ROLLUP: Biden’s Crypto Executive Order | Sanctions & Commodities | Coinbase & MetaMask | Bear Watch?

Transcript

i thought we agreed during the break we'd stop saying the b word deal no we can't bowl or bear that's true not bold not bare but bankless hey bengal station happy second week of march david what time is it oh it's the friday banquets weekly roll up time where we cover the entire week in crypto this week not actually as crazy as as all the other weeks there are some very big headlines and not too much more other than that so definitely a week of some big news headlines but uh a few just concentrated news this week concentrated news this one's coming at you one day early uh we've got some uh things scheduled so we we're getting this to you a day early so i guess maybe

that's our treat but some topics of the week for you number one the biden executive order for crypto just came down the the pipeline this is a question much anticipated yeah i mean there was a ton of fun about this and we're gonna answer the question whether this is actually bearish for crypto as many anticipated or is it bullish we'll talk about that the question ryan was oof question mark yes exactly exactly and it's still a question mark that's why you have to tune into the episode also commodity prices we got to talk about that we talked a little bit about that earlier in the week the week but uh getting crazy out there maybe threatening a global recession that's happening um update on sanction week more sanctions people freezing everyone's bank account

coinbase uh the exchange we'll talk about what they're doing in the sanctions world also metamasking and fiora are they sanctioning people too what's going on there oof uh david you got the last one there's some uh things going on in the nft space how would you characterize those things oh i would definitely characterize them as complete shenanigans writing uh not just one shenanigans story but multiple nft shenanigans stories uh so definitely deserves an oof there as well nft shenanigans guys before we dig in we want to tell you a little bit a bit about our friends at opolis okay they sponsored this message they wanted us to tell you about what they are doing for the self-sovereign worker and this is for us listers

primarily because for u.s listeners it's very difficult to get health insurance if you're not working for a large corporation like how do you do it if you want to work for a dao if you want to work for yourself if you want to work for a community how do you actually get health insurance well you can get that through opolis they offer health insurance and other payroll benefits to the self-sovereign worker this is the 21st century worker the worker who's working for a set of dows working for themselves is somewhat independent uh they also provide the ability to get paid in crypto they take care of all the pay stubs all the paperwork all the w-2 sorts of things so that you don't have to it's a really awesome tool and i think is going to power a whole new

generation of of dow workers and crypto workers to ultimately get more people onboarded to web 3. and there's also a bonus tell them about that bonus david if they sign up for opolis now yeah if you sign up for obelisk and go through the onboarding process you can get a thousand work tokens and a thousand bank tokens so long as you do that before may 1st uh which is a couple months away but it's going to come fast so go ahead and click that link in the show notes to get your bank and work tokens work tokens being the tokens of opolis which is a dao awesome dallas helping dallas that's what we're doing is bitcoin helping us switch to markets david bitcoin helping us confuse market i think i would i would call it confused market this week start of the week at 44

000 bitcoin price hit a low of below 38 000 but has since climbed back up to just above 42 000 to where it is right now at 42 200 overall down 5-ish percent on the week yeah this is this is hopeful though this little spike is a spike on the on the live views but yeah i mean we want to zoom out though ryan and see what it looks like okay fine if you make me 30 days yeah do the 180 days 90 days 180 okay yeah yeah okay okay down okay all right but look at this line it's good all right look at this okay it looks like we're actually up and here's a report from cnbc

uh eight percent bitcoin up eight percent as biden announced his executive order on cryptocurrencies we're going to uh talk in depth about that when we get to the news section but seems like the market is interpreting that as uh possible bearish anyway yeah and positive news all right silver lining yeah we're gonna yeah we're gonna have to unpack that there's definitely um some optimism to be had about this uh executive order you know what i could tell david you're feeling bearish aren't you yeah i'm getting my baby in bear mood you're never in a bear mood what happened what changed we'll get to the commodity section started the week at three thousand dollars hit a low of two thousand four hundred and fifty dollars uh and is currently at 2 720 down about 8 on the

week eth down 8 on the week uh chris berninski i saw had a take on on that but that's actually to do with the ratio let's talk about the ratio first eat the bitcoin ratio that's down on the week too what's happening here yeah we broke down below point zero six five we are at point zero six four four i think we're at point zero six seven last week so the eighth big tc ratio took a big hit um down three percent uh the bitcoin news had the uh executive order out of biden has uh where bitcoin jumped eight percent ether didn't follow suit so bitcoin responded more than the rest of the crypto market on the executive order news which is interesting so uh bitcoin up more than eath we're back to where we were in february which

was sort of a local below where we were in february we're now below where we were in february wow we're going back to where we were in uh what's this october october yeah and this bodes interesting things i think we've said on bankless before when each bitcoin ratio is going up that means second bull market i mean risk on uh this is what uh chris berninski says as well why don't you read out this tweet david yeah chris says bulls are celebrating bitcoin ripping on the executive order news uh wow meanwhile while the eth btc ratio which is a proxy for risk appetite and crypto grinds lower so this is a mixed signals right btc up on the executive order news but uh eth

btc uh which as we've said before is kind of a bull market indicator is hitting new lows that it hasn't that we haven't seen since october uh which is one of the few things one of the many things that has caused me to not have my bull hat on this week okay well i get to i get to be a bit more bullish than david hoffman this week uh so i i know chris has been bearish the last uh few weeks and months i would say and i i do agree with this eth bitcoin ratio being a proxy for risk appetite and crypto but doesn't eth or doesn't bitcoin generally have to go up first when we're breaking out of these uh bear market patterns like generally that's been the pattern bitcoin has a breakout

everyone's like okay is it safe is it safe weeks go by sometimes months go by and then other assets follow suit eth generally next in kind of the the classic cycle that we've seen again and again could that be what's happening here david that's definitely been the meme historically but i don't think we've seen that been a thing for the past like six months or so uh i think a lot of just like we are in uncharted waters and i think we have been for a for a while now uh crypto is in a place both in its development and in its global relevancy and in the regulation spotlight uh both very good and very bad and just like a lot of neutral stuff uh that is relevant

to the crypto markets that really just changes i think like all of our like previous models and patterns like oh first we would have bitcoin season then we would have eighth season then we would have altcoin season when's the last time that that happened ryan i think it was over a year ago i would say i would say the last time that probably happened was like um a year ago it kind of started and we had a good after d5 summer we had a nice strong bitcoin rally price rally and then we cycled into uh and then it kind of skipped d5 and then we got all ones yeah straight to all l1's and then that like trailed off and now here we are uh so but you think it's different and i think probably the reason you

think that is maybe because of the macro conditions which we'll get to uh in a few minutes with the commodity prices but before we do bankless bed index that's a third a third a third bitcoin ethe and d5 what are we looking at on the week uh it's about flat on the week start of the week at about 100 it's currently at 99 so flat flat on the week a way to get out some of that volatility from holding one of those asset classes individually um all right let's get to a few other things on the on the bear watch bear market watch airwatch this is the second worst start of the year for us equities in 123 years that's the tweet um good good uh place to start the bear watch is

in the equities market we generally don't talk about equities but look at this for context the 11 negative 11.9 percent drop in the first 44 trading days in 2022 that's what we've seen is only rivaled by the 1920 great depression and the great financial crisis those are the only two times something like this has happened in 2009 of course when we had the financial crisis and in 1920 when there was um the 1920 great depression uh oh right there yeah okay right here eleven point eight point one percent yeah but then we got the roaring twenties david yeah it's 1920. yeah so like it's a

little bit like one half bear watch but also it's like all right did we already express all the bear is the bear already expressed i don't know maybe maybe perhaps um but uh i mean also it's a little bit of just like a timing thing right like we hit the highs in the stock market right at like december january uh and then and then putin invaded like you put amassed his army uh we did a normal correction then a war happened so like yeah there's a little bit of just like timing bias on this on this one uh but still at the end of the day uh down 12 percent is a big deal bad start to the year for all assets uh including equities including crypto of course um this is uh the headline title from the

financial side uh times war in ukraine sparks a commodity crisis so let's dig into that let's dig into the commodity crisis a little bit more here is uh prices of various commodities and i'm looking at the one year here is that the thing to look at yeah well i mean it just shows that spike at the end of the year so clearly where like in april of 2021 we had 60 dollars a barrel for oil we are currently up above 120 a barrel so like oil has doubled in the last like six months uh and we don't we don't have this tweet ready but uh jim bianco made a tweet where like every time that there's been a 50 increase in crude oil has triggered a recession like the hit rate is a hundred percent uh according

