Bankless 🤝 Daily Gwei Friday Livestream! ($ETH ATH, Coinbase Listing, WHEN DEFI SEASON??)

Transcript

hit that refresh did you uh retweet that tweet by the way to tell everybody to come watch us uh i will i will we're probably live yeah we're live all right we are live well andrew retweets the tweet to get everyone into the youtube uh hey anthony what's up uh good morning to you yeah hey man hey man very very good morning uh today you know last night i went to bed either was going up you know i woke up eighth was uh even higher and you know we're at fresh all-time high so very very good last 24 hours i think yeah except it looks like we're trying to fight a battle to keep above 2100 right now maybe you should go back to

bed i mean all right i'll i'll take one for the team but like yeah i mean i just just looking at the chart i mean it does it it makes sense right uh uh we kind of go straight up as much as we i mean we all want to go straight up but like i would i would rather us not just like go straight up and then have like a massive crash again and then we're all just like oh crap here we go another bear market so well okay so we've gone up a hundred dollars today we've gone up uh let me go into the uh maybe it's more than more than that man oh jesus yeah yeah i think it's like the one day candle that we just closed started at um 1970 and ended at yeah 21.40 so 170 dollars that's a pretty good pretty good

run no that's not that's yeah that's bad math 130 dollars yeah uh yeah i mean it's funny because like when i look at the days it's like i think the charts are in utc so for me it's just like uh it's just weird like because because i'm because of where i am in australia but yeah um i don't know like just looking at like the four hour chart it's just been going up like so steadily right there's been like you know obviously a hundred dollars now isn't really that big of a deal because we're in the thousands like if you if we were going up like from you know 300 to 400 that was a huge deal right that was like a massive move yeah um you know this is still a pretty pretty good move but i think if we just look at the the

four-hour i mean you know we were 1500 bucks like well like on march 25th or something like 15 40. that's where we kind of bottomed and that's only like you know a week or so ago now it's pretty crazy yeah man and like i i don't know i just i feel like it's it's time finally uh you know we've kind of like had to wait around you know watch bitcoin keep pumping for like so long and we've just sat there and the ratio kind of like just sits there keep getting keeps getting slaughtered and then yeah i don't know like because i just sometimes i look at it and i'm just like are people just not seeing what we're all seeing and i think that's that's really it right the day there are a lot of people who you know um i i talk about this a lot

there's a lot of people who just don't understand what makes eath valuable right and i believe that as more and more people kind of like learn about it uh you know the i guess the more people buy eighth the higher the price will go and i see this playing out on you know with my kind of like twitter following i see new people coming in all the time and commenting and being like you know and kind of like discussing the value proposition of each so it is happening it just it takes a while right like exponential growth is is you know obviously really quick but it starts off slow right and then like it gets exponential from there and then you don't really notice it it just happens and you're like oh wow okay like a few days ago you know there was not many

people in that now there's heaps of people so i think that's what's happening here um but you just got to give it time like there to some degree like a lot of the ethereum people are somewhat like muted in this like we're all we're all happy about it and we're happy about it on twitter and everything but like just at the early at the beginning of this week we were just at like the 15 to 1700 range which is just a couple hundred dollars above the 2017 all-time high meanwhile bitcoin is literally 3x it's 20 it's it's previous 2017 all-time high and so like while we can while we're super stoked that we're watching ether run from from like 1900 which was like the tickling top to where it is now at 2100 it's still pennies in comparison to like what other

moves have been made and so like it the celebration is still like decently muted and you said something that like finally eth is catching up and finally people are finally getting bullish again but like we still have so much left to run comparatively to to bitcoin and to other other crypto assets like ethan still lagged behind at least in 2021 yeah and i guess that's i mean that's probably a major function of like all these public companies buying btc i think that's played a huge role in in btc's like monster run really i mean people don't really kind of think about it but as you said it's three times its previous all-time high while eth isn't even 2x like nowhere even near

2x its previous all-time high which is 3k around 3k and then if you 3x8 it'd be 4500. so if eth was like the same as bitcoin right now it would it would be at 4 500. and you know the funny thing is i was looking at it the other day if ethe had the same market cap as btc right now it would almost be 10 000 so you know btc has already set the precedent for the 8 to 10k kind of thing um like markets don't don't necessarily work like like that where like you know just because bitcoin did it has to do it but i i do think there's like a huge element of that where people will come and keep beating it up and keep kind of like buying into it because it is you know relatively undervalued compared to bitcoin so there is merit to that but

you know markets are complex you never know what's going to happen and if we do see public companies putting more public companies we have seen like one or two uh putting eighth on their balance sheet that'll be a huge boon and i think they are like honestly i don't think this buying is all retail kind of like spot driven it has to be institutional as well and you know there's a bit of evidence i've seen you know to support that and institutions aren't going to tell you when they're buying right they're going to wait they're going to buy and then they're going to wait you know maybe even like a few months before they tell you uh you know they don't have to report their financials for three months these public companies like it's a quarterly report so they can wait the full three months and then um you know

it even lines up with with the quarterlies right now because we just ended q1 and now we're pumping in q2 so you know are they buying it now and then like so they don't have to report it for three months who knows maybe i'm overthinking it but i can see that happening yeah i i maybe maybe these are my bull market goggles but like there is a phase of ether on the balance sheet in this bull market right like this is like we've been saying this on the ether podcast but like the jump from bitcoin to ether is trivial in comparison from not crypto to having crypto and not obviously when you start with not crypto you go to bitcoin um but but ethan's ultrasound money uh and all of a sudden that meme has stuck really

really well and you know i don't think it's that ridiculous to ask the questions like well what about other non-sovereign store value assets that aren't bitcoin like is this the only thing that that crypto has to offer what else is there behind behind the scenes of bitcoin oh this thing that all these other cryptographers have been like working on and progressing and putting like research and development into what about that like weird hmm yeah man and you know on that note as well with the ultrasound money stuff i've seen more and more people on twitter recently um kind of talking about how they're like eighth can challenge bitcoin right eth actually has the merits and the long-term monetary

