Bankless Daily Gwei Livestream | Bear Market, Wonderland Drama, NFT Mania, Merge Cometh,

Transcript

anthony what's up hey hey man what's going on so disclaimer anthony's internet is going through his phone so we're gonna make the best of that uh but since both him and i like to rant i don't really think that's gonna be too much of an issue with uh latency between us um but uh now that that disclaimer is out of the way anthony nice room thank you thank you sir new room new house uh over the holidays moved into a new place so very uh very happy uh at the moment but they had much bigger room like this is i think five times the size of my little shoe box i was in before so uh so much more room for activities that's for sure so much more room for activities um yeah yeah so in speaking of activities what

are we gonna talk about today so much man i think the last time we did like one of these streams was uh it was months ago now i don't remember how many months because you've been like traveling like crazy right over the last like six months or something you've been traveling like mad like the conferences and things like that i've been seeing it on on twitter and even on instagram because they follow you on instagram but it's it's fun like how like on twitter it's like you don't really share like you know you know my personal stuff of things going on and kind of like what you're doing in real life yeah yeah exactly social stuff like whereas an instagram is like all about that so i've got like the the david the crypto dj inside and then i have the david socialite side and

it's just funny how like those are those are very different between the platforms some people make those lives the same thing as in like you see the same thing on their instagram as they are on their twitter but my instagram is locked down like i'm deleting like follow requests after follow request like no like you don't like go follow me on twitter like you don't need to be here on instagram this is for me and my college friends yeah yeah yeah exactly exactly so that's why i didn't even use instagram uh at all really and i get that too i'm just like nah guys like there's nothing interesting here like you don't need to say anything on here anthony to kick things off how would you characterize or yeah characterize the last like four months in crypto

uh weird i think i think it just caught everyone kind of like off guard because we went back to all-time highs and everyone thought oh wow yeah we're gonna go you know keep going to price discovery it's going like 10k btc is going to 100k you know it's all well and good and then we crashed again and i mean it wasn't actually like a big crash like back in may it was just kind of like a gradual kind of like dump and then it accelerated obviously like the further into the dump you go the more it accelerates because people start panicking and everything then we have like all these macro stuff happen with the fed and everyone's trying to be an expert on that like what is the fed going to do and everyone's like oh the fed's killing the crypto markets and so i i just think

it's just been weird man like but but weird on the market side but really encouraging on the fundamental side because of um stuff like layer 2's taking off and and things like that has been they've been really cool but um i think weird and sobering as well because as we saw i guess over the last kind of like it's 96 hours now um that the frog nation kind of like uh is not it's no longer really a nation it's kind of like i come apart a bit uh because of people doing what they always do which is deifying someone and then that's someone eventually not you know living up to their expectations so i think that you know it's funny how like the timing lines up where it kind of like lying that lined up exactly with the projects tokens going to [ __ ] like time which was

the kind of like on fork which is like the the the stand stand and bearer of that eco system that kind of like dumped really hard and then suddenly this stuff comes out to make it even worse it's just funny how like the timelines of these things always line up i know i think that's actually a great place to start because um uh we saw a very small anecdote which is actually not the point of the conversation that i want to make happen is like we saw the same thing with the penguins where like the penguins floor just kept on falling falling falling and then all of a sudden there's a bunch of like drama with the founders team like like no [ __ ] right uh and also like something i noticed and i was like wary of it i had like an eye on it happening

during the last quarter of 2021 uh and then like you know it manifested in kind of the way that it was would be predictive is that like the last half of the year of last year especially the last quarter it really really felt like there was way more toxicity there was way more just yelling there was just way more tribalism there was and it it felt like to me that the ecosystem was like grasping for the last uh scraps on the table it's like everyone was like yo like what's going on here like you know but like people it was weird because it was bullish but people were still fighting and it definitely feel like the sentiment was just like that the the ma the growing

the pie sentiment was not present in the last half of the year and it was very much like there's scraps on the table and there's not much left and now we have to grab it all and so people started fighting me and ryan started getting like we got we got attacked as in like the got appointed as east maxie's way more than we ever have had and i take i did i take that i put that blame upon myself not not blaming the people saying this but like we did it too like the industry just kind of felt like there was just like scraps on the table and there's not gonna be much left and so we started grabbing after them and then the next like three months after that and continuing throughout that was like downwards bearish price action like did you notice that too

yeah yeah i mean i noticed that and i've seen people call it kind of like a pvp environment or a player versus player environment rather than pve because you essentially are fighting over you know it's the same kind of like scraps that are left on on the table because like all the all the food's gone because like all the the um the non you know i guess like i guess people call them really time investors um they kind of like came and went and they took their money with them and then yeah things start falling apart and i think it's funny that like uh you mentioned the example of the punju penguins thing i think what ends up happening is that people are making money they don't care to look at these things and then when people start losing money they look for a reason to can

explain what happened and then they inevitably find skeletons in the closet right that's why you always see it coming out once and then it just i mean the thing is it can come out during bullish periods too but i think it what ends up happening is that during the bearish periods it just feels a lot more kind of a lot worse because you know you're not only losing money on whatever token you speculated on but now the people that you deified or the the people that you followed or the you know the the the truth that you thought was uh was real um turns out that it's fake and you have to deal with that you have to deal with the fallout of that while also losing money and then what ends up happening is because you have like such a loss of confidence you're like oh crap

like do i just cut my losses and then when you actually materialize the loss by selling that's like the final kind of diet to the heart and you just get kind of like really depressed over it really sad over especially if you lose a lot of money especially first-time crypto people and i think a lot of people who played in these kind of like projects especially the the the ponzi-esque ones the ones that kind of like had those ponzi mechanics to them uh they were newer people and um they i don't think they have ever experienced losing like you know even 50 of their investment let alone some people probably lost eighty ninety percent yeah yeah exactly and it started it started with um uh as i i mean maybe it started with like people like dying from like the nft market but that happened a while ago um

but like owen was the first big one but it was after people started losing monies in the in the blue chips right like after bitcoin and ether had like basically cut their prices in half uh and then home was like you know oh it turns out some projects only work in bull markets right some some projects don't actually work when prices go down uh and i think owen was like the first one of that uh 2vd as to whether the whole entire thing implodes like to to its actual death i don't think it's actually dying dying but like the hype is definitely gone and that was like the and then the the next like ponzi nomiks type type projects just kind of followed suit and i think it's kind of a question now is like do do we see more of those because like there's so much like defy just like

