ROLLUP: 4th Week of December

Transcript

if you are looking for the front page of defy look no further than xerion.io xerion is your home base for managing your d5 portfolios xerion offers a central place for you to engage with all of the d5 protocols and assets that you engage with on a daily basis but all in one central spot here you can see i've loaded up a wallet and xerion is giving me the portfolio performance of all the assets in this wallet over time as well as a breakdown of all the assets that i own as well as all of my transaction history that i've ever done in an easy to view fashion xerion also lets you invest right into d5's best yielding financial opportunities right from their home page xerion also makes

it super easy to access interest in defy using applications like compound and ave in the background and you can also exchange your assets using the xerion app using an exchange aggregator in the background to make sure that you always get the best rates you can even use the xerion mobile wallet to add your metamask or arjun or another ethereum address right into your mobile wallet so you can see your portfolio and engage in defy on the go here i just loaded up my argent wallet and now i'm going to load up my meta mask as well and xeron will do the same thing it will add all of my assets and wallets together all in one space and give me a portfolio summary of what's going on adding wallets is trivially easy if you already have a meta mask you can get it

right into the xerion app and it can sync with your desktop app as well and the best part is you can also buy ether right into the app itself use the invest tab to look at all the things that you have invested in as well as other opportunities and coming soon to the xerion app is the ability to buy and sell your assets straight from your mobile device as well so download the app it works on ios and android go to xerion.io plug in your wallets and get a historical report of your portfolio over time as well as a comprehensive breakdown of all the assets that you own and how much yield they're generating for you we're also brought to you by monolith monolith is your cool new defy account your d5 savings account your d5 checking

account except the cool thing about the monolith defy account is that it gets software updates right you actually get to increase the usefulness of this over time so here are some of the features monolith is a smart contract wallet with a lot of the features that you would expect if you've come to know defy and what it is you can you can add money to it you can put that money to work in compound and accessing yield uh but you can all and you can also swap through uniswap what was cool with monolith is that they will send you a very sexy monolith visa card that connects to your smart monolith smart contract wallet on ethereum so it's a really awesome tool to live a bankless life with a a savings account that gets software updates so this is something

that you're never going to find out in the real world but you can still do real world things with you know real money it like buy your groceries so that's just fantastic coming soon to monolith actually already here to monolith is now you can buy die and get it sent to your wallet directly right so it's also being an on-ramp so you don't have to go through your centralized exchange like coinbase or gemini or wherever you can just go straight from your bank account right into your monolith checking account smart contract wallet so check them out at monolith.xyz nation welcome to a special holiday episode of your weekly rollup this is the fourth week of december david what

are we doing today we are rolling it up we are rolling up the week of news into a short little snippet that gets injected right into your brain the crypto industry the ethereum world the bitcoin world moves super fast and so therefore we need to roll up the weak and get it injected into your brain so you can keep up with what's going on in the crazy industry of crypto because this is a holiday week guys we're releasing it to you a day early a day before christmas so this is going to come out on thursday for your thursday morning coffee so whatever you're doing this holiday season we hope you are enjoying some downtime with your family but we wanted to get this roll up to you david we're going to attempt to do this in about 25 minutes and we hit market we

hit releases we're gonna hit news some hot takes and finally end with what we are excited about so as usual you can view this on the bankless youtube channel check it out there or the podcast david are you ready 25 minutes let's roll into this let's roll it up all right let's start we're actually starting with something new so let's highlight a bankless citizen this week david so who is this guy yeah so like we say when we usually do our roll-ups uh to bring your coffee and drink it with you because this is a very high energy show but uh the bankless citizen uh matthias i think yeah mathias uh he does handstands while he listens to the roll up so uh matthias hi i hope you're doing a handstand right now and thanks for the shout out on twitter and if anybody else

has some crazy rituals that they do while they listen to the weekly rollups let us know and add us at the banquet twitter dude two things at the same time getting fit while you are getting crypto injected in your brain there's nothing better uh that is awesome man okay let's talk with let's talk about the market dave let's start there what is the market telling us bitcoin continues to to hover up above its all-time high its previous all-time high anyway what are we looking at this week yeah this is the second phase it looks like of very high btc consolidation the last time we had a weekly rollup it was right before the bitcoin broke into the 20k range and it had been consolidating in the very high 17 000 low 19 000 range and then it

jumped up to 23 000 ish and now it is doing that same thing consolidating between twenty four thousand and twenty three thousand dollars extremely high prices and with historical in reference to historical bitcoin prices yet the dumps seem to be uh bought the there doesn't really seem to be significant dumpage here like bitcoin is at all-time highs and it doesn't really want to go down from that uh we'll see if that holds but again like super high consolidation levels from bitcoin right now pretty bullish way to end december also bitcoin dominance is doing like really well are we close to 70 percent now yeah we are on we are basically touching 70 bitcoin dominance was already doing really really hot and and then the xrp news broke xrp the third