policy to challenge bitcoin with one five five nine and uh you know pause only issuance group of stake only issuance which i i mean we obviously have spoken about for a very long time we've believed for a long time it's been obvious for years now uh yeah it's been obvious to us but like it's hard to convince people because i mean a lot of people obviously like started with bitcoin right and have like a huge love for it i mean i started with bitcoin in 2013 but i kind of like you know sold it in 2014 during the crash i didn't come back to crypto till 2017 and obviously like getting into ethereum then like i you know i have a bias and i want to see ethereum succeed but objectively if you just compare the two monetary policies right you know just just from a pure not even about the

human aspect to it just from a pure kind of like utility aspect and a pure usage aspect where you know can potentially go deflationary that is you know net better for its value accrual than um than just having a cap like with what bitcoin has and then you're not going to talk about the security benefits either of that and i i listened to your podcast on bank list with uh hazu the other day the 1559 podcast then you know hazu he started as a bitcoiner right he was very heavy into bitcoins you know still heavy into it but you know over time he's coming to ethereum he's gravitated towards it because i think ethereum you know naturally attracts the brightest minds in this space of which hazu is one and then he he made a really like a comment that just took me back like i was like

wow i didn't expect him to say something like this and he said that he believes i mean he was cautious about what he said but like essentially the the what he said was he believes that that has a has a shot at challenging bitcoin in terms of like it's it's monetary policy which i thought was huge validation of what we had been saying for so long because it's all well and good for us like hardcore ethereums to just like say it amongst ourselves right but as soon as we get buy-in from the wider group that's like huge validation that's like holy crap we actually weren't crazy we were onto something right like this this is the way cryptosystems work right like communities come around crypto systems and they take in the information they digest the data then they try and promote the data and if the data is real

then that promotion of the data will like work its way out of the insular communities into the greater ecosystem and uh you know respect to hazu for you know because hazel was a it was a very strong bitcoiner if not bitcoin maximalist uh and he just he said he has kind of just migrated over to the world of ethereum be like well wait a second like what about the end results of these systems and naturally the end results of of the systems is a very important question especially when we come to the conversation of predictability which is why so many companies are putting a bitcoin on their balance sheet in the first place is because the dollar is no longer predictable for them uh and so they want bitcoin because bitcoin can

give them more predictable predictability than the dollar can and that's great like and i do believe bitcoin can be plenty predictable for what suits the needs of institutions these days when like the the value of the dollar is completely uncertain all of a sudden you're ready to take on the risk of bitcoin but the the need to have predictability doesn't really extend beyond 10 years even less like fi they just mean people just seen predictability for the next five to ten years in bitcoin but we're trying to architect a grant a brand new financial system financial systems are not supposed to come and go in ten years they're supposed to come and come and stay for multi-generations and like the the the take away from that justin drake's

episode that that we tried to talk about at the very end is like once everyone else realizes that there's only one crypto system playing the longest term game in crypto then like other people are going to acknowledge that and that's the new shelling point yeah yeah i fully agree and yeah about the long term stuff like that's kind of like how i like to play a lot of things is is with a long term in mind and um you know i mean what draws me most to its monetary policy is the fact that not only is it is it long term but it makes like so much sense from uh from a security standpoint and you know just from that point of view it's like you know i mean i we thought we were crazy for for a while there like the bear market and things

like that because no one else was seeing it we were like are we wrong and obviously like you know you know bitcoin maximus we're trashing ethereum all the time and whatever but the fact that we have like you know people outside of our core group saying this is huge uh validation and i think that's ethereum superpower at the end of the day is that it attracts the brightest minds and it doesn't mold them to its will but it basically infects them with these ideas that are very hard to ignore because they're so intellectually stimulating i mean if you're an uh if you're a person who wants to be intellectually stimulated and you want to work on the hardest problems in crypto you come to ethereum because you know you have so much to pick from like even just just to name a few you have scaling technology

right layer 2 scanning which you know people might may make it sound like it's easy but it's not it's extremely hard to do you have you can work on protocol level stuff like in eth1 or eth2 which is which is just as hard right distributed systems are not easy to do you can work on mev related things right which is obviously i think mev stuff is attracting the smartest people in this space because they're just like okay how do we fix this because if you can fix mav or at least mitigate it to an extent i mean that's a huge achievement in the crypto space so you have like all these things to choose from and then once you're in ethereum it's like pretty much impossible to get out like i know there's some people who like to laugh on twitter and say they started

in ethereum and then they went to bitcoin um and it's like well i mean i can get that but at the same time i really don't think you started in ethereum i don't think you actually did or studied ethereum finished going down the rabbit hole yeah exactly you kind of like we're at the surface level you may have had like some bad experience where i don't know the fee was high on something you were trying to do and you're like okay well this is junk i'm going back to bitcoin um and that's fine you can do that but i just think that uh i don't know how anyone could join the ecosystem and not be stimulated um you know intellectually by what we're building here and this is a lesson that we can see in crypto at large right like usually people don't leave crypto like and

that's not true all the time like you you came you said you came into into the world of bitcoin in 2013 and then you know i said now yeah whatever and then all of a sudden you come back into 2017 and then found ethereum and then that stuck right if the the surface area that ethereum has is so immense it's so sticky and this is not just true for people this is what we talk about with acids on ethereum when an acid gets deployed on ethereum it generally doesn't get undeployed off of ethereum it usually just stays there and like granted we're in the young phase of these things so like there can really generally only be diffusion in one way on to ethereum but it's generally been only one way and until that data starts to reverse then like i'm going to start saying it and so

not only and not only are people sticky on ethereum but assets are sticking on a theorem ethereum is just sticky and so like you you just rattled off some uh you know mev uh l1 distributed systems uh you know layer two systems like all these things are rabbit holes that people can go down and like there's not each one is a massive rabbit hole in of itself but there's also like this new these new rabbit holes that just got created since defy summer which is like um yeah you know treasuries like yam yam treasuries you're in treasuries uh and like what it has been started started to become like in my opinion like a cultural layer on ethereum like urine has its own culture yam has its own culture the daily gray has its community

and its own culture the bankless has its own community and these own cultures and they there are these discord channels with people in them and that's just really that's just market product market fit in my mind like it's just ethereum creates like pockets for people to come and stay and just like here come come live here with us we have these tokens that go up in value yeah yeah i mean exactly and i i think that's like the second superpower of ethereum is that it has so many kind of like uh rabbit holes which means it has so many communities and so many diverse communities within it like um you know i i don't want to bash bitcoin but like uh you know its community is very it's one like i guess just go yeah exactly it's like one holistic

