Bankless's Hottest 2023 Predictions

Transcript

welcome to another episode of state of the nation we've got our 10 predictions for 2023 David prepared this list I'm just along for the ride and um just to give you some insights into kind of the the world of live streaming we just barely got this live stream up David right you had a software update and uh it kind of wrecked your live stream setup but down to the wire we made it here for you guys yeah just just a few minutes late but yeah made it made a software update to OBS absolutely broke everything uh and then fixed it right at the last minute yet here we are the stream must go on and there's a lot of things to talk about for 2023 and that is what we are going to be covering today on the episode we've got 10 subjects 10 things we want to cover the

big categories that you all know and love Bitcoin ethereum alt layer ones uh layer twos uh prices nfts regulation we got 10 categories a couple ones I haven't mentioned yet that we just want to give our predictions for what they look like moving forward into 2023. some of them will have more clear predictions than others but I think we can look forward at the year ahead pull back some lessons that we that Ryan and I experienced going through the 2018 to 2020 bear market and apply them to the current state of crypto as it stands today so we're going to go and run through all of these major categories of crypto just to see what lies ahead for us in 2023 this is going to be raw thoughts guys it's going to come at you quick so I hope you're ready before we get in got to talk about our friends and

sponsors over at osmosis osmosis is an app chain in the cosmos ecosystem the starter way to think about osmosis is it's kind of a the uniswap of uh Cosmos the cosmos ecosystem it's its own independent app chain of course but it allows you to trade Cosmos ecosystem assets swap one for another but it's not just that there's also the ability to look at all of the Assets in your portfolio has a wallet type feature has the ability to stake also the ability to vote so it it mixes some uh you know portfolio other D5 Hub type tools into into the system and if you're coming from the the world of ethereum um I think you'll notice a pretty easy

user experience in that there is not metamask but a wallet called Kepler which is metamask alike that you can download and use it to get started I recently did this David I'm pretty impressed with osmosis and the cosmos ecosystem and what these guys are Brewing up so it's just a fun little adventure for 2023 I want to do more of these as we get into this year yeah I'm uh consistently learning that the crypto's best ux actually is not inside of the ethereum ecosystem from from what I've learned about the Solana ecosystem and now also the cosmos osmosis uh Kepler wallet and all that stuff is uh other people have better ux than than what I've experienced with metamask and Ledger let me tell you but uh and so

just to to Really drive this point home osmosis is an app chain on the cosmos in the cosmos ecosystem there's also the cosmos Hub which is another app chain so that is a different way of operating that if you are only used to the ethereum ecosystem that you'll have to learn about uh and how to navigate different app chains not unlike layer twos on ethereum but something to get used to as well Ryan we have so much to cover in this episode we're going to start with Bitcoin and I actually had to ask my Bitcoin friends uh about what is ahead in the world of Bitcoin because I don't necessarily feel like I am equipped to answer that question uh and so I've pulled in some extra help to talk about Bitcoin but then we're going to go into the broader subjects uh that the bankless nation knows and loves alt

layer ones ethereum layer twos Etc so all of that and more is coming up right after we talk to some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible Kraken has been a leader in the crypto industry for the last 12 years dedicated to accelerating the global adoption of crypto Kraken puts an emphasis on security transfer currency and client support which is why over 9 million clients have come to love kraken's products whether you're a beginner or a pro the Kraken ux is simple intuitive and frictionless making the kraken app a great place for all to get involved and learn about crypto for those with experience the redesigned Kraken Pro app and web experience is completely customizable to your trading needs integrating key trading features into one seamless interface Kraken has a 24 7 365 client support team that is globally

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on the hottest tokens of the month and the regular updates from the token report go into the token Bible your first stop shop for every token worth investigating in crypto bankless premium also gets you a 30 discount to the permissionless conference which means it basically just pays for itself there's also the airdrop guide to make sure you don't miss A Drop in 2023 but really the best part about bankless premium is hanging out with me Ryan and the rest of the bankless team in the Inner Circle Discord only for premium members want the alpha check out Ben the analyst Degen pit where you can ask him questions about the token report got a question I've got my own q a room for any questions that you might have at bank list we have huge things planned for 2023 including a new website with login with your ethereum address

capabilities and we're super excited to ship what we are calling Bank list 2.0 soon TM so if you want extra help exploring the frontier subscribe to bankless premium it's under 50 cents a day and provides a wealth of knowledge and support on your journey West I'll see you in the Discord alright I hope you guys enjoyed hearing about Kraken our strategic sponsor in the exchange category for 2023 it's our recommended exchange going into this year uh David we've got the 10 predictions for 2023. I'm going to read out all of the categories we're going to cover really quick and then we'll hit them one by one number one we're going to talk Bitcoin number two ethereum then prices number four alt layer ones layer twos of course then nfts Dows C5 that is centralized exchanges number nine the cftc and the

SEC standoff and number 10 some of our thematic predictions for 2023 editor's Choice Ryan's and David's thematic predictions I'm gonna have to think of mine before we get to the end here I think David uh and we are along for the ride sir why don't you kick us off with we got to start with old granddaddy Bitcoin who started this whole crypto movement hats off to you Bitcoin without you we wouldn't be here what are the predictions for Bitcoin in 2023 what's in store for us David and uh we're looking right now at a Bitcoin happening clock I'm gonna read this out 441 days 22 hours 51 minutes and 50 50 seconds until the next Bitcoin happening

what does this mean well okay so uh people will notice that that is more than one year away 441 days but uh if we pay attention to the last time a a Bitcoin happening happened uh there is this chant that gets chanted and it starts to start slowly and then starts to Bubble Up and then it just becomes dominant throughout like crypto Twitter or at least Bitcoin Twitter at the time which is the happening is not priced in and so my big prediction is in around Q3 Q4 of 2023 of this year uh we are going to start to hear that happening is not priced in The Happening is not priced in because the 2024 happening date is scheduled around March it's probably

going to creep up uh earlier than March because that's kind of what happenings do they tend to accelerate people think it's every four years but it's actually quicker than four years because hash rate for Bitcoin is up only uh but I think that is something to expect towards the end of this year is you are going to start to hear the words that happening is not priced in remember this time in uh four years ago around when that was just dominant I do and I'm curious okay so how many havings uh have you been here for you remember the 2021 and that was certainly dominant that was the chat leading a chant leading up to this uh do you remember the 2016 one that was I was not here I was not here for the 20 the 2016 happening I was part way here I wasn't all the way here but I

was part way here this was kind of early days of ethereum um and then prior to that David it goes dark for me uh I guess the the one prior to that must have been in uh 20 2012 or something at that point in time um but for folks that aren't familiar this is when the supply issuance of Bitcoin gets cut in half right hence the happening and traditionally David as you've been saying that has been very bullish right bitcoin price at least The Narrative of Bitcoin price because what is bitcoin celebrated for what is it known for what is the one use case and thing that it does it has 21 million Bitcoin that's a million units yes right and that there will only ever be 21 million and so that that is at least the

promise of uh the Bitcoin Network and that's what's coded in the algorithm of course that is all at the end of the day Bankers would say socially enforced at some level but we are approaching less and less issuance uh per year gets cut in half every four years now in 2020 it felt like a lonely thing to say but I know some of this were sent some of us were saying okay uh Bitcoin Community The Happening is coming up we're excited about that uh algorithmic uh Supply issuance yay not Central Bank back that's great take the humans out of the money that's wonderful but also keep in mind find Bitcoin community that when you haven't your issuance you also have in your security budget and the security budget happens to be a very important