to according to jim bianco and like you can also see this in other commodities too uh like gold which i mean i guess isn't really necessary for production but still is an indication of just kind of um people being spooked out of equities and fiat and other currencies like gold is surging past two thousand dollars uh zoom out zoom out to like the five year on that one ryan here's the five year on gold yeah yeah setting almost setting new highs basically we're back to covid remember when it did a big run during uh kind of early coveted days right yeah and then bitcoin sucked all the air out of its uh out of the the out of its sails uh and then of course corn and wheat are are up bigly as well uh corn and wheat setting basically new highs again um

uh yeah and like that that really matters because that's food prices right corn and wheat is food prices and it's not just like food prices going up like 20 to 25 at home which is probably what it could happen if these prices sustained their higher levels but it also means just like perhaps a famine for africa because apparently some economists are saying like yo like so much of the african continent is dependent on russia and ukraine for wheat that they have to are going to have to rethink where they're getting their wheat from because there's there's absolutely zero way that a cycles worth of crops is coming out of ukraine right now and so specifically specifically wheat because ukraine produces a massive

amount of assets for the world so commodity prices are jumping this is a commodity indices from the dow jones as well and i think we can see that uh if i can pull up the uh yeah yeah so these are all commodities right and you can we're going all the way back from april 2021 but even with a five-year you can just see the commodities going for going from uh where it was like 500 this is an index so these numbers are arbitrary 500 where it was at 27 in july of 2017 to where it is now at 1260. so i think when commodities go up in price over over a doubling over that four year four or five year period

so like four or five year period that's that's uh a very large time in crypto terms but in commodity terms and manufacturing terms and production and food and just the cost to produce things the commodities of the world have like over doubled in a four-year period so like how is that does that make how many businesses are no longer viable because the cost of goods are higher uh and and so much of this run has come up in the last like three months and so like if these high commodity prices stay sustained for a long amount of time it can cause significant disruption in so many businesses that consume that need to uh to consume commodities to produce their products so this is this is part of like bear mo

bear mode david right now and it's some of these uh niche commodities as well like things like neon gas which is an ingredient for semiconductors like which parasites are in everything right including your coffee cup yeah including my coffee cup um you know and uh um fertilizer for for crops apparently that's a that's a product that uh belarus has a commodity ingredient which is now sanctioned a country that's now sanctioned so we can't buy that anymore palladium that's a a key commodity for cars i believe and other manufactured goods like that um so it's just like a ton of different commodities and we've never we've never seen uh crypto

during this sort of a you know macro backdrop so is this what's giving you the bear market vibes this is this is a very big part of it and i think the story really hangs on is that how much of this are traders just speculating that commodities are the trade right now and like forcing commodities up and how much of this is actually going to be sustained broken supply chains uh eastern europe disruption uh cascading contagion domino effects of across the globe or is just this just a blip like are we going to return to more like normal levels in a couple weeks or is this actually going to cause significant disruption because like if commodity prices are high right now like like when the wind lumber spiked a lot of like at the beginning of covey when

lumber spiked like construction was just like paws and people waited for it to come come back down uh and then people just resumed business as normal as soon as just like the the markets cleared if the if it hadn't spiked however that would have caused significant disruption in construction and so that's basically what i'm looking at right now like is this a spike is this just financial markets being financial markets or is these high commodity prices going to be sustained uh and and remember at the end of the day while there is a big difference between currency inflation and commodity price asset inc like valuation increases for the average consumer it doesn't really matter because it still makes your milk more expensive or still makes your construction more expensive or driving your car more expensive how many

how many individuals can can stomach like a 10 to 15 increase of the goods that they consume on a monthly basis like it starts to like raise the water the threshold line as so like what is viable in the world do you know do you remember that episode we did with lynn alton i think that was like during the summer and uh we're like lin what what should people hold during the the 2020s uh because it's going to be a chaotic decade and she was like you should hold commodities like cold commodities she did say that uh very interesting that that's that's what's kind of coming through when fiat is unstable when there's uncertainty in the world commodity prices just shoot up um not necessarily crypto commodities though right ethan bitcoin as commodities but consumable commodities

yeah you can't you know fill up your stomach on each gas right so it's a different type of commodity class that is not following suit here but we'll get more into that a little bit later i think the commodities story is something that we'll be talking about a lot over the next uh weeks to come probably on the roll-ups as well but we put out an episode with kyla scanlon on uh fortress russia and commodity prices as well including the the r word recession we talked about so go check that out it was published earlier in the week we'll include a link in the show notes as well just a good episode to get a recap on everything that's going on in the world something that is down as far as commodity price though is either block space okay either gas fees

dropped to a six month low uh the decrease is likely related to a cooling off of the nft market is the subtitle here i've definitely noticed way prices down here lately uh is that some solace to you david bear market david i mean no like when ethereum block space demand is low that's an indication of the bull market it's not i wouldn't say it's a predictive indication it's a lagging indicator but it's just like another signal that like things are just quiet in crypto land and as we know like it's kobe put out that article a while ago that was like basically everything in crypto hangs on attention right like things only go up when people have attention on them and what i'm seeing is

that the crypto industry has less and less like attention on it other than the regulators which isn't like the best kind of attention that you want um nft attention going away is bad because that was what sustained a lot of the bull market and that's actually kind of the the graph that we have up up next is like we all know that the nft search terms on google just like when scott gangbusters during nft summer but like how long can it be sustained and right now we're back down to roughly september 2021 levels of nft search volume um so six over six months ago i think so so much of that block space demand for ethereum and for other chains came from nfts and people are starting to care less and less and less about nfts

does this little uh this little graphic here in the search bar does this remind you of 2017 at all icos it reminds me exactly like 2017 i'm just feeding into the bear market david this week i'm less worried than david for bankless listeners but um i i do think that this could mark a turning point as well uh i guess we'll just have to see but you know you know what's uh if you if you don't laugh you you're gonna cry you know um this is the gas price i saw this is a screenshot from somewhere outside of la and we're talking like seven dollars a gallon in the u.s for gas god damn and contrast that with way free fees right so like

real life gas up yeah but each gas price down um that's the world that we're living in right now i don't know give us a give us a case to be hopeful though what do you what do you think what's what's um something that gives you some bull market vibes well it's one of those you maybe if somebody of your preferred park podcast is bearish maybe that means that the bear things have already happened and so uh there there was a line that i heard i can't remember where i aware it was said but like people oh yeah i was actually in ray dalio's book which ryan got me on where like people will keep on buying amazon stock at every single price level because it went up so much therefore it's it's it's

clearly a good buy forgetting that like when you're buying it at the top it's not a good buy it's an expensive buy uh and so perhaps this is just like the inversion of that like if so much of this bare niche has already happened maybe that means all these stuff is cheap and the bearish just has already manifested um however the whole contagion crypto the commodity contagion thing still looms in the back of my head like we really need that to not trigger a bunch of other breakdowns in other parts of the world i do think it's funny that the the only thing that really um concerns me at least in the short run in crypto and the short to medium run let's say in crypto is macro events like the fundamentals of

everything else are just like so strong always i mean the the eth merge this year right like that's gonna be that's a massive catalyst how can it not be and yet if that happens while we're still in the in the slumps of the bear market maybe i mean uh when you have good news during a bear market it just like doesn't move price and that's an indicator of the bear market so i think in the next you know three to six months we'll actually see what type of market we're in for real including when uh when the merge happens and when that ships what happens to the price of crypto will that be a positive catalyst or will it just like fall flat because that's a massive fundamental event that hasn't been priced in maybe it won't get priced in

if we're in the backdrop of all of these macro events we will have to see i think that's exactly right and if you believe the bitcoiners that about like how uh the four-year cryptocycles that we've historically had are all triggered by the happening events typically the habiting happens during a bear market and only bitcoiners would care they're like oh happening yay but then the mainstream media is like we don't really care about that uh but then because of the supply issuance reduction coming out of bitcoin would get have there would be miners selling less bitcoin on the secondary markets and then slowly bitcoin would start to creep up uh and it would creep up for like a year straight and then people would realize it and then they would turn into a bull market uh and so if you believe that these the supply happenings out of

bitcoin triggered bull markets anywhere between like 12 to 24 months later you would definitely expect that same thing to happen to ethereum during the merge because it's three happenings all at once and so like maybe a viable path forward is that like we are we are in a bear market as bear market david says that we are and then the merge happens and the mainstream media just doesn't care about ethereum they forgot about crypto no one's paying attention it's quiet uh and so the the merge happens we get a small little blip in price but it doesn't nothing really happens but then for the next like 12 to 18 months eth just slowly just grinds up and grinds up and grinds up because of the supply issuance reduction like this isn't something