largest cryptocurrency dumped 25 on the news which just propelled bitcoin dominance to be even higher so bitcoin dominance doing really really well right now and guys if you're not familiar with what bitcoin dominance is of course it's bitcoin's percentage of the total crypto market cap so bitcoin now in terms of value represents 70 of the total crypto market cap uh that fluctuates up and down over time it's close to its all-time high on dominance as well at least the highest it's been in a while um also like corporations continue to buy especially michael saylor and mike microstrategy they they talked about buying more bitcoin it looks like they have now

indeed bought some more bitcoin for their balance sheet what's going on here right so this was the announcement of microstrategy doing a an offering a bond offering a convertible note so if the price of the microstrategy share price gets above a certain number the loan that microstrategy took out converts into shares in the company uh but this was what was announced last week the last week they announced that they were going to do this they which implied that they were going to be purchasing 650 million dollars worth of bitcoin and what they are announcing today is that they did it right like they told us they would and then they did i'm actually surprised that it happened so quickly uh 600 to move 650 million dollars in seven days is no small feat and what's interesting to me is that the bitcoin

price it's it's hard to pin where microstrategy made the purchase right it obviously wasn't one big market buy it was spread over time uh but it's it's hit because bitcoin is so liquid it's been hidden in the market frothiness that we've seen so we actually don't see a bitcoin price increase specifically because of this uh 650 million dollar purchase which illustrates how liquid bitcoin is guys this is why we always say liquidity begets liquidity this kind of a purchase a 650 million dollar purchase would have been impossible to make like five years ago right like there just wasn't the liquidity to support it now or even in the bear market because prices creates liquidity too absolutely and so as as the market cap for these cryptocurrencies get

bigger then larger entities institutions can begin purchasing them in larger quantities liquidity begets liquidity let's talk about eath price too so we're kind of flat from last week uh or so up just three percent in the last seven days it really feels like david bitcoin dominance is just sucking the air out of the room here well last week was the week that bitcoin broke its all-time high so that's to me that's no surprise like the the week following bitcoins breaking of all-time high is a bitcoin themed week you know bitcoin was up 21.7 it's 21 in the last seven days ether up just three percent uh it's just a bitcoin week um and you know we'll we'll see what happens again

moving forward uh yes you are right ether is struggling to keep itself up above the 600 mark it recently touched 670 now it's floating right above 600. so yeah it's definitely got some room above it in comparison to bitcoin the interesting thing about this is um you mentioned it was the bitcoin week that the when bitcoin dominance starts to get at these heights people start talking about like well is 2021 going to be a bitcoin dominated year right it always the conversation always swings in that direction until there is some type of reversal so tbd on 2021 whether that is bitcoin dominated or whether a reversal really uh like swings the conversation

the the other direction so we will see let's look at total locked value in d5 so that is down a little bit from about 16 and a half billion to 14 billion uh what's happening there and what's happening with the d5 pulse index david yeah this is most likely just the depreciation of the value of assets inside of d5 bringing that total value locked down uh dpi the define index token is down from where it was last week at 115 dollars down to a hundred and eleven dollars uh so like still still pretty flat uh things kind of are waiting for the ethereum markets to heat up again so it's been a quiet week however like you are showing right now on the screen the east number locked in

d5 continues to march upwards and that is one of the core fundamentals of the ethereum economy what percentage of ether is in d5 that number continues to march up to new all-time highs so we've got 7.3 million eth locked in defy an ad in this e3 staking contract there's another almost 2 million we're at the cusp of hitting 2 million so that's almost 10 million locked so that's a good close to percent getting close to ten percent between staking and eth locked in d5 um i love the new charts that divide pulse put out this this bitcoin at work chart too which shows a breakdown of all of the um bitcoin assets that are tokenized on

ethereum today uh and so it shows right now there's a 142 000 bitcoin that represents about 3.3 billion dollars tokenized on ethereum today this number was like zero yeah at the beginning of last year like crazy man look at this growth chart dude like this is just like mount everest which is like straight up um and i love this this because they actually break down the different types of wrapped bitcoin tokenized bitcoin wbtc of course has an eighty percent dominance yeah and that is a custodial crypto bank type solution so really interesting chart here do you have anything to add david yeah i'm i'm happy to see bitcoin on ethereum

infrastructure like and data available like just having data about that available to us i think that's really important to growing that sort of conversation the the bitcoin iron theorem conversation is really really hard because bitcoiners like their bitcoin on bitcoin uh and we are going to see over i think the next year we are really going to see whether the bitcoin blockchain as a as an entity embraces ethereum and embraces ethereum as an l2 solution for bitcoin or do they or or does bitcoin kind of just be stay reclusive and stay self-sovereign stay keep itself like in bitcoin on a bitcoin and kind of keep to itself we are going to see whether the the narratives and the ecosystems make that choice or not

yeah absolutely uh two other things in the market section we're just going to skim over them quickly because we gotta get to releases the first is grayscale is like printing money my friend with their gbdc and their e3 products 25 million a month in december annualized that's like what 300 million annualized uh what a great product for grayscale not so great for retail like the sec blocking etfs is really uh hurting retail they're paying a premium for these products but grayscale is cleaning up there of course also we're gonna get to this a little bit later david but it's worth highlighting a little bit in the market section xrp uh some news came out that the sec is