thing for your blockchain because that is how a blockchain actually defends itself and provides settlement assurances security budget comes from primarily issuance in Bitcoin it's like 95 to 99 issuance and a small fraction is transaction fees that is how you pay the military to provide the defense service around Bitcoin the military for Bitcoin the analogy being miners proof of work minors so while you're excited about getting closer to 21 million and cutting off your issuance and less Supply available in the market now I start to wonder if the 2024 happening uh the community starts to wake up and realize oh

um our security budget is going down a lot and can we really afford this do you think that'll be a new conversation in a new dynamic that we didn't see in the last decade it's going to be interesting because that is where you mean the last happening that is where we saw some of these hardcore bitcoiners uh start to consider that angle uh hazu being one of the one of the big ones that was previously a very hardcore bitcoiner that started to come around to the idea of a security budget happening I do not think that this happening is the last hat is The Happening that triggers a weakness in Bitcoin security I think we still see fomo I still yeah yeah I I still think like there's bitcoin's lack of Securities a number of happenings

away uh and so I think that I mean just to play it forward how it happened last time bitcoiners started enchanting that happening is not priced in ethereum people are like your guys at security budgets cut in half I think it's fundamentally bullish either way for the same reason that we are bullish on the supply of ether and ultrasound money it's the same reason to be bullish about Bitcoin but I don't want to hang on to happening too much because again like this is actually in 2024 uh and so not happening this year it's just like you're gonna start to see this rumbling and so I asked my my bitcoiner friend CK uh my my podcast co-host before you Ryan uh what to watch out for in the world your ex my ex-podcast yeah and what to watch out for for in Bitcoin in 2023 and

his answers were Bitcoin mining and this thing called Noster we'll take those one by one but I think the things to watch out for for Bitcoin on when it comes to Bitcoin mining is the consolidation of Bitcoin miners into uh in into either more Central uh Central uh large entities or into newer entities that are also energy production energy energy producers and so if you look around actually I was doing a little bit of research before the show if you look around uh a lot of energy producers across various countries are also becoming Bitcoin Miners and now that could actually if you believe the uh the Bitcoin proof of work thesis lead

to integration of Bitcoin into the real world power supply the decentralized power grid and actually lead to the decentralization of Bitcoin mining uh if if that is the trend uh the other Trend it could be is that a lot of these weaknesses in the current mining ecosystem a lot of bankruptcies for the Bitcoin uh the big big Bitcoin miners lead to further consolidation centralization that is something to watch out for that is a theme to watch out for the other thing to watch out for is Noster which is something that that Eric Wall is predicting uh just does not gain any traction but this is the social media for the Bitcoin world for bitcoiners uh social media buy bitcoiners for bitcoiners uh this is something I'm not very familiar with but

this is gaining a ton of attention in the Bitcoin world and it is basically an implementation of sort of decentralized social media but using Bitcoin as the settlement layer for data uh and so this is something that is gaining steam in the Bitcoin world really yeah I wonder how this works so they're actually uh how are they doing that without Bitcoin being kind of an expressive base layer I don't know I don't know I don't know but this is it's got a bunch of apps and uh this is something to probably to explore if you are uh look chess oh like uh settlement assurances with chess as in like I make my piece and I'm I don't know why you want to put that data on the blockchain but this is something that is being pioneered out of

the Bitcoin world it's really interesting that mining is a thing that um hardcore bitcoiners are really excited about um to me that's just not an area of interest uh for me like personally and I just like what I see is a lot of uh you know the consolid do you see um someone tweeted out um I think this is Evan Van Ness that um just just just uh before the end of the year last year over 50 of for the for the last week of blocks or something of all Bitcoin blocks have been produced by one of two um centralized minors mining pools yeah mining pools so this kind of centralization is is um I'm not you know I don't know I mean I I guess there's this this Utopia where all of

the major energy companies right um around the world become producers of of uh Bitcoin miners but um we're not really seeing that all we're seeing is kind of the shake out of the bear market and just more consolidation in I don't I don't know it I don't know if I'm seeing that um I think and that is something and the kind of the why I'm putting that as a conversation in this agenda is to that is something to pay attention to in 2023 is where the diffusion of mining power lies at the end of their system bankruptcies that needs to happen Asics are going to get distributed um but I will say that mining pools I would say are not a pretty weak form of centralization uh in the same way that like uh I can take my I can either run

my ethereum staking node through rocketpool if I choose to or run it solo like mining pools don't have ownership over the Asic units and so that's actually a weaker form of centralization I get that distinction uh overall what's your take on on bitcoin so there's some excitement for the happening uh are you you know bullish uh Bitcoin in 2023 well I had to ask my friend about what the 2023 has in store for Bitcoin because it's like it's Bitcoin yeah radar well it's not on my radar but also it's like there's no roadmap that's the point and so there's designed to be not much on the on the roadmap for Bitcoin that's part actually a feature that the vehicle owners enjoy about Bitcoin I do think it's down too much and uh is due to go

up uh maybe in 2023 so we'll talk about that a little bit what do we got next we got ethereum I think we're we're talking about so uh what's what's the prediction for ethereum ethereum yeah and I got this fantastic uh thread out of Proto Lambda and I've lost the particular tweet but uh it's about how many how hard forks will ethereum see this year and Proto Lambda says we may see three ethereum hard Forks this year uh I checked this uh take with Tim bako and he was like probably just two uh and so again rough consensus out of the ethereum land but the two is a lot two is a lot two is a lot and what are those two hard Forks uh Shanghai and Cancun are the next two hard Forks uh these are the execution layer hard Forks Shanghai

of course might as well be called the withdrawals hard Fork that is slated for probably March of this year pessimistically April uh and then uh Cancun would be eip4844 or proto-dink sharding uh also partly named after a Proto Lambda here who's uh got this tweet but that is what is in store with ethereum hard Forks this year probably almost certainly two hard Forks Shanghai to unable withdrawals in March April of 2023 and then Cancun later in the year to enable 4844 and those are going to be the three the two major ethereum protocol upgrades uh for this year I hear people are talking about Cancun in Q3 as a possibility and if eip4844 gets

shipped in Q3 that would be huge very accelerated yeah can you remind people what uh 4844 is oh so you said it's um you know proto-dink sharding but what does the net effect of this for the ethereum ecosystem for crypto yeah certainly it gives Roll-Ups a first class status on ethereum so it really is changing the way ethereum architecture is to really enable layer twos to take off the breaks and be unconstrained and because uh what do Roll-Ups do they post data down to the ethereum layer one 4844 gives a little uh sandbox of data on the beacon chain for the Roll-Ups to post data too and to really allow uh Roll-Ups

to use the beacon chain for data availability which allows them to like have orders of magnitude increase in speed and uh cheaper transactions don't you think then Cancun is like the alt layer one killer [Music] yeah I guess what I'm just saying is right like we expect another bull market to come and eth Main net gas fees to increase but now instead of the transaction volume going to Alternative layer ones it is so cheap for that transaction volume it's almost like close to zero cost for that transaction volume to go to uh layer twos and they will be much more mature by the next Bull cycle uh comes around this is um if I was an alternative layer one I'd be a

little bit worried about 4844 yeah and uh Cancun and I'd be looking at my strategy and maybe thinking about how I might become a roll-up and uh get my security from ethereum because it's way cheaper certainly certainly moving on in Proto's uh Proto's uh uh predictions he of course predicts that 4844 prototype charting will ship on ethereum Main net so we've covered this uh but he also says the line between chains will start to blur due to eigenlayer Suave and large layer one stakers offering offering different sequencing as a service Solutions and so this is also this is a pretty like 401 ethereum level take and but eigenlayer is something that more and more people are clamoring about a really quick tldr on what