these are patterns that we've seen before that that i could totally see playing out if we are in the bear market though like um let's say this repeats similar like a fractal of of 2018 and 2019 uh there's some like periods where things stay steady and then there's like a series of drops yes you get a 50 drop and you're like okay that was it that was the fifth and then you get another 50 drop right right and you're like oh my god okay that was it and then you get another 50 drop that's one of the things that's got me into bear market mode it's just like every time these crypto prices come up to an inflection point it always goes down like you can predict it's like well if we're in a bear market it's gonna go down and then it goes down

yeah i um i you know it's i think it's a different orientation certainly looking at how to how to invest during the you know the bear market but um i mean the thing that remains true is like don't sell when the market is panicking right that's the absolute worst time to sell and uh so you can either hold through these types of things you can have some dry powder on reserve to buy aggressively the dips that could happen or this could be sort of a fake out of some sort and we're not repeating 2018 2019 given the strong fundamentals so impossible to tell um but i've noticed that the uh the super cycle believers have been quiet

recently well the thing is like i bet you if we like zoom to all-time highs in like three to four months people will be like oh super cycle it's like it's like narrative follows price guys all right not the other way around that's exactly anyway we got a lot more to talk about we're going to cover the releases we're going to hit the news of the week including including that biden executive order but before we do we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible bank list is proud to be sponsored by uniswap unit swap is a new paradigm in asset exchange infrastructure instead of a cumbersome order book system where trades are matched with other humans uniswap is an autonomous piece of software on ethereum that lets you trade any token at the current market price no human counterparties or centralized

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trade and that's why you should be using matcha matcha has smart order routing that splits your trade across all the various liquidity sources in ethereum and is also operational on polygon avalanche finance smart chain and other chains trading on matcha is super easy because it pools the liquidity for me in a single easy to use platform and allows me to make limit on chain orders so you can set and forget your d5 trades and they will go through automatically while you're away so when you're making a trade head over to matcha.xyz bankless and connect your wallet to start getting the best prices and most liquidity when you trade your crypto assets hey guys we are back with the news of the week now we got the bearishness out of the way let's talk about what's getting released i said news of the week but first we got to

cover what's getting released starknet that's some good news this year okay layer two is coming layer two is here this is a stark net hyphen hyphenecosystem.com website look at all these projects on starknet or either live or on the roadmap in beta version of some sort alpharoad arjun x bitmapbox brick uh dydx of course is already there dope wars uh it's a cool game diversify we know diversify their their immutable x the ecosystem is getting larger and larger so i expect this website to fill up with tiles what do you think about this oh i think on the other side of the bear market ryan we're gonna come out with five second five cent transactions

and instant finality and everyone's gonna be like oh ethereum solves the scalability problems during the bear market it's gonna be great sorry we're supposed to leave the bear market behind david's recovered though that's that's bull market david talking just might take a few months um let's talk about this too the tally wallet what are they up to yeah tally wallet that's a new metamask competitor now has the swap feature ingrained into the tally wall inside the tally wallet all the fees go into the community multisig and they have apparently half the cost of a metamask swap fee and then they finish up the tweet saying you'll want to give this a try before the dow launches dot dot dot i wonder what that means ryan what do

you think that means you'll want to give this a try before the dow launches hmm i don't know what hint they're dropping here dave what do you need to launch a doubt there's literally only one thing that you need does it start with the t it does start with a t and it's not tally okay we'll let bankless listeners uh derive what this tweet could mean for themselves but uh hopefully you can read between the lines there a little bit i will say that uh when you advertise the shmersh mop that's coming uh it generally becomes crowded it definitely becomes a crowded thing so why not why not say it everyone knows

everyone else is going to do it as soon as they can as soon as it makes sense so why not just yeah uh this is cool this is not something that's being hinted at from our our friends at ledger they wanted us to let you know that there's a new ledger uh device that's out this is ledger the hardware wallet um i don't have one of these yet but i want one and the reason i don't have it is because it just came out this is the ledger nano s plus so maybe you have a ledger nano s you probably do maybe you have the other version of uh of ledger's as well ledger nano x the ledger nano s plus is a new ledger device that has just been

released bigger screen more memory more stuff you can do on the wallet side of things including when you plug it into ledger's software the ability to manage your nfts send and sign your nft transactions with full transparency in ledger live so this is like taking the ledger that everyone knows and loves and probably already has and like upgrading it making it better yeah so this is like uh for the right mental model i think for this is like this is the new shiny iphone se is what the ledger uh ledger s is it's like the more affordable version of ledger the other one being the ledger x which is kind of like the iphone pro um

but this has gotten a big upgrade to kind of look like the the ledger x uh which i have uh i also i have both the old ledger s and the current ledger x i thoroughly enjoyed the ledger x but it's looking like the ledger s is getting the glow up to look a little bit more like the ledger x but also being a little bit more affordable just clocking in at 80 for one of these things yeah it's super cheap for uh for a new product like this so go check that out i think uh these aren't going to last long like legends has also sell out yeah yeah they always sell out and they're you know supply chain is difficult yeah another reason to be bearish stop okay just get your ledger that's what you should do there's a link in the show

notes get a ledger nano s plus um go try that out let us know what you think of it uh immutable they just raised 200 million dollars now immutable the company is valued at 2.5 billion dollars of course folks that have been listening to bank lists know what immutable is it's a layer 2 solution particularly for nfts what's the significance of this raise david yeah so this is uh not too long ago immutable announced a partnership with gamestop and had the gamestop like development fund uh and people got really excited about that but then they got disappointed and they and the fact that this f the funds from this came from a sale of imx this is not that i think this is not the token this is

the company itself i believe that has raised 200 million in series c funding yeah uh and so valued at 2.5 billion which is distinct although related to the 3.2 fully diluted valuation of the current of the imx token currently uh but this is all going to go into building games in the gaming ecosystem on top of immutable x more later to dry powder this is cool too wallet connect just announced they've raised a little bit of money 11 million dollars worth uh what's wallet connect david yeah well connect is a nice way i use it to connect some of my mobile wallets to whatever whatever i'm doing on desktop so argent particularly if i want to use anything with my argument wallet but use a desktop app like uniswap or compound or whatever you can scan a qr code using your mobile

wallet using wallet connect and the the qr code will link your wallet connect wallet on your mobile phone to whatever app you're using on desktop so it's a nice hybrid mobile desktop connectivity feature and actually just really useful and fantastic ux and they've raised 11 million dollars to help grow out wallet connect um so congrats to the wall connect team yeah you know what's really cool is i remember wallet connect back in like um 2018 2019 when like there was very little funding in crypto and it was it was kind of thought of as a as a public good with no like no funding no real business model and um like not really a strong way forward from a revenue perspective now here they are in 2022 getting 11 million dollars in funding my have things how

things have changed and i think that's because like tokens have changed things right so now that there is there is a way to monetize the public good we've seen this with ens previously which uh it didn't really seem to have a good monetization strategy back in 2018 2019 we're seeing this with wallet connect we're seeing this with all sorts of projects so it's very cool to see good public goods-esque projects get funded in the way that they're getting funded now yeah i think people that consider publicly accessible tokens on decentralized exchanges close enough to public goods so yeah count it yeah yeah bain capital ventures they just launched a crypto focused fund now with 560 million dollars bing capital of course

is like a fairly famous private equities firm i believe and um you know there are 38 year old firms this is kind of old old older money pe now joining the crypto fray any thoughts here well that's good timing to be raising 560 million dollars it is a good time to raise it is a good time don't buy just buy the dip guys my advice for bing capital uh we'll see what they do with their money all right who's this diagonal finance they're excited they say to announce that they have raised 2.5 million dollars in a pre-seed round what are they gonna do they're gonna enable crypto native subscriptions on ethereum what does that mean yeah so this is using the super fluid streaming payments

protocol uh really yeah yeah so this is a startup built on top of a startup so that's already pretty cool uh and so this is um rather than just uh i don't know however you would normally do subscriptions with crypto i don't even think that you there's not really a way there's not really a way with superfluid you can stream like micro transactions your subscription so like i don't know you pay for netflix like one penny at a second or whatever the right math is how about a bankless premium membership something like that too that would work too uh and obviously you aren't paying gas fees for this that's that's kind of the work around that super fluid offers so on chain subscriptions now a thing coming out of diagonal subscriptions in 2022 were 7.3 trillion dollars so that's a fair fairly uh

significant market to capture if diagonal can do this um david a16z they're at it again they've just invested in lido finance how much they put in here 70 million dollars into lido so this has to be a discounted token vested lock-up investment out of lido so probably a discount it's discounted valuation on the lyodo token going into a16z probably locked out for a number of years good investment in uh proof-of-stake a16z is getting uh speaking of good investments the best investments you can make is getting a career in web3 join crypto get a job in crypto as we say every week if you can get a job during the bear