going after xrp in a big way ripple in it a big way and some of the crypto trust indexes namely namely bitwise already have are just sold liquidated all of their xrp grayscale is probably going to uh follow suit so some interesting developments on the xrp front i i generally ignore xrp david but it's worth talking about a little bit i think today do you have anything to add to that i know we're going to hit it later too yeah we are going to hit it later i think it's just worth to note that like because what happened was that xrp is going is getting pointed at by the sec saying this is a security and then all the related infrastructure around xrp that legally cannot provide

infrastructure to securities needs to change their path and so that's what we're seeing the bitwise is dumping all of their xrp to remove it from their their index grayscale is likely going to be dumping xrp because they can't be offering a security product in the way that they're offering exchanges can't list xrp because it is a security overall a bad day to have infrastructure for xrp because you need to exit in that environment in order to be compliant according to the sec i think a lot of people saw this coming so it's tough to be surprised but it's you know that is actually happening now i guess is is somewhat surprising all right let's get to releases the graph network which is sort of a an api for all of d5

built on top of ethereum some other protocols they they um their token grt has just gone like absolutely bonkers nuts this week uh i was kind of looking at it in the background but what's the story here i see this grt token is now a 4.6 billion fully diluted valuation what the heck is going on very high yeah brand new token on the block it immediately started pumping which is where so much attention got thrown into it the graph is straight up a great project a great team and really a needed service for d5 it is one of the important cornerstones that allows d5 to work while also maintaining decentralization so very useful and valuable product i do

not think that the token is currently reflective of the value that that the graph currently is adding to the ecosystem i think there's a lot of speculation here um and the the token made big headlines by like doing a like a 10x on the first day like three times over again um i would not recommend getting into this token at this present moment this is extremely bubbly this is extremely frothy however congratulations to the graph for getting the token out the door and getting the graph network up and running of course guys this is not financial advice we are also going to be publishing some information about the token economics of drt and the graph project pretty soon on the bankless newsletter so make sure you are subscribed to that speaking of tokens

david tornado cash they released a governance token what's going on here yeah a retrospective airdrop very much like uniswap did if you have ever used a tornado cash you might have gotten some t-o-r-n tokens i've seen some criticisms about the design of this token saying that it doesn't actually do much there's not much about the tornado cache protocol that needs to be governed it's a pretty static system so i i have heard that criticism that like what's the point of the token however everyone likes retroactive air drops to anyone that's used tornado cash so if you have used tornado cash in the in the past go check out to see if you've got any torn tokens dude we've got to do an article on a bank list about a retrospective airdrops because here here's the reality

guys if you are using d5 protocols chances are you're going to be rewarded with airdrops in the future so there's a list of some protocols that don't yet have tokens that are candidates for rewards um zapper comes to mind xerion comes to mind dydex we should do a full post on this david tornado just went in that direction so get rewarded for using defy early that's a pretty compelling reason to start using these tools as well i think it's safe to assume that your tokenlist product and project that you use probably will have a token in the future probably uh all right compound labs some interesting information here so they this is this is the compound protocol of

course they released a white paper for a new i don't call this a side chain proof of authority side chain on ethereum that they are building um and it's supposed to serve as a bridge uh from ethereum to maybe central bank digital currencies through to other chains what's your take on this new compound chain yeah this was met with a little bit of controversy however i'm i'm sitting on my hands and waiting for this to play out um compound is building like you said a a unique and its own independent blockchain that does one thing which is serve the compound protocol on that blockchain there are definitely some advantages to this such as you know low gas fees like you're not

since you're not on the ethereum main net there's also some centralization going on because proof of authority trains are inherently centralized and i think that might be like the angle i don't know what compound is up to however i do understand that they are some of the smartest and most on the frontier uh of many of the d5 protocols that we talk about so i trust that they're doing makes sense for a compound maybe the centralization element that they're adding to compound is something that allows for off-chain real-world assets ave has done something similarly similar to this by creating a centralized like derivative version of ave that can host off-chain assets maybe this is what compounds doing what's also interesting is the cash token so compound has their

own native stable coin which is like the ether of their own um chain uh so some some interesting plays what the criticism comes from compound is no longer explicitly and uh only built on ethereum it's now its own self-sovereign thing and so some ethereum axes are are hesitant about that however i'm i'm uh cautiously optimistic and waiting for whatever the benefits of this thing are to to play out um so well i will be watching this i agree with that take i i think it's important uh to just kind of let things play out this is definitely not a competitive threat to the credible neutrality of ethereum um maybe it'll amount to nothing maybe it'll be useful for compound i think it'll be useful for d5 let's

