. Probably not. Yeah, I would definitely not buy Kevin as that thing is shameful. Sorry, Kevin. But we're

talking about it. Sorry, all Kevin's out there. So it's getting more airtime. That's what they want. All right. Let's talk about an exploit that happened on Arbitrum. Again, NFT news here. Let's flip over to this. These are all the ugly Pixelmons. Sorry, I can't stop. I got to look at this guy again. Okay. So here's Kevin in the Pixelmon universe. And then here's the actual Pixelmon. like a Minecraft mod, which was like what was used more or less to market the whole Pixelmon thing. Like, yeah, like that looks like a $70 million game. Yeah, that's okay. I'd buy that. I wouldn't buy these things. All right. What happened with Treasure on Arbitrum? There was an exploit. Yeah. Treasure, the NFT ecosystem marketplace on Arbitrum has been exploited.

The details of this are currently unfolding. The exploiter has been able to force NFT listers on Arbitrum to sell them their NFTs for zero dollars, basically. And they've taken a number of different NFTs, I think over 100 now at this point. So if you have NFTs listed on Treasure, you might want to go check that out. Make sure you're OK. Sorry if you're not. I don't know how pervasive this is. People are still trying to figure out what's going on and how this exploit happened. But as of now, the treasurer marketplace is not necessarily considered to be safe. Okay, take that into account. Also, I released this week a Scalera NFT index on Kuiper Finance.

Kuiper Finance was that new index protocol that we talked about a couple of weeks ago in the releases section. Now there is an NFT index where you can get exposure to blue chip NFTs that has just been deployed on it. So that means basically you buy a token and you get exposure to a basket of NFTs, at least priced exposure to that. Kind of cool to see that that's coming out of DeFi Pulse. Any other thoughts on that? Yeah, we've seen NFT indexes before from NFTX and a few others. Also, Bitwise has their blue chip NFT products, which doesn't have too much demand for it. As you can imagine, boomers aren't really ready to buy Fidenzas. But I believe in Scott as a builder. And

I think Kuiperfanius has the potential to be something very cool. So I'm optimistic. Yeah, it's very cool. I think we need more NFT index products as well. What about this? Do we need more digital streetwear, digital clothing? This is real clothing, isn't it? Oh, this is real? This is Dom, the guy behind the loot phenomenon, if you guys remember loot. There's this cool new website, blitwear.com, that allows you to mint an NFT and also receive an actual jacket of the same pattern, the geometric pattern of your NFT. Oh, that's awesome.

So real world, physical world, virtual world, meta virtual world, pairings behind your NFT and your jacket. How much are these things? I don't know. You're going to get one? Nah, I mean, like, what would I do? An MF-er? A turtle? What would I do? No, I don't think you get to put your own NFT there. I think that, like, each jacket has its own pattern, and that's what the NFT is. Oh, okay. If they are interested, they should probably go research more. Each blitware will be auctioned off as a one-of-one NFT of the design. I see. The winner of the piece will be able to redeem the NFT for a bespoke one-of-one matching physical garment custom made to their size requirement. Okay, so those are the details. We even had them in our note. I forgot to read them. You know what? I kind of want my NFT, though. I'm going to wait on this. Yeah, I want my

own NFT on my clothes. That's what I want. Sure. You'd have to buy an NFT first, Ryan. Dude, I have some NFTs, okay? I'm not a nobody in NFT circles. What about World of Women? KPMG, this is an interesting pairing. What's this? KPMG decided to purchase a World of Women NFT. So they tweeted out, we completed the purchase of digital art from the highly acclaimed World of Women non-fungible token community. That's awesome. Yeah, a lovely World of Women NFT. Very nice. Yeah, that's very cool. I like the earrings. Now inside of KPMG's balance sheet. Yeah. weird weird like stodgy accountants that's where it's coming from they're buying nfts they're the ones excited about this this is kpc canada by the way our first foray into this