market you're going to thrive during the bull market that's your that's the pitch i thought we'd say i thought we agreed during the break we'd stop saying the b word bowl or bear that's true not bold not bare but bankless okay because bankless is featuring an editor that's the number one job do you know that do you know we're hiring uh an editor for the bankless newsletter who seems like a great job i'm gonna i'm gonna hold on this look bankless fantastic newsletter read by over 150 000 crypto natives actually more than that yeah who wrote that it's old news okay we're at 175 000 now anyway we're looking for an editor if you can write if you've got some skills in the crypto space if you're a

bankless consumer go ahead and apply for that job um let's talk about a few more of the jobs on the jobs board i lost it here it is um a senior product manager at the bankless academy i guess wow is this bankless dao hey we're we're hiring for bankless stuff wow bankless is hiring across the board both nhq a senior product manager is super rare what an awesome job that would be an nft company a senior technical product manager at runtime verification ahead of marketing at status.im an operations manager at maker dow lead financial analyst strategic finance at maker dow deep dallas hiring prima's hiring tally's hiring not a novel's hiring i could go on there's a lot more

at the bankless jobs website go ahead and check that out guys and uh get a job during the job the b market market that's a great way to put it listeners can hear whatever they want to hear news time all right news time let's start here um this was a crazy story that i read this is i guess is the the ukraine thread but it it sort of read like a crypto dystopian novel a little bit a little bit yeah uh ukraine is buying bulletproof vests and night vision goggles using crypto that's what they're buying i mean it's better than like ak-47s and missiles i think uh that would be a little a lot more contentious uh bulletproof vests night vision goggles are

i mean once to protect you one is definitely to help kill other people uh but again this is what we talked about last week on the roll-up like when you donate your crypto assets to the ukrainian government they can go buy bombs with it and it's not just that it's the military suppliers themselves they are now spinning up crypto accounts so they can accept crypto ooh if that's deserves a noof that's an issue right doesn't look at this man this just reads like a a dystopian novel like worlds at war and now people are using crypto to like buy uh military gear in order to protect themselves and permissions for military gear is a scary sentence right um that's the world of 2022. uh i guess on the flip side of this the happy side of

this this is a summary of all of the inflows that went to ukraine um and for various things many different things but look at the top line here uh eath donations 18 million dollars that was that that beat out bitcoin bitcoin is 10 million dollars and the rest i think is over 55 million dollars or something like this the rest were in erc 20s there's some dot donations as well but what's interesting about this is uh eth was now the money not bitcoin eth was the main money uh provided to ukraine um something we've been saying for a while is eat this money looks like it here yeah and my bias is definitely going to come out on this one but like uh the ethereum

community generally a little bit more altruist i would say than the the hardcore conservative nature of bitcoiners uh and i i the theorem community showed up showed up more than bitcoin did but it's important to note that like not only did 10 10 million dollars out of the bitcoin bitcoin came and and got sent to ukraine 18 million dollars out of ethereum but the bitcoin market cap is like two and a half times the size of ethereum's market cap which means the total wealth held by bitcoiners is two and a half times the total wealth held by the people that hold eth uh and each donations almost doubled bitcoin donations uh so the ethereum community i think much more tapped in to the global world that's going on and where needs

need to be met uh youth still definitely underrated as a money in the way that bitcoin is uh rated as a money okay so this is the story in ukraine ukrainian deputy minister just reiterates a call for crypto exchanges to block russian users and you can kind of get in their headspace they're just doing whatever they can to survive and they're calling on the rest of the world to just do whatever they can to sanction russia in all various ways but i don't know if um we should always be listening to to them it's kind of the same reason we don't have you know the victims of a crime as jurors in a court case right they're like they're too amen entrenched in the problem to actually provide um

you know a less a more objective response a cool-headed response to this and this is sort of sort of what they're saying so they want all crypto exchanges to just block all russian users that's the message that's coming out of ukraine right now yeah and how helpful is that really like the russian individuals of the world uh who i think i mean we can feel pretty damn certain that ukraine does not have a coinbase account or a kraken account or any of the other oligarchs they're too easy to find but that leaves like the russian citizens the russian users of these crypto accounts and like how is freezing their accounts going to help anything like bombs are still going to drop on ukraine even if you freeze uh russian users out of their

coinbase account um so this one as much as i stand with the people of ukraine and want the the war around ukraine to end as soon as possible i don't see this one moving the needle uh elizabeth warren related to this just crafted a bill that targets cryptocurrency exchanges in russia sanctions so um she's worried i think you some lawmakers are particularly elizabeth warren that cryptocurrency might be used to sidestep existing sanctions there are few interesting quotes in this article senator lindsey graham says cryptocurrency is rearing its ugly head here uh as you sanction the russian central bank which is a good thing i worry about how the cryptocurrency the cryptocurrency could be used by the

russians to stay afloat that darned cryptocurrency um some of the i think the language in the bill says the like the provision would make it easier to verify the identities of customers and transfers to private crypto wallets by requiring financial institutions that is like the exchanges of the world to keep detailed records and submit reports to the treasury department so basically they already you know coinbase or kraken or gemini they already aml kyc everyone now treasury wants a copy of all of the identities of all of the crypto wallets that they're aml ky seeing whereas before you'd expect coinbase to sort of

have that information in their own private records in case they need it maybe there's a court order some sort of you know reason uh to give it to authorities but otherwise they'd keep it private now treasury wants a direct data feed so that every time you deposit or withdraw from a crypto wallet treasury knows whose wallet it is so your address your ether address is linked directly to your identity that's what she's proposing yeah they're they're asking all of the crypto exchanges to spin up their own eye of sauron directly connected to the meta eye of sauron which is you know the central government and so they're asking it's like hey like we we do our job with financial

surveillance we want you guys to take part in equal parts in financial surveillance that's what's going on here remember we talked about last week that some of the exchanges were resisting some of this in particular they they were resisting the complete blocking of all russian accounts on their platforms and what we said at that time was like uh i wonder how long that's going to last right one week barely right like if even so what happened here david uh coinbase will block russian accounts to sanction the country uh so they are just not trying to pick a fight at all during this debacle and they have indeed kicked off russian users frozen russian users off of their accounts to comply with

sanctions uh and so i'm pretty sure this is true uh but like once again crypto exchanges are not regulated in the same way as other financial institutions and so this um complying with sanctions i'm still i'm pretty sure this is true it's optional right like they are not because they're not a bank they don't have to comply with bank regulations they're just doing it anyways because they don't want to piss off the eye of sauron it's probably a good move it's probably a good move um but they have indeed blocked access to shanks and sanctioned users it's kind of like optional in air quotes right it's like when you get letters from the government how optional is it really uh brian armstrong put together a thread

about this you want to read out some of these tweets yeah the main tweet uh that i think is important to highlight is that tweet number five in this thread you can we'll link it in the show notes he says that being said we don't think that there's a high risk of russian oligarchs using crypto to avoid sanctions because it's an open ledger trying to sneak lots of money through crypto would be more traceable than using us dollars cash art gold or other assets which is what we've been saying for a long time if you want to launder money you shouldn't use crypto it's a terrible vehicle for that because of the fact that it's an open public permissionless ledger people like lindsay warren and uh lindsey graham and elizabeth warren thank you i mean same talking head though [Laughter]

[Music] [Applause] they when they totally different sides of the aisle but somehow the same same but same exactly like when you go it's just because when they go to ether scan and they don't understand what the hell is going on doesn't mean the rest of the world doesn't like it's a public ledger you know everything just because they don't understand that doesn't mean that crypto can therefore be used to violate sanctions just because they don't get it i mean can you blame the exchanges like we knew this was going to happen what else what else are they going to do like are they going to really piss off the nation state is that a good idea i mean they can't they can't afford to do this this would cost them their entire business obviously that's what they're going to do obviously that's what centralized entities do this is the

whole reason for defy the whole reason for bankless is so that we don't have a third party that can surveil us and be the eye of sauron and arbitrarily lock our accounts this is why we need defy what's this take here it seems related it's not just brian armstrong saying this but it seems to be like uh you know nation state uh authorities saying that crypto is a poor conduit for russian oligarchs what's this about this is from from hannah lang at the webinar this morning the national security council director of the cyber security carol house says that the scale that russia would need to circumvent all of financial sanctions quote would almost certainly render cryptocurrency as an ineffective primary tool for the

state which is what we said last week which is what we said on the on the the monday opening note two weeks ago like the market cap of crypto is about true true trillion dollars and russia and all the oligarchs have like a third of that that's being frozen like you cannot fit a third of the crypto market cap through tornado cash or through like like whatever tumbler you have it doesn't work uh and it's that's aside from how it's all public and permissionless and transparent uh and so uh the more and more consensus of by people who know what they're talking about are all like yeah crypto wouldn't work for sanctions so why are we even having this conversation well they're having this conversation as an excuse to tighten up yes the the state