implosion right now that like i'm kind of shocked that it's actually staying relatively quarantined as as to like the rest of the whole entire market yeah it's funny because like you you said it a lot of these things only work during bull markets because they needed fresh you know cash flows or cash input to kind of like prop themselves up i think there's still a lot of interesting ideas but a lot of it was implemented in such a way that it relied on kind of like the bull market it relied on the degeneracy and it's funny because there's a lot of the d5 quote unquote default 1.0 projects that a lot of people are giving [ __ ] to over the last you know few months and saying they're too boomer you know they're not doing anything but they're not trying to do what the quote-unquote 2.0 projects

are trying to do they're not trying to be these speculative games they're just trying they're aiming for stability and with stability is boring right like stability is not uh something that people you know i think you think of as something like fun and a game that can play but the thing is is that when the the tide kind of like runs out and when all the money runs out you want that stability and that's exactly what these projects will kind of like offer you whereas as we've seen like these other ones that you kind of like get this false sense of security being like oh this product's awesome like this works so well we've kind of like new paradigm right we've unlocked all these kind of new numbers so much yeah exactly and then and then you know the music stops and there's literally like one

chair and then and there's like 100 people right so i i think um it's just that's why i said like weird and sobering the last few months because sobering because i think a lot of people that was calling who were calling this stuff out got a lot of [ __ ] for it as well um basically they were they were kind of derided saying you know you're you're just being like a maxi of this or you're just kind of like being a bear for no reason and they've kind of like been um vindicated now i think by that i think there's lessons learned and the main takeaway for me if it was the whole thing is that this sort of [ __ ] is what regulators look at and it's kind of like really pissing me off that they're just going to have more ammo to go and

regulate this stuff with instead of like you know realizing that defy is is you know an actual kind of like the real d5 products are actually kind of revolutionary and provide a lot of value they're just going to look at these things that attach themselves to the d5 brand when in reality they're just ponzi games they're literally they're not what we think of as d5 they're just attaching and they're not even decentralized like we saw with with the sifu thing they're not even decentralized so not only are they not d5 they're not even they're not as kind of like the whole they're not even decentralized so it's just funny how that kind of like shakes out as well yeah granted the newest d5 projects are always going to be the most centralized like that's kind of just like a force of nature um they're also the ones that make the

most noise and they're also the ones that have the most upside in the tokens right by by just process of them being new um but you're totally right like it's a very unfortunate combination that of those of those things right new projects have the most upside therefore they get the most attention uh and they're also the most centralized like these things all happen at once and so it's always like the frontier of d5 that is always the branding of what defy is because that's what people like elizabeth warren will hear from the outside right they're going to see things like oh this map literally something is called magic internet money it's like look at that magic internet money thing with the founder that was a felon that was like hiding out as an anon literally becoming a shadowy super coder that's what i was

talking about right like and how can you turn to elizabeth warren and tell her no you're wrong like there's actually things called maker dow actually things called uniswap actually things called compound that are extremely boomer and boring and stable and they're not making any news because they're stable and they should be like actually like not having news about maker and compound and and uniswap and ave is a feature it's a feature of stability and and i don't think anyone is really valuing that side of of like the d5 1.0 that you and i grew up with yeah and i think it's just virtual the fact that the tokens either don't move in price or they've come down a lot from

their golden days during d5 summer um but the token price doesn't take away from the actual kind of like product like the token price performing poorly doesn't take away from the product i mean eth performed poorly for a very long time and the product kept getting bigger kept getting better uh you know up and to the right and it happens with a lot of projects their metrics just keep going up and up and to the right but they're um their comprises stay stay kind of like flat relatively and you know crypto's a game of attention like uh i've been talking about this for a little while now trying to make people realize that the things that the most attention are going to be the things that consistently go up in value kind of like over time but they have to retain that attention like you can have

attention for like three months and you can be the you know the best thing ever like three months is actually an eternity in crypto but think about as another example think about all the kind of like random um airdrops tokens that come out and like for a week they have all the attention like everyone's talking about them and then not i mean sometimes there's even less than a week but like then they just kind of like disappear completely no one's talking about them the attention game is literally the game you want to be winning and you know that's been one of my ball cases for ethereum is that like it's impossible for ethereum not to have everyone's attention all the time because it's just the network that runs everything um but there's a lot of these things that uh if they don't have the attention they

the price won't move because people people won't buy it like as simple as that like it's literally just a marketing game within the day like look at the top ten there's a reason why cardano is in there right like when it shouldn't be there's a reason why xrp is still in there when it shouldn't be it's a marketing game at the end of the day it's an attention game so i think from that perspective you know the reason why a lot of these things have come down now is because uh they they blew up but they're also going to lose their attention now the you know i've already noticed the frog nation like the engagement that they're getting is like 90 less than what it was like two weeks ago like they're all gone already because they lost money like they were just newer participants who wanted to

play these games and as soon as they lose money what other reason do they have to stick around like the game's over they're like okay i'm going to do something else now and part of the existence of the frog nation is predicated on the fact that they are very good at forcing attention upon things like what is the frog nation other than just like this nebulous ball of energy and attention telling everyone else that they need to focus on it like that's part of the game and like maybe they don't know this concretely but they know this subconsciously as a unit that attention is the game um what's about to say about that yeah um go ahead no i was i was going to say like it's funny because like frog nation i think started with chain link um or at least like they had the frogs

and tranley performed really well for a while then it lost its attention but the chain link product is still going you know it's still growing it's powers so much of d5 it's still um you know it's still something that a lot of them a lot of people kind of use even if they don't realize they're using it because they're using d5 products that use it um but like the price stopped going up and and the the frogs that were kind of like most of the frogs that were supporters of chain link or they just kind of like disappeared right so i think building up a community around this nebulous kind of like thing that like the frog nation is probably not a good long-term strategy uh and it's just funny how like people love to always deify someone like you know daniel sesta like to his credit was very very good at