rapidly growing asset class you love it yeah we'll skip skip ether skip bitcoin let's go straight to the nfts put those on our balance sheet guys sanction this um how do you say this rakuten rakuten that sounds right Rakuten, Japanese online retail giant Rakuten, they just launched an NFT marketplace as well. So I think that's going to be, I think that's a big deal. The traditional e-commerce websites launching NFT marketplaces. There have been a few of those recently. This is the latest out of Japan, Rakuten. It doesn't say if this NFT marketplace is like specific to one type of NFTs. It sounds like a generalized NFT marketplace. So we'll see how much adoption they get. I wonder if they just... mainly stick to Japanese

adoption, but no. I feel like it's going to be hard to compete against the crypto native NFT marketplaces, right? It's like when you're kind of stuck in the old world and you're trying to transfer the new world. I get why you want to do that, but I don't know. Maybe your best bet is just to acquire. It said further down in the article that it allows people to spin up their own websites for buying and selling NFTs. So maybe it's like a Shopify type thing where you get to custom make your own NFT platform. We'll have to see. That'd be kind of cool. actually. Puma, the latest brand to adopt an NFT. I used to wear Pumas. Puma shoes. I love Puma shoes. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, what are they doing? They bought a cool cat, which is pretty cool of them. That's very cool.

Because we like the cats. And I mean, it makes sense because Puma is a cat. And of course, they're pretty cool. So they have to buy a cool cat to put on the Puma balance sheet. This looks like a good one. Is this a good one, David? I think so. Tell me if this is good. I like the tint of the glasses matching the shirt. Great. And like the beanie, very chill, very chill cat. Very cool cat. It's a very cool cat. All right. Good job, Puma. Another brand entering NFT in ecosystem. All right. Last thing on NFTs, David, MFers. They're making derivatives. There's many MFers. What are MFer derivatives? Well, first off, MFers are the profile pictures that both me and Ryan have. They're these kind of facetiously cute, smiley, little stick figure NFTs. And like, for some reason, they're a little bit ridiculous. I think they're the perfect amount of ridiculous. And the

thing is, they're also so simple that they make it really, really easy to generate derivatives of. And because Sartoshi, the guy behind MFers, has opened up the Creative Commons license to everyone, you are free to make MFR derivatives as many as possible. And so there have been so many MFR derivatives. So I put out a tweet. But what is derivatives? Like that sounds like a financial product to me still, but it's not, right? We're just talking about like a. So just like versions of MFRs stylized differently. So there's the base MFRs, which are now like the CryptoPunks of MFRs, but now there's a bunch of derivatives. So there's which are MFers that look like Azuki's.

There are XMFers, which are the X copy versions of MFers. There are ahead MFers, which are MFers that are looking straight at you. There are invisible MFers. The number of derivatives is absolutely insane. There's little MFers for the cute little guys. GM MFers, butt face MFers, 3D MFers, dead MFers, like punk MFers. The number of derivatives is absolutely insane. And so like the MFer ecosystem has absolutely exploded. which is kinda cool.

But each of these derivative MFers have their own price, it's not like existing MFer holders hold these or get these. So what does it do for the main MF? Well, some of them do, because every single derivative has its own rules. So some of them you can mint because you have your own MFer. Some of them, the fees that are baked into the royalty fees actually go to the OG MFers treasury. So the X copy MFers, XMFers, I think like 30% of the fees that they take from the royalty fees are sent to the actual MFR's treasury. As like tribute? Yeah, as tribute. Yeah. And so like there's this growing ecosystem of MFR's, the MFR community treasury, all of the MFR derivatives. And it's turned into starting to take into like so much like real estate and mindshare out of the NFT community. That's

really cool. And it's all because the creators of the MFR project did this Creative Commons license. So anybody can do whatever they want with it. And also made an NFT project that's very, very easy to like, you know, iterate on. Like they'll just stick figures. That's really fascinating actually. And I guess like it's all pie expanding value, right? So it's not like these derivatives take away from the main MFers. They add value to it. And these derivatives capture value on their own as well. This is definitely me like being excited about my own bags. But so like take that with a grain of salt. but also like MFers are really cool. Like the ecosystem and culture and community around them, I just find really fascinating. I don't have serious MFer bags and this is exciting. So there's some validation for you. This is pretty cool.