surveillance on crypto it's just a nice narrative in the headlines where you can start to get things through and pretend like you know exactly supports it and pretend like it makes sense terrorism child porn uh russian sanctions these are all the same things great excuses to like uh restrict freedoms that's what's that's what's going on um let's talk a little bit about a new story we didn't get to last week because it was kind of breaking we wanted to see what happened when it settled but there were reports i think last thursday and friday that metamask was actually blocking transactions blocking individuals in venezuela from putting uh metamask transactions through in the wallet that was not that's not

quite true that's not quite what happened can you tell us what exactly happened there there was some uh arbitrary blocking but it wasn't on the metamath side where was it david yeah it was on the infuria side of things and i believe it was venezuela so it did have to do with a geographic region but it was not as a result of sanctions or not any pressure by any nation-state regulation apparently it was just like a misconfiguration in infira uh so basically like a whoopsies a bug an exploit a glitch what's what's in fury for people don't know yeah so when you send a transaction via metamask it gets relayed to an ethereum node all transactions all get relayed to an ethereum node somewhere

somehow some way and metamask defaults to infira and ifura is a centralized node provider spun up by by consensus as a consensus product and so if you just need a if you need an ethereum node because you do if you ever want to write a transaction or do anything else you have to send it to an ethereum node and so inferior offers that service and when you download metamask it defaults by pointing to infira uh infira was this it was the thing that had the whoopsies in the in the configuration for venezuelan countries and so venezuelans when they wanted to use metamask uh said when they went to mendomask and then they got this warning saying that there is no node provider for you basically and your transaction won't get through running uh hooking up a node to metamask that's different from the default one is

not something that users typically do just because inferior works so well and we never have had any issues prior and we still really don't have any issues but it's important to know that you can quickly and easily and trivially swap out infuria for any other ethereum node there's a website spun up by our friend david mihal called ethereumnodes.com which just lists off a bunch of public companies or also communities that run nodes that you're welcome to hook into so if one goes down you can just pick up a different one or you can run your own node which is also an option uh and so if the back end node provider for metamask ever goes down do know that you can go to ethereumns.com and just pick a different one uh and it is and which uh

many many bitcoiners have not realized that you know no like ethereum does not have centralization risk around infera because there's an infinite number of alternatives anyways including running your own nodes including running yeah it's just a matter of changing the defaults although you know i will say it is important increasingly important that we uh try to decentralize this data like this data um provider portion of ethereum node infrastructure right because it's it's also not super practical for everyone to run their own nodes obviously and they're like they're like bit torrent like solutions uh to this and there's some companies working on decentralized data providers that i think

will be very helpful in the future but yeah it's a good psa it's it's something to know but this is a link you included in the agenda david and i'm wondering if you could explain this this is sort of ethereum versus bitcoin sanctions and this is a a document here what what is this document talking about david the difference between bitcoin versus ethereum sanctions yeah so this is a document i put together when i heard uh on a podcast uh about how bitcoiners were pointing at this event of infura um uh being down for certain parts of the country and and bitcoiners were pointing at ethereum like they always do and they say this is why bitcoin is designed the way that it is it's maximally simple it's maximally like uh manageable and

there isn't any sort of just like no like risk like this like the uh ethereum always centralized around in fira and so the this podcast uh the the the host just kind of regurgitated a bunch of bitcoiner takes and i was kind of i messaged him and i said yo i'm kind of disappointed in your reporting because all this stuff is is just basically wrong and so i put this document together we'll put it in the in the show notes which he asked me to put together as like a statement as to like trying to like fix uh correct the record and so i'll just share a few lines here um i say uh i say that bitcoiners often see a few chinks in ethereum's armor how metaphor mask defaults to infuria the larger state size of ethereum's nodes and then they extrapolate it into

hyperbole and use this as a narrative as to why the simplicity of bitcoin is good but bitcoin does not shine during times of nation state ire by not even making on-chain native financial applications possible which is kind of where the need for inferior comes from in the first place bitcoin waves the white flag of providing self-sovereign finance in a trustless way and gives it straight to the centralized institutions who are forced to bend the knee to those that have monopoly on physical power the absence of native defy on bitcoin allows bitcoiners to sneakily critique all of the ethereum chinks in the armor that comes with actually taking the hard route of providing native defy and so here's my spicy take this is akin to a cheeto dust fingered couch potato critiquing the landing of a pro sports

like gymnast sure they didn't stick the landing but they did three backflips in a 720 twist [Laughter] arm chair keyboard warrior sort of takes yeah and so but the last spicy line that i have is that uh bitcoin shouldn't be getting props because it doesn't even try to offer defy that's not a solution that's a cop-out and it's not a pro argument for bitcoin just because it succeeds at not trying uh and so if you are a bitcoiner who likes to flood ethereum for having some sort of centralization risk around infira um read this and reconsider dave is talking about bitcoin maximalists yes you know in particular that they'd like to charge and here's the point right if if all of your

uh banking transactions have to take place on a centralized exchange like a like a block fi or a uh celsius or a coin base or a kraken like how how many orders of magnitude worse is that yeah we just saw what coinbase can do is can block an entire country an entire class of of citizens from accessing their crypto right this is the need for for defy and uh why i think ethereum as well is like uh already ahead um let's talk about this i think this is the big story of the week maybe this is the big story the biden administration just put out an executive order this was a long-awaited executive order like all the way months back when we were talking to andrew yang

and i think he re-echoed this in uh that denver the executive order was coming a lot of people in crypto were terrified about this they thought the executive order would be a biden administration crackdown a complete crackdown on crypto uh a very hostile uh you know attempt to like kneecap crypto in in the united states but it was not that no actually maybe it was actually bullish what was inside this thing the fact that it wasn't um just a massive failure of an executive order and then the fact that it actually looked like they were trying to do an intentional and like well-researched job is like the bullish part of this it's like oh they're not

just being ridiculous nation status like elizabeth warren and they're actually taking a well-reasoned approach to this uh so that that's what the market i think reacted to basically joe biden said hey let's spend some time let's spend some resources and research the best way to regulate crypto oh cool yeah with with a uh measured on focuses on six different areas consumer protection obviously financial stability uh illicit activity us competitiveness financial inclusion and responsible innovation responsible innovation the last one being like the thing that everyone in crypto is really really happy about um so there's some some things to talk about but generally people in the crypto world are all pretty like happy with this executive order look at three of these things

actually all of these things actually like matter a lot u.s competitiveness thank you for considering that financial inclusion that's important that's something web3 can bring responsible innovation like absolutely let's talk about the innovative side of crypto rather than all of the kind of uh illicit activity side of things that that people want to dwell on it's fantastic to see this kind of language in a report and this is just a call for investigation into into these areas it's not a call for like some sort of um decision right now or some sort of immediate action it's a call for a decision after research uh however i i will uh push back a little bit with what you said ryan because there's two sections that kind of make little to no

sense to me but i think that if they do their research they'll discover why the illicit activity one this is a statement from president biden the president has called for an unprecedented focus of coordinating action from federal age uh federal agencies in mitigating illicit finance and national security risks posed by cryptocurrencies he is also urging international collaboration on this issue uh we already know from chain and chain analysis that like very very illicit uh illegal transactions happens using crypto rails like less than one percent is like the lightest figure that i got so like i'm hoping that when they go and investigate the illicit activity being used by crypto rails they did they discover like oh there's actually not a lot there they they in this article they cite the uh the bitfinex hack which we already

which we know about uh and then um they and and then the the trope of how like following the russian invasion of ukraine they're worried about how russian individuals can use crypto which again we've already discussed um there's another do you think this is like a good faith effort though i think yes i definitely think this is a good faith effort wow certainly i did not expect a good faith effort right right yeah but you know uh yeah can be i'm happy to be surprised another thing that came out is a climate change um biden also dropped a mention of the sheer energy cost baked into digital currencies like bitcoin he wants the government to study ways to make crypto innovation more responsible reducing any negative climate impacts i think this is actually really hilarious he wants the government to study ways to

make crypto innovation more responsible oh do you mean what the ethereum researchers have been researching for the past six years with proof of stake like don't worry guys we got this we've been doing this for years now well do you think uh you know a bunch of uh government people in the in the executive branch are now gonna have to listen to bank lists and get like schooled up on what's going on here oh my god are we gonna be cited as a source in some sort of like federal statement oh god i hope not but maybe a bunch of new podcast listeners that'd be that'd be kind of fun so what are the takes from around the industry on this yeah so jeremy alaire and also jerry britto from coin center jay britta from coin center jeremy miller from circle disable coin put both some threads together that are