eigenlayer is it's generalized security for other computational resources uh using staked ether so if you are staking your ether you can sign up for additional slashing assumptions slashing conditions to secure something else such as an Oracle and so you say you're a solo Staker with 32 ether you've you're already signed up for the slashing conditions of validating incorrect blocks but you can sign up for an additional slashing assumption for something else as in an oracle layer or a data availability layer and this is something eigenlayer has captured a bunch of nerds attention and people are talking about this more and more and

more so one of my predictions for 2023 is eigenlayer starts to be talked about even more it's probably throughout all the the entire year as we kind of Reason about what this thing can do would you know a date for eigenlayer when that uh when that ships no I do not no I don't know so this is not an ethereum protocol this is not like part of the all core devs call this won't be an EIP this is a startup that is working on this problem that is separate from any sort of core development from ethereum yeah it's just leveraging the economic security of ethi asset to economically secure more things more things hugely bullish for ethi asset in my opinion it's also just man it adds another dimension to the whole

game here and the economics behind it and I'm both um excited and and simultaneously a little terrified yeah of uh the downstream effects of this but um that's super cool uh and I mean if we're gonna if I'm gonna put on my eth maxi hat again I would be even like any time any reason you need to have a specialized chain that's not ethereum any other alt layer one eigenlayer kind of is like well I can turn that into a commodity and I can just use staking uh this is remember that take on the weekly roll up that we gave a while ago I can't remember who I think Jimmy Jimmy rasua or something he said eigenlayer will enable Halal layer ones for ethnics oh I get that and I what I'm kind of worried about is just the stacking

wrists that we don't realize that get hidden in some eth that you you know stake somewhere and uh I'm worried about some big slashing events for people who don't anticipate the risk they're looking like what what this means is there'll be all sorts of ways to earn yield on your eth besides just staking and hey do you want this you know five percent for going over here and using the yeah I'll take that sign up for five percent sounds great but you don't realize in the background that there's also the stacking risk associated with that and something bad happens David as you know it will give it enough time and then boom have you have you ever like played uh like Skyrim and like loaded up 20 30 mods and they all start to like conflict with each other that feels like but yeah it feels like wait eigenlayer

could do exactly what else we got here all right moving last in our predictions of on the ethereum ecosystem I think I just want to raise the question Ryan what do you think about the supply of ether throughout 2020. so freaking good isn't it look at this man well do you think it'll be deflationary or not deflationary because if you look at the chart right here like I don't really know by the way we were at 3000 ether Earl there's a few hours ago and we burned a bunch in the last like yeah but like what what is this what is this chart telling you is that first of all let me just say this let me just say this this is kind of a vanity guess right of whether you say it's inflationary deflationary uh first I'll say who the f cares click that button there simulate po

okay look at what it would have been had we had proof of work 1.4 million ether issued in the last 117 days if we were on proof of work versus how much is it unsimulated 2 900. see who cares over a million less eth issues oh a million four hundred don't forget that extra 400. yeah 1.4 million 1.4 million was of eat that would have been issued was not issued that is the bottom line here whether this thing is Vanity metric inflationary or deflationary doesn't even matter but uh that is 1.8 billion dollars that we have not issued it's so bullish it's so stupid bullish I don't

even know like this is okay here's another thing I feel like is going back to the happening it's like man uh ultrasound.money totally takes the happenings Thunder doesn't it yeah I mean like I find it really hard to get excited about happening when I have when ultrasound money that money exists uh anyway I'll take that kind of the vanity metric I still kind of bet that we end the year deflationary it's my call I think block space demand increases uh even post eip4844 I think we're still deflationary in the on the year if I had to call it yeah I I think that's right and that's because uh I tweeted this out that uh ether it's easier to burn third than it is to issue it as in when when there's demand for ethereum uh it burn we burn ether way faster than we issue

ether there's a cap on how fast we can issue ether there is absolutely no cap on how fast we can burn ether and so just because there's a growth is constrained and contraction of Supply is unconstrained I think it's rational to say that we will burn ether we will be deflationary as in 2023 and this is also what Proto Lambert says so he agrees with us that will be net deflationary in the second half of 2023. good he's smart he knows what he's talking about that's great all right this is number two Bitcoin eth number three is prices predictions David Price predictions price predictions I don't know I don't really want to make specific price predictions because you and I are not necessarily it's not our skill set nor is it anyone's really skill set no one

really knows but I do think we should take our time and reflect on what prices did during 2018 to 2020. uh and so we've got our our price service provider Kraken up on the screen here and if we Zoom all the way back out let's see if I can drag no I cannot drag I might have to go to trading view but do you remember the Bitcoin price action between 2018 and 2020 because it threw everyone for a tizzy Bitcoin uh pricing action between 20 wait what'd you say 2018 and 2020 2018 and 2020. uh I I mean I remember a successive um down it was there's basically yeah yeah zoom in on this this is this is exactly what I remember some chop and

you saw at kind of the bottom this is the 2018 this happened I don't know three times it looks like from the chart something like this is we had a big massive leg down and like you catch your breath and you're like oh my God I'm glad that's over right and then we rise up there's some hope we get some green candles for a couple of weeks maybe a month uh maybe two goes by and then boom you get hit with the next leg is that what you're talking about a little bit Yeah so at the top of uh the 2018 Market uh Bitcoin is twenty thousand dollars and then it went down 83 percent uh which I mean it was about roughly where we are now we're not down bitcoin's not down that much but then it from the bottom it goes up three it goes up three x it goes from

three thousand to like fourteen thousand dollars and in the middle of uh 2019 and then what does it do after that it goes down to another seventy percent yeah and so like me saying Bitcoin went from three to fourteen down to four thousand dollars like think about that in today's terms like it's it's something like where is it now like fifteen thousand back up to forty thousand dollars back it down to all down to twenty eighteen thousand dollars yeah and and ether did the same exact thing right so except more exactly yeah except worse right and so here here is the top of the 2017 Market down 94 uh and so then it bottoms out at around like eighty dollars and then it goes up to three hundred and

eighty dollars so people who bought those at that eighty dollar each made like a three and a half X inside of a year and then what does it do after that it goes down 75 more percent again right and then and then that's when D5 Summer started so like we don't really have any specific predictions I'm gonna go ahead and say if we I don't think you have a specific price prediction Ryan but I'm gonna I'm gonna say people should be cognizant of how fast these markets can whip around or how much they can whip around inside of a year so from a timeline perspective we're kind of mid uh 2018 or so as far as like length of the bear Market yeah aren't we so I would say it's almost lining up pretty perfectly because the top of the 2018

bull market was like January of 2017 to to January excuse me December two months off I guess yeah it's a few months off so like if we want to I just closed the tab but if we want to like uh that's a rough analogy though right so 2022 is like 2018. yeah so then 2023 I think we're like around like here's ether price I think we are like right here in 2018 terms I think what you're saying saying is I think you're trying to draw lessons from the previous runs and you're saying hey expect run-ups and then then major dips major crashes yeah kind of test your conviction um this will probably happen in 2023 and partially into 2024. are you just extreme but like is it a fallacy to think that every um every bear Market

plays out the same way what I remember going through the last bear market and everyone was like oh next cycle next cycle next cycle and I was like everyone's saying like the next cycle like doesn't that mean if everyone's saying it is not going to come and then it totally came uh and so I think that you just assume that it's going to play out exactly how like people expect it to with another cycle uh and I really I mean is like I think what people should watch out for is like Bitcoin might have a run up to forty thousand dollars ether might have a run up to three thousand dollars people are gonna get really bullish people say the bear Market or the bull Market's on and the bull Market's not going to be on yeah and it's going to throw it's going to Buck people off uh and people are