This is pretty cool. Maybe I'll buy some more MFers. Look at the cute little MFers. Those guys are so cute. This X copy MFer gets me, man. They're just copying the styles. I love it. That's very cool. Discord grinding. What is this? You were talking about this a couple of rollups ago, but it's, decrypt it's the newest crypto side hustle people are hiring people to grind in discord for them that's what's happening what is discord grinding yeah so this is people trying to get on the white list for nfts uh so very hot nft drops they need to figure out how do they enable whitelisting to happen to individuals that are aligned with the community uh and probably aren't robots so these things aren't gamed and so discord grinding has become a thing where people are in discord engaging That's it, that's what they do,

they engage. That's what the job is. Because in Discord, you can rank people based off their engagement, how active they've been. And so people, there's a meme of people going into Discord and be like, hey guys, how is everyone doing today? What you guys up to? I just ate my French toast for breakfast. What'd you guys have for breakfast? Just fake social engagement to be good community members. And they can get on the way list. Okay, so they get on the white, wait, okay, so it's all about getting on the white list because what these NFT communities are doing is they're basically going through all of their Discord participants and they're saying, okay, here's a threshold for how engaged you have to be in order to be on the white list. And everyone wants to make that cut, meet that threshold. So they're hiring fake

community managers to talk. In Discord, that's what's happening. In the active, right? Yeah, you guys, listeners might be familiar with Ryan's line, give the protocol what it wants. It's like Uniswap wants liquidity. Ethereum wants security. Well, NFT communities want engagement right now. They haven't completely refined this mechanism. And so right now, what these NFT protocols, what they want are engagement. And so people are hiring people to make engagement happen. There's a Charlie Munger quote out there too, which is show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome, right? That's what we're getting. Incentive gaming. This can't be long for this world. This is unsustainable. But I think this is indicative of things to come for what it takes to be a good community member. This is hopefully we can refine this behavior so it's not gamed. And rather than injecting

fake engagement, we inject real engagement. What my talk about East Denver was how we will train our protocols to respond to us with appreciation and love rather than like feeding us with rage and advertisements. And I see this as a very early step in that. It's funny because, you know, every incentive structure that you put in place does tend to get gamed over time, right? So there was a time when Discord engagement was pretty pure. It was a good marker of community engagement. Now it's been distorted and kind of wrecked. All right. get to some regulatory stuff david um while we finish the news here so uh first i don't know if this is really well let's talk about this this is definitely regulatory um bitmex co-founder arthur hayes uh just pleaded guilty on bank secrecy act violations so bitmex

co-founder arthur hayes this is something that's been caught i don't know in the not in the court system yet but in the justice system for year close to that anyway when uh these charges first came against arthur hayes so what's going on yeah well it's not really any surprise he was kind of like on the run on the lamb a little bit struck a deal with his lawyer struck a deal with the courts if he turned himself in he would have a a softer plea deal uh and so now i think what's the end ultimately happening is arthur's probably gonna have to pay a fine bitmex is probably gonna have to pay a fine he's gonna have to serve some amount of time in prison but this actually might be the last news about Arthur Hayes that we hear about this story because this is the conclusion? I read this story and I wasn't sure about the

prison. It says that there's a maximum penalty of five years. They're definitely paying the fines, but it didn't say whether the prison sentence would be Like whether Arthur would actually go to prison or not, not sure on that. So. I mean, Arthur Hayes definitely has the money to buy his way out of prison if they give him that route. So that's definitely true. He also really, prison works. I think like monopoly. Yeah. A little bit. Yeah. I mean, it's not explicitly in detail, but that's part of the, and, uh, I don't know. Maybe like, and Arthur has been writing articles. We have a take from him in the take section, but like he's, if this story concludes and this is the last like part of the U S. versus Arthur Hayes story. And he's still paying attention to crypto. He's still writing articles about crypto. So what does Arthur Hayes do next? We should get him on

the Bankless podcast and talk about that. That's exactly what he should do next. That's exactly right. Well, let's ping him after this. Anyway, let's talk about this. SEC is now probing fractional NFTs for securities infringements. So what are fractional NFTs and why does the SEC care? Yeah, so fractional NFT, you put an ERC-721, an NFT into a contract that spits out an ERC-20 token. Fractional, the application Fractional does this. And they've always been very careful about how to engage with this because an ERC-20 token that's based off of ERC-721 collateral technically is a security, even though it doesn't like feel like it should be, it technically is.