let's uh see what happens and figure it out it's definitely different though than the roll-up approach yes very right so very different the question of why they didn't go with kind of a roll-up and like the way synthetics is doing it you know i still have that question in my mind i am happy to see a more a new stable coin enter the arena though the cash stable coin i think i have high hopes for that interesting okay we'll be monitoring that for sure also uh another protocol just mentioned a raise this is the union finance protocol uh tell us about this david yeah i this is new to me as as well i haven't heard too much about this but this is a project going straight after uh straight-up credit on ethereum and that's credit in a very different way in

the more traditional way which is unsecured loans um we in the d5 world are very used to over collateralized loans this is going after no collateralized loans or or maybe collateralized by something alternative like your reputation which in the legacy world would be your credit score uh and so they are working on building a system that allows for unsecured loans in d5 and so i'm that is something that definitely could uh really be useful in d5 we love our loans uh and why not add unsecured uncollateralized loans if union can figure out how to provide this so uh good luck to union and congrats on the raise yeah i've seen an early demo pretty excited about it we will see how it goes once it hits mainnet um this perpetual protocol as well they just

launched mainnet as well this is a ethe and bitcoin perpetual contracts protocol david what what is this and what's different about this versus something like a dydx that is doing uh perpetuals right now yeah perpetual protocol is one the first team that issued their perp token their native token using the balancer smart contract or smart pool which is the same same pool that we distributed the bat tokens with so some combination of an amm slash dutch auction mechanism which i'm really bullish on as a token distribution mechanism and with regards to the actual uh architecture behind the perpetual swaps i i don't know what the difference is

between perpetual protocol and dydx then that it's a little bit outside of my area of expertise but do know that there are options out there new options out there to go leverage long on bitcoin or ether i do know that duidx caps out at 4x and perpetual protocol is offering 12x so if you are feeling three times more degenerate than whatever you were doing on dydx perpetual protocol might be for you tis the season to be degenerate is that what you're saying david you know just a full yolo man full yellow all right well let's talk about uh speaking of of yolos uh great git coin actually like people during the the holiday season or in fact all year have been yolo giving and funding public goods on

the ethereum ecosystem and in general in open source software so um bitcoin just passed 10 million in funding to open source software over their history the vast majority of that occurred this year this is super bullish for public goods yeah my take on this one is that this is just a symptom of ethereum building the tools that solves its own problems ethereum has historically had terrible funding problems how do we fund development and get coin is the platform that really tackles that problem head on and seeing git coin have all the success that has had makes me really really optimistic because it just shows like if ethereum

has it's a new problem bitcoin has a way to fund solutions to that problem so so bullish on ethereum solving its own problems i just want to add to that to you david it's like bullish ethereum solving its own problems without taking shortcuts because a couple of years ago the shortcut that everyone was taking that was in vogue is basically okay your protocol should start issuing money to developers basically to public goods to infrastructure right um and so a lot of a lot of chains like decred uh tezos they started doing that of course the the trade-off to that is that starts to affect the credible neutrality of your monetary policy right because then there's a a group of people who own the coins who are voting like a plutocracy

and saying yes these developers this group gets some of the new senior age coinage that we are minting and these other folks don't that is definitely bad for the credible neutrality of the monetary system uh ethereum could have done that in fact there were proposals were segments small segments of the ethereum community wanted to do something like that but it didn't uh and you know the net effect is we have maintained a credibly neutral monetary policy in ethereum and we are also solving our own problems the the harder way like so uh very bullish and i think um like bullish on ethereum not taking shortcuts to this solution as well yeah and i would also add on to that like git coin is

something that is really resonant with some of the core values of ethereum funding public goods is one of the world's hardest unsolved problems it's not just an ethereum problem it's a world problem how do we add and direct money to things that aren't going to profit anyone yet still create a better world for ourselves so when i see git coin pushing out 10 million dollars in public goods funding i see that not only is really optimistic for the ecosystem that that's benefiting from but as a proof of concept of other ways to solve bigger and bigger problems that aren't just ethereum related it reminds me of that slaying moloch episode guys you have to look that up so one of our most popular ones of the year one of my favorites of the year podcast

episode all right david we talked about um releases we talked about market let's get to some of the news let's start with the news again about right here well what's what's worth repeating i mean i guess um like what what's happening with the sec versus ripple thing right so it's been long speculated that xrp is a security that is under the purview of the sec the sec hasn't done anything yet up until today or yesterday and that was the day people have been speculating about this happening for years and now it's finally here this entire industry has always hated xrp as soon as you get into the world of crypto and start to begin to understand how to evaluate and understand bitcoin and

ethereum and what makes these things so awesome you then see a complete opposite ethos or values coming out of the xrp ripple project and so the xrp or at the sec is going after ripple for generating this you know quote unquote coin and then marketing it and then dumping it and doing all of these extremely unethical things to prop up the valuation of the token so that they can continue to sell it to continue to fund themselves brad garlinghouse the ceo of ripple took in 600 million dollars in personal revenue that's revenue into his pocket from uh just ripple from from being the ceo of ripple uh so what's interesting here is like this is