going to try and trade it and they're going to on net lose money as they try and trade that thing so this is this is why I was never a full believer in the super cycle David is just I I'm still a Believer and I think this has proven out like if you if you kind of zoom out right is crypto is just plays out markets play out and fractals so this is the next kind of fractal we're just at higher numbers on the highs and higher numbers on the low but it's it's just going to play out and that's kind of repeated every cycle and now the Cycles might lengthen they might you know there might be kind of different timelines involved I'm fully anticipating and they think the base guess is probably the right guess which is just play for another fractal it's

gonna happen in uh you know the way it has in similar bear markets now people always interject but like what about macro macro is completely different uh and if you have a take on that but I guess um my take is I don't actually think macro is going to affect um the crypto cycles and the way people think think it will I think just the fracta fractal will play out how it's how it's going to play out maybe it could be kind of elongated or dampened or something like that by macro but I just think we're kind of it's all in the charts it's already destined it's already pre-planned that it's going to play out this way I think that's right I think macro like If the Fed had this Immaculate pivot uh it would nudge crypto prices in a particular direction as in like the feds like all right we're

gonna ease up on interest rates again yeah I think I think that will be bullish I think that'll be a plus 20 day A plus 50 day I don't think it will create a bull market crypto needs to create a bull market under its own Steam and that takes time that takes building that takes Innovation and so sure we could be like nudged by macro in particular directions um but crypto's gonna come out of this bear Market under its own Steam not just because something else happened to us so we think that's Bitcoin uh ether the same thing now you have a take where you think eth is going to lead Bitcoin always and I guess maybe that's a play on the kind of the ratio too is that what you're showing yeah Bitcoin ratio um and I know uh you have said previously that eth has led the last

um bull markets um I think I know what you mean by then which is like eth use cases if not they asset price but each use cases certainly have led the previous uh bull markets and you think that will remain true or do you think it's a kind of a true in a different way in the for the next full cycle what do you think happens to eat yeah I think ether the price of ether has not LED bull markets I think it's gone perhaps it's followed Bitcoin perhaps it's gone in tandem with Bitcoin but every time there's a bull market it's because of something on the ethereum app layer that's always that's been true as long as ethereum's been in in existence icos first icos in 2017 D5 summer in 2020 well Bitcoin and ether did absolutely nothing while we had this

amazing bull market in in the defy space which ran into a bull market in nfts and then ether and Bitcoin rocketed and so there was a bull market on the ethereum app player for a full year before Bitcoin and ether prices reacted I expect that to play out again yeah I I think I agree with you do you have any uh predictions on the East Bitcoin ratio uh I think it is going to do something like that go up oh yeah it's going to go up uh I am not a charter uh I don't I don't have Crystal Ball but I am positioned to benefit from an increased ratio in eth BTC which is why the current price action is exciting to me and remind me where's the flipping where are we now

and where's the flipping so right now we're at um 0.0776 yes 0.77 and then the flipping is about here we need to get here at point about 1.1 so it needs to double ether price just needs to double so if eth price hits uh what 3000 or something uh well Bitcoin stays stagnant at this price then we flipping is that right yeah we need to hit .159 we need if Bitcoin stays exactly the same price we need ether to be two thousand seven hundred dollars and we will flip Bitcoin that doesn't seem that far away uh I'm still not calling it for 2023 but it feels like uh it approaches it approaches

um all right alt later ones that's the next category David what are the predictions for alternative layer ones all layer ones and so I've got coin gecko pulled up with uh smart Contracting platforms uh we got BNB cardano Solana polka dot Tron Avalanche uh and then I think that's all of them there's some other ones as well uh but I think I just want to get your broad take Ryan on the landscape of what it's like to be an outlayer one right now uh like where where do you think the out there one ecosystem is in its current form well um I think it's um it had a narrative run up on the use K on the on the idea and on the entire narrative that eth gaspy's youth transaction fees were too

damn high and that was the value proposition of of kind of Youth Killers um very few of them if any develop their own independent set of tools uh many of them were evm based and so they kind of just glommed on to the existing ethereum tools um I think Solana's maybe somewhat of an exception they have a different uh developer Community they have some unique tools like like Phantom so there's some life there Cosmos also a little bit different um cardano really hasn't done anything it's just been a lot of talk there's like nothing really not much you can do on cardano at this point uh so I think the back to EIP

4844 being sort of the alternative layer one killer is if you if you lose the value value proposition of being a cheaper version of ethereum what then do you have right and I think um I think they're in a precarious position though I do think many of them will come through this I'm perhaps a little bit stronger I many of them I I not many of them some of them a few of them I think one or two I mean it's like if you're talking about Cosmos as a entire ecosystem right there are many different app chains and count that as one that might be one um I think Solana might pull through this uh nothing's really happened with DOT David like dude I know man so like okay so we have uh BNB and so you you say like what

what is the place of the alt layer one in the face of eip4844 I think that's I think that's it's definitely something to consider but also like what's the place of an ALT layer one when binance marching exists at the same time I know which is a gargantuan uh of a of a chain and I think it's it's it's you can't really call uh BNB chain and ALT layer one it's something else but if you're gonna compromise on on decentralization and security as well you may just use binance Smart chain yeah I mean I I know it's this place in the middle it's kind of the idea that the middle cannot hold and uh that's what some of these these um chains are doing and trying to do so I'm not bullish on them um so looking at some market caps binance smart chains coming in at 45

billion dollars cardano's coming in at 11 billion dollars Salon is at six polka dots at six Tron is at five can you show that can you scroll to the red one okay uh yes yes uh okay Tron is that five billion dollars Avalanche at 3.8 Cosmos at 3.2 and I actually don't really and there's actually uh Ryan uh you've been saying Cosmos while we're talking about all Air once uh they uh coing gecko doesn't actually put uh Cosmos in the smart contract platform category no I get it it doesn't have uh smart contracts on Cosmos the app chain ah you have to go to like osmosis Cosmos at 3.2 billion dollars where binance smart chain is at 45 cardano's

at 11 and so long as that six makes me really bullish on Cosmos it's different though Dave so here's why which is why I'm bullish because it's different okay here's why it's different in my opinion it's just because um uh you could you can be bullish on the cosmos ecosystem without necessarily being bullish on atoms the asset of Cosmos I have two totally different things I'm bullish on Cosmos the ecosystem you just it's if people get that confused then they'll run into a bad time I think investing in Cosmos it's very different than investing in even binance which if the binance ecosystem grows or the BNB ecosystem grows then it value should occur to BNB because that is the kind of the unit of account it is the is The Ether of uh BNB

chain but Cosmos is just um I mean that that should scale with the amount of app chains that are using the cosmos Hub and they don't even have to use the cosmos Hub David right they can use their own mesh security they don't now have to use Cosmos at all and so it's kind of an apple I think it's an apples to oranges uh sort of comparison yeah I think that's a pretty fair take uh we will see I do not think there's a lot of uh alt-layer ones out there like again cardano Solana polka dot Tron Avalanche Cosmos Finance smart chain how many can actually make it through this bear Market I think if you have a cult leader you're much better situated that's why like it's ironically it's like um cardano Is Not Gonna Die Ada is

