ROLLUP: Tik Tok NFTs | Facebook Goes Down | Société Générale & MakerDAO | Ethereum 2.0 Merge Updates

Transcript

Hey, Bankless Nation. It is the first week of October. It's Friday morning. Do you know what that means, David? I think I do. It is the Friday morning Bankless Weekly Rollup, recapping the whole week of crypto inside of hopefully an hour and a half. Maybe we can get it down to an hour and 15 minutes. Ryan just backed up because he knows we can't. But we'll do our best. I have faith in us. There's so much to talk about this week, though, David. We're going to talk about some of the main events of the week. But firstly, man, how are you doing? You doing okay? I'm doing pretty good. I'm liking that CryptoPunk in your background. At first, you know, it was like pretty big. And I'm like, do I stare at David's face or do I stare at the CryptoPunk? And now I've gotten

used to both of you being there. It's the same face. It's the same person, really, right? It's just the metaversal representation of David Hoffman. Mm-hmm. I can't wait until like he starts speaking. Does he talk to you at nights, David? Hey, when Zoom can give me the filters and we can just upload our own faces, then yeah, you'll talk to the CryptoPunk. Oh, that's perfect. Still waiting for you to get your turtle back on your wall. But for some reason you haven't done that yet. I really should. You know, I just haven't had time. But, you know, turtles are slow. That's what they do. Don't say that. OK, no, Scheller. All right. Well, all right. I'll stop with the insults. Let's keep going. Main events of the week, guys. TikTok is coming to Ethereum by way of NFTs. That's huge. Also, banks are coming to

DeFi now. There was a post from Societe Generale on the MakerDAO governance forums where they want to inject 20 million collateral into Maker. Facebook was down this week as well, but not Web3. Web3 cannot go down. David, we've got two other things. What else is hot this week? Yeah, this is the week where a lot of the Ethereum community figured out how to... pitch this whole modular blockchain thing, which is basically roll-ups, but really put it in a way that's really distillable and understandable in my mind that is in stark contrast with monolithic blockchains. Whereas some blockchains try to do everything all at once, the modular approach separates out the consensus layer, such as proof of stake and all the nodes talking to each other and the execution layer, which

are roll ups. And so that is a big theme going around in the Ethereum community this week that we are going to talk about. And also the merge. The merge is happening. We have the first ever hard fork coming for the beacon chain. So you got to update your nodes. And this is the hard fork that is going to enable the merge to happen. So the merge is coming. Got some updates around that as well. There's five things for you. You're going to have to wait to the news section before we give those to you, but that's a reason to tune in. Of course, tune in to the end. You get the meme of the week. And if you're on YouTube, the moment of zen. There's two this week. The memes, plural, of the week. But first, a couple of announcements from the Bankless community,

Bankless Nation. The first is, have you RSVP'd? for the bankless doubt season two launch that is coming up i believe that's 11 eastern on friday so if you're listening to this friday morning you got a couple hours to go check that out that's gonna be live on twitter spaces season twos are always better than season ones and season one was awesome for the bankless dow i think what they're going to do is recap a whole bunch of the things that happened in season one talk about planning for season two david my favorite part about this meeting is like i have no idea What's in store? Like this bankless Dow thing. We will be informed. Yeah, well, I mean, you and I are kind of opening it up, but the community is really taking charge of this and what a community it is. So if you

want to understand what's happening in the Bankless DAO, tune into this quarterly meeting where they unveil season two. There will be a link in the show notes to that or just check out Bankless DAO on Twitter. I'm sure you can see it there. Also, David, got to talk about our sponsor and friends at Zerion. And to do that, I'm going to open up this little portfolio, this little NFT portfolio. I'm going to take a look at these Fidenza rocks. So Fidenza rock. I was literally opening up my, my ledger and open seat a day to try and send these Fidenza rocks to the burner address. You're ashamed of them. You're ashamed of your NFT, sir. Yeah. I, I thought, I thought that like, oh, Fidenza rocks. Like what happens when you combine Fidenza rocks, people are just going to buy though. If they've bought rocks,

they'll buy Fidenza rocks. And it turns out it's a scam. I think it's a scam. Uh, Well, I don't really know. Anyways, I bought a bunch of Fidenza rocks. I want to send them to the burner address, the 0x000 address. Cost me $50 per rock to do it. And I bought like eight of them. Hey, it's open. Excuse me. Zerion with our NFT Explorer can show you all of my mistakes that I bought with NFTs and and also the wins as well. There's my 3D pudgy penguin, which I actually do like. And somebody sent me. I know what your favorite is. What's your second favorite NFT in Zerion here? It's got to be one of my flowers. One of those flowers. The flowers as a whole are pretty cool. No, it's got to be. It's got to be that black and white one. not though

this one no no the other black and white one the oh this white white on black that's one of my favorites as well but also the pudgy penguins man because they're just the goddamn cutest all the way down all the way wait okay it's not the 3d one yeah the 3d one is an artist an artist rendition of uh pudgy penguin 5071 uh cowboy hat yeah so we got farmer penguin and then we also got uh socialite penguin You know what? The next thing we need to do. So you could view all of this in zero round. Of course, uh, zero has like a fantastic NFT viewer. Now they're adding more in the future. You have the ability to like exchange NFTs as well. Um, also you could put them on your Apple watch face, like check this out. I don't have my wife has

an Apple watch. I don't have an Apple watch or I would be doing this with my turtle right now, David, because I'm not shell-less like you. Uh, but, uh, Yeah, you don't, these are all ifs. What could you do with your turtle if you actually cared about it? Someday, sir, I'll surprise you on a roll up someday. Anyway, here's what you can do with Xerion is in a few simple taps. You can add that to your Apple watch face and flex in real life with your NFT super cool stuff. They are adding there. You can check that out. Xerion.io/bankless and find out more about that. But guys, the first thing we get to on every weekly roll up is markets let's start with that we're gonna start with bitcoin bitcoin is still the top dog so what's bitcoin doing this week yeah started the week

at 43 000 which was also the low for the week hit a high earlier i think yesterday at 55 000 we are currently clocking in at 54 000 for bitcoin so overall up 30 percent on the week that's a hot week for Bitcoin we haven't seen that kind of jump in a while like 55k that's uh that's so slouch yeah good job Bitcoin back over one trillion dollar market cap so uh bitcoiners excited about that i'm excited about that's fantastic i think it's great for the crypto market in general what's eath been doing this week too oh i can't show you let me start the weekend at three thousand dollars which like bitcoin was also the low for the week hit a high of three thousand six hundred and twenty dollars and we are currently clocking in at three thousand six hundred and five dollars

overall up twenty 25% on the week. Also a good week for ETH. Okay. Bitcoin to all-time high first or ETH to all-time high first? What's your bet? I mean, gosh, I would, if ETH hit all-time high first, I would be so happy. Okay. Bitcoin to 100K or ETH to 10K? Which happens first? Oh, and that's only a two, that's less than a 2X for Bitcoin. And that's almost a 3X for ETH. So like you gotta, you gotta go with common sense and say Bitcoin to 100K first. I'm I'm going to take ether just, just because do we, do we want to turn this into a bet bet or, or, or I bet you a turtle, sir. I like the actual value, sir. Oh my God. Oh, shell minimalism will not survive, sir. All right. Let's get to the next one. ETH and Bitcoin, the ratio,

how are we checking out on the ratio? We were down, it looks like earlier in the week. Let me scroll to the monthly here. Give you a, give you a, a, a look at that ratio is down now it's back up a little bit, but still not close to, I guess the three month high. Yeah. I think the market is pricing in Bitcoin at a hundred K before ETH at 10 K. So, uh, I mean, historically Bitcoin always goes first. The crypto market is generally like wait for Bitcoin to do things to, so Bitcoin can signal the all clear. That's why I really, really want ether to hit all time highs first, because that for once would actually, uh, reverse that trend um but it looks like that has not that trend has not been reversed yet so we are currently clocking in at 0.0667

each per BTC where last the other thing David I think they're pricing in is Bitcoin ETF everyone's been talking about October okay van Eck said to the SEC hey we've got two fantastic Bitcoin ETFs in there should be no problems with this like it's I don't The fifth time they've submitted these ETFs to the SEC. These are the golden ones. We hope you will approve both, right? And we've been waiting for that olive branch for Mr. Gary Gensler to come to crypto. I still think that's coming. And a lot of people think it's going to happen this year. Maybe that's why Bitcoin is making a run. There was also that report. I can't remember who, but Coinmetrics was partnered with it about how onshore futures markets are actually leading the spot markets, which tells the SEC that price discovery for Bitcoin is happening on U.S.

regulated exchanges, which was basically the big reason why the, um, uh, why the stated reason, the stated reason as to why the ETF was not approved. Uh, and so they, the, I think I can't remember who helped with the report, but overall they proved that, uh, Bitcoin price discovery happens on us regulated futures exchanges like the CME. Yeah. Yeah. There should be no more reasons. If you say no now, you're saying it for different reasons than the previously stated reasons. Okay. Let's talk about the total locked value in DeFi. We're up into the 90s. That's $90 billion, $92 billion as of the time of recording. Still haven't hit $100 billion, but look, man, we are within striking distance. One, one good week away of price action or overall just more time, because I bet you, you know, yeah, yeah. One day it could be a

day. I bet you, if you hit that ETH link, so it's actually ETH deposit into DeFi, which does a good job of separating away price movements from value locked, right? So if we just denominate in ETH, we don't get the ETH price volatility to actually tell us how much values locked in DeFi. And you can also see that ETH locked in DeFi is about to break an all-time high if the trend continues. So we actually don't need ETH to go up in price to break that 10, was it 10 billion? Yeah, 100 billion locked in DeFi. We just need more time and also prices to not go down. Q up your tweets, guys. Get ready.