community that appeals to a very small set of people i think and those people are basically digital gold bugs it is the same thing if you go and look at the same talking points that gold bugs bring up right it's it's exactly the same so they've just swapped out gold for bitcoin and that's not necessarily bad but that is like so boring for me like absolutely boring i i actually don't like care about that stuff really at all i'm not a gold bug i do care about you know ultrasound money in ethan stuff like that and and and kind of like uh eat as an asset but you know for very different reasons like i'm a part of like so many different communities i like to kind of jump into different discords see what people are doing you know and you you know you have all

the d5 communities you have the cultural stuff as you said which is the dows the social tokens the nft stuff like that is bringing in a whole new set of people that that aren't even interested in d5 um so you know and that's what i can't i think kneecaps bitcoin is that they can only appeal to one specific set of people and that set of people is is is pretty much like not very big right um yes people own bitcoin you know you can own bitcoin without being part of the culture and that's why bitcoin's value is so high i think as well uh and you know you can own eight as well you can own any asset you don't have to be part of the culture to own it um but you know if you're in this space i just don't see how you can sit in

bitcoin and be like and have fun right so i think that you know if you want to have the most fun you come to ethereum if you want to be part of a community that's you know not just singular focus that's actually interested in you know multiple things you come to ethereum and as you said like earlier that's what's so sticky like ethereum is just sticky for everything right now um and i don't see that going away i don't see like bitcoin inheriting that because it just it inherently can't do that it just doesn't have the ability to do that exactly so here here's my question to you and i want to i want to zoom back out and get back into the zeitgeist of what it feels like today which is the east price and the eth chart which is like we've and you've been promoting

this as well and i've been like beating this drum as like ethereum promotes like cultural vibes that's what a token is it's like the instantiation of cultural vibes and that's really what this world wants and then we also have like this ultrasound money meme which is something that i think is really valuable as a meme and also just as as a product sound bunny is product market fit uh these are things that we've just created like the ultrasound money meme just happened and like this conversation of around culture and tokens just happened with like nfts these are brand new and so when we talk about like companies putting ether on the balance sheet they i don't think they're doing it because of these conversations why do you think people like companies are putting ether on the balance sheet

or why will that i mean if they do which we they're not even really public about it so they maybe they're not even doing that so like if when there comes a time for like ether on the balance sheet time why like if we look at why companies are doing it with with bitcoin um as like a starting point of why they would do it for eth um you know a lot of them say with bitcoin they're using it as like a hedge right they're like they want to diversify their treasury out of us dollars because obviously those are inflating and they want to put it into a quote-unquote hard asset in in bitcoin right so that that's the main reason they're with eth the the companies the public public companies that have put it on their balance sheet so far uh are my two the one in hong kong i don't know if

i'm saying that right but they gave a different reason they bought bitcoin as well and they said you know bitcoin was the same reason they're like a digital gold it's a store it's still hold of wealth and all that sort of stuff um but with ethereum they said well they want to use the theory the ethereum network in the future and they know that they need to kind of like use eighth as as gas phase to use it so they're stockpiling each so essentially they're stockpiling ethers like i guess um you know oil like you would stockpile or barrels of oil right to kind of like use in the future now you know i i totally get that and i totally think that's a completely valid reason to do so but i think you know you don't buy 50 million dollars worth of eighth just to

to you know use it as gas i need to spend it yeah yeah i i i don't think i i think what what my2 is actually doing is that they're betting that the ethereum network keeps growing right and they're betting that the ethereum network keeps growing and that the fees paid keeps going up and they're basically saying well if we buy eth now um and then in the future the fees are like really high that means the eth price is probably even higher um because because of that and the other reason so we're just going to stockpile eight now you know there's i totally get that but i think you know the positive note here is that there are multiple reasons why public companies can can put eth on their balance sheet i think a lot of them aren't even aware i mean i would say

that pretty much all of them aren't even aware of each kind of ultrasound money properties at all and and that's just even more bullish because if they're buying it simply because they think the network itself is is so valuable that they need eath which to me ethics is like the totem of the network right the the heart of it right where you see eath growing or see if the ethereum network growing sorry you buy eight you don't even care that the value isn't directly going to to eat right you're just you're just basically saying well eat is the the center point of this whole ecosystem so i'm gonna buy it right now what happens when people actually understand that once one five five nine is implemented it will be getting that value from the transactions of the network right so not only are you speculating on it

um you know from a pure kind of well you know if goes up because ethereum network activity goes up but you're also saying well i know that it is going to fundamentally go up because of the activity on the network it's actually going to to come from the transactional activity so i think you know public companies will end up understanding that eventually it's going to take some time um but there's an element of fomo here too where they're like well you know he keeps going up right like you can't deny that that's like the the one objective truth about all of these systems is that you can look at the number right and you can say well it keeps going up it doesn't matter what you think about it if it keeps going up you're wrong right if you think it's going to go down or

you think you're bearish on it or you think that theorem is crap but eth keeps going up you're wrong right this is simple as that you can't even argue about that you can say oh yeah exactly you can say things like oh you know it's just going up because it's just like a short-term thing it's like no you can look at the long-term chart they're like oh you know it's a pump and dump well no the volumes of ethan the market cap is so high that it's very hard to pump and dump each like to move that market takes a lot of capital so those kind of things as well i think act as like shelling points and stuff too where people were like well okay you know it doesn't even matter that we you know there's these other networks out there you know eighth is still king is

huge if the ethereum network is still king so let's let's buy eighth but you know it's hard like with bitcoin it's very easy to say companies are buying it as like a hedge against usd as digital gold because that's exactly what you know people have meaned it to be and and kind of like the only thing it can be whereas with eighth there's many reasons why you would buy you want to speculate on different areas you can do that you want to speculate on nfts you know you want to say okay well nft is going to grow you know it's all on ethereum let's buy eth right so i think it's it's hard to pin down and we're going to see multiple kind of like i guess press releases that say different things from these companies and i'm curious to see if any of them i think if if one of them