And so now the SEC has their eyes on fractional NFTs, you know, with all the bad actors and all the scams out there, you know what they should go after? Fractional NFTs. It does seem like it's such a, I don't know, like a letter of the law thing, not spirit of the law thing. But even Hester Pierce is like, this is what the letter of the law says. She says that plain vanilla NFT collectibles don't have revenue potential. They're unlikely to fall foul of regulations. But these fractional NFTs, because there's a collective investment, they might be considered NFTs. But it's just like when we were these, the SEC, the SEC, like the securities laws that we have in the books right now, do you think

they even contemplated something like this? Like, why should a shared JPEG have a 10K filing associated with it? Right? Like, it's just, it's stupid, isn't it? Yeah. So the laws have to change. the dog community from the Doge NFT. PleaserDAO bought the Doge NFT, put it through fractional to make the dog token. So there's a dog token that's backed by the Doge NFT. And now there's a vibrant community of dog token holders because they all own a share of the Doge NFT, the Mona Lisa of NFTs. And like, PleaserDAO has very good lawyers and so they've definitely thought about this. So this is not like they just said this willy nilly, but like this is kind of like what this is in the conversation of. It's

like, well, the dog community by the way is happy. Like no one feels sad about how they own a share of the Doge NFT. No one feels like they have been just scammed by like, that's not on the table. No one feels bad here. No one feels like they got harmed. No one's getting hurt. No one's getting hurt. People are just having fun owning a share of the dog NFT. Well, we'll see how that progresses. It's another bizarre argument. We have old laws in the books. Citadel is getting into crypto in the months to come, is the report. This is Kenneth Griffin. Remember Kenneth Griffin, David? Who's he? Yeah, I do. He's the guy that bought the Constitution from the grips of Constitution DAO. He's the guy that bought the Constitution. last minute didn't he say something like he bought

it from a bunch of kids there's a bunch of kids yeah outbidding a bunch of punk kids well um he there's not a lot of fans of citadel or ken griffin in the gme community or the retail investing community either he's an internet villain these days yeah i guess he's coming to crypto but that's our territory so we'll see you there ken See how it goes for you. The news is that Citadel is now market making in crypto. That's the news. Sorry, we got caught up on Ken Griffin, didn't we? FTX has pledged up to $1 billion for a philanthropic fund to improve humanity. What's this? Yeah. So SPF has always stated his interest in being a, what do you call it? An activist philanthropist or something where like he takes all the profits from his business and basically because soft,

like verbalize his commitment to donate basically all of it. He said this, he talked about this on the Sam Harris podcast for people that want more color there. And so yeah, FTX pledging a billion dollars for improving humanity. We also are having SPF on the podcast. We're recording with him sometime next week. So that's going to be pretty exciting. We'll have to ask him about this. What does he plan to do with his $1 billion in philanthropic funds to improve humanity? David, we've got the takes coming up and the meme of the week. Some really good takes. And of course, a pretty hot moment of zen, I think, or at least a bizarre one. One that I'm very sorry about. You guys, we apologize in advance, but you're also going to want to watch this. Before we get to all of those things, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible. The Brave

browser is the user first browser for the Web3 Internet. with over 50 million monthly active users. Control your digital footprint with built-in privacy and ad blocking. Inside the Brave browser, you'll find the Brave Wallet, the first secure crypto wallet built natively inside of a Web3 crypto browser. Web3 has freedom from big tech and Wall Street, more control and better privacy. But there's a weak point in Web3, your crypto wallet. The Brave Wallet is different. Brave Wallet is built natively inside the Brave browser, no extension required, which gives the Brave Wallet an extra level of security versus other wallets. With the Brave Wallet, you can buy store, send, and swap your crypto assets, and you can even manage your NFTs and connect to other wallets and DeFi apps, all from the security of the best privacy browser on the market. Whether you're new to crypto or