We're celebrating 100 billion. I scheduled it for Tuesday. Just take the chance. Yeah, just do it. And you'll forget about it. And you'll tweet it out. And people will be like, WTF, David? It's not 100 billion. All right. DPI. This is the DeFi Pulse Index, a great measure of DeFi tokens on Ethereum. So how are we looking on the week? Yeah, start of the week at $300 per DPI, which was also the low. Hit a high of $360 earlier in the week. Fell down down a little bit to where we are currently at 334 dollars so overall up 9.5 percent on the week here's the status chart and crypto David you ready for it oh DPI to ETH ratio we are down to 0.093 at this point in time and it's yeah what's my creeping down one three point one two it's history we'll never

know what your original call was right I think it was 0.08 Yeah, maybe. We're going down. This means that is not DeFi season. It is more ETH season than it is DeFi season when we're down on the ratio like this. Only matter of time, though. It's going to reverse one day. It's just not right now. I will blame NFTs for this because like... One of the reasons, in my opinion, why this chart is the way that it is, why DeFi tokens just can't catch a bid is because all the attention is on NFTs. Like DeFi tokens are boring. They're now they're now like the boomer side of crypto where NFTs are like the cool, cool zoomer things. It's so funny because both of the NFTs and DeFi, good for each other, best friends, they should be married. They're going to do well for each other

long-term, but definitely the narrative attention is on NFTs. I would also say alternative layer ones, maybe like alternative layer ones, DeFi things. So that's garnered some attention too. But let's check this out. This is Ethereum strikes back, I think, when you see layer two beat, which is a measure of total locked value in layer twos and up 25% on the week, 26%. Is that what that is? Pretty cool. Very cool. It's nice to see because with that big, big spike that you see about three weeks ago, that was Arbitrum launching. And then also that whole Nyon cat coin also sucking in a ton of TVL. That's gone now. And so we're kind of, we're almost back up to the all-time high of like 0.36 billion in layer twos without the

whole meme coin sucking in a bunch of money, right? It's much more sustainable. Layer 2B added this, which I absolutely love, which kind of shows the risks of these various Layer 2s, at least at the state that they're in now. So some of them are upgradable. Some of them are still kind of in like a beta type phase. And you can view that on Layer 2B as well, which I absolutely love. But looking primed, man, this is going to be the... It looks so good. It looks so good. Yeah, this is going to be the chart. This is like the new total logged value. This is like... the new DeFi pulse type measure, which is like how much is locked in layer two. And this is going to go up and to the right the same way total locked value and DeFi did. That's that's

I think both of our predictions. I'll say that for you too, David, because I know you agree. Yeah. IP 1559 burning ETH every day. We're burning more ETH. I thought this was super cool, though. There's a report that Coinbase put out in their blog that said to date Coinbase, because obviously they have to settle transactions on Ethereum as well. They just do it in big batches and they pay for it. They charge users too. If you ever withdraw from Coinbase, you know, it might be like a $5 gas fee or something for your token, whatever. Anyway, they have burned over 15,000 ETH to date. Thank you very much, Coinbase. We appreciate your contribution. Love you guys. Very good. EIP-1559, I said, turns transaction fees into economic security. I still don't think people are bullish enough on EIP-1559, David. It happened in August, and now it's

just like a slow burn. It's a slow burn, right? And it continues to burn every day. Coinbase also said, you know we're not just doing this to burn the eth we're also saving nine percent on gas fees because of eip 1559 versus the legacy transactions uh no sacrifice in confirmation time so it wasn't any slower to confirm to ethereum for all and they're burning 250 eph per day every exchange is doing this centralized exchanges they're all contributing to the economic security of ethereum used to call these like some of these centralized exchanges like um I guess like parasitic, right? Because they were using Ethereum security without actually like paying for it. no longer they're paying for it they're paying their taxes too just like every other citizen of ethereum very

cool to see there's also a nice little history lesson in this the whole saving nine percent on gas fees using eip 1559 let's back up all the way to i think eric connor's uh post where he actually introduced eip 1559 and talked about how um the whole auction uh block space auction um model, which is the pre EIP-1559 model, as a lot of cognitive overhead to users transacting, they actually have to guess the right GUI number. And they would just like slap in a GUI number that would like be just like probably way too high. And the overall like ended up just because of the inefficiencies of the auction model, people would end up ultimately pay more than they actually needed to. And so the A narrative that arose around EIP-1559 was that it would help just like reduce gas fees. And then that narrative

caught on a little bit too much. And then there was some resistance thrown on like four or five months ago. It's like, hey, EIP-1559 is not going to do anything to gas fees because all it does is just change how the fees are collected. It doesn't actually lower the gas fees. And then the Ethereum community had to back up. It's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, EIP-1559 doesn't do anything for gas fees. like directly. And so they, the Ethereum community had to walk back. It's like, Hey, EIP one five, five, nine, not going to fix gas fees. Right. And remember EIP one five, five, nine was actually introduced when, uh, gray prices were like one. Uh, and so like gas feeds weren't an issue like they are now then. Yeah. But now on the other side of things, now that EIP 1559 is here, we actually can

see that it is reducing gas fees by reducing the need to like have informed estimations about what the fees need to be paid. And instead, you could just pay the number and like reducing that cognitive load for Coinbase has reduced gas fees by 9%, which is not insignificant. Yeah. Another case of the truth being somewhat in the middle, right? It, you know, it did end up to reduce gas fees, just not like eliminate them. I think people wanted like zero gas fees on Ethereum. That was never the point. That was never the promise. But, you know, the promise was some reduction. We are seeing that. This is cool. This is not reducing. This is only increasing up into the right. The past 12 months, Ethereum settled $6.2 trillion with a T. in transactions. That's the value of all ETH transactions. That's the value of

all stablecoin transactions. That does not include other ERC-20s as far as I know. That's just stablecoins and Ether the asset. Take a look at this chart, David. from 1.2 trillion in 2020 to 6.2 trillion year to date, year's not even over, in 2021. And that's all settled on Ethereum, right? Like, how is the world not talking about this? This has got to be like, it's bigger than Bitcoin now. Include all those stable coins. The largest settlement layer in the world. It's open source. It's permissionless. It wasn't created by large corporations. It was created by a decentralized

community. And, um, people are still sleeping on this i don't get it man and this is just currency transfers this is just ether and stable coins there's so much other value that's also settled on ethereum nfts being a big one also d5 tokens uh so this is actually just a fraction of the total amount just a fraction let me remind you what that means right it's like how hard is it for me to you live in switzerland i live in the us i want to get you some money right My God, I have to go to like in the US, I have to go to a bank account in person, present my ID, talk to a bank teller who asks me where I got my money. Where's it going? What's the purpose? I fill out forms. I fill out documentation. I submit my ID. Using

a pen and paper, by the way. Pen and paper. They charge me $50, maybe $70. And they tell me to wait like a day. And then, I mean, I think actually international wires can take like three to five days, right? Right. it's okay the difference is with this i don't have any central intermediaries right i click a few buttons i have my self-sovereign private key don't even have to get up off of your chair and this is any amount any amount in the world by the way like that's what we're talking about here better better settlement number Let's go on the next Zapper. Zapper is, of course, a great way to see your DeFi portfolio. They've got a lot of ways to kind of zap in and out of

protocols. Monthly active users, 640K up only. Super impressive. Um, looks like they were maybe like 20 K or so January. I can't see the, the units on the chart here, but I like the, uh, the, uh, up 100, uh, 1000% number. They clearly just broke it. Like it didn't, it didn't, the number metric wasn't able to go high enough to illustrate how fast Zapper is growing. Yeah. Greater than 1000%. I can't tell you, you broke our computers. All right, guys, you know, it is the end of the quarter. It's the end of the third quarter. So, um, I think maybe it's time to reflect and summarize some trends for what happened over the past three months. And Coinmetrics, I feel like, does a great job of this with data. So past three months, what happened last quarter? If I were to distill it all down

and summarize it, one of the interesting things that happened was The rise of ETH killers and alternative layer ones. I think this chart from Coinbase is sort of a great summary. They've got kind of two lines here. The first is ETH price. it's sorry, Ethereum's gas fee price. It's mean gas fee price. The other is the price of Sol, which has been kind of the darling ETH killer layer one. And you can kind of see the correlation as ETH price goes up and we have these large spikes in ETH price and everyone starts complaining. Everyone's angry. There are two shifts.