not only just a retail scam trying to pump the xrp token but it's also a regulatory heist because ripple has also trying been trying to get cozy with regulators by donating to the biden administration just being really cozy with people in dc and so it's it's one part scam one part heist and i'm glad it's over yeah yeah uh absolutely even if italic got a little spicy i think on twitter this is a little off-brand for vitalik but um it's interesting that he called srp as shitcoin on twitter um you know and and this is this is some shade that xrp lawyers were throwing at bitcoin and ethereum and i think part of the reason why um you've just taken kind of the the hardline stance against xrp

that you just took is because xrp and ripples really specialized in decentralization theater right so because retail is not as plugged into you the credible neutrality and the decentralization that make bitcoin special and make ethereum special um xrp very much tries to disguise themselves as if they are just as decentralized have the same value set as bitcoin and ethereum and um sell their token to retail and like many who are new to crypto can't really tell the difference i don't know how many texts i've i've gotten from people over the years saying like yeah i'm gonna buy bitcoin ethereum and xrp and i'm like guys like one of those things is not like the other two right like uh you should make sure you know what

makes bitcoin and ethereum special before you go start buying other cryptocurrencies that like you you have no idea where their value comes from not only is xrp to me um and quite possibly a security in a scam it's also a bad investment right it suffers from the like the um mv equals pq velocity problem of 2017. it's just not a good money so lots of problems with it it looks like the um the ship might finally be at least under attack but part of me david is is wondering if they don't just get off with a slap on the wrist a multi-million dollar fine maybe a large fine maybe 100 billion dollars but they can kind of afford it and go on their

merry way i'm not sure what's what's going to happen you have any thoughts there yeah it's definitely a very strong worry of mine as well we saw this happen with the eos case which eos also had a dubious token sale uh arguably much less dubious than xrp but eos they raised like something like something crazy in the multiples of billions of dollars and then they got like some 60 million dollar fine which at the end of the day like is that even a fine if you've raised billions of dollars i i'm optimistic that the sec will not go that same route simply due to how much money that xrp raised specifically from dumping xrp tokens into retail and also some of the back office

communications that the sec seems to have stumbled on upon which are extremely damning about the intentions of brad garlinghouse and and other members of the ripple board yep very interesting um another development has been this week uh the ledger breach so if you have a ledger wallet hardware wallet which um we love like it's a great great product uh david's showing a few fist wow um uh this week some hackers actually published the full list so i believe in june of this year uh there was a breach so anyone who had ever purchased a ledger up to june through ledger specifically their information like

their their name their email address their uh their home address wherever the ledger product was shipped to uh was hacked and taken and that was published online through dark markets sold that way now some hackers actually like published them for downloads uh very publicly so you don't even have to purchase the list of all ledger customers this is pretty bad because of course crypto is a bearer asset and ledger absolutely um should have been more careful i think they're on a little bit of a an apology to her at this point in time what's your take on this david yeah it's it's quite unfortunate there's nothing worse than just a list of people that are known to be bear asset holders

along with their email address phone number and physical address that's like just a bad thing to come into the world ledger i guess could be blamed for for just being careless like we all know that centralized databases of personal information are honeypots and ledger specifically was like one of the hottest lists of information specifically because of the bare asset nature again this isn't a problem specifically to crypto this is just a a privacy and data problem that we've known about like this is not nothing new or specific to crypto it's just the fact that it's happening inside of our industry which makes it so bad kind of feel bad for ledger because like it's the same like almost most companies have this problem you know like most companies

have been hacked and had their data uh breached at some point in time and that's always bad it's just in in the crypto world it's just 10 times as bad due to the bare asset nature so yeah ledger ledger messed up here kind of feel bad for them because it's like a problem that everyone messes up with oh as at some point in time um uh overall just like an unfortunate reality well i i feel bad for them but um i also like more feel bad for their customers right there's a lot of people that are now getting like scam emails they're getting scam text messages um i don't think there's like serious threat uh for most people of somebody showing up at your house but the fact that this information is out in the wild and as accessible as it is is not good so here's what you

need to do to protect yourself um i recommend actually argent just put out this uh this fantastic website at argent.xyz slash ledger hack you can put in your email address and actually see if you are on the list they'll email you and and show you essentially what information may be been disclosed what you need to do is completely ignore any text messages that you receive from ledger any you know like phishing email addresses uh from somebody representing ledger make sure you triple check that never share your your ledger private keys of course hopefully this kind of like like fades away but in the meanwhile gotta gotta protect yourself and don't do

anything uh stupid because hackers have your data now if you purchased a ledger unfortunately meanwhile we'd love to welcome on the quarter million new subscribers to the bankless newsletter somebody made that joke right like we just signed up everybody for like our favorite newsletters um all right david let's get to the next one the fincen proposed rule maybe we don't have to dwell on this because guys we we had a great conversation with jake travinsky and we summarized that in our market monday report on the newsletter so you go check that out if you want it but like what's the tl dr here david yeah the tl dr is that fincen is asking for newer and much more strict regulations with regards to kyc they are just constricting the bottleneck that