building a following in a community like very very good i mean he knew the the things to say to get the people riled up like and very popular tactics but they work there's a reason why they work um but they only work when times are good when times are bad and all the promises that you've made start falling apart then it's very people are very quick to turn on you or very quick to just like be like okay well this guy turns out to be like not maybe not a fraud but turned out to like not actually um you know be my savior sort of thing and it's funny because this isn't unique to crypto this has been happening in humanity for thousands of years people always love to look at someone and be like yeah you're promising all the like politicians the perfect example right you're paul you're

promising all this thing i love you i'm going to vote for you and then they don't do any of that and you just kind of like ah crap well now you know you lied to me again and we keep falling for it every single time because we all we want people we want you know to be able to trust someone to actually help us and make our lives better um especially like in politics and things like that and especially in crypto where people come in and they're like i don't know what to do right the new people they come in like okay what do i buy you know who do i follow how do i make money here and then you have someone promising you that they're doing like especially danielle where he basically said oh i'm doing this for you guys like screw the vcs

we're all in this together we're the frog nation you know we're gonna take on the big bad billionaire vcs and of course you can get suckered into that because you're basically like well yeah i'm not a big bad billionaire i just want to make some money on this sort of stuff i'm going to join the frog nation this is and it's a community thing too right it's like this is cool i feel awesome um and i don't blame people for doing that but it always ends the same way like you people can these people they're not gods they can't live up to the promises that they that they kind of like go on about um and you know even if they're being honest actors it's still i think they get sucked into it as well it's very easy to get sucked into if you have like thousands tens of thousands

millions of people all kind of like loving you you kind of like get this god complex around you and you're like yeah well i can do all of this like maybe i am as amazing as everyone thinks i am and it's just it snowballs from there doing it having the frogs on your side is like doing a deal with the devil right like you get you get riches you get success you get popularity you get momentum you get attention they all align with you but like as an individual who joins the frog army like the frog army will if you don't bend the knee to the frog army then they like then it's like it's like if you're not with us you're against us right and so like there was a was one of the guys at bank list when we were going through the drama with the

frogs and we were butting heads with them he was like yo why don't we just like try and align with the frog army like why why don't we like join like why not like they're populist bankless is populist why can't we be on the same side here and the problem with that is that you can't you actually be on the same side as the frogs without becoming a frog yourself like it's not like you can brand yourself as a friend of the frogs because if you start to deviate from what it means to be a frog they stab you in the back so fast they will they will stab you so quickly if you deviate from the the script right and like whatever the script is undefined but all the frogs know what it is right so like you there is no such thing as aligning with

the frog army without actually turning into a frog yourself uh and and exactly what you said about like becoming like infectious for these builders like the frogs the frog army puts their will upon these builders too like it's like you gotta make us rich bro like if you don't make us rich like we're gonna leave you and we're gonna move on to the next person that makes us rich like first it was train link and then it was avalanche then it was like the time like that there was like you know a couple things uh and then and then there was like wherever the frogs landed like they're just like locusts of the attention their attention locusts that go around and then they milk dry whatever project that they decide to descend upon uh and then they move on to the next one and so like it's one of

those things where like you have as an individual or as like for somebody like you you and me and mia bankless and and and daily guys like you cannot align with the frogs because they will consume you and redefine you and will make you for like give away all of your values and your morals in order to become a frog yeah i mean i i try to like personally just taking a neutral stance to these things where i don't get involved in kind of like in in either way in like a positive or negative way i i observe um i remember i remember that drama with you guys and and the [ __ ] but is that you being oppressed by the frogs because you're not you're not like saying [ __ ] you frogs you're wrong you're just letting them do their thing is that some sort of frog oppression

look it's not it's not just with the frogs with everything like these days i try not to stop stir up too much drama um because there's a lot of things that i i want to say publicly um but i don't and then it just ends up that like i should have because it turns out i was gonna be right anyway um like i i wanted to say plenty of times that i thought that arm and its forks were all going to kind of collapse during the bearish period because it was very obvious that was going to happen but i don't want to that take to be taken the wrong way by the genuine builders as well who who are genuinely trying to build something cool they they may not you know they may not actually be kind of like uh nefarious with it but they may take my

my opinions as as being like bearish on their project when in reality it's just kind of like the truth right like it's kind of like very obvious to me that these things can only work when markets are hot um but that's why i take the neutral stance and i just can't be bothered with the drama these days uh i used to be much more aggressive um there are some things i'm aggressive about like cardano i just oh god i talk about it too much but like it just annoys me it's so much like how much they can get away with in terms of like misleading people and how much people will give how many chances people will give them right after everything we've seen not just from them but like from so many projects that they promise the world and they don't deliver it and then the people

just keep giving them chances i don't know and i you know obviously ethereum as a protocol was guilty of over promising too but like at least ethereum kind of like has a bustling ecosystem and a lot of things work right the double standards of this whole thing is absolutely ridiculous because like if ethereum and cardano feel like they get the same level of scrutiny which is absolutely ridiculous because ethereum and cardinals should be receiving a lot more scrutiny than ethereum because ethereum is actually provably following through with what it's claiming to do albeit slowly and then cardano is just whatever the [ __ ] it is like it's just some sort of mess utxo ecosystem yeah what i find funny is that whenever

i bring up dude we are not getting charles hawkinson on the podcast it's not happening sorry sorry that was youtube yeah um well you got his son on the podcast or it's all right now so it's all right um uh i don't know people know that i mean people think that i'm charles's son but um i think like for what i find what i found daniel on the youtube comments just says don't talk bad about your dad anthony yeah there you go well what what we thought before karen had smart contracts right i used to kind of give him a [ __ ] for it and then people would bring up oh but you know there's no e2 yet neither has been promised for like years and it's like well i mean yeah okay but like if ethereum didn't have smart contracts or

if you didn't have any functionality before e3 went what was going to go live or this mythical e2 thing we don't call it eth2 anymore but you know what i mean um like i would still i would have the same opinion then but like it's just different like people like to do these false equivalences and there's what about ism whenever you kind of bring something up um but i think that for me it's always the false promises of these other ecosystems where they basically promise the world and they deliver hardly anything and you know this funny thing is that this doesn't just happen in crypto it happens a lot in video games as well where you'll see like a brand new ip from like a major studio they'll show off the game at some kind of like gaming conference and it'll be an awesome tech demo they'll promise like