The ETH is unscalable. Like it'll never scale. We need more cheap block space. Then what happens? Well, Alternative layer, uh, layer ones, Solana price goes up to, and that was definitely a key theme of the year. I'm going to talk about the other twos, but any reflections on this, David, uh, a we've seen this before, uh, same pattern happened in EOS, 20, 20, 17. And like, yeah, the whole narrative is that like, do I say it sloppy Ethereum sloppy? It's our show, sir. Okay. Oh yeah. Sweet. We're the chain. I captured Ethereum sloppy seconds. Nice. Yeah. Well, there you go.

So that was the first. I guess ETH killer season, alternative layer one season, if you prefer that term. The second was JPEG summer. We thought we were going to get more layer two summer. We didn't. We got JPEG summer. And here's some interesting graphs that Coinmetrics shows. Again, Coinmetrics pulling this directly from the blockchain, which is why I love it, right? All of this is open, transparent. You have the analytics skills. You can view this data too. But this is ERC721. That is an NFT. The amount of transfers... per quarter and you can see we're up to like nine million from almost nothing like nine million units nine million nfts transferred in the last quarter whereas the quarter before that was like 2.5 and the quarter before that was 1.5

so big difference this week right Huge difference this week. Another NFT, I guess this is OpenSea transaction volume. We just had Devin from the CEO of OpenSea on the podcast. We talked about the insane numbers they're throwing out. So JPEG season was the second. And the third is the coming, the advent of, and the deployment of EIP 1559, of course, which we were just talking about. You could see two graphics here, two graphs here. Total ETH burnt over 400K at this point in time, which we've been updating you on. This is an interesting chart, though. ETH daily issuance. Sometimes Ethereum, at least from a proof of work chain perspective, has actually had negative issuance. It's actually gone into like the ultrasound territory where it's deflationary rather rather than inflationary because

we're burning more than the network is issuing. So pretty cool to see. Those three things, I think, that's the summary for Q3 in my mind. Nice. nice nice quarter ethereum that's wrapping it up yeah what's uh what's in store for q4 david you have any big big bold predictions for us i'm just gonna wait and see uh well i i think we're gonna see even more ultrasound this in in ether like that definitely a downward trend of daily uh each issuance um q4 god do i say it d5 tokens to make a comeback oh gosh no probably not uh probably more nfts More NFTs. More NFTs. Yeah. I don't know if I have any predictions.

My only prediction is I think Thanksgiving is going to be like really happy. I think by Christmas, crypto is going to be doing really well. I think this is going to be an up quarter for crypto. - Isn't the holidays always generally a pretty bullish time for crypto? I think the seasonality- - Q4s are good. - I think, yeah, Q4 is a good quarter. - I remember a lot of, you know, Thanksgivings and holidays where family members are asking me about crypto because we've just had a big run up. And they're like, "Should I buy Cardano? Should I buy Ripple?" Okay. So since we're on the subject, this is something that frustrates me about being a crypto person, a sister have a sister. There's some sibling rivalry there. And, uh, She gets really frustrated when like I'm talking about crypto all the time, except the

problem is like family gathering events or just greater. People ask you. Right. They ask me, it's like, oh, so I asked him, like, hey, what do you do for a living? And then they tell me some like normal job, which like, oh, I work for marketing for some like company. Like, OK, great. I already know everything you do. and then they asked me what i do and i'm like oh i work in crypto and then they have of infinity questions and then my sister comes over and like hears me talking about crypto she's like ah dave's talking about crypto again i'm like they asked me it wasn't my fault they asked me i'm just existing don't get mad yeah yeah that's the other thing but the other thing i mean for me is like if i really go on about crypto i can't shut up

yeah so i have to be intentional around like the other thing is i we're just like for your family and friends the information's out there like this is public service right now bankless go listen to bankless this is what we think about crypto you always direct your family members here if they're really interested in diving in but they have to be really interested in diving in anyway i'm going to start with episode 55. episode 55 is that our uh welcome to bank 2021 edition yeah yeah well the well the welcome to bankless episode that we made after we got good at podcasting not before actually david go back to episode one it was pretty decent i listened to it recently it's pretty decent we did okay on that but 55 guys is the real answer All right. We are going to be back with the

releases of the week and get to the news, TikTok, Lil Nas, everything you need to know about crypto. But first, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible. Bankless is proud to be supported by Uniswap. Uniswap 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, which is what Ryan and I call a money robot. No human counterparties or centralized intermediaries, just autonomous code on Ethereum. Input the token you want to sell and receive the token you want to buy. Something brand new in the Uniswap ecosystem is the Uniswap Grants program is now accepting applications for grants. We have been saying this for a while and

we'll say it again. DAOs have money and they are in need of labor. If you think that you have something to contribute to the Uniswap DAO, apply for a grant to Uniswap. Just look at the size of the Uniswap treasury. It's almost $3 billion. This mountain of capital is looking for labor. Do you have something of value to contribute to the Uniswap DAO? No matter how big or small your idea is, you can apply for a UniGrant at unigrant.org and help steer Uniswap in the direction that you think it should go. That's exactly what we did to get Uniswap to be a sponsor for Bankless and you can do the same for your project. Thank you, Uniswap, for sponsoring Bankless. The era of proof of stake is upon us. Proof of stake systems like Ethereum, Terra and Solana allow the industry to move away from

the hot, loud and wasteful proof of work systems and return back to a cottage industry of individual stakers and individual validators. And that is what we need to make this industry stay decentralized. Individuals must play their part in crypto network validation. And that is what Lido is here to do. Lido makes staking accessible to everyone at the click of a button. By delegating your stake to Lido's network of nodes, you can access the yield offered by proof-of-stake systems and claim your share of the network transaction rewards. Do you have 32 ETH and want to stake it to Ethereum, but running a node sounds intimidating? Or maybe you have less than 32 ETH and you need to pool your ETH with others so you can access staking yields. Lido offers a solution for both. Simply go to Lido.fi, choose which assets you want to stake, and

deposit them. deposit them to the Lido validating network. Lido is working to make sure proof of stake stays as decentralized as possible, and it's committed to decentralizing its own validating network to eventually become a completely permissionless protocol. So if you want to stake your ETH, Terra or Sol and get liquidity on your stake, go to Lido.Fi to get started. All right, guys, we are back with the fresh releases of the week. The first is this Axie Infinity is launching a decentralized exchange. David, that makes a lot of sense. They are a massive crypto gaming company, a lot of assets being traded back and forth. A massive economy. A huge economy. Massive economy. They're the Axie nation. It's a real nation. Now they're launching a decentralized exchange. That just makes sense

to me. What's your take? Yeah, they needed this on the Ronin sidechain, right? So if you were an Axie Nation economy participant and you needed to do some exchanging, you would have to go from the Ronin sidechain to the mainchain to do stuff on Uniswap. But that is inefficient. So Axie just is releasing their own decks on the Ronin sidechain, which makes sense. Put the market where you live. Nice. I bet the sidechain will become a roll-up in the future too. That's a prediction. I know we're going to talk a bit more about roll-up maximalism, I guess, in the future. Modular blockchains, as we hinted at, but let's wait for that. The next is this.