not gonna die because it has because it use cases yeah um I hate that that's probably right isn't that like don't you think I'm like actually relative to some of these others I'm bullish on that um Ada right just because of the cult of Charles yeah and look we said it before we said this all the time in the last bear Market is if you have any doubts about which like if you're if you're questioning if you're wondering which chain you should invest in try to use stuff on the Chain right like like does it work can you do D5 things can you do cool things on it is it a step change from um something that you might find an established ecosystem like ethereum if it is that's bullish like so many people

watch the Youtube and they don't actually do the work to to run the software and to actually use the applications it's as simple as that until there's applications on some of these changes that I can actively use I'm just not bullish uh activity yeah yeah how do you I don't know how to measure Cardinal block space the band and that's probably an indication all right should we move on to layer twos yeah let's do it all right layer twos of course Layer Two beat uh right now I declare that layer twos are in a bull market of activity and one of the few areas of growth that's happened in the last year which was a terrible year was layer twos uh Ryan the uh the best asset to hold last year was if you didn't know

this token called GMX which is an application on arbitrol and here here's the uh here's the price chart for GMX look at that this was it go it's going it went up and it went up in 2022. uh that is the one of like three tokens that went up in 2022 three D5 tokens three no three tokens that's it oh my God that's it besides stable stable quite safe flat stable coins stay flat yeah so that was on Arbitron arbitrum the arbitrum ecosystem is just running circles around almost everyone else arbitrine's got 2.3 trillion or trillion billion in total locked value like this this was a 2022 bear market and total

tvl on arbitrum stayed about the same yeah I love the arbitrim optimism rivalry because I think they've been red versus blue yeah they they make each other better and I just love that they're both there and they're both like fully like I honestly can honestly say I support them both and you know uh look at this look at this here is uh a half a million dollars on optimism in January of a year ago and now we're at 1.27 billion we had growth in layer twos last year hit activity can we hit activity on some of these does that oh that story this is transactions right transactions yeah total locked value which is a a metric an important metric not the only metric but it's kind of a vanity metric

and then you have activity activity is as transactions and uh like transactions are just like up a whole bunch if you go to the top go to the top here of l2b and hit activity on the right and see aggregate activity and I love that line there that line in blue I think is ethereum mainnet activity isn't it correct yes and we're above where now we've been consistently above since october-ish uh ethereum mainnet activity on Layer Two is that has been a flipping in the ethereum ecosystem yeah and where the scaling Factor 2.48 that's the highest I've ever seen it uh scaling factor is how many times uh layer twos on ethereum are transacting one ethereum's worth of uh transactions on the aggregate Layer Two so so there are

2.48 times the amount of transactions of the ethereum layer 1 happening on layer twos my prediction Ryan I put this in the newsletter is that this number Hits five and I think that's a pretty safe prediction for 2022. right I think 2023. I think it's conservative well what but what happens if um I guess these are used transactions right it's not total capacity is it um it's not total available capacity so capacities way capacity might be like 10 or something the scaling capacity we actually don't really know the upper bounds to layer twos uh the scaling capacity could be like a 10x you know and when we hit uh 4844 it's going to be something like 100x so we've been bullish layer twos relative to alt layer ones for a long

time and for most uh for a good portion of 2021 and for a good portion of 2022 that has been the wrong bet in 2021 that was the wrong bet for that one year yes and then into like the first part the first three months of 2022 is kind of the wrong bet but again bankless thesis operates on longer term Horizons right in crypto you you either invest in the trade level that is like kind of daily to weekly sort of thing or you invest in the narrative level the timeline there is like every you know a few weeks or months or you invest in thesis and fundamentals your timeline there could be years I think that we've been right on that call I think so it

was the time frame that was uh at odds with people right we we're stuck in kind of people are stuck in a narrative timeline that lasted months rather than the thesis timeline which is uh like years plus yeah that's why you know I've people say this investors say this all the time but a lot of arguments on crypto Twitter are just time frame arguments time frame arguments yeah semantics yeah people arguing past each other because the time frame is wrong and we've consistently say bullish Layer Two is relative to alter of layer ones and that was uh you could be laughed at for saying that in 2021 couldn't you right well now now it is the inverse so I've got the optimism chart up on the screen and this optimism the op token launched in June uh so we have seven months of data but like do you see the

bear Market in that chart like no like you don't you don't really see the FTX contagion you don't really see uh theoros Capital getting liquidated like this does not look like a bear Market chart and optimism just dropped their token with a 5.5 billion dollar valuation fully diluted uh arbitrum hasn't even dropped their token yet and so that it still got that in the hopper uh and like all these other like Layer Two tokens are doing really really well so what's the prediction bullish layer twos I'm I'm uh the bull market will continue to be hosted by layer twos as it has been for the past like six plus months these ecosystems are very very very much alive yes the most alive thing

in crypto in my opinion 100 100 I'm trying to click these things oh that's because you would also have here uh oh starknet also doesn't have its token released right and so like there's still a bunch of hype and attention and finding attention in Bear markets is really hard and we have arbitrum and we have starknet and these communities are extremely strong there's not even a token out there for them yet CK sync as well CK sync as well yeah okay EVMS uh scroll making a significant progress we're gonna test that right now and so here's a one of Eric Wallace predictions is that ethereum layer 2 tvl reaches above 10 billion dollars uh where are we right now we are at five four five no less than that I'm pretty sure three

yeah 4.5 4.5 billion dollars so he's uh expecting a little bit more than a doubling of tvl cool conservative yeah I call I call for 25. uh 25 is extremely bullish yeah and that may bleed into next year let me just say that but yeah um definitely by the end of 2024 I would say that 25 is is good yeah cool all right all right Bank location we got some other conversations that we're going to talk about I've got some opinions as to where nfts are going in 2023 uh everyone's gonna have to ask me but we also have to talk about what is the state of C5 in 2023 because uh you know For Better or Worse C5 is a fundamental part of how crypto is going to be uh and then also we got to talk

about regulation because a lot of things are going to be happening in 2023 as it relates to this SEC and the cftc there are some specific cases that we're going to call attention to that are cases to watch and then Ryan uh I had uh dowels in the original agenda but I actually replaced that with bank list so what's coming for bankless in 2023 because we've got some plans uh and then what Ryan and David are bullish on so all this and more right after we talked to some of these fantastic sponsors that make this episode possible uniswap is the largest on-chain Marketplace for self-custody digital assets uniswap is of course a decentralized exchange but you know this because you've been listening to bankless but did you know that the uniswap web app has a shiny new Fiat on-ramp now you could go directly from

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start building your first app with arbitrum experience web 3 development the way it was meant to be secure fast cheap and friction free how many total airdrops have you gotten this last bull market had a ton of them did you get them all maybe you missed one so here's what you should do go to earnifly and plug in your ethereum wallet and earn if I will tell you if you have any unclaimed air drops that you can get and it also does poapps and mintable nfts any kind of money that your wallet can claim earnify will tell you about it and you should probably do it now because some airdrops expire and if you sign up for earnify they'll email you anytime one of your wallets has a new airdrop for it to make sure that you never lose an airdrop ever again you can also

upgrade to earn five premium to unlock access to airdrops that are beyond the basics and are able to set reminders for more wallets and for just under 21 a month it probably pays for itself with just one airdrop so plug in your wallets at earnify and see what you get that's e-a-r-n-i dot f i and make sure you never lose another airdrop back with our 10 predictions went through the first five number six we got to talk about nfts David all right uh I am the student you are the teacher tell me about nfts what's going to happen in this crazy world of overpriced jpegs it's just jpegs what are nfts to begin with and uh where are they going in 2023 yeah I think this is something that we can draw a lesson out of the 2018 to