all these features and then by the time the final product comes out it's like you know 10 of what they promised essentially and that's because as i said before it's all marketing and attention game you need to drum up the attention for your game and there's no consequences for them not delivering they can just say oh well you know we ran out of time we can't deliver a lot people still buy the bloody game i mean look at pokemon it's the same bloody game for the last 20 years and it's record sales still so i think um it's funny like how all these you know these all the industries do it right they over promise but i think within crypto it's especially nefarious because you can get away with so much uh because so many people don't understand the the the kind of like nuances between things

like the amount of people who think that comparing the amount of transactions a chain does within a day uh is an actual kind of like equivalence is is mind-boggling right like i actually expect ethereum l1 transaction count to go down over time as heavier transactions fill up the block space right like down in quantity up in up in magnitude up in value exactly so and the thing is this is very kind of in the weight stuff and i don't blame people for not realizing it not that in the weeds but but look look it's in the ways in terms of like um i mean it is like okay the way i always think the way i always think about this is like if i said what i just said to you to my mom would you have absolutely any idea what i'm talking about no okay

if i explained it to her would you have any idea what i'm talking about no right i have to explain it and i'd have to start from like zero i'd have to start explaining you know what a blockchain is what a block is what transaction is you you got to get the building block that's what that's that's how we're taught in school right in primary school especially where they give us the building blocks over time they don't just go straight into it and be like okay here's how you do multiplication division right they teach us about numbers first they have to start from like the very beginning and this is god this is what emin has been doing from avalanche he's like oh yeah like avalanche is like 93 of the way have caught up to ethereum that's a nonsensical sentence you're not catching up to ethereum after

you go off into a different direction like the block height how many blocks are appended to a blockchain only works when you compare it to two forks of the same exact blockchain not a different blockchain and for some reason it's like oh yeah avalanche is only like you know two years old and it's caught up to 93 of the way to ethereum it's like you can't compare these things they're not comparable no they're not comparable at all um because the block times are different right yeah the block and they're different block size is different like it's just yeah it's so it's so like it's funny because like this is what eos used to do remember it's all the same tactics eos used to do the transaction count tactic they used to do the block height tactic as well they used to do all the

misleading marketing but in reality um it was just their transaction account was all bots because it was like basically free to use the network it was all bots and that's what we saw actually happen with solana um but maybe we should like move on from bashing the other ones you and i tend to do this we do it a lot it just i think it's just because it upsets us but let's let's move on to some more positive things i actually want to talk about the layer 2 stuff a bit because that has been amazing i mean that has been like one of the most positive positive things over the last six months i think it's finally coming into its own and i'm actually noticing the narrative shift pretty heavily now from ethereum can't scale at all to okay ethereum is scanning by a layer twos and

people can actually use it right right there's a difference between us talking about it for years and saying we're gonna scale by a layer too knowing that it's coming but no one could use it now that people can use it they're like oh okay it's real oh wow okay it's only like you know obviously it's still more expensive than some of these cheaper alt l1 but it's only like a couple of dollars for a swap compared to like 50 bucks on main net or something like that's a massive improvement so the fact that people can use it i think is what's changing the narrative and as i've said like plenty of times before i think once they have native tokens as well that's going to change the narrative completely we're going to see people be like why do i need l1s when i can just buy l2s and i

can buy east and stuff and it's just going to be like one of those rotation trades i think for a bit but uh i think on on the tech side as well like arbitrary and optimism are like in a battle right now to a lower gas fire gas phase right they're like pity they're picking up frog right yeah for the last like three roll-ups that we've done on bankless i was like okay uh optimism just announced a 30 reduction in gas fees uh that's different from last week's 30 percent reduction in gas week the gas fees this is another one and also now they're ahead of arbitrarum and then next week is like oh arbitrary just reduced gas fees by like another 30 percent this is not the nitro upgrade that arbitrary talking about that's coming next this is very very satisfying to be able to just

like iterate week after week like oh yeah the fees are going down there's more total fees and there's that one chart that optimism put out where they had two lines on it one was quantity of fees on on arbitrary and in the last like week it's just hockey stick and then they also had the multiplier of how many times cheaper it is versus the l1 and also hockey stick and like oh weird like when you uh you know or reduce the fees by orders of magnitude you induce the transaction count by orders of magnitude like weird how that works and like we are just at the beginning cusp of this like this is about to be 30 after 30 after 30 reductions for like the next half a year at the very least before it gets down to just like straight up pennies and finally can be like the five

cent for a transaction internet of money meme that vitalik has been getting like yelled at for the past like two years yeah yeah and that's the thing like i think there's just such a stark difference between promises and and the real tech people can use at the end of the day right and that's why uh for the longest time people were like oh you know we've heard about these l2s for ages and there were some really bad takes where people said oh the ethereum altercation system is going to be like the bitcoin lightning network where it's not going to get any adoption and it's just going to fall flat on its face i actually hated those takes because i knew for a fact like i was so confident that that was not going to be the case like comparing the lining network to a roll-up is a nonsensical comparison they

are literally completely different things just because they're both called layer two doesn't mean they're any even the same thing just like a lot of layer one block chains are very very different um so i i and for me it's just been like super positive to see people actually um using it even though they're not they can still afford the l1 fees like there's a lot of people that i know who um you know whales right like i i have a lot of money but they're using l2 because for them it's kind of like well the l2 experience is just better it's faster transactions yes they're not finalized until they're posted through the chain but they're confirmed pretty much instantly there's blossoming ecosystems on there that aren't going to be on l1 because there's no point deploying to l1 you just deploy to l2 like there's plenty of apps now that are

l2 native and much more coming um and you know when you the thing is about the fees is that yes you can afford the fees but do you really want to be giving up 50 or 100 worth of 8th or you know a week or something to fees um when you you're really bullish on eighth i don't want to give up my precious if i don't need to like if i can do these things for like a fraction of the cost even though i can afford the l1 phase i would i would do that and i think that that was very promising for me because i actually wondered i'm like okay are these whales going to move to l2 quickly and i think they will especially if there's kind of like opportunities for them but i think the fate of l1 is just to be kind of like mev stuff um and l2