linked in the show notes so we will read out a queue a few key tweets starting with number one jeremy says white house executive order uh and u.s government strategy for digital assets a thread with thoughts tldr this is a watershed moment for crypto digital assets and web 3 akin to the 96 97 whole of the government wake up to the commercial internet uh and then i'll skip to tweet three specifically the executive order calls for nearly every relevant federal agency to take an on understanding and developing policy positions that understand and address risks but vitally that support innovation and us national economic competitiveness and then skipping to the last tweet for those of us in the crypto community in my opinion this executive order should be viewed as

the singest big biggest opportunity to engage with policymakers on the issues that matter this proverb the proverbial doors of policymakers are wide open this is now a national conversation in the u.s so like this is the the policy doors are wide open for the crypto industry to go through them and educate them but also for the banking industry to come in and fud us so like the board is set the match is about to begin it's now us first like basically the banking industry to make sure that crypto is treated well uh so those those are the key tweets out of uh out of uh jeremy layer from circle so here are two tweets from from jerry britto out of coin center coin center being the uh basically our lobbying agency for the industry

um jerry brito says the the message i take from this executive order is that the federal government sees cryptocurrency as a legitimate serious and important part of the economy and society and i think it's a good signal to serious people who have been holding back from getting involved the executive order also presents another striking contrast with alarmist politicians and media in that it is ultimately a call for further study and deliberate planning not a reactive rush to legislate or regulate this is why we are happy yay we like it we like it we like it bullish david's back on the back of an executive order nonetheless things i wouldn't anticipate in 2022 more of them coming i guess uh that's

awesome that's really great and i i think um our friend jake trevitsky maybe summed it up really well i'm gonna read out his tweet anyone worried that president biden's executive order would spell doom and gloom for crypto can fully relax now main concern yes i feel relaxed the main concern was that the executive order might force rushed rulemaking or impose new and bad restrictions exactly that was my concern but there's nothing like that here it's about as good as we could ask for guys you could fully relax now that's not real do you have some relaxing music i i don't but that's a cheer okay but i got one for elizabeth warren though yeah

i'm relaxed this is great it's great news cool i'm really excited about this very happy i guess that's all we have to say about it maybe we'll get some more content on this in in the weeks to come but it sounds like as you said the the the game and the pieces are now laid out and we just have to play our hand um there's nothing scary about this executive order but um we got to hit the gas pedal and keep moving forward in dc yeah maybe actually relaxed is actually not the right way to put it because we still have to play the game um but uh the game appears to be fairly set and not rigged against us so that's nice that's nice that's nice it's a nice change yeah uh ethereum stuff layer two

continues to get cheaper what's this optimism once again reduces transaction fees by about another 30 to 40 percent i mean when you keep on doing this for like seven times in a row like things start to approach zero really really fast um so um uh as of recently like the last time this happened was like on march 3rd and what is it today march 9th uh so on march 3rd it call data got compressed by 40 and we're doing it again by another 40 like fees are approaching zero which is kind of unfortunate because now the gas fees on the ethereum l1 are also approaching zero like it starts to matter less but hey at least when the bull market finally rolls around again layer two fees will actually be like close to zero it's kind of like the bankless podcast is just

like a repeating cycle of us being sad about gas fees too high and then us being sad about gas fees too low and we're in the part where we're sad about gas fees too low yeah but it's awesome for the long term honestly this is exactly where we need to see the market going ave is on optimism too that's happening deployed on optimism yeah contracts deployed on optimism so guys layer two does not stop getting built out um nft nft side of things let's start with this story this is where you said there was some shenanigans okay tell us about the shenanigans tell us what's here ty lopez who i don't know who he is other than an influencer uh has released his own nfts i think very very um very very uh

inspired by gary vee garyvee he meant to these nfts that were redeemable right like one of them was redeemable for like a gift box and another one was redeemable for a phone call with garyvee and another one was redeemable for whatever and the his community just loved it like big success everyone loved it he executed well he executed beautifully tai lopez is taking a a similar approach as in like redeemable nfts but these ones are uh egregious these are ridiculous kind of cringy oh these are terrible okay so like let's go through some of these uh i think the most also okay i'll save the most hilarious one for last um one-on-one michelin star restaurant with tai lopez like i'm sure that's a very like for the right price that would be used interesting for the right fan but it's

being sold for 29 and a half eth i don't even know what that is in dollar terms because i think in east terms but 30 times where are we 200 at each price or two thousand two thousand two thousand dollars don't say two hundred that was a bear market joke that's like this eighty thousand dollars for a one-on-one michelin star restaurant with tai tha you you're allowed to pay 80 000 to take tai lopez out to a michelin star restaurant one-on-one whatsapp access to tai's personal phone number he's basically selling his phone number for 32.8 eth that's a whole entire ethereum validator for tai lopez's number you want to tie you up like what are you gonna do with

that like what are you gonna do he doesn't even guarantee that he'll respond one-on-one watch a movie with tai lopez for 13 eth you can't even talk to the guy you just got to shut up and watch the movie just watch a movie with him he's gonna have popcorn like wait is that in person i hope it's like on his couch or something if you like guys you guys are on zoom and you guys press play at the same time please okay here's my favorite one a one on one ten thousand dollar game of horse with tai lopez for the low low price of 20 ether you can have the ability to play a game of horse with tai lopez and if you win you get ten thousand dollars which

is like one-fifth the cost of what it costs to buy one of these things fifty thousand dollars for a game of horse with tie yeah wow better make that last wait if you lose the game of horse you have to pay another ten thousand dollars i hope like i don't know this is do you think that maybe we just don't get it because we're not part of the community and this is just laughable but tai has some super fans that to him he's just kind of like uh i don't know like a taylor swift or a kanye west or like someone actually worth this kind of uh you know experience price you think we're the people who don't get it you think those people in the community want this yeah are we the

blank holes um no we're not no there's no way you know it's mostly greed just it's it's an eth too yeah why would you spend your eat this way guys god damn yo the merch is happening people people spending like 20 eth on a game of horse do they know how much this is going to be worth post merge david god this can be one of the most financially terrible investments ever made by a lot i hope people well apparently people are actually buying these things uh and because you can actually see it on chain how many of are actually being bought i don't know um but yeah uh either way ridiculous oh it's crazy do you think this is uh gives nfts a bad name this kind of thing

because this is what makes headlines right bigly yeah like i think it was kind of just got onto my radar just because somebody tweeted this out it was like oh this is clearly the end of nfts like tyro lopez is ruining it for everyone like honestly like here's the here's bear david coming out this feels like the last gasps of icos in 2018. the ico mania was in 2017 when they all worked out the ico mania continued for another year while they got more and more ridiculous and more and more egregious and just more and more cringe uh and like this is that to me where like that was the icos this is nfts this is like the cringiest nft thing i've ever seen really it was was it worse than uh whatever we talked about last week with those uh mutant uh nfts

um what's his name you're right yeah uh kevin and pixelmons you have to make me consider that ryan but like i'll make you consider that this happened two weeks in a row what's happening next week oh god i don't even want to know all right well speaking of cringe david a former file sharing site limewire is getting ready to relaunch as an nft marketplace don't tell me this is another top signal remember limewire back in the day did you use limelight limewire so much yeah it was great it's coming back how would you like it as an nft platform what the hell what the hell at the absolute hell uh yeah i mean

you can't use it yet there you can join the waitlist or say that you're a creator i mean they got to just be rotating the brand into an an nft marketplace platform uh because nfts are hot that's why but again a little late guys like you have to wait for for the nft markets to come back well it's uh we'll we'll see what happens there maybe we'll be pleasantly surprised i doubt it i doubt it um andre andre cronier he is a d5 builder and kind of a famous d5 builder we hadn't on the podcast in 2020 i believe was the last time we had him in the podcast we were talking april 2020 yeah the launch of wiring and wi-fi and his whole strategy and a really

interesting developer he's gone on since then to build a lot of things he's had his hand in a ton of different d5 projects and even like sidechain uh alt layer one networks like phantom well he just quit it sounds like almost like a rage quit maybe although there's not much communication as to what type of departure this was because he like deleted his twitter account and everything and announced through um i guess maybe a business partner of some sort that he's terminating uh all of his work on all of the the apps and service there are 25 of them that he had formerly worked on what's uh what's this about yeah i think i'll actually zoom all the way back out just to provide

context to this when andre came on our podcast uh this was right after yearn got kicked off which urine like stole the show in defy for like two weeks people couldn't stop talking about it uh and so that's kind of where andre like rose up in fame just because he built this product and this token that he gave away for free and didn't really collect any of himself went from zero to sixty thousand dollars in like four weeks or something uh and so that's that's when like the uh brand of andre came around but he came onto our podcast like in kind of a storm talking about like how like he he basically bought off but didn't realize what he was going to turn himself into like dms like when like the the it was too much just too much too much attention like too much degens