2020 bear uh we had 20 we had icos uh that just totally decimated the brand of crypto um sadly this bear Market we have two things tainting the brand of crypto one of them being FTX and other one the one of them being nfts if you go into like any like normal internet Forum non-crypto forum and you say the word like nft you just get bullied like do you use this plague please leave we don't want to talk about your stupid and it's always a three-letter acronym that's a problem NFC RSA uh okay so but what what did we see what lesson did we learn from 2018 to 2020 like icos they really just turned into governance tokens they they evolved they

got better uh all of the fraudsters and these scammers and these short-termists left the space and then what were we left with uh Capital allocation and tokens and that turned into Dows that turned into governance tokens that turned into airdrops that turned into yield farming which started good ended bad um I think nfts will have a similar Arc and actually I think nfts in their current Farm are in a much better spot than icos ever were board apiat Club mutant Apes uh cool cats pudgy Penguins uh azuki's these are like real efforts by real teams to produce real things and so all the short-term nfts got just pushed out already and now there's a flight to Quality projects and so this

is what I see I see nft teams are going to really fight for their market cap they're going to to fight for you know raising the value of their nft that's kind of the purpose of these whole teams to begin with and they're going to do that through raw Innovation and refinement as to whatever their product is so you think that in the same way icos were a complete laughing stock nfts are a complete laughing stock now but what we saw is a transformation of some Ico tokens let's say a lot of all the sketch teams and scams they just died those projects dried up and died they left they're gone but the ones that remained like the um well unit swap didn't have a token but I'm thinking of like project like synthetics or a link rocketful examples

rocket pool these projects remained and they transformed their token into utility types of of tokens at least the utility is some governance participation with the potential promise of future cash flows right and that was a big pivot from a time we said all uh tokens are worthless to hey some of these are actually worthwhile you think the same thing could happen with nfts this would imply that nfts add some sort of utility is that the resurrection of nfts that they become more than just the jpeg there's something else to it I think that's right and and this has been the trend that I've noticed in the crypto space first we created bitcoin it was this static collectible no utility asset

and then after every single asset that's gotten adopted by the crypto space after that has had some form of productivity some form of utility what can you do with ether you can stake it what can you do with ether you can put it in D5 you can use it as gas to pay for stuff so ether has a lot more utility than Bitcoin Bitcoin has this blessing of like getting to be this like static inert collectible asset same thing with uh nfts we created crypto punks crypto punks have this blessing of being able to be this in nerds collectible every single other nft board Apes azuki's uh Penguins unlock some sort of access for their holders some sort of privilege famously you know like nightclub parties

in New York if you're aboard eight but that's kind of the brand uh or yacht Hoggers or whatever but like each one is going to provide utility and reasons for its Community to hold them and buy them and own them and so my claim for 2023 with the world of nfts is that nfts are the closest prediction of closest prototypes to balaji's network State thesis that we have and so I think we start to look like these nft like communities start to look like some sort of prototype Network State idea in the metaverse yeah uh just what what's the link to balaji's network State idea these are just communities that believe in something have a shared set of values and are passionate and are

on the trajectory towards um building out a universe so balaji's Network state is really about uh getting people with like like-minded people together and then physically instantiate in the world somewhere I don't really think that we're going that far but one of his big metaphors for the his Network state was like with Google or Facebook if you worked at Facebook you could be uh you would have access to any Facebook campus all over the world and you have this little badge you could like get into the Facebook building no matter where that Facebook building was if it was a corporate privilege or exactly and so he said that this is starting to look like a network State I think that's going to be largely similar with nfts not necessarily in the real world but

also not not that like there are cool cats Meetup I've been to a cool cat Meetup in La the board Apes have parties all the time but then there's also going to be similar Vibes inside of virtual lands like the board apes are building out other deeds and the board Apes aren't other yoga Labs is they're building out virtual places for their token holders to be able to experience and I think that is starting to feel look and feel like balaji's Network State idea I think that hits on the current uh survive like the the current um cohort of nft projects that we have but I also wonder about a new cohort of nft projects that are kind of built during this market so we're talking about nfts and some existing communities but we

haven't yet touched like gaming nfts are they going to be a thing this year what are artists going to do uh like sound nfts music nfts that sort of thing uh we're not even talking about that here and I think that's a bunch of latent potential here we are looking at a nanson which um nft folks tell me is this is a an index of nft projects where you can kind of track price over time if you go to the top here David what are we looking at charts this is across different sectors Blue Chip is the orange line here and so I guess maybe I'm asking from a price perspective um to be honest it's not down that much I think this is all priced in terms of the price and eth yeah which is honestly

in my opinion the right denominator for any sort of metaverse item like an Enterprise 50 years you want this to appreciate relative to eth it's kind of the unit of account here and um I guess I'm wondering from your perspective uh do you think the indices as a whole like art or blue chip the top 10 nft projects or metaverse or gaming or social will they appreciate relative to eth do you think that's a way to think about this Market I think that that is the goal that nft teams ought to have whether they actually do that or not I don't know but that is in my mind why do nft teams centralized

coordinated teams exist it's to increase the each nominated value of the nfts that they represent and I think this bear Market 2023 is going to be the time where teams get really Scrappy and Innovative to encourage an appreciation of nfts in ether terms that's what we're all trying to do and increase increase our values or terms how to denominate each terms uh okay regulation David what do you think regulation comes after C5 I don't really have anything to say so I'm just going to stop sharing screen and we're just going to talk about C5 really quick uh because the C5 landscape uh it's being stressed right now coinbase as of today announced that they are doing a uh a round of layoffs just because it's crypto winter another 20

another 20 Kraken did a round of layoffs uh Gemini did a big round of layoffs uh and so it's I mean layoff season side would say it's not behind us uh because we've already done it all uh but uh I mean FTX really soured soured everything as it relates to centralized entities like no one wants to touch it no one wants to like hear the word C5 these days so I just kind of want to get your perspective just like in moving into 2023 what's the state of C5 and how do you think that's going to play out for the next year I think one thing that's true is um um we can't throw out the baby with the bath water right so you know crypto it's just just is so um they're just like a pendulum they go

to extremes on one side or the other and so it was uh centralized exchanges can do no wrong put all your money in these centralized exchanges centralized lending it's glorious amazing why why is the blockchain yeah that's the X like why blockchain yes all of these things let the centralized entities use the blockchains you just use the centralized entities exactly um and and so we swung from that side of the pendulum to this other side which is a little unhealthy and that we're like oh all centralized exchanges are bad and evil and we don't need any of them ever and I hate them and the reality is there are some good actors in The centralized exchange um space and I think the vast majority of Bad actors have actually been washed out at this point so the

ones that survive there might be still some some bad eggs in the bunch but the ones that have survived are largely the ones that have done things right and uh have begun with a long-term uh perspective so I think that's um that's important context to this but um I think it'll be a long time before we trust centralized CFI lending providers yeah again I mean Celsius block fi Voyager uh even Tara Luna to some extent I know you know like had the anchor protocol just these yields coming from nowhere it'll be a long time till we trust those things again and I think that's a good thing so this means more in the D5 space um there's also David we've got a lot of

things to just tie off from 2022 so FDX is not completely resolved that's in bankruptcy court so is Celsius digital currency group remember it's like we ended last year and that's the last Domino default and it's still kind of wobbling it's in this space of it hasn't quite fallen over yet and it's still like up-ish and something's gonna happen the leaning tower of dcg yeah I just want that thing to be over uh even this morning there was a kind of Winklevoss uh twins tweeting at Barry Silber and calling for dcg the parent company of of Genesis to um exit uh Barry silbert uh it said that you know he was unfit I think was the