proofs but you know the funny thing is is that the mev stuff will actually get priced out by l2s because they they won't be able to compete lt's will be like well i'm gonna pay like the biggest fee and you guys don't even stand a chance because i have much more money than you because you can think of l2 is just like a a a this kind of like monolithic user who uh basically collects all these fees remember around using it and then post it to r1 and they're like the bidder of that block space they're like they're like me or you bidding on the block space and but they've got a lot more money than we do so i think that's gonna kind of like take over as well and i'm actually looking forward to seeing block space be used for more l2 stuff because that is

the future we're working towards and once once it does that it's kind of like a validation of the of the thesis of you know one being the settlement layer do you think that the whole like well i guess we can't really call it a rotation trade until like the tokens come uh so like i feel like people are like they're warming up to it it's like oh yeah maybe l2 is our other thing but they actually aren't like can't actually do anything about that like you can go and just like uh retroactively farm all these like l2s just by going like and putting your money on there and like pressing buttons on your ledger but no one really knows how to actually try and farm the airdrop on these things yeah yeah i mean i think obviously a lot of people are trying to farm the edge up

right now and just by using the networks but the funny thing is is that there's so much to do on these networks now that even if you're only farming the airdrop you just get stuck there anyway because you're like well why would i go back to l1 like l2 is awesome um but i i think that there will be a pretty major rotation trade um i'm not sure like i don't think all the l2 tokens will come out at once they'll probably come out like relatively close to each other but i think that there will be rotation traits that happen and i think the money will come from the other l1s i don't think it's going to come from anything else because that's the most sense sensible thing um i'll be curious to see if like the l2 tokens go up in value with eth like is that kind of like a

correlation trade there because in my mind like if you're speculating on the l2 stuff you should be speculating on ether as well because it's all additive to eat at the end of the day so you you should have both it shouldn't be like okay i'm going to go 100 into like the optimism token i'm not going to hold any i mean as a long-term investor i don't think that that would you know be the best path forward um but that's how i how i would play it too i just like well i have my eight stack i'll buy some l2 tokens right and see how that goes and you know they're probably gonna have staking and things like that too so i'll just stake them and and and kind of like uh maybe earn some spend some yield there but uh it's going to be

interesting to see like how quickly the narrative shifts because i actually i'm not a big fan of these rotation trades because it's so obvious what people are trying to do like there's a few big accounts on crypto twitter that are always doing the rotation trade they're like oh so luna avax and they tried to mean phone which was like phantom um cameron but the o was uh and there's a n i think there's neo in there and there's like some other ones in there but they're trying to meme that i think harmony harmony was was the o and then um the fact that it's not any one name and it has to be an amalgamation of many many names speaks volumes yeah exactly it's just like people just oh well these things haven't pumped yet we're gonna go rotate into them and it's just trader games this is why whenever

that happens i'm like well there's no way i'm touching this because like these aren't investors these are traders and traders do not stay in a position for for very long right especially if it's like a a week or month long trade for them um so i i i think the rotation stuff can be dangerous too because it can burn people but that's just the markets this is what they're gonna do but i do think the narrative will very quickly change because you're gonna have like a community that is now bought into these ecosystems now has exposure to it sort of like what happened with polygon i mean polygon is technically the first kind of like well one of the first kind of automatic i should say one of the first l2 tokens because they do have l2s now like obviously much of the value came from the pos chain but they do have

l2s now um and i think just looking at what happened there with their community and how well it did um is kind of like a a sign for what's to come with the l2s i think and and um the matic token i think you you talked about like um valuing ether versus these l2 tokens and we definitely saw matic and ether move in correlation with each other versus the rest of the market so like it's always kind of been my position that if ether goes up maddox is also going to go up and i think if i recall correctly like mata goes up more than ether does when ether goes up uh and so i'm kind of in the camp that lsu tokens are kind of been going to be a marginally leveraged ether position just because if i mean if when ether price goes up then

ether fees go up i've there's debate about whether this is true on the l1 or not and like i definitely kind of think that like when the value of ether goes up you're paying higher gas fees uh and so if that's true if the value of ether doubles the incentive to move to an l2 also doubles uh and so like you're just going to get more and more activity on on a layer 2. um before you respond to that guys anthony and i do these live streams every now and then it's been a while but i would expect them to continue in the future anthony if you guys don't know if you guys live under a rock and you haven't been paying attention to ethereum as granularly as he has you can go and click that link in the comments it takes you to the daily

great youtube channel where dan anthony puts on daily videos every single day talks about ethereum talks about data because he just absolutely loves ethereum he also has a newsletter the daily way that also goes out every single day uh anthony um what's up with that uh leverage eth2 token or layer two tokens leveraged teeth leveraged yeah i mean if the narrative is there i think it can be and especially because they have much lower market caps than ethereum i think people forget like how different how much of a difference in market cap there is between ethereum and like most other things like ethereum's market cap even today still 300 billion if i go to polygon and check 400 there it fully fully diluted my oh no 300 i mean we dumped man like i'm sorry to tell you

it eats in the 2000s bed oh wow 304 wow yeah but but but comparing it to polygons fully diluted value is 17 billion right so you you compare those things like very very different market caps so yes they're going to move you know uh uh faster than than if's going to move just just by virtue of that and my hunch has been that a lot of these l2 tokens are going to be worth similar valuations especially the popular ones like optimism and arbitrarium um starkware zk sync i think that they could be worth around the same like they're going to be mean as a relative trade as well so i expect them all to be worth multiple billions probably 10 plus billion as a fully diluted market cap so we'll have to see how those move as well

but it also depends like what the tokenomics look like what the emission rate is if they do massive liquidity mining programs and they're going to be relatively uh do relative trades with l1s as well i think they're going to be rated against the l1 so it's going to be interesting to see how that kind of like shakes out but uh i i i mean i don't see them not being worth a lot because like i mean the potential for growth is massive right just as big as any of like you value an l2 the same way you would value with kind of like an l1 in terms of like okay well people are going to build on this everyone's going to be using it like it's going to um generate like a lot of a lot of kind of like revenue blah blah it's like the

future of scaling so but yeah it depends on the tokenomics too depends on like the airdrop like they have to get the airdrops right if they don't the command we've seen the projects that don't get their airdrops right powerstop is the perfect example here they completely messed up their airdrop and their token is down like or 90 or something and like i think their product actually people boycotted their product over it uh the tokens down 99 i thought i thought yeah the products the products yeah the products fine but the thing is is that they did such a poor airdrop that it actually affected their core product so their token actually worked against them so i'm actually very conscious of that these days especially for the l2s i really hope they don't screw up those sorts of