kyc imposes on off-ramps you now have to make a report if you make a transaction greater than three thousand dollars outbound out of your coinbase or custodian uh service if it goes to a wallet you need to say who that wallet is owned by whether it's you or your friend or family member you need there to give them their name and their their physical address as well so they need to you need to report who and who lives where which is pretty pretty ridiculous that is the strongest kyc requirements we've ever seen ever from from any sort of industry uh and it's it's there's a lot of second and third order consequences that it's pretty obvious that the drafters of this potential rule do not understand so like ryan said we go through all of those

details with our episode with jake stravinsky it's in your podcast player it's also on the youtube so check that out for more information there's a chance we can overturn this it is a proposed rule now so there's an opportunity for us too that we'll be publishing more information about how you can comment how you can get involved so we can shoot this down before it becomes a reality not the end of the world but not great news um speaking of like i guess news in general this is really interesting so everything that you've heard if you've been in the u.s about congress issuing a 600 check to all americans of course um they issued a 1200 check back in what like april may of this year um another stimulus check was was

supposed to go out congress went through the arduous process of like like getting to a compromise where they're like yep 600 check and then last night trump uh shoots it down and he's like and he's like no i i don't think 600 is a good idea i want everyone to have 2 000. so now they're kind of back to the drawing board i guess and this is just more of the the the 2020 theme that we've seen of money printer go bur um individuals are getting uh money so are businesses so are corporations right why should individual americans but it might have a very interesting effect on the monetary policy in the u.s yeah what's interesting to me is is about how this 600 czech proposal news

got absorbed by the people and as soon as the 600 you're getting a 600 check when the last time you got a 1200 check and it's also been like six seven months since that last check as soon as that news broke i started seeing guillotine memes and that is something to pay attention to if the populace of a country are is making guillotine memes about not receiving enough aid from a central government while the rich are getting like roughly 10 times more than what the poor are getting that's something to pay attention to uh what's also worth while paying attention to is how quickly uh the democrats rally behind trying to up that number to two thousand dollars and then what's even more interesting is that trump just went right with it so

now it's the democrats and trump versus mitch mcconnell and the republican party which is just one of the most interesting things that i think has happened in this month with regards to politics muted we've made the point that that perhaps this kind of uh this kind of activity starts to shake the illusion and the meme of of money right so people think of money as this they don't think about money all the time but they just use it as a as a tool but this this causes individuals to stop and think about where the money comes from and if it can just be printed well then it's not scarce and is it really the money i want to store my wealth in um very interesting psychological effect i think these these airdrops will have on

the american public and on the world as we sort of come to social consensus on what the the money of the 21st century should be i think there's a bull case for crypto there people getting these 200 2 000 checks potentially where if they have excess beyond kind of the groceries and living expenses where they where they're gonna store this cash david well we saw brian armstrong tweet out the a number of specifically twelve hundred dollar deposits into coinbase uh weeks after the 12th conversation no way i didn't see that oh you didn't see that yeah yeah so the the number of 1200 specifically 1200 deposits to coinbase uh spiked right after the 1200 check that got distributed back in like april or whatever

i don't see why this would be any different this time wow very interesting all right um a couple other things we could talk about of course is uh switzerland is doing a central bank digital currency seems like every week there's a new country experimenting with that uh we will include a link in the show notes here also hudson jameson he has been the ethereum core dev facilitator he is stepping down after a fantastic run and tim baco who is running the eip1559 project is taking his place to kind of lead coordination on eth1 look man this is super exciting because uh hudson's been great this really exciting to get tim in there get

some fresh blood looking at it i'm very bullish uh tim baker in this role i think he's going to do well and i think eve to eat one will ship faster as a result of this uh sort of changing coordination leadership what's your take here yeah hudson jameson just one of the the the friendliest people that you will ever meet has done a fantastic job like just cohering the ethereum community i call people like eric connor and anthony cesano and dc as like ethereum's unofficial community managers well hudson is actually the official community manager of the ethereum foundation uh so he's been in ethereum since day one he's helped uh helped quote unquote herd the cats they heard all the developers and get them coordinated um so hudson congratulations on on finishing this role out with a

bang and uh yeah i'll echo what you said ryan about tim baker tim bako has done a fantastic job with eip1559 and leading the charge there i have full faith that he'll be able to continue that charge with all the other things that are useful about ethereum that i know many people don't really uh know about in comparison to eip15559 that but that is still extremely useful and that is things like account abstraction um i i don't actually understand account abstraction all that well however all the people that i do listen to such as mariano conte and vitalik himself are really really bullish on account abstraction and so getting features like that finished off and polishing included into eth1 is going to be really really useful in the long term and tim baiko is

absolutely the man for the job if you want to live a bankless life you need to get a hardware wallet there is no alternative for storing your crypto in a self-sovereign fashion that's why i have four ledgers that i use to manage my different crypto assets using the ledger live account as well ledger live is like your home base for managing your ethereum defy and crypto accounts it does a really good job of aggregating all of your different ethereum wallets if you are the type of person that uses more than one but you can also add other cryptocurrencies like bitcoin or cosmos or whatever your preferred blockchain is and then it will display an aggregate portfolio of all your accounts at the main page one thing that ledger is doing