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The Uniswap Grants program is accepting applications for grants. Do you have something of value that you think you want to contribute to the Uniswap ecosystem? No matter how big or small your idea is, you can apply for a uni grant at uniswapgrants.org and help steer Uniswap in the direction that you think it should go. Thank you, Uniswap, for sponsoring Bankless. Hey guys, we are back with the takes of the week. David, let's start here. Web3 won't rug pull you. Web2 might though. This is a kind of a story and a take combined from a startup founder who says he lost his company and $100 million by trusting by relying upon Facebook?

This has just been a core tenant of Ethereum since day one. Facebook is not the only example of a company that's done this, but there are, and Twitter, for example, has its own APIs to have outbound data out of Twitter that allows other companies, other websites to consume that data. And you can create businesses around that. Kind of in the same way that we have money Legos on Ethereum. You can use the data coming from other companies' APIs that they give out free for willingly or sometimes they charge um you can start to build services around that so like facebook is so incredibly big that people have built businesses on facebook twitter has become so big that people use the data around twitter to build businesses the thing is when these apis are centralized they can just get rug pulled so this founder tells this

story of this hundred million dollar business that he had that got deleted because facebook changes changed its algorithm This has always been one of the core tenets of Ethereum about how you can have unstoppable censorship-resistant code that can never change on you. So you have long-term assurances about the viability of your business. This wasn't really relevant in the news except for how this one founder told the story, so I thought I'd just mention it here. Yeah, I think it warrants repeating for sure. And the founder says it sends chills down his spine to watch others build businesses on Instagram and TikTok as well, given what happened to him. Definitely a good lesson. Remember, you don't own your own Instagram account. That is property that you rent from Mark Zuckerberg. Absolutely. So why would you build on someone else's property? I don't understand. Would

you build your house and someone else's land? Seems like a bad idea. Just build on Ethereum. Arthur Hayes. We're just talking about him. Apparently, he wrote an article this week. I haven't had a chance to read it. It's called Annihilation. What's this about? This is basically connecting the... the costs of war, so this is coming off of the Ukraine-Russian conflict, the costs of war, where like, say, like, it takes money to fund a war. So then it takes money to fund it, to build a tank. And then it also takes money to build a building. And then when war happens, a tank comes into a country and it destroys the building. And then the opposing side destroys the tank. And so the value, all the energy, the economic resources that got put into the building and the tank, and also all the lives, not to

mention all the effort and energy that it went to creating the lives, all gets destroyed. And so when we think about the values of the fiat currencies that are going into funding these things, ultimately the cost of warfare comes out of the value of fiat currencies. And so Arthur Hayes does a very good job making the narrative of how you can see when countries go to war, inflation happens right afterwards because that's how they need to finance the war. And so eventually the efforts and resources expended in the war comes out of the value of the dollar. And so this is a great article by Hayes. Having just finished Ray Delia's book where he looks like at empires in history and reserve currencies in history, almost all of the reserve currencies in history died and ceased to become reserve currencies as a result of

some protracted war. Sometimes they won the war, But even if they won, it was very costly. War is incredibly costly on the fiat system. That is totally true. And this reminds me of the Ether ultrasound article that I wrote. That one didn't get too much traction because it was actually really long. But this was coming after Justin Drake's ultrasound money meme when we were memeing that. And I talk about how like... Ethereum, what it does when it does the buyback from EIP-1559, and it's putting the money back into the currency. Where war, for example, out of nation states, takes money out of the money to fund the military, like these self-sovereign finance systems like Ethereum take money out of the economy and put it into the money, which is, it's

an important relationship to understand. So I encourage people to go and read that article. All right, you have another take here. I'll read it out. The full power that crypto brings can only be truly harnessed by the individual. What do you mean by that? So this is again kind of coming off of the Russia sanctions crypto conversation. The larger you are as an institution, the more muted the powers of crypto offer you. And so what I'm saying here is the powers of private keys, the powers of DeFi works best at the individual level. And the larger the institution, the less and less those powers actually work for you. Because then we start to get into it's easier and easier to censor you the larger and larger you are. Going back to the conversation of how Russia had one third of the total crypto market cap