and a relatively kind of like you know big company not like a small company say it's a billion dollar company if they say they're buying it as a store of value that's what's going to kick off i think the the kind of market because that's what's what michael sailor did for bitcoin he he kicked it all off by saying that because you don't want to be the first one in but you don't want to be the last one in either so you you you want to like you really don't want to be the last one in because you're buying the top essentially so you want to follow the first person in because they they basically de-risk it for you as well i think that yeah there's two things that you said that that triggered and triggered my mind one one was like i'll start with what leads into the

triple point asset is like one one company will purchase it because they want to use eth to to transact on the network and then another company will purchase it because they believe it's a competitive store of value uh and then another network and then somebody else will say well we're gonna buy it because we're just going to take for the staking rewards and i was like oh those are different reasons like you you guys are each buying these for different reasons like oh that's because there's three different like fundamental reasons as to why you would buy ether as an asset and each one of them is related to the asset super classes and so what if they're just saying it's like oh we're buying it for one one reason it's just because like well they're missing the other two but that's okay because they only wanted it for the run reason

it only needs to be just for the one reason that they want the other the other thing that you said is um bitcoin has a hedge and i think this is the more compelling thing about ethereum to me and this is why i think you left bitcoin in 2013 but came back and stayed in ethereum and in my mind why ethereum is so much more sticky is because like hedges are supposed to be boring like that's what they are hedges are boring they just are static and inert right bitcoin is this inert thing and that's his value proposition i don't want to be as a member of a community i don't want to be a member of a community of an asset that's treated as a hedge right what about growth what about the abundance mentality and that's to me to me is like as a cultural disposition the

difference between ethereum and bitcoin is like bitcoin is like if everything [ __ ] up at least we'll have bitcoin and ethereum is like think of all the things that we can create we can create doubt we can create culture nfts like many of them will be [ __ ] but we're going to create them anyways and we'll find out the ones that work and that mentality is the mentality that i resonate like let's like sorry about the ico mania like we [ __ ] that one up like whoops but like cool we have defy tokens now they're cash producing assets we figured it out like abundance mentality that's what i want yeah and i think you're right about like why i kind of didn't stick around um you know in 2013 like i was really into into bitcoin back then but the theorem wasn't

around right there was no smart contracts there was nothing there was bitcoin there was litecoin there was like name coin and peercoin were like the major ones at the time and i think dogecoin as well came out during my tenure that time but so and i i was also like younger than what i am now my early 20s so that that played a part in it too but but definitely the biggest part was that i had no reason to stay in bitcoin during a bear market right because like for me it's like well what am i going to do during a bear market with bitcoin there's nothing happening in bitcoin right like i can't do anything i can't enjoy like what i can enjoy in ethereum during a bear market so and that's kind of like when i discovered ethereum in 2017 that's kind of like i knew what i knew

obviously i knew a bitcoin i was like okay well this is like totally different to bitcoin this is like i mean at the time i i fell into the trap of believing that um you know ethereum was uh going to replace bitcoin right and at the time i mean i think that's what drove a lot of 2017's rally is that people actually believe this narrative that ethereum is going to replace bitcoin and it almost kind of flip into it but that's not replacing it but at this point in time i believe that you know bitcoin will exist as a very niche sort of thing right it'll still be worth trillions of dollars um but ethereum it will exist as i guess like as you said like so many different things we will do so many different things there will be countless experiments run on ethereum there will

be countless kind of like um different points of view on ethereum of what ethereum should be uh but we're going to like ossify the monetary policy which is incredibly important so ethy asset still has all its nice properties except they're kind of like locked in place and you know i didn't even mention staking right as a reason why public companies would buy either because i didn't even cross my mind because there were so many other things that i was thinking about but that's like a major reason i think because if you you know it's like as you guys call it a bank list it's like an internet bond right where essentially like these institutions will buy government bonds that are paying like one percent or whatever right um and like yes that's obviously very safe because it's the government the government bond but with eth right

now and and and you know it's staking it's paying like seven percent or something like that so you know and yes it's a volatile asset and all that sort of stuff but if you're buying eight anyway right putting it on your balance sheet you may as well buy staked ether as well right so i i think from that point of view we may see that playing out too uh it's going to be fun to see how much eight you just locked up in staking because the yields are definitely not going to stay as high as they are now and i'm curious to see what they kind of like balance out at um but you know staking is not the only place to get yield on your eighth either like you can do it in d5 but there's plenty of places now yes it's riskier but you know

there's that aspect to it so i think and not just like yield on your eighth but yield on your stable coins and things like that all of that's going to bring in so much of of these kind of like traditional finance people and i i have no doubt that even the ones that are into bitcoin and own bitcoin they have brought their bitcoin over to ethereum right like so ethereum and nothing can escape ethereum's kind of event horizon it sucks in everything you cannot even try to be like yeah but exactly like bitcoin can't even exist on its own you know ethereum's like no you're you're coming here right like we're gonna make you better than what you are so from that persp from that perspective like ethereum just sucks in everything around it as you said like assets um

and people right and nick carter even said this on his episode with uh um lex friedman which was a good episode uh i have a lot of respect for nick carter um and he he even said that like bitcoin and theorem are going to be synergistic um because like ether bitcoin on ethereum can do more and even big even you know nick carter is kind of the only bitcoiner that i really trust uh to be completely sober in his thoughts and nick carter saying this uh like bitcoin under ethereum is just like it's it's useful it's more useful um and so that that's pretty cool to see the the the other uh narrative that i've been thinking about and i got this from the one confirmation guys when we had

them on the podcast is that um that they gave this line that bitcoin is going to be the asset for institutions and ether is going to be the asset for the people and the way that they came to this conclusion is that like and especially like the institution like big companies and nation states which have generally a much more adversarial stance towards each other than people do they need something that is has that like adversarial focus that bitcoin does and so like nation states the us versus china can transact in bitcoin and they can kind of use bitcoin's like strength as a transactional uh settlement network because bitcoin is a very good transaction transactional settlement network and like the lack of trust that

these people have between each other can really be facilitated by bitcoin but as the people the the stat that they gave is like the more the ethereum has been outpacing bitcoin in 2020 and 2021 in unique address growth with ether then versus bitcoin unique address growth this is what we would expect to see for something that literally cannot scale without institutions like well if you can't scale without institutions then only institutions are going to use it and so last week we saw or this week yeah this this week we saw a visa deciding to settle transactions on ethereum and we wrote this article in the bankless newsletter saying ethers or visa is paying ether holders and we drew the connection between like okay visa is settling