things because you don't want to you want to piss off your early community that's for sure you want to you want to reward them or at least kind of like have them bought in um because if you don't then yeah the bad stuff happens somebody you're going to get a kick out of this somebody in the youtube comments as i just asked what other l1 tokens do you hold david except for ethan btc and i'm like bro i don't even hold btc man [Laughter] yeah yeah i mean i'm the same man like i only hold eighth like i've never actually bought uh well no i should say 2017 i did but like since then i don't think i bought any other l1 the one that i held until uh relatively recently was was dot because i bought that at the 2017 ico but i traded that like pretty much immediately

for eighth when it unlocks yeah and then the funny thing is is that like if i i mean if we both had bought like the l ones kind of like a year ago uh it would have been a really really good trade but i can't bring myself to buy things that i don't actually believe in it doesn't matter if i'm wrong or right like i just can't i just can't do it even if i had the thought and i probably at some point did it was like well you know all l1's ethereum just went ether just went from like 600 up to like you know twenty four hundred dollars in the first half of 2021 like there's probably i think i remember having the ideas like well there's probably going to be an l1 like movement and then i didn't care about it and i

was like well like you know whatever like do i really care and and you know maybe that's just like oh i watched my tokens go up like 4x and price really fast like do i really need to do i really need to press buttons on my ledger at this point but also it's one of the things where like none of them have ethereum's roadmap and it's it's ethereum's roadmap that i've fallen in love with not ethereum itself it's the roadmap the roadmap is is the specific design architecture um i also kind of unless you want to respond to that point specifically i kind of want to go back to the l2 conversation because i think we have left some conversation on the table with regards to the bridges um yeah yeah let's talk about the bridges let's talk about the bridges okay so like many many l2s they all need tokens

l2s have to have tokens like just almost everything needs to have tokens especially l2s bridges also need to have tokens and so what i've been doing as one would expect is going on to l2's via bridges via hop protocol i think hop protocols will hop onto retro retro farm connects also uh basically all the bridges uh and then at least because you you you hit two birds with one stone like you you use the bridge to farm that retro air drop and you're going from one l2 to another l2 which means you've already touched both l2s uh and so like you can and and then hopefully you also start doing other contract-based things on these layer twos like the amount of surface area that

is potentially available for just this mass air dropping is so high and maybe i'll just leave it there i just think there is like a potential of like we there's a [ __ ] meme about it l222 that the amount of just airdrop marketing surface area to happen on layer twos and the bridges and the infrastructure and the native apps is like insanely high it i mean yeah at 100 i think that all the bridges will definitely have tokens i think farming them um is the right play especially if you're on l2's like you can kill two birds with one stone by bridging between the l2s to farm the l2 airdrop and farm the the bridge protocol airdrop um but it's funny because like

it i've often thought about this like does these bridges or l2s kind of like delaying a token and for as long as possible actually benefit them because they're going to have so many people on boarding just to farm the token and that's just kind of like free marketing for them because as i said before if you're on board um to this thing just to farm the the l2 token but then you realize that there's actually a whole ecosystem here for you to play around with there's more like it's more likely that you're going to stay there so i think that these l2s and these bridges may uh at least most of them may delay doing a token until until uh you know as late as possible just so they can get that free market because once you've done the airdrop no one's farming the airdrop anymore

obviously right like that you don't get that anymore but you do switch from people finding the airdrop to okay now you have a token now you can incentivize liquidity in certain ways you can pay you know developers to build on you you can kind of put liquidity mining rewards on on things so it kind of switches it up a bit but i i do think like the the potential airdrop thing they're always holding up that you know that carried on a stick to people is a massive driver of a lot of these volumes and and it's actually pretty wild to see because i mean i in the delegate disco channel i'm always ready people kind of like speculating okay well if this if this has a token like let's just go farm it like there's a whole channel dedicated to air drop farming in there um but you

know i've always said that uh just assume that every single project that doesn't have a token yet will have a token some point in the future so you know farming it is probably like the um the plus tv thing to do yeah yeah exactly so uh but it's it's it's still going to be funny how like it it's it's kind of like swapping out the engine um uh and swapping out kind of like from uh um a gas powered car like an electric car um when you kind of like swap out the the way you incentivize the usage but uh yeah no the bridges stuff is is interesting because the the british stuff worries me as well at the uh so to some extent we saw a bridge get kind of like exploited today on bsc i think it was for 80 million

these bridges are going to be the biggest honey pots ever like for people who've watched on the daily grade listen to me going about bridges you'll know why and the major reason is that not all bridges are created equal um and they're going to hold so much kind of like ious between them because when you bridge your assets to another l1 from ethereum if they've been issued on ethereum they're only secured by ethereum uh they only exist on ethereum what you get on another chain is an iou so if you bridge each from ethereum to the avalanche sea chain you don't actually have eighth on the avalanche sea chain you have uh avalanche eight which is an iou that basically yeah exactly which basically says okay well you have eth locked in a smart contract on ethereum um okay we'll credit you some ious but if you lose

that on on the c chain for whatever reason then you're not getting that back from the contract on ethereum like there's no way to get that back unless i mean the avalanche bridge is centralized so they could get it back for you but i'm talking like if they didn't do that there's no way for you to recover it yourself and we really need to come up with a different name for these things because there's roll-up bridges which are the canonical bridges built by the roll-ups then there's also trustless bridges coming out of connext and i think all the other ones too i think hop is is i don't know the inner details of this but i think equally like as trustless well the funny thing is is that they're not even bridges because um hop is like a cross-chain decentralized exchange technically right right right yeah so

like it's better and and a bridge implies that you go from one point of this of the bridge to the end point right you start at one side you go to the end but but you don't you're basically cloning your asset essentially right and locking at some point so an actual bridge would be burning the asset on the chain on on ethereum and then asset only existing on the bridge side so if so um in that in that sense it's like native to every chain that you bridge to but you can only do that with certain things like you can't actually do that with eight because ethereum is the only network that issues eight and has the ability to issue eighth like ethereum eighth can't be issued on another uh l1 or even on a kind of like l2 so that's