seized. And people are talking about, oh, well, if it was in crypto, we wouldn't have been able to seize it. If Russia had one third of the total crypto market cap in crypto, we would have been able to nullify that. They would have been still able to send it from address to address, but they wouldn't have been able to pay for anything because we would have made it illegal to receive that money. And tracing that money because it's a third of the crypto market cap would have been trivially easy. And so the larger and larger of the financial institution, the easier and easier it is to target with sanctions, target with regulations, target with rules. Where the smaller and smaller you get, closer down to the size of the individual, the full might and power and optionality that crypto brings to you can be expressed.

So like you think about just like metaphorically, a whole the size of the individual. You cannot fit Russia through the whole of the size of the individual. You cannot fit $600 billion through just an individually sized technology. And so the is why the private keys are so cool is it always benefits the margins of society the most which are the people that need it the most and while it does also the powers of crypto also do benefit institutions they don't benefit institutions as much as they do they benefit the individual this is why we're seeing ukrainians and russian citizens alike both buying bitcoin to protect their wealth wealth the country of russia is getting sanctioned meanwhile and so crypto will always benefit

the individual more than it will the institution. I do think it's, you know, I do think that this provides asymmetrical advantage to the defender, right? That is the principle of cryptography and certainly levels the playing field. So it's a nation state actor. The crazy thing, the cool thing about crypto and private keys is like a nation state actor cannot decrypt assets and take them from you. That is incredible power. Where else in your life do you have this level of power to resist someone with that amount of force?

So I do think it's a massive equalizer for individuals for sure. This is another take. NFTs are the most authentic reflection of your identity. From Cooper Turley. What's he saying here? Yeah, so there was a time where I think we would have put this into the Bankless Weekly Rollup and been like, oh yeah, this is great take, great tweet. But I've learned about different technologies. And so I actually quote retweeted this and said, people only think that NFTs are good for identity because they don't know of the other options. And so what I'm talking about are these new technologies that I've recently learned about called decentralized identifiers and verifiable credentials.

And so like think about the NFTs in your wallet. You might like them, but how much of your identity are they actually? Do they actually reflect where you went for university or your credentials that you have because you did something or your birth certificate or your healthcare records? These are not going to be on-chain NFTs. At most right now, it's probably like going into my like, I don't know, like my stamp collection or my coin collection or my like that's more what it's like, which is not the most authentic reflection of my identity, right? Like a bunch of turtles is not who I am. Right. So Evan, who's proven authority shown in here, talks about how NFTs are like your jewelry, like they're your gold chain or your watch. And they kind of reflect your values, they kind of reflect your priorities, but

they do not reflect your soul. And so what Evan is building, we had recently had Evan on this social media panel. So if you wanna get a taste for what she's building at Disco, go check that out. But if we want decentralized identity, if we want crypto to reflect our personality and our soul, that does not need to be an on-chain NFT because sometimes you want to actually reserve your identity in a private manner and not give those things out for free by putting it on-chain. And so this whole concept of a decentralized identity via verifiable credentials and basically what's considered off-chain assets, like off-chain reputation, has started to just like be in my brain at all times. I think that's something we have to dig into more for people to fully understand what you're talking about there. But yeah,

I totally agree. NFTs aren't like everything right now, for sure. This is Kevin Milwaukee's meme illustrating the same thing where NFTs and putting your identity on chain is basically giving the world all of your data. Imagine if your soul was on chain and everyone could transparently see you, you would have no privacy. And so decentralized identity via NFTs is a dead end where decentralized identity with identifiers and verifiable credentials is the right path. What are you excited about this week, David? Is that what you're excited about? I'm excited about decentralized identity and verifiable credentials. And one of the illustrations, Ryan, about why this is so cool is because we actually get to have Think about how the conversation of Facebook sells your data, Twitter sells your data.