a really good job of is enabling all the money verbs that me and ryan talk about with the bankless skill cube enabled in the ledger live app so right now in the ledger live app you can buy sell lend swap and stake your crypto assets which is doing a really good job of fulfilling all of the money verbs in the bankless skill cube something that's new to ledger live is ledger swap where you can swap assets one for another directly inside the ledger live application ensuring trustlessness in your financial activity on ethereum and on bitcoin if you want to learn more about what you can do with a ledger go to the blog post the power of ledger live on the ledger website where they share some of the more advanced things that you can do with your ledger that you might not have

known about there's a link in the show notes that will take you to the ledger shop where you can get your preferred ledger hardware wallet i personally like the ledger nano x but i also have both they're both great options when you own a ledger you own your own assets in the way that they have been designed to be held by the user and the user alone so go get your ledger today to make sure that you are as self-sovereign as possible the bankless state in the nations are brought to you by wiring wiring is defy's first self-building community run project which i just get really really excited about iron is a system that seeks out yield in d5 and it does that in a number of different ways a very aggressive way is

with the vaults where you can deposit your preferred asset of choice and different defy experts will come in and generate a strategy for what to do with your deposited token right and so it'll go find ways to get yield in that deposited token in d5 for those who want to just earn yield on their stable coins the earn system is for you where you can deposit your preferred stablecoin and wire will go and figure out which money market on d5 and d5 is producing the best interest rate whether it's dydx it's compound or ave it looks around d5 to see where the yield is coming from and it directs stable coins automatically so you don't have to check them out at wyrn.finance to get started and also check out the stats page to see what

other people are doing david uh we've hit we've hit the news items let's go do some takes so uh do you want to start with this one from hayden adams yeah so uh in the missouri exchange list it lists the country that every single exchange uh is domiciled in right so like coinbase is in you know america finances in the caymans uh but uniswap just doesn't have one and and like hayden uh gives out this tweet um where he says i can go back to the tweet uh hayden says you joke but legit the coolest thing about this page is not is not uniswap competing with centralized exchanges it's uniswap being the only one without a country section that is filled in a blank country section ethereum is the closest thing to a

country that uniswap has this this tweet resonates with a lot of the themes that we've been uh speaking about on the bankless program i want to send this tweet to our friend rowan gray so he can talk about um protocols that can exist outside of the nation state and actually facilitate human coordination it's something we of course are bullish on uh he thinks that the nation state is kind of the sole coordination vehicle the legal structure as well it's something that is is proving to be the case that that like hey human-less systems can actually facilitate massive amounts of of commerce and coordination activity very cool i do hope that missouri adds ethereum as the country do they feel that in there or the how would the bankless station

david that maybe yeah all right what's our next stake here next take is from you ryan you want to take it that was sure yeah so uh this maybe goes off of the conversation with rowan gray to you but um so this is part of the stimulus package we're just talking about in news uh congress actually stuck in some additional language in there that has nothing to do with helping individuals or fiscal stimulus they actually put in some some copyright language so language that's in favor of copyright laws and restrictions uh to the point where you can actually get fined for streaming videos you can actually get fined for taking copyrighted materials creating memes

of them and uploading them to the internet the fine could be as high as 30k for sharing something like a meme there's some information about this we'll include in the show notes but this kind of like stuff kills me dude because it's like uh congress is supposed to be there for the people and promote legislation that that helps the people and we've got a stimulus package that that is meant to help heal the wounds from coronavirus and they're putting in this kind of pork and it's not like self-serving pork it's like clearly lobbyist injected special interest injected crap that nobody wants and that nobody needs and it's not even relevant to stimulus or not even relevant and it erodes some of our some more of our digital freedoms and

digital rights right so like boomer congress strikes again and quite frankly david it pisses me off dude it just pisses me off every time this happens and this is the reason in our conversation with rowan gray we made the point hey rowan you want to do this mmt stuff right that's all great but like um the government right now is not working for the people and you want to put all our eggs in that governance basket it's it's just going to become corrupted and even more corrupted uh as you continue to do that and give them more monetary monetary power that's that's i think what what crypto is doing it's providing a lifeboat an alternative right we don't necessarily want to give this broken governance system more monetary and economic power we want to diversify out

of it that's what the crypto movement is all about so that's my hot take boomer congress continues to screw over our digital rights uh when they have opportunity we always have to be vigilant to try to stop it but crypto is an alternative approach that um has neutral neutrality baked into its core yeah and it's just all too obvious as to where the why people are being distrustful in institutions when uh institutions or the government tries to give the people money for covered relief i guess thank you but then also when you try and like include like a bunch of like different like restrictions on what you are able to do with your life and then like dangle the coveted relief carrot in front of you at the same time