letter from from the winklevosses at Gemini and so 900 million dollars of um you know retail funds like in Genesis doesn't feel good so that all has to that all has to sort itself out too yeah I don't know what's what's your what's your take on the exchange World in 2023. I've got two two C5 takes uh one is that 2023 is going to be dominated by the court proceedings from washed out actors right we got FTX we got three hours Capital we got Celsius we're perhaps about to have dcg so like that's gonna either what is the bank list weekly roll-up going to be like there's probably going to be a section in every single weekly roll-up that's like here is the most free update on bankruptcies

bankruptcy updates that's going to be a huge C5 theme of 2023 which is just hooray that's awesome and I don't mean that in a serious way uh that's lame uh but that's just gonna be the way that it is because like people have money in Gemini earn people have money in Celsius so like these updates are actually important and they're kind of going to define the crypto the centralized crypto industry moving forward my other update is that B and C tier centralized exchanges are going to struggle and be kind of severely tested and I think we're seeing that play out with uh wobi who I would call a b or c tier centralized exchange uh and so like I think the call to action is it's like you know

having centralized exchanges are going to be a part of the crypto world now and for forever they're going to be around we have to accept it uh we should if we are going to use centralized exchanges probably should be using a tier centralized exchanges not b or c tier so if you are still having your money on a c tier centralized Exchange in this day and age in crypto don't I don't don't use an a tier clearly you're using a centralized exchange if you're going to continue to do that use an a-tier one like don't be on the long tail of risk because that is a bad spot to be in a bear Market or even any market for that matter I I it's it's hard on centralized exchanges because we don't know everything about all of them uh the way I feel right now at this point is if

someone were to ping me on Telegram and just be like hey what centralized exchanges do you recommend do you trust Kraken would be top of the list and not because they're sponsors we picked them as sponsors because they were on the top of our list right coinbase as well would be on the top of the list uh take a big deep breath from there I don't really know after that Finance I hope I think yeah I don't know though yeah um I would I bet my money that Bonnie s would be okay but it would be a Gamble I feel that way and again it it could totally not be but that's part of the challenge with centralized exchanges is you don't know for sure

um and uh that's why proof of reserves is so important it's uh all right that's another big theme I think will be throughout 2023 is proof of reserves is going to get better that's where Regulators should demand this if they want to do something helpful just help it demand proof of reserves and audits on liabilities yes just raise the bar there thank you it's so simple it's so simple it's so freaking simple yeah Clarity and for secure what's a security and then just proof of reserves please um okay what else we got David all right um now moving into the the regulatory conversation Regulators speaking of regulators here's our favorite guy oh hey what's up Gary uh so this was a an article written by Mike selig who I had uh had on for a conversation and he

wrote this 2023 the year of Regulation versus decentralization uh and he's basically saying uh that the world of regulation is going to push and squeeze crypto and as a result of that squeezing crypto will become more decentralized now I remember being very very into these conversations that almost felt exactly the same Ryan back in 2018 2019 it's like all right icos just tainted the industry The Regulators are totally coming what's going to happen uh and it slaps is what happened wrist laps well some some more than wrist laps but the Ico industry it was the Ico it was an industry for a while did grind to a halt

probably under its own wake but also because everyone realized they were issuing an unregistered security and so this is where people actually started to like step back from their own projects and become more quote unquote decentralized sure and so this is the opinion of Mike selig and I totally agree with him is that in this year the cftc and the SEC are going to push the boundaries of their current existing authorities through novel enforcement actions and that as a result R is going to force crypto to become more decentralized in response to that which is good that's a good thing even though it's going to be rough it's still a net out positive outcome for me the jury's

still out on whether it's net positive or not but I will give the benefit to this um it's honestly ofac ofac sanctions for tuning to cash have been one of the best things to ever happen to ethereum from a decentralization standpoint sure yeah and sorry I I said that probably a little too hyperbolically there have been a lot of great things to happen for ethereum but I just mean one of the things that seemed uh bad and very oppressive that has quickly turned into I think a victory um for ethereum which is it's forced the ethereum community to really focus on what censorship resistance means at the protocol layer for Block Builders and as

a result I think I mean we said this in our earlier predictions um Mev censored blocks or you know uh blocks with Emmy with censorship have probably peaked if you have that chart up but I think you and I both believe that and there are a lot of censorship Solutions um like on their way yeah Dave's going to pull up ofac censorship oh you don't have the chart button uh yeah what is that website I can't remember what that website I can't remember either it's Mev something um Mev watch yeah it might be Mev watch let's try that Mev watch not.com no God this is something else this looks cool though this looks like a dune dashboards chat can you help us out anyway it does it

doesn't doesn't matter but like anyway that that that's an example of the thesis that this uh coindesk opinion piece is is kind of playing out uh in that way yeah this is it Mev watch it was for people uh they're listening www.mev watch dot info uh and you know this I think will go down over time I think this is this is peaked and we're gonna get some not ofac compliant blocks and anyway the ethereum community has been educated on it and has successfully defended against it and um yeah I think it's gonna be an improvement moving forward so that's an example and uh one thing I want to point people to is I asked Mike what is the case to watch what are cases to watch and uh ukit tau

is the Dow that is being charged by the cftc it was going after a Dao but then a Court ruled that you they a cfdc should actually just serve the two Founders uh the two founders of Okie Dao uh and so this really this court case really means is like okay what does this mean if a dow violates cfcc regulation what happens as a result of that uh and this case is still ongoing but it because you can't really charge a dow uh they are instead going after the two founders of the Dow who have a bunch of the governance tokens how this court case Falls however this lands is going to be important for other Dows and other founders of I hope this lands the right

way this could go very bad in my opinion I don't know what Mike thinks about that have you talked about that on the episode but I'm worried about this case David yeah um but the the take that we gave that we talked about is decentralization theater versus actual meaningful decentralization and that was the point that he really wanted to hammer home on it's just like well if you have two Founders and they just make a dow like well no you need real decentralization not fake decentralization and so I know like in this crypto space we don't really we want to protect our Dows but we also want to protect our Dows against grifters who are not appropriately using dowels in the appropriate sense and if that's what the cftc comes and charges

these two people with is like no your dad's not a real Dow you two are just hiding behind the Dow mask like we have to accept that as a crypto industry I think fingers crossed we'll see the trust isn't there yet between these two groups so hopefully with with some mutual education that uh you know regulators and and crypto natives can can find good Solutions and we get sensible regulation um all right so ready we got two two things left we got what bankless has in store for 2023 uh and then also what David and Ryan are thematically bullish on for 2023 but we got some stuff planned in the bank was world and so I I put out a tweet not too long ago is that the best prediction to make about 2023 is one that you're in

control of uh uh and so I'm bullish on Bank list going into 2023. uh Ryan you want me to keep on elaborating you want to take this yeah no you can you can you could talk about it but uh maybe I'll tee you up for we're launching a new website guys uh for bankless members citizens of the bankless nation that is going to be absolutely fantastic I just um there's a cut of the beta right now in our inboxes David that we have to go test um you and I hope we can spend some time to do that then we're going to open this beta to members of the bankless community and hopefully this comes out pretty soon yeah um do you want to say more about that yeah uh I mean we have a Chad designer

and a Chad website guy uh and they are doing absolutely just moving mountains to make a brand new bankless website and I really think it's it's a website that I I think the crypto industry really deserves it is a place that hosts much more than just these like podcasts and newsletters and and articles that we're writing uh but just uh it's a hub of all raw educational resources if you are paying attention to the bankless world you've noticed us producing these super refined very short videos that are on a different YouTube channel uh which we'll Link in the shout outs I wish you should subscribe to but we're also doing stuff like uh I'm working on videos like what is decentralization what is a blockchain like stuff like this uh and