what i'm saying like these bridges i get very complex and very messy very quickly and that's also why they're big honey pots because you can take advantage of this right so it's the cryptographic bridges that are the l2 bridges that we feel very very strongly about and then there are the the indiana jones swappers that are like the hot protocols and the connects protocols that allow you to trade assets like for like assets across the bridges and they use the bridges in order to operate that and so those are both trustless but then you have like the multisig bridges which are the insecure ones which we need a different word other than bridge to use so we can differentiate these things and that's the thing where it's like a bank iou where you put your money in and then there's a number that comes out on the

other side of which that bridge owes you on the other side of the bridge once you cross back over and like it's the bridge like the bridge does a disservice in the in that scenario the name bridge does a disservice to the actual true bridges which are the cryptographic bridges because we like cryptography or the things that trade across them for you in faster ways so like we need like it's more like um i don't know an international ferry of sorts where like i don't know maybe maybe the government says that the ferry's not going to go anymore and you're stuck on the wrong side like whoops yeah and i think so the way i try to like have a mental model about it and i think when thinking

about bridges is like what's it secured by at the end of the day so the roll-up bridges they're secured by ethereum like i think some of them still have centralized control i think pretty much all of them would have centralized controls in place but let's talk about the movies if they were kind of like trustless and decentralized and no centralized controls if something happened to the l2 this is why they're called an l2 if something happened if the l2 went offline you would still be able to withdraw your funds from the l1 that's the whole point right because the funds are still secured by ethereum all that's happening on the l2 is that um it's kind of like batching your transactions together to give you those cheaper fees on a roll-up whereas your funds on say the avalanche c chain is secured by the avalanche validator set

it is not secured by ethereum only the funds that's on the contract on the ethereum side is secured by ethereum but you can't access those funds without bridging back right so if you lose the funds on the on the seed chain there's nothing that ethereum can do for you because you don't have ethereum's protection for those ious um and i think people don't realize that i think people when they bridge over they think that uh uh that they've got like actual eighth or actual you know whatever other token they've bridged across uh and that's actually gonna be very dangerous as time goes on i think because bridges are lucrative bridges uh people love using them because there's opportunities on different chains but this is why i even like vitalik is kind of bearish on cross chain um stuff because it there's no way to do it super

securely there's there's obviously a way to do um multi-chain securely which is like multi uh the ethereum and its l2s or another chain and its l2s but doing cross chain securely with you know as is basically impossible i think from what i've seen it's uh it's just not technically feasible so love to see how that all shakes out but um that's what i've been thinking a lot about with regards to the bridges especially as they become more popular uh so uh somebody just said ask on the youtube comments would you encourage doing smaller transactions to minimize risk if a bridge is attacked in transit i don't think there's much like in transit risk is there um and again it depends on which uh which kind of bridge we're talking about um i don't think there's there's the amount of time in transit

from l1 to l2 i think it's pretty damn small i think it's something like 20 blocks and so unless like you're only the only way that you're going to be attacked is if you're someone like goddamn whale who's pushing like a saturated level of volume through these things would you agree with that i mean if you're going from l1 to l2 via the official bridges then the risk is pretty small like uh but if you're using these cross-chain dexers then there's a bunch of different risks i guess liquidity is a big kind of thing where i mean there could be some mev stuff in there as well that's uh that i i mean i i haven't thought deeply about that but uh i think just using the kind of like normal bridges from l1 to l2 is is is relatively safe but it's it's when you

start using these cross chain kind of like um uh dexa's that it becomes a lot more risky and then obviously the bridges with multisticks that secure them are probably like i mean i wouldn't say that they're not safe relatively but they're all it's also a you know a risk right if those multi-sig kind of like it get compromised i'm not saying that the the people that are behind it um aren't trustworthy and and you know will rug but it's more about like if those things get compromised like what will happen then um which which will happen eventually for one of these things so i think from that perspective um it's it it definitely varies greatly but just going from r1 to l2 from by the official bridge like survive the official kind of bridge contract

uh should be relatively safe for no matter the size it doesn't i don't think it matters if you do a smaller or a large size because you're literally you're not using any liquidity pools you're just literally bridging across your asset to to the l2 anthony win merge when merged look the latest implementers call previously implementers call mentioned that we have to do it in in june if we don't want to push back the difficulty bomb because difficulty bomb starts going off in june by mid july it will make the chain basically unusable so if we don't do it by june we have to do another hard fork to delay the difficulty bomb again and then do the merge um i think they're pushing for june they're trying really hard to get it done in june like mid-june i think

but anything can happen between now and then uh they could find some kind of like big bug that needs like a month to fix that would push back that date uh definitely so i would say that i mean there's not a quote unquote official date given this is just kind of like targets um but from my experience with ethereum core development i'm on the fence about you know them actually hitting the june target because there's always things that prop up not to say that they they aren't going to work hard to get there but there are lots of unexpected things that can that can pop up and this is the biggest upgrade in ethereum's history everyone wants to get it done asap but you can't rush these things like we can't get the merge wrong like that would be very disastrous but um when like june is like the target it

could you know it could happen in june it could happen in like july august i think that it's still happening this year 100 but um we'll have to see if it happens you know media or close to the end of the year yeah i forgot about the timing of the uh the um uh [ __ ] what is it called the freeze free difficulty bomb yeah yeah yeah yeah bar barring any significant like i'm caught in the middle of the merge is a really big effing deal and we cannot mess that up and the devs are feeling more pressure to shift the merge then and and more confidence i would also say with previous previous successful shipping and so like there's on one side there's like can't mess up the merge it's a really big deal and also like there's a

lot of pressure to ship the merge and like even vitalik i saw his vitalik's comment somewhere where he was saying like yeah like external when merged questions are just becoming more and more like legitimate um so i'm kind of in the camp of barring any significant bug that makes the developers feel like they lost in that test net and they need to start a new test net in order to start over again if that doesn't like minor bugs i would say that are still on the this side of the ice age equation um i feel like that's a very balanced take yeah no i i think so and i i think that like having an aggressive target date like that is actually pretty beneficial um as long as it doesn't lead to kind of like burnout