payments peer-to-peer payments that where people swipe their visa card and they're settling this on ethereum which is an institution and visa is that the announcement wasn't that visa bought bitcoin to put it or visa bought ether to put on its treasure on its treasury what the announcement was is that if visa is purchasing ethereum block space to promote its product to make a better product and what that does is instead of institutions putting ether on the balance sheet it's instead paying ether holders which are the people because that's what ethereum enables it till it facilitates everyone to be able to beat a part of consensus and everyone to have cheap transactions at least that's the goal

that's the one hiccup that we're at but this dichotomy between like you know only nation states and large corporations are eventually going to be able to touch the bitcoin blockchain and everyone else will touch the bitcoin blockchain in an intermediate fashion that's that's where the world of like oh bitcoin 100 billion dollars of bitcoin gets put on the apple balance sheet yay versus apple is using ethereum as its payment layer which pays ether holders like pick your pick your world like which world do you want to be a part of yeah exactly i mean i think you put it really well there that's that's kind of like the crux of at the end of the day and the difference between these two networks and you know

i as i mean i find it hard to just kind of like not bet on the utility of ethereum and like uh and ethereum's kind of use as being you know much better than than bitcoins and you know to be fair bitcoin's network doesn't want to be this right bitcoin's network wants to just secure btc and that's it um whereas ethereum wants to secure eighth but also secure uh you know itself and the rest of the i guess like applications that are built on on ethereum as well so you know for me uh the way the way i kind of i look at the visa stuff is that you know i think we've both been calling ethereum like the world's best settlement layer for a while now because you know bitcoin can settle bitcoin right and that's fine and they claim like with lightning network and whenever

that materializes which i don't think it's ever going to they claim they can do like tokens and settle them and you know that settles back to bitcoin that i don't think that's going to play out i think that that ship sailed a very long time ago i i think ethereum that's right it's yeah exactly with with its proof of stake consensus mechanism and 1559 it has the best security policy out of any uh kind of monetary policy out of any kind of blockchain out there and that gives it the kind of like settlement assurances and security guarantees that other chains do not have um like not even bitcoin so from that point of view you know you can settle anything on ethereum and it's treated in the same way you settle eighth right it's got the security of ethereum you set all tokens it's got

like um you know defy tokens the same thing you settle nfts you settle any form of value on ethereum and you're inheriting the the security and that security is provided by eighth so i think that's a big point that a lot of people miss is that the higher the eighth price the more security ethereum has it's as simple as that um so you you know everyone should be rooting for that if you want if you want to be as secure as possible so from that point of view i just think that ethereum is already won as a settlement layer it's a little more value than um the bitcoin last year and it's settling more value than bitcoin just with its native asset this year like if you look at the native asset because obviously you have to take away the rest of the targets if you want to

compare bitcoin to to eat in terms of like settled value but eth as an asset is is being settled in in more than than bitcoin and its market cap is like five times less than bitcoins so if you would actually market cap adjust that you know and and either the same market cap it would be so much so much higher so and and this is kind of like a bearish case for for bitcoin um maybe maybe bitcoin keeps going up but like the long-term bearish case is that bitcoin wanted to be a settlement layer they said well well we're going to be the settlement layout for the world and everyone's going to settle on bitcoin but that's that's probably only going to play out for the btc asset every other asset is not going to settle there so i i i look at that and i'm just like well long-term

you know i don't see how this works because their security policy um kind of like runs on this the security policy depends on massive fees being paid to the bitcoin network now if you can settle on you know ethereum without without paying the massive fees uh because you'll be able to kind of like do it on layer two and then layer twos will settle to ethereum for you um and then you can also set up whatever asset you want including stable coins which i think is very important uh i don't know i just don't see how and we've already seen it play out like this isn't like me theorizing about stuff happening in the reality that's going to happen it's already happening like visa is just the first one as i said you don't want to be the first one in but you don't want to be the last one in so

we're going to see this massive kind of adoption wave here i believe and the the the scaling can't come at a sooner time yes it's going to take us like years to scale up to billions of users um but the fact that we have this technology out there and and it's live and we've got more coming live um you know that's going to alleviate a lot of the concerns from these institutions that say well you know ethereum can't really scale it's like well no we can't scale we scale this like really cool layer two thing that actually uses layer one for its security and you know as soon as they understand that they're like wow okay and they'll probably be like okay how do we do this right how do we settle on this this kind of global neutral secure infrastructure so we've in my mind ethereum has already

kind of like won that i don't think ethereum can can lose at this point i think that i mean saying that might be like a bit dangerous but at the same time i have so much kind of like i guess trust and faith in this ecosystem on on every layer that i i don't know i don't see how ethereum loses from here well like how how bitcoin isn't even a competitor to exactly all the things that you were talking about like because that's not what bitcoin wants to be um bitcoin isn't suited to settle other assets by by its values like it's again it wants to be a hedge and so like the future of crypto it can't be just with bitcoin because bitcoin isn't inherently having with growth like optionality and cool other

stuff that's not a hedge can't happen and if it could happen they would strip it out because bitcoin is always trying to become more and more simple not more and more expressive and ethereum's doing the opposite there are a few uh comments in the youtube that i want to read out and i do want to make this a more interactive for the youtube comments so cave johnson says good points let's not pretend that eip1559 and proof of sake are fully implemented and adopted today yes this is true now the the way that i address this statement is that like well like i'm always going to talk as if they are because i want my content to like live forever and i have that conviction that these things are going to be implemented and so i'm going to talk as if they are so that in five years from now when

people go back and watch an old video of like me talking with with anthony on the live stream they're like oh look they were talking about it even before it was implemented and that's just the bet that i've placed um i have another comment i want to read out but zazzle do you want to say anything about that yeah i mean that's a it's a fair comment don't get me wrong but at the same time if you wait for things to actually happen you're going to miss out on the alpha right i mean i said this a while ago i i've said this for a long time if you wait for eip1559 to actually be implemented then you're buying ether at a much higher price which you are right because 1.559 has been around for a while and part of my uh like a big part