saying like hey we're gonna you get free money but we're also gonna restrict your rights like you like no i like how do you how do you as an institution ask for trust in and when it's in a situation like that like you don't like there is no trust in institutions these days and this is why definitely part of the trust erosion story for sure all right david we did takes what are you excited about this week my friend i'm excited about cultural spillover and here's what i mean by that uh in the ethereum world in the crypto world in the bitcoin world we have a lot of culture we have like a lot of shared memes that people don't get from the outside like we have we all have like the same way of speaking we all we all value the same memes we all laugh at the

same jokes we have really strong culture in the crypto world and what i think the world really really is thirsty for right now is new forms of culture people and especially digital uh digital communication and social media people love having digital culture and that is what we have cultivated in the world of crypto and specifically the culture we've generated is like the culture and jokes and memes around making money and growing wealth and especially in time hard times like this where people are looking for like online communities social communities and also looking to make money i think that is culturally product market fit i think the world of social media is uh is going to be

compelled by like some of this the d gen jokes that we make on crypto twitter uh and that's kind of what i'm i'm excited to to see happen in 2021 is exporting crypto culture to the rest of the world that is interested in it i think that actually this is something that the rest of the world is more or less ready for uh we see people like d-gen and aping into robin hood investments uh back when back in the the bear the the crash back in march and april uh that same energy is super relevant to crypto uh and i i think the cultural spillover from crypto to just general um millennial type communities uh you know the group dms i think that's going to happen really really strongly in 2021 uh and that's

that's something i'm really really interested in that's super cool david i do think actually the spillover could happen the other way too where some of the the other uh like culture that hasn't historically been crypto native will become a bit more crypto native i'm thinking of the uh the beeple sale so digital artists and people as kind of this cult following outside of crypto completely just sold 3.5 million dollars of his art collection right um that is you know elements of digital culture that haven't historically been crypto becoming um becoming tokenized and becoming crypto native and so it's like this this fusion this this melting pot with with other cultures that's really exciting i think in 2021 too i'll echo that

yeah and if you want to get in on the crypto culture the bankless instagram is heating up we have a guy that is managing the bankless instagram so if you're on instagram and you want crypto memes in your instagram feed follow banklesshq on instagram uh we are trying to spread the frontier spread the message on instagram so give us a follow there shout out michael wong who is helping us with that activity uh yeah very cool ryan what are you excited about you know i'm excited about all-time highs my friends so bitcoin hit its all-time highs um but uh lucas from our team from the bankless team put together a post about uh ethereum so ether while bitcoin hit all-time highs interestingly enough ether is still 50 down from all-time highs from a price

perspective and yet this is what's exciting yet the ethereum economy is hitting all-time high on almost all of its other metrics besides besides price so lucas just published like 10 of those metrics the first is like network utilization rate so the ethereum network is being used more than it's ever been used before that hit all-time highs in 2020 a hash rate so this is the the uh compute power that secures the ethereum network that's at all-time highs never been higher than 2020. ethereum open interest ether open interest so ether as kind of a options market the liquidity in the ethereum ether options market has hit all-time highs as as well so this

provides a more price efficient market and more liquid market which again liquidity gets liquidity we've got defy users hitting all-time highs this year so that's number four we started the year with a hundred thousand now we have over a million defy users so we are the small with the size of a small american city at this point and it's a 10x growth right total locked in d5 that hit 15 billion this year blew the previous all-time highs uh out of the water we were like very less than a billion at the start of this year so that's incredible as well and then he goes through uh five other all-time highs too so dex volumes all-time high bitcoin on ethereum we

talk about that every week on the weekly rollups that's all-time high eth in greyscale uh is now becoming institutionalized as well so 2.3 of all ethereum's supply is in grayscale that is all-time high um stable coins on ethereum 20 billion circulating in the ethereum economy that's number nine that's another all-time high and of course there's now two million that's about two percent of all ether in the east deposit contract that didn't even exist at the beginning of this year didn't even exist at um like last month in november and that is now all-time high so the ethereum economy is is flourishing it is hitting its all-time high the question in my

mind is how long will it take eath price to catch up nick carter put out a post similar to this with uh bitcoin metrics and he put that out about uh a month ago it was basically like bitcoins at all-time high transaction volume all of these things um but price isn't yet and within a month price price breached all-time high and caught up we will see what happens in 2021 uh if price catches up with all of these ethereum economy metrics all-time high but so i'm excited about that david and you know what i'm just excited we had a good year in general in crypto so ether price is up 265 bitcoin price is up 218 percent uh the nasdaq in comparison that's a 40

a gold was up 20 s p 14 so crypto outperformed this year my friend uh when we're starting the year like we weren't sure which way it would go uh we were bullish on this industry long term and it it's nice to have some feedback from the market that like directionally uh crypto has been right and like you know the bankless thesis has shown itself strong this year that's what i'm excited about listeners will know that we are generally perma bulls on ether on the bankless podcast however i still believe that the onus is on you if you don't think that ether will cross all-time highs in q1 201 2021 if not even sooner than that

yeah absolutely all right guys this was a little long but hopefully it gets you through the the holiday season on behalf of david and myself everybody in the bankless nation have a merry christmas have a happy new year we will see you next week