people like now asking andre to pump the price him being way too way too responsible for things and that was like almost two that was over two years ago uh wow it's crazy that that's been that long um anyways uh andre has since then built other stuff which got him even more clout and put even more pressure on him as an individual and that kind of continued he started building on phantom building more products uh just kind of leading the charge of like the d-gen side of of crypto people aping into andre contracts like andre kind of turned into a meme and then he was also tangentially involved with the whole wonderland danny sesta xerox sifu drama and i think that's kind of the straw that broke the camel's back and actually

why i think we see andre having quit because like he just didn't just burnt out he just burnt out uh he after the whole uh xerox sifu quadringa wonderland danny cessa drama he wrote this tweet saying like i don't support danny's actions i just want to build i don't want any of this drama i just want to build stuff uh and so i think after like slogging through the mess of crypto twitter and dj twitter and dj and crypto life for two years uh he finally just called it quits and it's like i've had enough of this um which uh he's not the only person i've seen do that in the last like month or so another reason why david's in bear market mode um but yeah so he i think he's just kind of done with dealing with all the toxic defy

community which he's kind of gathered around himself accidentally um but yeah the the end of an era i don't think he'll ever really be gone maybe he's bound he spun up an alt a private alt that we don't know who it is so he can still participate but the persona of andre is being sunsetted at least for now i i do hate to see d5 builders go but one thing that i am actually a little bit relieved to see is i feel like we were getting into an unhealthy position with respect to some of these d5 builders and the cult of personality uh around them like danny sesta was a fantastic example and i think something similar was also happening to andre where people just ape into these projects

you know just because these d5 builders names were associated with them and then it almost seemed to get to a healthy place not necessarily with andre i'm not i'm not too sure but i was getting vibes that um some of the builders of these projects were like pumping their own projects in unsustainable ways as well and if not them themselves like kind of the crowd that gathered around them uh and it just seemed really unhealthy and unsustainable for the space and so i guess my take is this is personality cult defy dead i kind of hope it is i and maybe andre as well hopes it is i don't know maybe some of the other d5 builders in the space or just want to code as they say they want to do uh are

are happy with with kind of personality cult defy sunsetting a little bit and i do hope it's the end of it at least for a season this always returns though like when there's success when there's like bull market when number goes up front we see this every single time right and again like like tourists uh we we talked about tourists and crypto and and um the settlers right and i guess if you're a settler you kind of get tired of seeing the same thing every cycle but it does feel like the end of maybe a a local cycle here of personality cult defy and honestly david i think that's kind of a healthy thing maybe it's a maybe it's a bee market thing but it's a healthy thing

i i tweeted out uh earlier this week i still never found out who danny cessa was uh which is like a joke because like that's how what started the whole like frog drama with us yeah and like what kind of replies did you get on that one completely modest normal people with an absence of no way the frogs are gone from crypto twitter like there are no said that six weeks well you did say that six weeks ago and i got absolutely hounded by the the cultivators yeah i had to like take a personal day and just relax and have an ipa and like so now i get to joke about danny cessa because the tourists are gone and your boy's still here and he always will be look man we

invited danny on the podcast and he said he would come on and never he said he'd come on multiple times in private like dms he said it publicly never came on we never got to find out who he was um are ever confused as who the settlers are you're listening to them right now we're not we're not leaving okay i'm not leaving this is leo dicaprio it's the bear market i'm still here you know what i'm excited to do bank list if this is a b market david i'm excited to do b market season uh that's kind of what i'm getting into that's trying the mood i'm trying to invoke like there are plenty of good reasons to be stoked about a bear market a bee market

goldman sachs is connecting clients to galaxy digital's eth fund i just think this means gold gold and stats as a headline goldman sachs has a bunch of clients of course with a lot of money and they want an easy on board to uh to ethereum uh so they are onboarding to galaxy digital's ether fund probably getting commission on that as wall street likes to do basically just a finder's fee for funneling people into galaxy digital's youth fund i don't hate it fine yeah whatever more people in crypto goldman sachs is some worse things this is a little bit of uh drama yeah you know well let's talk about what this drama is so laura shin released a book that you have i'm not sure if you've read it yet david that's pretty thick

book but we've seen a lot of like a couple of weeks ago we talked about the dow hacker identity reveal uh there's some other things laura shin uncovered and revealed in this book why don't you talk about um the spat between charles hoskinson and laura shin on twitter yeah so this got started off by somebody tweeting out reading laura shin's book it's great to discover charles's early years portrayed on there hashtag crypto and then charles responds a great work of fiction tough market to beat george r.r martin martin and tolkien but we wish her well basically saying that everything in laura shin's book is a fabrication fantasy um and so laura shin comes in taking the opportunity to probably promote her book says hi charles

speaking of fiction do you want to address the discrepancies between your claims of dropping out of a phd program and the school's assertions that you were enrolled as an undergraduate uh yeah so charles has said that like that he never got his phd but he was a phd student for a while before he dropped out probably to go do cryptocurrency stuff uh and then the school allegedly never even had the phd program that charles claims that he was a part of uh and and you know so that's one thing like a lot of people a lot of um deep ethereum people will kind of know charles is like a what's the word for a chronic liar he's a chronic liar of sorts um but then uh who had a really good take it was um it was uh eric wahl had a really good take

that was retweeting laura shin's comments and said something that i think we're all thinking and eric wahl says if you think about a person who so easily fabricates the truth about what such a simple thing as being a phd student not even having a phd but being once a phd student is what he lied about don't you think that maybe just maybe the claimed technical impressiveness of cardano is just a tad bit exaggerated uh i think this is a great like microcosm of my concerns about the cardinal ecosystem at large uh it's kind of a cult of personality as we were just discussing project around charles hoskinson who appears to be a chronic liar and that ryan is my spicy takes for the week

there you go you get one per week and one spicy take in per week that was it do you know is this the part of the market cycle where we like call out people who have been um maybe deceptive yes like when price goes down everyone's like part of the market cycle we see again it's classic we already saw we saw in 2008 as well and uh it seems like these cult of personalities are they can't persist during during bear market cycles at least not the same way they have during bull market cycles so that's another turning of the wheel i suppose more indication that it's b season there was also an e s vote that ended uh sunday david can you talk a little bit about that and the interesting graph

accompanying it yeah this is i think uh coming to closure with a lot of the ens drama that was happened about a month ago basically to speedrun that drama one of the founders of ens brantley very catholic tweeted uh anti-homosexual things anti-lgbtq things got onto it twitter spaces did not back down from it caused a bunch of drama uh in in the crypto twitter sphere uh and then there was a movement to uh remove brantley as a delegate towards ens and in us it's a dow with delegate governance and what we are looking at is the vote as to whether we should remove brantley from the ens dow delegation and really that's the back story but really what we want to talk about here

is it's actually really cool to see the transparent nature of how and which delegates voted for what and how big they are uh and so you get to see all of the delegates for ens and how they voted so it's basically like representative democracy and you get to see your representative and so you as an ens holder you could vote for however you see fit if you want to individually vote directly or you could just like delegate your ens to a delegate such as coinbase.ed coinbase is a delegate rainbowwall.ether is a delegate nick.e nick johnson uh griff.e which is griff griff green i'm pretty sure simona.ethe which is simona pop you get to see how your delegates voted and you also get to see the weight on which they voted wish with which is how much delegate they

delegate weight that they have behind it uh so as of the end of this vote brantley was uh the the against side one uh which was tipped over by brantley himself which is uh something to consider uh which will actually retain brantley as part of the and the ens delegation system uh but the point is the transparency and yeah the transparency and i guess governance system in action particularly delegated governance this reminds me of you said representative democracy also reminds me of sort of your corporate proxy vote basically because everything's weighted by um by uh allocation of capital and how much capital you have and you're delegating to but this is a dow coming to a decision on something and all of the delegates weighing in so i think it's

healthy from that perspective and a good thing for governance to see i just love the transparent breakdown as well all right david uh takes time you ready to talk about the takes of the week let's do it all right we will do it in just a second but before we do we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible the brave browser is the user first browser for the web3 internet with over 50 million monthly active users control your digital footprint with built-in privacy and ad blocking inside the brave browser you'll find the brave wallet the first secure crypto wallet built natively inside of a web3 crypto browser web 3 is freedom from big tech and wall street more control and better privacy but there's a weak point in web3 your crypto wallet the brave wall is different brave wall is built natively