of the reason why i kept buying eighth is the faith that one five five nine would be implemented and proof of stake would be implemented as well so fair comment but yeah i don't know that's just not how i think about these things totally and the other comment i'm about to read but i'm also going to put uh zazzle's daily gray youtube channel in there so you guys should go go there and follow that uh this one comes from chris and i really like this one i i'm sorry i'm gonna butcher butcher this name of the chat i don't know the project maybe you do anthony uh i jumped into the illivium chat on discord uvm yeah i'm discussing with game developers ideas for the game and the direction of how it could go my mind was blown not only can i be heard but i can also vote

on how the outcome is and even if i have a small stake my vote my voice is influential to the community as a whole that's the power of ethereum that is that is what we are calling cryptoculture and the power of tokens i don't know if elluvium has a token uh but if they did i'm sure yeah it fits right in right and this is where the the value of tokens gets integrated into communities and empowers people at this point like the the the saturation of people that shill eath which is like me anthony ryan like dc like a few other people like that's kind of saturated and so like and this is something that vitalik's talked about where like uh like who did he who did he he was on an interview with someone oh

yeah it was on a tim ferriss podcast where he would where tim ferriss was like well if ether pumps and goes really high in value and just like that's just like the new that's just what it is like how are we going to spread this wealth and he said and vitalik said well one thing that helps me like feel like that's a problem he said that this is a problem and uh one thing that helps him sleep at night is the fact that like ethereum's app layer offers a secondary place of wealth wealth growth and so like maybe maybe like when people come like five years from now and ether is a bajillion dollars because we don't know what the value of dollar is anymore people are going to be like oh i miss out on on eth but then they're just going to move into the app layer and be

like well these new communities are producing new value and producing new tokens and that's where you can access that upside there instead uh how do you feel about that yeah i mean i think totally that that makes a ton of sense because we already see it playing out with you know say defy tokens where people are actually trading their eighth for defy tokens right so it's basically spreading the wealth um like that it's you know a lot of people obviously will hoard their eighth like dragons and things like that and then hold on to it but i think that's fine and i think it's yeah it's a very good point that the app layer serves as like a pressure valve for that where you can go there and you know you can be early to projects and you can make like you know life-changing money

and that will let you stack your more eath essentially too you can get a bigger part of the eat pie and that's i mean i've been following the alluvium discord myself i haven't participated too much but it's extremely active and there's so many people having fun in there because it is fun like it's a video game right it's going to be a game with uh you know built with nfts it's going to be built on immutable x which is so it's going to be scalable it's it's going to have its own token right that sits at the center of it it's going to be able to kind of like vote on things as as they were saying and stuff like that so yeah i mean totally this is this is just like another superpower that ethereum has of kind of like rallying people around something because

you can think of you know as i said each is like the totem that sits in the middle of everything happening on ethereum but then you have like all these other like little totems in the tokens that sit in the middle of these other projects and they just like all sit around there and it all feeds value back to east of course but it lets so many more people come into this ecosystem because as i said you know not everyone is interested in d5 and you know financial products and financial primitives they would rather just like not think about that uh but they are interested in like video games and art and like you know collectibles and stuff like that and they're interested in human coordination problems and and you know uh getting together with humans and doing like cultural things it's yeah the the the design space is just so

vast and there's so many opportunities for people to get involved without having to i guess like just buy eighth you can you know you can buy eight just for gas and then you can just go buy tokens if you want you don't have to buy but naturally you want to buy ether as well because you know you know that is going to go up if the ethereum network keeps getting more activity uh you know on it so yeah it's it's a very good gun it kind of points there yeah and and this is the exact point that we were shooting on bitcoin just a second ago is like well if you're a bitcoiner but maybe bitcoin doesn't resonate with you well no you're not actually a bitcoiner anymore like because there's nothing else there's no real what you just said release valve like well what if you want to stay on

ethereum but like maybe ether as an asset like maybe the triple point asset thesis or the ultrasound money thesis is like oh that's cool but like you don't give a [ __ ] but all of a sudden some nft gaming thing you do give a [ __ ] and like oh cool you are actually still inside the ethereum ecosystem and all of your demand to use ethereum stays inside of ethereum like that's what bitcoin lost and that is what ethereum has to gain yeah exactly totally i mean in it's it's just amazing how many different ways or different doors there are to enter ethereum now but things that aren't not even i'm interested in like right uh you know there are some things that i don't really care for within the nft space um you know like i'm not really like a huge art person or anything like that uh but

i can see the value in it i can say a guy with a bajillion figurines behind him what is that not art i mean okay maybe traditional art then um i don't know if you consider this i consider these collectibles really um but like you know you get yeah like did you traditional art stuff like you know hanging paintings up on walls and things like that you know not not really my jam um but definitely see the value in it um and i don't have to like it right i don't have to like everything as you said bitcoin is have to like bitcoin to be a bitcoiner i don't have to like you know art nfts to like ethereum yeah yeah and and it's that growth and abundance mentality that again i think is really infectious and i think is missing from from the world at large um

what did i want to turn to oh here's what i wanted to turn to after this um so i looked at my portfolio this morning and i was happy in u.s dollar terms but then i looked at my uh ether denominated portfolio and then i got sad uh what what's your opinion about like thinking about the the future of these markets in ether terms or defy token terms uh like and also when is defy season happening like what yeah i mean so this is this is a funny one because it depends on a lot of things right so it depends on i guess like what you want to do with this kind of uh you know when you're investing in this space like do you is your goal to just stack more eath and keep that as east and not cash out to us dollars

right if it is then yes you should be measuring your portfolio in eight you should not be measuring it in us dollars is your goal to stack us dollars because you know you know that inevitably we're going to go into another kind of bear market and you don't want to be you know in the middle of that you don't want to ride 8th down another 90 percent which you know i don't think that's going to happen but it's still there's a chance it will of course you're going to measure your wealth in usd but if you're trading between positions and you're trading eth for something else then you need to measure that trade in each because if you trade eighth for um you know another d5 token say you trade 1080 for uh for for a bunch of snx right if you're if that snx doesn't outperform

eighth for the duration of that you're holding it you end up with less ethan you put in then that trade was a bad trade it doesn't matter that you made more usd the fact that you gave up 10 8th and you you got back maybe 8th or something like that is a bad trade so that's another aspect to it um you know there's other things that you can do where you can actually i don't recommend this unless you understand what you're doing but you can take leverage out on your eat you can basically put your eat into maker borrow stable coins against it and then go speculate on other tokens from that point of view you can measure it in usd right because it doesn't matter if you outperform either or not because you're not buying more east with it right you're not trading your e for