so I'm trying I'm hoping that we can make this the best unequivocally the best place to send crypto curious people uh and that is just it's going to be the universal hub for people who are just starting their Bank list Journey people who are very deep down the rabbit hole at 300 400 level content uh and like everything in between uh and so that's what I'm bullish on is that it becomes the best Hub to send somebody who's new into crypto who's wanting to get into it we call this the bankless nation all the time because that's the the metaphor the the analogy that we're using for bankless and uh I know you know this David but um bankless the nation is actually larger in population size than about 40 other

established United Nations recognized countries talk about balaji's Network State idea uh that's what we're slowly moving towards right with incremental incremental progress so population quarter of a million now how do we get to population a million how do we get to population 5 million how do we get to population 10 million um that's what we're aimed at with bank list and what we're trying to do here another piece that's coming down the the pipeline is an nft project have you mentioned that on the podcast yet I don't know but um I'm not going to mention any more detail than that

because there'll be some things that we want to showcase but think of this as kind of a the idea of a bankless passport what would that mean instantiated in nft form that's what we're working on um and again the idea of the the network State I think is uh burned into our minds we also um you guys remember last quarter we brought on Dawson Botsford as our CT to from a fantastic tool that we just love using called earnify and so bankless Labs is where that lives we're going to double down on our efforts to produce tools for the bankless nation as well starting with earnify which is an airdrop finder has helped find people

150 million dollars in Opportunities or talk about net good Public public good for crypto Natives and crypto Travelers uh that's what we're trying to do and then of course you and I David I think we've dedicated 2023 to kind of get back to some of the core Basics 2022 is such a frenetic busy year we're all over the place just trying to keep up with various things now we have a chance to kind of breathe and get back to some of the uh the basics content bringing it from the archive freshen it up and uh and talking about it in uh in new terms so we're going to revisit some of the OG educational Theses that we've had from bankless from day one so I think it's going to be a tremendously

bullish year for um what we're doing in the bankless movement and I'm super excited about that not to mention everything that the bank list Dow is pulling off which I just can't even uh keep up with it's uh it's so much going on over there yeah there um it's hard to like give transparency to what's going on in the back end just because like we have this Discord server uh we have like the bankless team in there the bank list seems large uh and I don't think a lot I don't think many people realize how how much hiring we've done in the last like two quarters or so we have like 17 people that show up to the MonDay meetings uh what are they all doing stuff we are I'm super stoked to be able to present to you guys soon TM uh we we've gone from like something like

seven or eight people uh at the start of 2022 to where we are now with something like 17 people going into 2023 and everyone's just been heads down working and I think a lot of that stuff is going to come to fruition pretty damn soon here Ryan's already teased out a little bit but uh yeah I'm pretty bullish you have to be sorry for being this every day all right what do you bullish on though tell me if you had to pick one thing in crypto for 2023. one thing that you're most excited about most bullish on yeah what's one theme that you point to uh I want to point in everyone to the concept of and project sign in with ethereum this is something that uh technically doesn't have a price tag

associated with it but it is still something I'm bullish on and it's something that I think is also going to be very very helpful with uh putting ethereum on the map when it comes to mainstream adoption because this is something that I think everyone can really get behind which is like you know sign in with Facebook sign in with Google sign in with your web 2 Overlord or sign in with your private Keys which you mentioned yourself and you control and you operate your own identity and I think especially as Society is getting more and more fed up with the web 2 world I think the sign in with ethereum movement which is we are just at the very very like tip of the iceberg on

this thing is going to see a lot of mainstream adoption because what people are Ryan are getting exposed to nfts Via Instagram nfts via Twitter and nfts Via Reddit so like parts and corners of the web 2 internet big Corners not like Instagram it's not it's not a tiny little corner they're already getting exposed to ethereum and so we're finding it and and also you know being able to log into a website without having to do email and password and other identities I think is going to to be a big Catalyst for just people accepting ethereum into their lives it's honestly it solves a massive problem here and you know I'm gonna I'm in a plus one year both case for signing with ethereum it's actually there's a

vitalik tweet too he's uh turns out he's also bullish on sign in with ethereum uh what's this tweet that we're looking at yeah so this is Matt Huang from Paradigm who's asking vitalik what is his definition of a good crypto future and vitalik just gives a list you know fixed scaling fix privacy fix ux of ux of course uh user accounts more secure for average users and centralized services that might be a nod to account abstraction uh payments and store Value Plus a D5 provide value to many people that sounds like uh banking the unbanked crypto social takes off and then identity plus sign in with ethereum succeed and the cool thing is is like sign in with ethereum it isn't just you have a private key and you authenticate your identity to a website via signing

with your private key it's it starts there and that's already a huge order of improvement in terms of user privacy and user sovereignty on the internet but as identity layers and identity tooling and whatever it means to create identity which is already a nebulous definition as that becomes greater signing in with ethereum becomes more useful as there's more that's a higher Fidelity relationship between your ethereum address and your identity because of the PO apps you collected or the attestations that you have or the things that you have done that your website that you're logging into is interested interested in your ethereum address can represent more and more about you that you control that you will have total like access over and so it's

kind of like when D5 grows ether becomes more useful as ethereum identity grows sign in with ethereum also becomes more useful and so that is something to be bullish on yeah imagine kind of the narrative coming out of this like youth gives you you know an ethereum address gives you a way to sign into any application across the internet in a decentralized way right and eth is kind of a um an investment in a global identity management system I even think some of these narratives if they come to fruition can turn into like bull cases that we don't really talk about we talk about ether's money but what about etha's identity um that's a super interesting thing to think about but the reality is identity is broken isn't it in web 2 it's broken

um just like the Twitter bot problem like uh wow what a it's a failure of identity identity systems and it's even like um we're talking about um wins for mainstream people who aren't into kind of the the money um you know memory go up type use cases well identity is also a national security problem how do I know what's a a Russian bot or you know an evil nation-state actor that's trying to kind of Prey Upon My population if I don't have proof of identity if I don't have proof of humanity um and I'm just thinking about how utterly uh how utterly lacking nation-state identities actually are pretty

embarrassing yeah no I know we were just talking about this in in one of our debriefs for an episode we just did which is I recently opened up some Exchange accounts and I used a selfie of course this is how you validate your your SEC your uh who you are who you say you are uh authenticate it and um it was you know a selfie of myself and then my driver's license basically three jpegs right a JPEG of me in a selfie a JPEG of the front of my driver's license is jpeg in the back and they just they live on my computer somewhere why because I do this so often right all someone has to have is those three jpegs and then they know my social security number which is a publicly available basically uh and

they know my birthday and then they can authenticate themselves on in a banking application like that is your state-of-the-art security nation state security sucks right now it's pretty bad uh and for this to be a solution to that well just sign in you have a private key um private Keys really are a superpower for the for the 21st century and unleashing that for uh um for identity is kind of a really bullish uh use case I don't know if all of this happens in 2023 though David I feel like 2023 will just be the start of that yeah at some level and it'll take a few years for that to fully play out but I'm also bullish on this well we are recording with the sign in with ethereum Team tomorrow and so we are going to turn this uh Theory into a

full-length podcast so we'll have more material on that soon there you go guys well that has been uh 10 predictions for 2023 we're excited about uh going into this year um I'll end with our typical risks and disclaimers of course gotta let you know that all of crypto is risky so is Heath so is Bitcoin you could definitely lose what you put in but we are headed west this is the frontier it's not for everyone but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey thanks a lot