Context is a new service that makes it easy to see what's happening on Web3. Just went into beta. That's the tweet. What is it? It's like a social feed. for nfts which is super cool like it's uh pretty basic right now but what i love about this is you can actually click over to punk holders and you can see all of the punk holders what they're doing what they've done recently yeah yeah what they're shenanigans they're on-chain shenanigans yeah so look at this pop wonder who's a punk holder he just sold this uh alpha kitari nft for 0.15 eth He did that two minutes ago on OpenSea. Scroll down and see a whole bunch of NFT, sorry, CryptoPunk holders. I don't see David on here. There's a transaction if you

try to sell your Fidenza rocks. I buy only. Yeah, you buy Fidenza rocks only? There's a turtle transaction for me somewhere, but we can't see it. Anyway, collectors, artists, friends with benefits. The idea of a social feed for NFT holder, this is very much a Web2 meets Web3 transaction. kind of idea and i'm all about it man i love this this reminds me of like big funds or um just investment firms that will use like satellite imagery to count cars in like walmart parking lots that's like a thing that happens in the legacy finance world and so this is kind of the same thing it's like all right like let's look at all like what are all the crypto punk people buying what are all the fwb members what are they up to it's just a little bit of just uh you know bird's eye

view analytics of what certain communities are up to and so it's a way to get some alpha i just want one that shows me what uh dc investors buying i'm like you should uh give me an alert on my phone yeah yeah thanks dc all right uh lido dashboard so lido like fido internet bond dashboard is is kind of the theme but okay so lido big eath shaking they're also sponsored the podcast thank you lido but uh they have just released a reward history tab where you can kind of see how much reward you are earning on whatever asset you stake. This is ETH, how much you're earning on the ETH you stake, a 4.8% average APR at the moment. This is kind of cool, man. This is what draws

traditional finance in this space, right? Because like you have Bitcoin, which is an asset that hopefully goes up, but it's not a productive asset. It doesn't generate yield. And you have ETH, which is also a store of value, but is also a productive asset. And you can see it right here on the dashboard. I think it's pretty neat to see. And I'm glad Lido added this. And one hammer that I've or one drum that I've always been beating is the more and more metrics that we put towards these things and make these things more and more legitimate towards the people that don't understand them. It literally defines and adds color to what the hell is going on in this whole Ethereum thing. And also just good user UX. So nice job, Lido. Yeah, absolutely. This is pretty cool. Maker, actually, Rune Christensen just issued a

post. It was all about clean money, David. We have a podcast episode about this, Bankless listeners, where we go into all of the details. That is coming on Monday. We talk about clean money with Rune Christensen. We also talk about his thoughts on, actually, Ethereum maximalism. That intrigues you? L1 maximalism. That also happens to be Ethereum. Yes, fair. But this is a clean money post that he issued all about turning DAI into clean money. David, why don't you give us the TLDR of what he's talking about here? So we saw society, Shenra, which we haven't covered yet in the weekly rollup, we're about to submit a governance proposal for MakerDAO to accept some of their assets as collateral so they can get a loan. when we extrapolate this out,

MakerDAO is now as a credit facility, as a lending protocol, can give the ability to use their lending protocol to whomever they choose. Bruin is saying we should choose to allow people to use our protocol that are aligned with green climate activities, our green capital. And so bruin says we should brand die as clean money right um for example bitcoin heavy proof of work a lot of uh non-green funds won't buy bitcoin because it's dirty like heavy heavy heavy energy consumption DAI can instead take the opposite route and brand itself as if you use DAI, you are actually helping MakerDAO fight climate change by allowing to

point their credit facility utility towards companies that are green and promoting green things. We've seen MakerDAO fund, I think, $20 million to help build a solar farm in New York. And overall, MakerDAO is a pool to express capital. And Rune is saying we should allow MakerDAO to focus its capital allocation powers towards entities that are building out a green future. And then by and large, giving the brand of DAI being clean. And so Rune one of the best ways to help change the future is by lowering the difficulty or lowering the barriers to actually helping and if that means that maker dao is making die just using and holding and borrowing die as something that

can help contribute towards fighting climate change then they should totally do that and that just lowers the barrier of helping fight climate change to just using die which is a nice narrative to get behind It's definitely flipping the script on what mainstream thinks of crypto right now. If you want the full extrapolation of Rune's thoughts on that, and if green crypto intrigues you, if the idea of generating alpha from climate and investments in green technology intrigues you, then tune into that episode on Monday for sure. Also tune into this. This is a new newsletter Bankless DAO is putting out. It's called State of the DAOs. One of my favorite newsletters they've put out so far because I really think, and I know you believe this too, DAOs

are the next big thing. Like, DAOs at some level never left, and they're sort of a container for everything else that is happening in crypto. But I don't think they've had their moment yet. DeFi's had its moment, NFTs have had their moment. DAOs will have their moment at some point in time. And a ton of infrastructure is being built out. If you want to keep up to date on the latest, go check out the State of the DAOs newsletter that is put out by BanklessDAO. That's banklessdao.substack.com. You can stay ahead of that. I think there's some alpha in there for you if you get in on what's going on with DAOs early and keep informed.

on the industry. Like it's a whole subset of the crypto economy that not a lot of people are paying attention to. David, let's get to raises. There are two this week we want to highlight. The first is back to Axie Infinity. They just raised 152 million this time from A16Z. That's a large number. But I mean, they're a large, it's like they're a large station now or A large economy now. A16Z getting in on this action. A16Z is just freaking everywhere. There's buying everything these days. We're actually going to have Chris Dixon on the podcast. Maybe we'll talk to him a little bit about their strategy for allocation, but a big raise for Axie Infinity, you know, congrats to that team. I don't know if they need the money, but

you know, they got the money now. Yeah, that is a big question. They have a massive market cap on their token. Like how much do they, what do they need this money for? I mean, I guess strategic partnerships from A16Z. I'd like to know a little bit more of the details behind like why, why why raise when you already have a massive market cap and also where is that money going for i think the next time we get um jiho and team on the podcast that would be a good question for them the axi and vision is extremely ambitious it's not just like this one singular game it is literally an entire economy at an entire like online nation like they are not the whole accination thing that's not just like a meme that is an actual like road map that's an actual manifesto Yeah,

that that actually might be part of the answer to your question, David. The second is this second raises this ramp network just hit a three hundred million dollar valuation in a series a so they just raised 30 million dollars. This is kind of like a fiat on ramp into DeFi. We've known about RAMP for a while. It's pretty cool. Rather than go through a crypto exchange like a Coinbase to on-ramp your fiat into crypto, with a few clicks of the button, you can use RAMP directly on board into DeFi, into crypto. I think it has better market presence in Europe right now. And not in the U.S. yet. But hopefully this helps them expand into the U.S. as well. Yeah, it's been a while since I took a peek under the hood at ramp. But if I remember correctly, it's actually closer to a protocol

than it is a company. That's right. Yeah, that's pretty cool. A protocolized on ramp seems nonsensical, but if they can lock that down as a product, that is no wonder it's $300 million. That's right. I'm recalling that they have a bit of a foot in both realms there. So very cool. Jobs time. Jobs. Get a job. Guys, your weekly reminder, get a job in crypto. I haven't got a job yet. If you got a job in the legacy world, it doesn't count. That's what she said. But a lot of people have, to be fair. If you've got a job in crypto, well done. Let's make this positive, David. But also, if you haven't, you really should. We're bankless is going to shame you into jumping into the crypto industry. Uh, a little bit off ground for us, but Hey, by whatever it takes, you know

what your job may be great now, but could it be better? It'd be better. Yes, it could go to the bankless job boards and you could check out some of the better jobs that are available for you. General counsel. That's a new that's for, for legal minds, I suppose, from smart defy finance and operations. expert required at Smart DeFi as well they also need a senior back-end engineer always room for more technical people in crypto Merritt is looking for a blockchain technical CTO as well this is more of an interim position so if you're looking to just uh you know sign in for six months or so and test the waters that's a great position for that uh Community Manager at I always want to say Aragorn. Aragorn.

Aragorn is required as well. That's on the job board. A blockchain engineer at Highlight, software engineer at Popcorn, community lead at Popcorn. And of course, TracerDAO still wants a senior front-end Web3 developer. If you feel like you have the skills for some of those roles, go check that out, submit your resume and get a job in crypto. What more can we say? News time. Quit your old job. Ready, Dave? Yeah, quit. Today, right now. Wait, do you have to quit your old job to start a new job? I guess you do. Yeah, you kind of do. Open up your, your text, your boss, email your HR, say I quit. Do it right now.

You're probably, here's the thing. You're probably already working in crypto. If you're listening to bank lists, you're just like working for crypto in all of the time that you're not working for your actual job, right? Like your nights and weekends, you're probably doing something in crypto. So why not make it all the time? There you go. Enough about that. We'll bug you again next week, guys. All right. This is cool. It's huge. Three things to talk about this week. The first is this. TikTok is coming to Ethereum and they're doing it via NFTs. David, why don't you take this story here? Yeah. TikTok, everyone's, well, all the Zoomers favorite social media app, famous for distilling as much like dopamine hits into short amount of time as possible. Hey, don't act like you're too good for TikTok, sir. I'm definitely not. They are now

working with Immutable X, the NFT Starkware-based ZK roll-up. which is focused on NFT specifically. It's like an NFT specific rollup. And TikTok is doing NFT stuff on top of Immutable. So that is absolutely massive. That's insanely cool. They've also bring on a ton of artists and just people who are going to be participating in the NFT world in TikTok. on immutable, uh, including little NOS, whoever that is, uh, Gary Vaynerchuk, Gary V Grimes, uh, Elon Musk's ex ex-girlfriend. Um, and, uh, a few other people that I don't know also coin artist card art.