it you're buying it with us dollars so that's how i kind of think of it whatever you buy the other token with you should be denominating your returns in because then you would have been better off staying in it the way i i kind of approach it i have a permanent eat stack that i plan to never sell um you know it's a percentage of my of my stock it's not like the whole thing i definitely will sell to you know fiat at some point because you know you can't just like um you know you have to take products adventure we did that once we made that mistake yes yeah that that and the fact that like you know i i i need to kind of like buy things i need to pay bills you know i need to you know get a house and stuff

like that um so there's expenses as well uh there so from that point of view definitely not gonna be holding everything but my goal is to just like not have to sell my eighth right i have a bunch of other assets that i hold um i just want to ideally not sell my eighth uh even if i have to write it down 90 or whatever that's fine i'll just stick it in staking sort of thing um so that's how i have pressure and i guess your last thing was like you know when defy season i mean typically we see if it's pumping you know d5 is not far behind uh you know the only rule here is that bitcoin needs to not go like really volatile it needs to not pump a lot because if it does it can end the party but while eth is gaining on bitcoin on

the ratio while ether's going up a lot it gives the market more confidence that other things can go up now and i think d5 is obviously tightly coupled with with eth so i think we will see that not investment advice of course but if you go back and you look at the charts this is typically what happens yeah so everyone's kind of tapped into the fact that like ether doesn't really do much when bitcoin is volatile and then when bitcoin calms down then ether tends to wake up would you say that that is the same relationship that defy tokens have with ether like d5 tokens like oh ether is pumping let's wait until it stops and then let's go would you say that's the same relationship i i think it is but to a lesser extent i think that um if i can pump on it while evie's pumping

as well but it's it's a function of like where i guess like the money is going because if eighths going up then you see all these people plowing into eath to ride that momentum because a lot of people like to be momentum traders and you know you don't fight the momentum in either direction right if it's going up like and going up a lot you want to join in on that and that's just like kind of what happens it's a self-fulfilling kind of prophecy where it's like okay well it's going up a lot i need to join in you know sometimes it's fomo sometimes it's a calculated bet but then it happens the other way where people are like well it's going down a lot and momentum shifted i need to kind of do that i need to sell into this because and then that kind of like you know i

guess like snowballs from there but i do think that defy uh because that you know it's it's tightly coupled to either but because it's it's a distinct thing as well it can go up you know while it's going up as well um but i i don't think each staying flat is particularly good because if eighth is flat and and bitcoin is going up then that's bad for kind of like d5 but if eight is flat and bitcoin is flat i don't know how much diff i can do in that scenario um it can probably go up you know uh still but and the eighth needs to kind of be in that that mix i think to give the the market confidence that you know it's time for like quote unquote alt season even though i don't think eighth is an alt it it leads them

it's definitely that like the king of them mm-hmm yeah it it to me ether indicates risk on versus versus risk off the the other question i have for you is that um everyone loves tokens people love tokens tokens are fun to play with tokens go up and down in value a lot sometimes you can make a lot of money off of tokens the only token that i remember in 2017 that's still relevant today is mkr and that mk the mkr token is also the token that has kind of been known as like the boring token right and so the other question i have is like great like these tokens these defy tokens are capital assets i highly doubt uni token is going anywhere but it also doesn't have that much lindy and you know comp

tokens brand new ave is still like relatively new with with regards to how big its market cap is and like there were plenty of tokens that i owned in 2017 they were like oh my god this is the future and then all of a sudden like they were not the future uh and so like what's your opinion on like the the sticking power of these tokens versus what we've had in the past and like because because again our benchmark is ether right like who gives a [ __ ] about the dollars like we know ether is gonna be here in the future and so when we talk about like how long are these tokens gonna last we have to assume that like our benchmark is ether yeah i mean that's just the function of like why you get more returns in these tokens they're way more speculative

right and why you you potentially get more more downside um but on your note about like things around since 2017 it's actually funny you mentioned that because snx and rv were noticed known as haven and lend in 2017. so they were both around yeah both both had a rebrand yeah both had a rebrand and a token swap and you know d5 wasn't a thing in 2017 so you know there there are a handful of them that survived you know xerox is still around right um that was in 2017 i think loop ring maybe uh kyber there's a bunch of them around but you know in terms of like outperforming eighth i haven't looked at which ones have outperformed either which ones haven't i know for sure you know rb s and x have mkr definitely hasn't from what i've seen yeah um

so it's it's hard like it's very and this is this is why you see the short-term volatility is because people don't want to hold these tokens for very long because they know they're extremely speculative right and and they know that there's a lot more risk involved especially the newer ones like if you see a new token that comes out and launches it's extremely volatile in either direction like it can go up you know two times in a day it can fall fifty percent in a day uh very very easily um you know and they typically have less liquidity too so it's very easy to kind of pump and dump them people just like as a function just do not want to hold it long term but over time this is what happens in every asset over time you build a long-term holder base you build a stronger hands base right

this is what what people talk about when they talk about weak hands versus strong hands you have the weak hands who are coming in their new you know they're not like comfortable with with holding these assets during these drawdowns because maybe they buy in at a thousand dollars on something and it goes to fifteen hundred dollars but then it drops fifty percent from there and it's it's it's kind of in it's kind of like below what they bought it at whereas you can have someone that bought it a hundred dollars right and if it goes to 1500 then dumps 50 they don't care because they're like well i bought a hundred dollars like i can hold through this this is like the strong hands versus weekend and that only happens over time as a function of its market cap increasing so you see this play out across like literally

every asset that's why volatility for btc and eight is way less than it is for the majority of other things you know the higher the market cap the lower the volatility you know normally how it goes um so yeah that that's kind of how i think about it but it's very very hard to invest in this space with like a three to five year mindset right because you can say i'm going to buy this default token right because i know in five years this app is still going to be around it's still going to be dominant and this token's going to both keep going up in value and outperform eth um is it you know five years is an eternity in crypto is you know i'll even go as far as to say is you know unisop going to be around in five years