With this off-chain data reputation system, you actually get to determine who you are in an off-chain and private manner, and you get to choose what parts about you you get to reflect around the world. Who do you want to be in this present moment? One of the conversations around Ethereum and identity is like, oh, you can have your Ethereum address that's your work address, or you can have your Ethereum address that's your play identity or your gamer identity, and you get to pick and choose your personas. That is a was a conceptual conversation for a really long time. People just used Ethereum addresses as like the way that we would use this. But that's because people don't know the alternatives. And I think that the alternatives are verifiable credentials, which are off chain and decentralized identifiers also off chain. And so this, this,

what this really allows us to do is it allows us to pick and choose our hobbies, our interests, who we are as people and allow those, those properties to find other people that also have those alike things. Kind of like how people self-organize into their favorite subreddit communities of their own accord. Like who you are as an individual can be automatically match-maked by people with alike interests and you don't have to do it by giving your data to Facebook or Twitter because you hold it in your self-sovereign wallet. So this whole concept has lived rent-free in my brain ever since I've learned it. And so Ryan, that's what I'm talking about. I can tell it's eating your brain up right now. I can tell you're very excited about this. Look, I think that as well, people who just see Ethereum, what we're doing in the space is like DeFi are totally limiting. It's like

saying that early internet is just like email. You know, like there's so many, applications that are going to be built out on this stack in the future and I do think decentralized identities is one of them and I'm looking forward to seeing the apps and I do think your plug for the web 3 social media plan is a fantastic one we just did that earlier in the week so you guys can check that out and we'll include a link in the show notes if you want more about that. Alright Ryan what are you excited about? Private keys man. Hey, that's an important concept of decentralized identity. I, well, okay. But like, I'm just excited about the ability to store my life savings in 12 words in my brain.

Like that I have that power. I'm not saying I do that now, but that I have the power to do that. And that each of us has the power to do that. I think we need individual superpowers if we're going to last in the 2020s. Like these are, Core skills. I tweeted this out earlier this week. The must have skills for surviving 2020s. Private key management. You gotta have that. It's key to not only storing all of your assets, but also identity as you were saying in the future. DeFi, the ability to use it. Cold storage, encrypted private messaging, exit planning, digital freelancing, crypto investing, VPN tunneling. This is no longer geek stuff. These are everyday survival skills.

That story of that individual in Ukraine, I'm sure there are thousands, maybe tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of stories like that that happen every day. And this is the reason why now is an important time to stay in the cutting edge of this and make sure you understand how some of these technologies work. There was a time where this was just for geeks. Like no longer, when they're shutting down people's bank accounts arbitrarily, right? like your currency can lose 40% because of some action that the people who run your government do. Like you need protection from that. We all need protection from that. So I'm glad these technologies exist and I plan to continue learning these skills and I hope bankless listeners will invest

in these skills too, because they are must have skills for the 2020s. The technologies that put individuals first are just getting started. 2020s is gonna be chaotic but at the end of it it's gonna be an individual first decade I I hope so and that's what that's what we're fighting for here that's the direction hopefully we're going in David you ready for it meme of the week yeah there's gonna be a good one oh it's back to Kevin Kevin time person of the year it's Kevin the pixel mon the super ugly pixel mon thanks Kevin Thanks for the laughs, Kevin. Sorry for everyone who bought one of these Pixelmon, but you know, it's how it goes. Maybe it's a good time for the disclaimer. None of this. Remember, there's a very cringe moment of Zen coming afterwards. Yes, I should warn people. I'm sorry about

that. Don't watch it. Don't listen to it. It's bad. Don't watch it. You will not appreciate it. You will not like it. What's her name? Mark Zuckerberg's sister? Zandy? Randy. Randy? Randy Zuckerberg. That's who was coming up. Randy Z. Randy Z coming up for you. Guys, before that, I got to tell you, none of this has been financial advice, except definitely do not buy a Pixelmon. ETH is risky. DeFi is risky. So are NFTs. You could definitely lose what you put in. But this is the frontier. We are headed west. We're glad you're on the journey with us. Thank you so much. I messed up the ending. Yeah, you did. Pixelmon distracted me. Thanks, guys. Bye.

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