I do know coin artist. Glad she is part of this as well. Yeah, this is super cool. Right? So, uh, first it was Twitter and they started with minting NFTs experimenting. Uh, now they're authenticating NFTs. They're getting into that business. Now it's Tik TOK. And they are now experimenting with minting NFTs. Next thing you know, they're going to be auctioning. And also having an auction. They're actually selling NFTs. Yeah, that's cool. Yes, they're one-upping. A full suite of activities, right? One-upping. And of course, they've got like TikTok firepower. So acting like you don't know who Lil Nas is, David. I know you've listened to Old Town Road, sir. I have not. I have not listened to that song. You haven't? I know of this song. I have not listened to the song all the way through. Okay. Well, I understand why you haven't listened to

it all the way through. I will say that. It's definitely like gets in your head. But okay. So people like Lil Nas are debuting in this TikTok NFT collection. So again, another easy way for celebrities mainstream to enter the market, enter crypto, create Ethereum addresses, eventually go bankless, buy by way of NFTs. This is web two meets web three. Web three is going to eat web two. They just don't know it yet. All right. Let's talk about this, David. This is kind of another important story of the week. You were hinting at it a couple of times through that throughout this episode. What is happening here? Yeah. Society general with like four asterisks in his name or Tilda's in his name. The third largest bank in France just made a

collateral onboarding application to maker Dow for $20 million. backed by Euro bonds. Uh, and so banks coming to maker Dow asking for a loan, they're submitting governance proposals to defy applications saying, please accept my collateral. And that's pretty crazy. Right. And so, um, when we talked to root about this again, podcast comes out on Monday where we talk about this more directly, uh, He said like MakerDAO and didn't go out to Societe General and asked for this. Societe General, they made their own governance proposal and submitted it to the MakerDAO forums of their own accord. No one goaded them or convinced them to do anything. They saw the value of what MakerDAO could offer them and they submitted a governance proposal advocating for what they need and what they have

to offer MakerDAO. So banks come into DeFi to get financial services without us like yelling at them to do so. So that's pretty cool. It's hilarious. It's not a small bank either. It's the third largest bank in France and coming to DeFi now. I never thought I'd see today. Well, I knew I'd see the day. I just never thought it would happen so soon. Pretty cool. That's happening right now. All right. Bruner follows up his own tweet with a fun little joke saying, turns out it was the future of France all along. - For those that don't know, the future of finance meme, which is DeFi, has also been co-opted into saying it's also the future of France, kind of as a joke. - For what reason? Just 'cause it's fun. - It sounds similar, yeah, that's about it. - Yeah, it sounds similar, it's

fun. All right, guys, the third, I think, lead headline for the week is Facebook was down. - Facebook was down this week. And crypto wasn't. Facebook down, crypto wasn't. Why was it down though? Let's talk about this. - Yeah, okay, so the reason why it was down was because apparently Facebook, it services itself, it serves its own servers. And so when things broke, the thing that starts up again, like you know how when your internet goes down, you like unplug it and plug it back in? Well, when Facebook is down, you can't access the thing where you unplug it and plug it back in. I'm not a technicalist. I don't know the details of this.

But apparently the way that Facebook server architecture is constructed is that like the password that you need to start up Facebook again, you can't access it if Facebook is down. They locked their keys in the car is what they did. They locked their keys in the car. So Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, all the other Facebook services were down for like... I don't know, 12 hours, which is also less time than Solana was down a week ago. I'm just going to throw that out there. But yeah, Facebook was down. Yeah, including, it was interesting, like employees couldn't get in the building. Right.

It was all tied into their security system and employee IDs. So it's like you're going to try to get in the building to go fix the server and you actually can't get in there. Not a great situation. What do you think this means for, like, are there lessons that Web3 can learn? I think there's definitely one lesson, which is when you centralize everything, you know, bad things can happen. There was a rumor going around, David, at the time that possibly Facebook was actually hacked, And a lot of its internal user data was maybe stolen by a hacker and like published on the dark web. What a nightmare scenario that would be 1.5 billion Facebook users, all their information, all of their data, you know, is centralized in the Facebook data

repositories. And that's now out and open in the real world. I think there's a lesson on, you know, what crypto can do in the self-sovereign identity, decentralized identity world. And maybe that's a future thing that crypto tackles and hopes to tackle. What other lessons do you think there are for us here? Yeah, I can't remember if I have this in the text or not, but I'll take it. I'll put it here just in case. Is that like more and more lately, starting in 2020, things have happened in the world that... are priming society to understand and appreciate some of the things that we are building here in the crypto side of things. So in 2020, we had the money printer go birth. 26% of all outstanding US dollars were printed in 2020. That's a lot. 26%. meanwhile at the same time people finally coming around

to bitcoin coincidentally right after money printer goes burr so society the the choices we've made as a society to print a bunch of money have woken up people's like oh that's why bitcoin's valuable i understand that now uh and now in 2021 we have like quarter of the internet traffic going to dead websites because of centralization of servers and centralization of power. So now I think society might be a little bit more primed to understand web three protocols as protocols that don't ever go down. They're public utilities that are unstoppable on the internet. And now I think there's going to be a lot more room for aha moments about like, oh, that's why crypto is cool. Like, Oh, I get it now. And, and I've always had this mental model

is like, Crypto is making itself more and more usable and marching itself closer and closer to society. We're figuring out the problems. We're actually making cool, better, useful things. And we're also figuring out the UX behind those things. So crypto is getting closer to society and society is also getting closer to crypto by all these things that are happening in the world that are now real concrete examples as to broken systems that crypto can fix. So that's my take there. I totally agree. Can I add another one to that, David? Yeah. uh, GME or lose. Yeah. I remember when Robin hood, like Robin hood, um, disallowed their, their own traders from, from trading GME because they got a co you know, phone call, got some pressure from, uh, prime brokerages.

And so they just disabled it. That was like an aha. That's why we need defy moment. So I totally agree with that take. And, um, it's a shame that it only happens when something bad happens but i guess that's kind of what it takes to wake people up from the status quo and at least we actually have options right like without d5 without ethereum without crypto we like and you we would have the gme debacle and be like well we don't got any other choice now we have the ability to exit and the ability to exit is very important lifeboat we have a we have a lifeboat noah's ark a big one really big jump aboard really big one because the monster blockchains but we'll get to that later before we do let's talk some ethereum stuff um merge is getting close how do we

know what's this tweet from danny ryan danny ryan the coordinator behind the eth2 efforts which is no longer called eth2 um for reasons um tweets out the altair mainnet launch at epoch 74240 is set for october 27th So there's a hard fork, an update for the beacon chain, for the proof of stake chain, which is the first update for the proof of stake chain. So if you are running a beacon chain node, you need to update your clients. All the clients have new client updates for you to download. And this is the hard fork, the update that prepares us for the merge. So this is the last hurdle we got to get over before we can merge. So more or less what's going to happen is we are going to update this node Update on October 27th. We're going to hard fork the beacon chain

to prepare for the merge. Then all the clients are going to start talking to each other. They already have. That's what's coming next. And once they are talking to each other stably for a really, really long time and all the devs feel comfortable, you merge. Here's kind of some tweets as far as the project plan goes. And remember, there's multiple clients doing this, right? So this was, I think, a tweet maybe a few months ago. And we see these different phases. No, this was yesterday. This was yesterday. Oh, okay, this picture. This first one, yeah. This picture, this image I'm looking at. M1, M2, these are just milestones. Milestones. Milestones. Yes. And I actually don't know what's included in these milestones. Yeah. I think they keep that a secret just to, just to, yeah, they just keep it. Fair enough. Yeah. So that people like

us don't like speculate. Don't tell them like, be good chain by January, 2022. Anyway, no check marks. Uh, Now we got a lot of check marks from each of the clients. - Check marks, good. Green check marks, good. That's the takeaway here. - Here's the bottom line. There's five milestones. They probably don't want us to speculate. I'm gonna speculate anyway. There's five milestones to complete in getting to Merge for all of the clients. And three of them now look completed for almost all of the clients, which means we are like three fifths of the way there, right? So hopefully fingers crossed Q1 2022 Q2 early 2022 looking good for the merge. Hopefully Anthony Cezano says he's bullish on Q1. He's bullish on Q1. Okay. I can,