right like unicorn's huge now you know that will it still be around in five years i don't know like i don't have like 100 confidence in that but that's the risk that you take um but like i know like i i have near certainty like not 100 of course but i have near certainty that eth and ethereum are going to be around right just the app layer is a lot harder to invest in because you just don't know um and you know the the further down kind of like the the newness scale you go of these apps the riskier it is because you know there's tons of apps that are launching right now that i can tell you 100 not going to be around in a year let alone five years uh because they just will not be able to gain the market share they

just you know they do not have the great the right team they maybe don't even have the runway to keep going they don't have the right idea they don't have the right product this is the exact same thing with the real world when you invest in a business 90 of them go to zero right so when you're investing in the app player you know potentially 90 of them are gonna maybe not go to zero because nothing ever goes to zero and crypto but they're just gonna like you know not not do anything and you're going to lose out won't keep up right and exactly to me this is an extension of why the app layer of ethereum is so good as in important for humanity is because there's churn in the app layer and the reason why these tokens generally don't have sticking power staying power is because

the app layer to ethereum is brand new like this is a completely new like spectrum of the universe that humans just discovered and so like no way is the thing that we built in 2016 going to keep up with the things that we're building in 2021 like that's not going to happen we know so much more and the the reason why this there's churn is because the app layer is like this crucible of free market competition and like everything improves so and iterates so incredibly fast which is good for the people the good for the consumer competition is always good for the consumer right and so like because because like liquidity is not sticky and can migrate from application to application and because like applications can be easily forked and made into new ones and then

composability and innovation blah blah blah like the the free market crucible and ethereum's app layer is so incredibly strong that like you're perhaps probably going to get beaten out by some design construct that you've never even thought about that's going to come out in like one to three years from now so it actually makes sense that the app player doesn't have any sticking power at least at the very genesis of ethereum at some point that does run out and i do believe that like with some specific projects i'm not pr i and personally i would include unit swap v3 in that model i think unispot b3 has the sticking power that many other applications don't i would also personally include an mkr in that camp as well mkr has some of the biggest lindy and ethereum's app player everything else has like not proven

itself to like be able to stick yeah and there's there's two points to that as well so the first point is that um we've actually seen uh you know unisop fight off competitors it fought off sushi swap right um it's still doing way more volume it still has more tbl right it hasn't gone anywhere it's still like the darling and everything like that people still use it so there's that aspect to it and then the other aspect people might bring up well ethereum has competition itself right ethereum has competition from other chains it's like i mean yeah but like can you even call them competition given like the fact that they're so so so far behind ethereum right maybe in five years there are other chains that exist and have like similar levels of activity to ethereum but i just i don't think that i

mean i haven't seen any other change that compete with ethereum in the same game right it is not competing to be the ultra decentralized ultra secure settlement layer for the world it is basically you know sacrificing decentralization to be something else and that's fine like i don't think honestly people might think that i think these things are crap because they don't you know do what ethereum does and no i think these things are uninteresting because they don't do what ethereum does right i i think that they'll they'll get market share and they're fine but it's not not where i want to spend my time so ethereum has incredible lindy you know it's been out since 2015. it has 100 uptime right you know some people will argue that functionally the shanghai dos attacks at the end of 2016 mean that ethereum went offline briefly because um

you know one of the clients went offline but the network was still producing blocks um you know yes no one could use it because there were dos attacks but it was still if you're counting that then ethereum has more uptime than bitcoin well yeah yeah exactly so from that perspective ethereum's you know stickiness is incredible um i think a lot of these other networks that have a lot of people involved with them are not going to be here during you know if we go into a down period they're going to exit as fast as they as that's as fast as they came um so from that point of view i don't consider 8th ethereum network to have kind of like any i guess like real competition and any real risk of kind of like you know failing you know i don't even care that the fees are high right now because i

know i am i'm very confident that um that layer 2 scaling is going to work we're going to be able to scale ethereum um yes we're kind of like probably bleeding some market share to these low fee kind of chains whatever but again they're they're different they achieve these low fees by sacrificing decentralization and then we can go into like the whole discussion about do users actually care about decentralization and all this sort of stuff and my my kind of like tldr there is like okay maybe users won't care in the short term but they definitely care in the long term and they they do not care until they need it and institutions and like you know companies and stuff with billions of dollars they're going to give a [ __ ] about it they're going to give a [ __ ] about decentralization and security

they're not going to want to use networks that um you know have central points of failure at the end of the day because you know if they're going to do that then just stick with what they have so i i that's that's kind of like the kind of way i view competition for ethereum and maybe people will say well you're being too like you know cocky about it you know you're resting on your laurels like we're not though like ethereum is not resting on its laura's ethereum is not bitcoin it did not say well we're just going to be this one thing ethereum is innovating across every single vertical that you can think of right now and that's not even slowing down i mean you and i spend every waking you know minute in the ethereum ecosystem and we can't even keep up with everything we

cover it all the time we try to educate um yeah so that's that's kind of like why i push back on that and you know people can think and laugh at me and say well you know ethereum's getting too cocky it's going to be dethroned and whatever like i i'm fine yeah exactly like i'll see you after the next bear mark we'll see how many of your favorite ethereum killers are still around then that's exactly right like and so at some point like the energy to convince the people that think that binance smart train is coming for ethereums like if you really think that like i create great for you and i'll talk to you later like you'll figure it out eventually or you'll leave and either way my problem is solved um anthony this has been a great uh friday live stream

we're doing this every week guys and again shout out for the people in the comments the comments are a ton of fun i just posted uh sazil's daily guay youtube channel so go ahead and follow that if you want to keep up with what anthony does he does basically what we're doing every single day but he does it by himself as he runs through a bunch of news it's my personal where i get all my alpha and then also while you're here go ahead and like the video and subscribe to the channel uh and anthony i will see you again in a week yes yes hopefully uh you know we're at fresh all-time highs in a week as well yeah keep all-time highs every day until next week i'll see you yeah and anthony uh what are we going to be at next week oh man oh man we have to be at least 2

500 i would think um in seven days i mean why not like 100 bucks you know less than a hundred dollar game a day like we're only 400 away from it now you know uh we're good i think we can get there but we'll see i don't want to get too ahead of myself yeah i love it i love that why not all right thanks everyone for tuning in and we will see you in a week at 2 500.