or anything but it's pretty beneficial because it gives people something to just really like steadfastly work towards but the thing is i think the the core devs and researchers feel exactly the same as as all of us they want to get this done it's been a long time coming they don't want to be on proof of work anymore for a variety of reasons um and it's kind of like this lingering thing that needs to be done before any other major upgrades can go in because the merge is just kind of like one thing right there are so many other things that still need to go into the network um on on them on the major sites like sharding and stateless ethereum on the um on the i mean still a big deal but miner side is like eip4488 which is reducing the cost for roll-ups um there's a bunch

of other things that people want to get into the network but all of that is on pause until the merge is done and i think that's actually kind of like not frustrating the the developers but like motivating them to be like well you know we want all these other cool stuff in but we need to do the hard yards of the merge first then we can do this cool stuff and i think once they get the merge out of the way it's also a massive kind of like um thing off their shoulders like weight off their shoulders where they're kind of like okay well this massive thing that like needed to go right is done and it's all well and dusted and now we can focus on all these other really cool [ __ ] we want to do that's way less kind of like um

risky and weightless uh kind of like things can go wrong with it and i think that's when ethereum really kicks into high gear as well because reducing the cost for all before roll ups by 5x with 44.88 is a big deal status ethereum is an absolutely massive deal sharding is a big deal if we can get all that done like 12 to 18 months i mean not all of it but like a lot of it 12 to 18 months after the merge would be awesome like it would it would just literally like i mean ethereum would become super super scalable like layer twos would become ethereum would get into every single corner of the internet the combination of l2s the merge and light clients means that ethereum is able to exist literally everywhere in all different corners of the internet and it's going to take a while for people to understand

what that means for ethereum to move and migrate into all corners of the internet but the combination of layer twos uh proof of stake and light clients makes ethereum the closest thing to water that any internet distributed system can exist it will seep into everywhere it can fit inside of and that's amazing yeah exactly and then users will feel it as well i mean if you think the l2 transactions are cheap today and and getting cheaper as time goes on um a lot of them are going to be like very very cheap like uh that we could get to that 10 20 cent kind of mark for for swaps eventually um which is stupidly cheap right like for ethereum security anthony there's a question in uh discord

how did anthony and david meet uh and the first time we ever met was probably on some like live stream somewhere probably so the answer is the internet but the first time we ever met in person was that eth denver anthony you're gonna are you gonna be able to make it to east denver oh it's true it's it's too risky because like i have to fly all the way from australia obviously and i was going to come until they instituted that thing where they're going to be um doing cobra tests to get into the venue i don't want to travel all that way and then get to the venue and be positive and not be able to enter the venue right like um and then and then even like if i am sick uh miss out on the conference and stuff like it's just it's too much hassle um i

really really wanted to go but i think you know there's plenty of other conferences i'm gonna go to eat amsterdam that's for sure in um april with devconnect as well around that that's going to be huge yeah yeah so and there's and there's obviously permissionless that you guys are running um in florida so i'm gonna i'm gonna be speaking there uh which is gonna be fun but i think it's in uh when is that may or june okay yeah may 17th and 19th please mark that iron calendar yeah it's all right i got it down somewhere but i don't actually remember how we met in terms of like the first time we spoke to each other or the first time we acknowledged each other's existence outside of like following each other on twitter on twitter and then we like ended up in the same discords together it's like oh

what's up yeah yeah that would definitely be how it was but definitely yeah when i first met you in real life it was denver um you know the funny thing is i haven't met like 99 of the people i know online in real life i think it's just because we haven't been able to go to comp well you have i haven't been able to go to conferences for like two years yeah it's it's really sucked yeah i'm excited to see you at the conferences man because like ethereum culture in real life has like changed shape a lot in the last like 12 months and it's definitely missing you missing you there well that's the thing like the last conference i went to was 8th denver in 2020 and that was like february 2020 that was before everything that eighth was like i was like one month before covid bro

exactly exactly and like um it was before the bull market is before defy summer it was before everything that that we can kind of like point to that happened uh and it's just been like i've literally lived through the entire last two years basically out of my study um i haven't really haven't traveled overseas um i haven't traveled interstate i've just literally gone maybe to like the country around here in um victoria a couple of times but um and to the city a couple of times but uh yeah it's just kind of wild like i mean i hear from you and hear from others that have been to conferences like how things are like you know super different to what they were and it's just funny how like i mean ethereum conferences were still good during the bear market they were like full of builders full of

like optimism but now that kind of like i guess we're in a completely different path where no one's doubting ethereum's future anymore it's kind of like you know ethereum's going to like bloody win ethereum's going to be huge i mean already it's huge it's going to be bigger than what it is i think i i can't wait to experience that so i think amsterdam will be my first conference i go to like since since september 2020. awesome man um bankless is hosting something at amsterdam as well so i will see you there all right guys we're up on the hour so i'm going to plug anthony's a show one more time so click the link in the chat box that's the daily way where anthony talks stuff like this every single day on his youtube channel and also writes stuff as well so uh thanks everyone for

tuning in to this uh randomly scheduled uh bankless daily gray friday live stream as soon as anthony's internet was pretty good actually uh but if he gets his internet at for real this time not just through his phone uh we could definitely be doing some more of these anthony any uh last thoughts no no i think it was good i i like doing these i know we hadn't done one in a little while because you were like traveling and stuff um but this is actually the first weekend that i've spent in my apartment in the last like eight weeks oh okay it's like the complete opposite of me man i never go out anywhere like i don't have a car so i don't go anywhere um but uh yeah no let's let's let's try to do this more often and i guess yeah thanks everyone for joining today

awesome and to sign off i'll read our last youtube comment salt spoon says anthony please don't wake up bullish can't help but mate i'll wake up bush every day i probably won't tweet about it most days though because it tends to crash the market awesome goodbye everyone thanks for tuning in cheers bye everyone hey we hope you enjoyed the video if you did head over to bankless hq right now to develop your crypto investing skills and learn how to free yourself from banks and gain your financial independence we recommend joining our daily newsletter podcast and community as a bankless premium subscriber to get the most out of your bankless experience you'll get access to our market analysis our alpha leaks and exclusive content and even the

bankless token for airdrops raffles and unlocks if you're interested in crypto the bankless community is where you want to be click the link in the description to become a bankless premium subscriber today also don't forget to subscribe to the channel for in-depth interviews with industry leaders ask me anythings and weekly rollups where we summarize the week in crypto and other fantastic content thanks everyone for watching and being on the journey as we build out the bankless nation you