I can give you that. Anthony Cezano core dev of Ethereum says Q1 2021. That was a joke. Bullish on Q1, hopeful on Q1. I don't know. Maybe those words are the same sometimes, bullish and hopeful. But we'll see what happens. This is all of the clients, as you said, talking to one another. This is what it looks like in the command line. Yay, consensus. Yeah, and yay developers, yay builders. Thanks for understanding all of this. Thank you for doing the hard stuff. Yes, so we can talk about it. All right. This was a close call this week in Ethereum world. So there was a bug. Rocketpool was getting ready to launch, which is like some of the first decentralized ETH staking provider. They've been in the works

like forever for a very long time. And the OGs in the space, I was super excited about that. They were supposed to launch a couple of days ago, but they didn't like 24 or 48 hours before they were about to launch. someone found a terrible bug, a security vulnerability that could have led to the theft of Rocket Pool ETH funds. David, why don't you tell us more? Yeah, apparently the same vulnerability was also present in Lido. And so it was like a two for one discovery of an exploit. The details of the exploit are beyond me, but they have now been patched. So no, you can't go and exploit this. But yeah, turns out, turns out code is hard. Delayed rocket pools launch. So the thing I think maybe one

learning lesson from this, if you are staking, even with a pool, it's more risky than if you want the look, it's more risky than staking on your own. If you want the lowest risk way to stake, you run your own validators. That's the lowest risk way to stake pools. You're at a bit more risk. there's a bit more like ease going on but um it's there's still some level of risk and we see that when we uncover security vulnerabilities david um connects we talked about this this is a bridge uh they just released last week um what they're calling nxtp which is kind of this multi-grid bridge uh interoperability protocol to move from arbitrum to to optimism back to mainnet bridge from any of the layer twos and i guess

I guess they've been live for a week and now 16 million in volume has been bridged across their chains, which is pretty cool. The insane thing is that $16 million in volume has come off of $1.6 million of like liquidity, right? So there's $1.6 million worth of stable coins or ETH. No, it's all stable coins. But that $1.6 million of stable coins has actually transferred $16 million of value. So the way this works is that like one stable coin will go back and forth between two L2s like 10 times and count for $10. So it's very, very capitally efficient. And so the total depositors who have deposited a total of $16 million earning 30% APY on their stable coins with a 0.05% fee. So this is definitely going to be

a very strong and sustainable source of yield that is going to ultimately come to DeFi when these things open up for mainnet. And you're going to see applications like Yearn develop strategies around these things. And so this is going to be one of those things that pumps up stablecoin yields across all of DeFi. Capital efficiency is great news too, David, because, you know, some of my worries about like payment channels and state channels are that they're not actually like that capital efficient. I mean, that's why they haven't had the, uh, the adoption that we all hoped that they would have up to date. And, uh, yeah, just say you agree, you know, I do agree.

Yeah. David had to walk away from his computer for a second. I don't even think he was listening. But he does agree with that. I was hearing you, yeah. Okay. All right, what's next? Let's talk, this is the subject you really wanted to talk about. This is the reason for the roll-up this week. So I'm not gonna steal your thunder, but I've read everything that Polly Nya has written. I suggest you do the same. I know you have too, David, but give us the TLDR take. I know we're gonna do a longer podcast on, on modular blockchains and the future scalability of Ethereum, how it relates and why we're so excited about this concept.

But give us the TL;DR here. Yeah, so we all know the concept of ultrasound money with Ether. This is going to become ultimately the narrative of ultra scalable Ethereum. in the same vein, right? One half of the coin is ultrasound money. The other half of Ethereum is ultra scalable Ethereum. The way that we get to ultra scalable Ethereum is by this concept called modular blockchains or simply the delegation of labor, the separation of labor of how blockchains operate into their respective components where they are optimized for. So Pauli Naya, who has a great blog, who's one of the probably the most succinct and illustrative, most accessible, accessible, like, yeah, illustrators of how this whole roll ups plus data layers of theory. Mel one is going to work

the relationships of all these things. Fine. I had tweets the first time in 12 years, which he is calling the monolithic blockchain era. The last 12 years of crypto, we had the blockchain trilemma. with zk proofs zero knowledge proofs and data sharding we have economies of scale that invert the trilemma the more decentralized you are the more scale there is and the cheaper the transactions get it's a whole new paradigm pauline iss uh so i think there's a couple more times in the roll up that we're going to touch on this but basically Uh, uh, before I get there, I'll read the second tweet. Paulinaia says monolithic blockchains and monolithic blockchains are like blockchains that try and do everything at the L1 without any sort of just accessories, like rollups,

like cram, cram all the things into one, one base chain. So really quick, what that means is Ethereum's current state is a monolithic blockchain because it does consensus. Yep. data and also execution on the same chain. And all of the alternative layer ones do that as well. Solana is trying to do all three of those things as well. And that's what he calls a monolithic blockchain. but once you're in the future, yes, Ethereum's future is changing with the merge and then the future upgrades that's undergoing. But anyway, continue. Right. So Pauli Nardi says monolithic blockchains are crippled by Moore's law and will only grow 64X over the coming decade. Modular architectures will grow by 1 million X at the same time. The only way the blockchain industry attains global scale.

And so he finishes off, for example, by 2030, 15 million transactions per second with ZK rollups on Ethereum alone. What we are talking about is basically rollups, but also importantly, the illustration of The execution environment is actually like when you send a transaction where that transaction actually gets executed. You can take that off of the L1 and put it on the L2. Then you can leave the consensus side of things to just optimize that on the L1. Make the layer one of a theorem really, really good at consensus. put all of the execution environments where you actually send transactions on the L2s, let the L2s bundle them up and then package them in a very, very small data footprint and put them on the L1. And this division

of labor allows the ZK rollups, the rollups chains to optimize for being really, really fast, really, really just good execution environments for doing crypto things. Then the nature of a roll-ups consolidates it and makes and puts it on Ethereum, which has been optimized for consensus. It never, ever goes down. It's the most up, the highest uptime system ever. And also has high data availability. And basically data availability is like food for the roll-ups, right? You need the data to be available and that you need the data to have the uptime of something that has optimized for uptime, right?

So ZK rollups, not actually up to optimize for uptime. Like they can actually go down and we actually saw that happen when arbitrage from one went down, but importantly, you can always get your money back out via the nature of rollups, but you let rollups do the execution and you let the Ethereum L1 do the consensus and the data availability. And this is what allows you to not just like scale linearly, like what he's saying with Moore's law, but scale exponentially. And this is the future of ultra scalable Ethereum. And not only is this, really good tech, but it's like blockchain agnostic tech. And so we were actually also seeing Tezos go with this roadmap because it's actually a logical conclusion of how blockchains are designed. The bad way to do things is try and just like push everything into one single monolithic blockchain. And

the good way to do things is to optimize the different modular components of a blockchain for what they are good at and allow them to be really, really good at those things and allow them to come together as a modular system. That is the narrative that's going to be happening over Ethereum over the next few weeks. And the reason that a monolithic blockchain design is bad is because if you want to scale, you have to sacrifice decentralization in order to do it. You have to disallow individuals from running their own nodes. You have to run those nodes in data centers or large institutions, large organizations in order to do it. So you sacrifice security and you sacrifice decentralization. There's so much to unpack here. We'll talk about it a couple

more times in the episode. David and I are gonna do an entire podcast about this in the future, coming up with an agenda for that. But keep this in mind, ultra scalability. That is the future for Ethereum. And it happens through this modular blockchain design that Ethereum is kind of silently pivoting to. I don't think anyone's really picked up on this until Paul and I started posting. It's been sort of the, it's been the design path, but there hasn't really been a term or a narrative or a way to share what's actually going on. So we're gonna be talking about this a lot more. And as you can tell, we're super excited about it. I think some related news maybe on the monolithic blockchain side of things. The SolRazor. Yeah.

There was an announcement from SolRazor, which is trying to do, I don't know what an IDO is, but I think it's just an ICO. It's an ICO with a different name. Okay. What's the D mean? X, I think. Oh, okay. Okay. Well, it's an ICO anyway. They were going to ICO on the Solana chain, but apparently they decided they needed to push that back. And it was because the Solana team asked them to, because if they deployed on Solana in its current form, there there would be issues, right? It would, Solano was worried that it would actually take down their network as happened a few weeks back. - We've seen the thing that already happened once, yeah. - The hazards of monolithic chains, right? So I guess

there's two pieces there. It's like some of these alternative layer ones aren't nearly as scalable as they let on it's like a lot more scalable than the ethereum l1 which isn't actually a great thing to compare yourself to because i don't even think they're scalable because they sacrifice like security and decentralization so they're not really scaling they're just giving you more transactions and making you feel like they're scaling um but but also like um it's kind of weird that they would kind of go to the team or that the Solana organization would ask them, Hey, please stop doing your idea.