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himself what's the take david i saw somebody tweeted out nfts the quickest way to annoy everyone in your life which is a funny joke but uh this is exactly what they said about blockchain back in 2018 uh at the end of the ico mania as after everyone was just done hearing about crypto and icos and decentralization people are like blockchain it's the the newest way to annoy your families the newest way to indicate that you're a virgin like the word blockchain was just like not in vogue in 2018. uh and you know that we just heard that all the way down like blockchain super annoying uh and now i just i just saw this tweet it said nft is the quickest way to annoy everyone in your life and i'm like i've heard this before uh and so i'm just

reminding people that this is what people said at the end of the ico mania which is a little bit of again a bear market hat but also pointing to the fundamentals that everyone that talked about how blockchain was annoying probably forgot to buy stuff during the bear market and forgot to get we forgot to make life-changing money in the next coming bull market so take note david is saying there is some um market opportunity coming your way some buying opportunity coming your way uh what's this take maybe maybe i'll read it this is a the parent tweet was uh from somebody who said three arrows capital holds avax it's avalanche token jump holds tara sam that's sbf from ftx holds solana sequoia holds polygon paradigm

holds cosmos institutions hold near sailor holds bitcoin only tetranode holds eth laugh out loud and you are thinking eth will go to 20k during uh proof of stake kind of making fun of the fact that no one holds it no big institutions no vc's no no brands no mega whales none of the like big money uh is an advocate for eth they all hold these alternative coins dc investor tweets on top of this and says they may not know it and they may not have meant it this way but this is exactly the eth bullish thesis run it back december 2018 style look somebody else recalling the

bear market 2018 style what is dc saying in this uh parent tweet yeah so he said this this parent tweet uh the chishi whoever says like all these funds hold all these tokens and they're not eath so why would you ever think that eth is gonna run dc's saying like yes they don't hold eth that means that they still have to buy it because they don't have any of it and so all of the size of these funds when heath goes to the merge and people realize that fundamentals matter and all these other chains are just speculation against what they hope could potentially be an ethereum killer once they realize it's not they all have to hold eth am i actually going to go even further on this not only are they not holding eth but these are

this parent tweet which they thought was a dunk on eth it's actually the complete inverse it's actually a dunk on all the other tokens do you want three arrows capital b to be holding your token as we go into a bear market because then that means they're just gonna dump it so i would be very nervous as an avalanche holder that three arrows capital holds is bag holding a bunch of avax tokens and basically this tweet is just listing off all of the institutions that are probably a little bit underwater to some degree with all of their investments and so if you have investments and we're going into a down market you you're gonna sell them like you're not you may i mean maybe they're gonna buy more but like you don't want in my opinion three hours capital to be

holding your asset of choice during times of bearishness oh my god definitely not i don't think they're gonna dump on you they are not they are not settlers okay these are traders these are mercenaries they're going to do whatever is in the financial best interest obviously they're not going to hold through a brittle bear winter they're going to switch over to usdc or stable coins or maybe bitcoin and eth in a bear market definitely not the holders of last resort that i would want on my team during the bear market and dc recalled december 2018 this is sort of what happened in december 18. like if this is a b market i'm not saying it is if it is a b market though

uh everything's going to dump but some things are going to make a dumb dump like dump harder than you can even imagine do you remember some assets went down 99 most never recovered okay so like what are you holding good time to take an objective look at your portfolio and see what other people are holding do you what what holding camp do you want to be in is the question if this is a be market okay lynn alden had a take two the difference between assets that are somebody else's liability and assets that are nobody's liability probably got a lot clearer to people in recent weeks what she what's lynn saying here yeah so there's there's assets like debt or assets that are conditional on the actions of somebody else for them to be

realized and then there's assets like bitcoin or ether or gold that are no one's liability if you have it you have it and you have a lot more security in these assets and during times of insecurity during times of chaos during times of war having assets that are no one's liability is really really useful during times of sanction as well you definitely want those see what the real assets are what the bearer instruments are um what's this take from nick carter he wrote an article and this is a quote from it could you read it out yeah nick carter says while seizing afghan or russian reserves may feel righteous and just the immediate effect of such actions is to completely undermine the credibility of dollar debt as an international savings device more or less saying hey do you store your value

in dollars because you think the dollars are a safe haven well we can also just rug pull you because of how you save them in dollars uh this is a an asset that is somebody else's liability if you hold dollars you are maybe it's a good store of value because you trust the federal government more than any other federal or federal reserve out there but they can also freeze your money and so anytime we sanction people regardless of whether you consider these sanctions to be good sanctions it's undermining the value of dollars because they can be snagged from you yeah exactly and i think what nick is saying here is just let's all just acknowledge the trade-off here it might still be the right thing to do it might still be the thing you want to do the thing you feel like you should do but

let's acknowledge the trade-off is the us's reserve currency status because what are other countries going to want to hold now that they realize the western financial apparatus can just like freeze their dollars on a whim is it going to be dollars is it going to be usdc are they going to look to alternatives and i think the answer is pretty obvious they're going to look to alternatives so cause and effect right there is going to be a reaction to this sort of thing it's not uh there's no free lunch in in the sanctions world yeah that's exactly right all right so let's get to this david what are you excited about this week i mean listeners already know like there's not a i don't see a lot to be excited about like what uh i mean we can we can talk about the usuals we

can talk about the merge blah blah blah there was at the beginning of this bull market i put a a a line into a market monday that uh stuck in my head where the the po bull markets are when society comes and they remember crypto is a thing and then they reprice everything and then some people stick around but most people leave and then the bear market happens again that's what i'm seeing i'm seeing the attention leaving the space people caring less about nfts these jpegs are no longer interesting they're just jpegs now defy tokens never really got traction again post defy summer uh l1 all alternative l1s are like falling through through the floor um meanwhile like the only real attention that crypto has on it right now is with sanctions and

regulation which are not exciting like crypto bull markets happen during exciting times uh and like what is there to be excited about like i like i'm excited about the merge i'm excited about layer twos but like those things don't scale out in the same way that the nfts did with culture and and like social dynamics and so like i'm looking at the horizon being like what left does the crypto industry have in its quiver how many arrows does it have left in script quiver to get people excited about it and i'm just not seeing very many do so do you think we're entering at the least like maybe a quiet a quiet period of uh if it's not a bearish period it's definitely going to be another bee which is a building period damn it i was going to say that

yeah entering the quiet building periods which kind of kind of are loosely synonymous with bear markets um because it's easier to build during bear markets but like i just i just see all the same things that we saw post 2018 like in in the 2022 version there you go guys that's david's take tune in next week to see whether we get uh bull market david back or whether it's going to be not bearish david builder david price goes past like three thousand dollars and i'm just like super oh i'm bullish again like i was totally wrong the super cycles right super cycle all right ryan what are you excited about i'm excited about the executive order just because it's not super dumb i thought it'd be i thought it would be super dumb like to be honest i thought

that they would screw it up it's um it's reasonably measured it's keeping america in the game and i care about that because look i i live in the u.s and i have uh hopes for the u.s uh to preserve you know some to reject state surveillance to reject the half-assed authoritarianism that's been trending towards in recent years to do something that a lot of other countries around the world aren't doing look i mean the u.s shouldn't try to compete with countries on authoritarianism that's a bad path it's never going to win it's just not authoritarian enough to actually do a good job at it right so what is the path for the u.s that's a hilarious take

i mean it's true it's just like it's ju you know it's just going to do a half-assed job so why do that why not why not double down on your core competency and like the founding narrative of the country which is like freedom right that like that's the true narrative that a lot of people in the u.s can actually get behind strong property rights freedom uh civil liberties these are the things that the constitution embodied and the things i would argue that that made the u.s actually a country worth living in and worth immigrating to and i think you can still preserve these things if it does things like embrace crypto technology i just saw a glimmer of hope this week in the executive order that not only said that not that they were going to embrace it but at least they weren't going to quash it all in one

fell swoop so that's what's exciting to me this week and i never thought i'd be saying a executive order is is an exciting thing for crypto but hey that's what we're working with during the bee market let's take anything we can get it's a complete inversion right now nfts are lame defy's dead but hey regular super sick yeah super sick regulation all right guys that's that's it that's the take of the week let's get to the last thing david which is so what's the meme of the week this week uh the meme of the week is just watching the uh a video of people watching the shell gas price just click upwards four dollars seven cents four dollars eight cents you can watch it go up in real time how depressing is that these are hands

on people literally watching gas go up in price that's crazy that's sad yeah gas braces are insane uh this week but um i don't know there you go guys sorry for all the be market top but you know we we got to say what's on our mind in the roll-ups that's what we do every week but of course none of this has been financial advice we don't know what type of be market it is that's for that's for you to make the decision uh but we do know that bitcoin is risky eath is risky defy is risky women telling you all along you could lose what you put in they're less risky in bear markets but we are headed west this is the frontier it's not for everyone but we're

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