Right. So you're supposed to be a permissionless network. You're going to break our network. Yeah. I mean, it's kind of weird. I guess some people would say, look, Solana is still an alpha and beta. I'm like, But then I'm always like, why it's worth $40 billion then. Okay. If you have to request a team to not do something because you're worried that it's going to break your network, like you kind of deserve to get your network broken. Like, and I don't mean to like cause like. promote harm but like the whole thing about crypto is that if it can be broken it will be broken that's why you have to make it unbreakable anti-fragile because like what if this team is actually malicious and they're actually looking to do harm then they can do harm the whole point is that you can't do evil and

you design your blockchain so they can't be broken so you don't have security by by request like please don't break our stuff like no just make it unbreakable This is just one example, guys. I think what David and I are saying is we feel like a lot of the layer one summer that we've seen is just not sustainable. It's built on the wrong foundation and it's built on the wrong architecture. And we've seen this before in crypto. We've seen this play out with ICOs. We've seen this play out with the EOSs of the world in 2017, 2018. And if we're right, if this thesis is correct, it's playing out right now. So careful out there is what we would say. Hey, next thing, US Bank of America, the bank of America, the largest bank, maybe in the world, definitely the largest bank in America, I

guess. They've just published a report on crypto that mentions DeFi, NFTs, and Ethereum. I think there's some quotes in here. It's difficult to overstate how transformative blockchain technology, digital assets, and the thousands of decentralized apps that have yet been created could potentially be. We expect rapid changes in the current market structure, but they are bullish, I suppose. A bank getting bullish on the thing that's going to disrupt them. I guess that's some honesty for you a little bit later, but interesting that they're discovering it. What would you say about that, David? I mean, we know that, according to Cathie Wood, we know that banks are very, very aware of some of their bottom line is getting chewed up by defy so it only makes sense that banks are now publishing

reports about like the promise of this industry the the first screenshot that's there in the tweet thread ryan if you want to go to that one um the a little bit up there you go uh the head the first headline is digital asset sector too large to ignore not just bitcoin so much more nice Nice, nice, nice rhyme. The other headlines are welcome to the token economy and then also followed by Dapps and NFTs, the most innovation. So like this seems to be a report that actually is talking about the right things about the blockchain world. um unlike what we saw earlier in 2017 2018. i gotta say way better reports coming out of 2021 from large institutions and banks they're starting to understand what's happening here um the ethereum

nft market openc has been hit by the toads the toads are absolutely exploding tell me about this phenomenon david look at these things yeah you don't look any more special than my turtles by the way - Except for the price tags. - What are these? - So the Toads are the NFT of the week. So congratulations for Toads. The amount of volume behind Toads was absolutely insane. Starry Night Fund through the Three Arrows Capital Fund, I think bought a bunch of Toads, including an extremely rare one. DC Investor got into Toads this last week. Cosmo de Medici, apparently who's the Snoop Dogg alter ego of NFTs, also got some Toads. Toads won the NFT Hunger Games this week and also created OpenSea's best 24 hours in

volume ever. So, nice job. Thank you. If you thought NFTs were dead, they're not yet because Toads are here. I don't think anyone thinks NFTs are dead anymore. I don't know. Somebody. All of the right-click savers are just gone. I saw somebody this week compare them to selling real estate on the moon or selling stars, basically. Not anyone in the NFT space. Just a critic of NFTs. Okay. We have a meme for that later. Teasing the meme of the week. Well done, sir. Bitcoin. On Bitcoin, George Soros, legendary investor, knows when to buy generally. His office confirms that they own Bitcoin. I think they own other crypto as well. I think that's big news. George Soros is a big name in the space, similar to some other large

investors that have gotten in. Now, I don't know when he's gotten in, but they've confirmed that they're into crypto. So definitely, they always confirm these things after they've bought a lot. So you can imagine George Soros now has a lot of crypto, maybe particularly Bitcoin. Maybe he's why Bitcoin's back over a trillion dollar market cap. I mean, totally could be, right? Yeah. All right, let's talk some regulation here. The first is a tax loophole is about to close, maybe. Can we talk about this in detail? Yeah, sure. yeah so the way that this tax loophole works is that uh in the way that it doesn't work in stocks because stock market the stock market doesn't have this but like say you buy something it goes down in price by a lot but you still want to hold that stock you're still bullish on it

just because it went down doesn't mean you've lost your conviction so what you can do is that you can sell harvest the tax loss and in stocks you have to wait 30 days before you rebuy if you want to uh compliantly to harvest that tax law in crypto you can just rebuy it immediately so you can just go to uniswap sell your token rebuy your token harvest your tax loss and get some tax optimizations that way apparently that tax law is going to get closed in 2022. Yeah. That tax loophole. Excuse me. That's a good explanation. And by the way, I would say none of this is tax advice, right? So different, different tax consultants will give you different advice based on that. Some may still tell you of which we are not some I've talked to, you know, have, have said you should wait

30 days anyway, just in case. But now it looks like there's some legislation in the House Ways and Means Committee that is going to explicitly close that loophole. So if you are looking to use that sometime, if you got some losses on maybe some Shiba that you purchased or I don't know, even NFTs, I suppose. and you want to sell those losses and then rebuy the same asset because you're still bullish on it, now is the year to do that. You only have to the end of the year because this could close on you if you're looking to do that. None of this is tax advice. I'll say it again. The Biden administration is seeking to regulate stablecoin issuers as banks. I'm not surprised about that the desire to do that not a lot of detail here i think we'll wait till that plays out

you have any comments david yeah at first glance i don't hate this uh they are kind of banks anyways so maybe that's actually gives them more power because of their status as a bank um ebd on the details Yeah, absolutely. As long as it doesn't apply to decentralized stablecoins, they don't cast too broad a net. Also, I read that there's some talk of applying FDIC to stablecoins as well, which is a nice consumer protection, right? If your bank goes under, you still get your money back. It'd be nice if stablecoins offered that guarantee too. So there are ways. There could be smart regulation in this space. It could be a W. Yeah. Don't know about this regulatory body recently, but the SEC is investigating Circle, which is the

issuer of USDC. Of course, they've been investigating them since the summer, since July. Circle's gotten subpoenas. Now the word is just getting out about this right now. You got to imagine it's the same kind of thing. Some sort of implication, investigation on whether USDC is a security or not. What's your take? - Yeah, so Gary Gensler, A, first off, Jeremy Allaire totally saw this coming, Circle At Large totally saw it. saw this coming they've been marching towards compliance uh way ahead of the game starting like four or five months ago they were working on better transparency better auditability because they knew that regulation was coming one way or another um and Gary Gensler has also uh he when he talked about stable

coins at this one talk he referred to them as stable value coins which uh people speculated was a nod towards stable value funds which are an SEC regulated financial product and so the SEC is probably going after USDC in the same way they were probably going after BlockFi and other like lindsay's yeah it's saying like there's deposits on one side and credits on another like usdc on another and the the sec probably thinks that it can regulate that uh and so that's probably what's going on uh this could be um something that we get clarity on via the courts uh coinbase unfortunately backed down on taking the sec to court and Maybe circles the one that fights back. I don't know. Right now it's just the sec doing a

probe, which in my mind is like, you know, you know, when your cop pulls you over, I've never been pulled over by a cop. Not true. You're not supposed to say you they're, they're going to say, can I look inside your car? And you always, everyone knows to say no, but the sec is like, Hey, can we look inside of you? And you're, you're supposed to bend over backwards and take it apparently like why it's just a racket dude well i mean that that is one of the special privileges uh of the government right that's we've armed this leviathan with weapons and they use these weapons to uh investigate companies like this i i will say usdc is not a security in my mind like it's nothing like you shouldn't have a like it's not like an ETF or something like this, right? But should

there be some regulation around it? Like, I wanna know that Circle, the uscc assets are actually backed by what they say they're backed by right and if they're not because because again this is not open transparent finance right this is sort of a a tokenized version of dollars in a bank account at the end of the day if they're not then circle and any issuers of the stablecoin should be responsible for that right if there's some shenanigans going on so like i don't love what's going on with tether you know like what what What's a tether made of, David? None of us know. None of us really know, right? I know exactly what a die is made of. I feel like the answer to a lot of this is better, more decentralized stablecoins. But while we're dealing with USDC, maybe there's some light touch regulation.

I just, I don't know. The SEC is heavy-handed recently. And yeah, we'll see what goes on there. Let's talk about a few quick things before we end this section and get to takes. Powell said, he doesn't plan to ban crypto which is convenient because he actually can't ban crypto that's i think that would require legislative power what's the next one here david yeah this next one is that um uh the bit go uh executive darren jordan says that he gets regular calls from corporates looking to add bitcoin to their balance sheet oh interesting bitcoin continues Good. That's good news. Utopia Labs is a company that's building some more DAO infrastructure. This is the season of building for DAOs. I think they're going to explode a little bit later, but a

ton of infrastructure is being built out to help DAOs measure, to help DAOs manage treasury, payroll, salaries, all sorts of things. And it's great to see that happen. David, why don't you take us home with this? Last quick one. Dave White tweets out. Dave White is a guy in crypto Twitter who works on options at Paradigm, but has apparently also been working on a new NFT primitive with Andy8052. We've had him on the show a couple of times. And Dan Robinson from Paradigm also had had him on the show. They have released Rix. r-i-c-k-s recurringly issued collectively kept shards basically this is at the intersection of nft and d5 fractionalizing nfts into tokens along with a way to reconstitute the nft once fractionalized when you fractionalize nft into rix the protocol mints and sells new ricks every day and all proceeds go to rix rix

stakers so if you are interested in the intersection of nfts and d5 you can go to this and read about its construction I just like the name, man. Rex. It's great. Rick and Morty. All right. I'm glad your brain goes there as well. Exactly. I was, I was just waiting for the, the meme, but there's no meme here. Paradigm. Why is there not a pickle? There is a pickle. There used to be a pickle, right? Alright, guys, we will be back with the takes of the week. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible. The Aave protocol is a decentralized liquidity protocol on Ethereum, which allows users to supply and borrow certain crypto assets. Aave version 2 has a ton of cool features that makes using the Aave protocol even more powerful. With Aave, you can leverage the

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Check them out at Gemini.com slash GoBankless. All right, guys, we are back with the takes of the week. We're going to start with this take. I think it's a hot one. I agree with it. This is Anthony Sassano, my five to 10 year crypto investment thesis in quotes. And he has some categories here. ETH, category in and of itself. DeFi, layer twos and scaling. Privacy focused tech, cross layer two chain bridges, NFT infrastructure, some really hot NFTs, crypto gaming. I know five to 10 years is forever in crypto, but I'm confident that Ethereum is going to eat the world. This looks a lot like my investment thesis as well. And I think the bankless investment thesis where you got some crypto monies, you got the new banking layer, which is

DeFi. You've got the scalability that's going to power all of that. You got privacy, which hasn't even been dealt with yet and needs to be in crypto and will be. Then you've got cross-chain bridges that connects liquidity throughout this entire organic system nfds which are a category in and of themselves and crypto gaming which is absolutely going to be massive i think there are some other bullet points that we could add as these as these uh areas emerge over the years but like this kind of sums it up for me what's your take yeah i looked at this tweet and just sat and tried to think of something that anthony missed and i don't i don't think he missed anything i if you scroll down i think coin sir How about meme coins? Do you want to own any memes? There's my reaction to that.

It's like, oh, that's about all of it. Porky pig? Yeah. I think it is worth noting that of all the things that Anthony listed, ETH is the only one that's actually an asset. Everything else is a category. So that's worth noting. Also, Ryan, if you had to pick like which one of these is the biggest category other than ETH, what do you think it is? I have my answer. Now that's a good question. Well, DeFi is going to be the entire banking layer. NFTs are absolutely huge. That's the cultural layer. Crypto gaming is kind of an intersection of both. All the rest of this is like scalability infrastructure. I think privacy focused tech, as bullish as I am, it's going to be a bit more niche than these.

ETH is going to be the biggest by market cap is what I would say. But some of these categories will be absolutely colossal. I just can't I can't give you an answer right now, David. I don't know. What's your answer? My my answer is crypto gaming, mainly because I think at the same time, we're going to see a redefinition of what gaming actually is. Gaming is going to move closer towards work. less it's not going to be just gaming it's also going to be in-game economies and so i think as a euphemism you can almost say the metaverse as crypto is what crypto gaming is and i think that that is by going to be the biggest category in here by far yeah Yes, I think if you call it

crypto gaming, that minimizes how large it's actually going to be and how impactful, right? This isn't just like Fortnite plus tokens. It's not just that. That's like the beginning stages. Crypto gaming is huge, right? But gaming is the start of the metaverse, I think. So it's good to categorize it as that for now. Okay, let's talk about this. Your tweet, say it. This was a fun take. Very, very short. Joe Lallooz from Bison Trails. He tweets out, after hours, is for NFTs as in NFTs after dark. Victor Bunin follows up saying during hours is for DeFi. So daylight is for DeFi and nighttime is for NFTs. I thought it was a fun take. Yeah, that's good. You know, Chris Dixon says, uh, watch what people do on nights and the weekends, the smartest people do on nights and the weekends, right? Watch their hobbies. I

think this is another example of that, by the way, Dixon on the podcast coming sometime in October. Uh, it's going to be exciting. Talk, talk more to him. We'll run this tweet by him. David, this is your tweet too. I'm going to say it. You tell me what it means. Ethereum is the best single source of truth we've ever come up with. What's that mean, David? Yeah. Yeah, so humanity loves objectivity and truth because it allows us to coordinate around truth. And Ethereum, as a state machine of truth, is the best single source of truth that we've ever been able to come up with. The whole Moloch and coordination side of crypto It's this lends itself to that, right? When everyone understands what the truth actually is, we can actually coordinate around that. And as Ethereum, as a generalized Turing complete smart

contract platform, it offers us the best single source of truth we've ever come up with. particularly important when all of our other trust machines, institutions of trust are failing us in this moment to build up new institutions of trust. So the world doesn't descend into chaos. Let's talk about this from Mariano. The Howey Test, 1946, that's when it came out, is closer to the invention of the stapler. 1877, then of Ethereum mainnet, 2015. Hey, I'm just impressed that the stapler was made in the 1800s. Nice. Yeah, that's pretty innovative. I wonder, I hope the stapler maker got a patent on that and made some money.

But what he's saying is like, why are we bounded by these laws written pre-internet, pre-digital age, pre-computer, right? When we're entering this whole new paradigm, right? The We need to create new laws. We need to create new regulations. Update the laws. Update the laws. There you go. You said it better. All right. This is cool for So from Aaron Wright, this is one way to think about emerging blockchain trends. What are we looking at here, David? Yeah, we're looking at kind of a funky Venn diagram. We have two Venn diagrams in the middle. One is DeFi, one is NFTs, and they also overlap. But another circle around all of that that completely encompasses those two Venn diagrams is a bigger Venn diagram that says DeFi. dows um so

aaron is implying that defy apps are dows nft apps like punks or like pudgy penguins or cool cats are also dows and then there's also things that aren't defy or nfts that are also dows uh so it's kind of a nice way to visualize how how gargantuan DAOs are as a concept. And then I also followed up this tweet with my own tweet again as well, saying Ethereum and Bitcoin actually fit inside of the DAO category. So like Bitcoin and Ethereum are actual DAOs. They're actually one of the only true DAOs out there. And so kind of a nice visualization. This is definitely how the economy is going to be organized in the future and reorganized as we move to that. All right, David, here's another modular blockchain take because it's modular blockchain roll up today. What's this take? Yeah, this is coming out of

a chain link. God, who I actually had the pleasure of meeting in New York a couple of weeks ago. Optimistic. He's not a frog. He's not a frog. Yeah. All right. Say no more. optimistic roll-ups zk roll-ups of validiums volitions means a shift from a monolithic blockchain model to segregating security data availability and execution into different layers the key is to not just mitigating the blockchain trilemma but inverting it aka solving it um so yeah just hammering the point home the era of modular blockchains are upon us and that is not that's how we go from just like a little bit more scale to like almost infinitely more scale when you say the blockchains when you say upon us it's like just starting right that's why we haven't felt its

effect yet right we still need a few other key technologies users have felt it dydx users have felt it we'll get to that soon too um but let's look at this this looks like a uh a galaxy spiral nice spiral galaxy image i'll read out the tweet in q1 2021 eth settled 1.5 trillion in transactions more than all other blockchains combined In 2022, ZK rollups and a sharded data structure could increase ETH's max throughput from 45 transactions per second to 100,000 transactions per second, setting the stage for ETH to become the universal store of value. This is a spiral galaxy with ETH in the center where it's sort of the black hole would be, all the star clusters clustered in the center. And it's all of the various M1 that

is like circling circulating currency, 35 trillion, M2, currency and savings, 60 trillion, stocks, bonds, real estate, derivatives, all swirling around the black hole, the gravity vortex, the singularity that is Ethereum. And I think that's a good analogy, any other takes. - Yeah, this also lends itself towards the modular blockchain narrative because all of these different use cases, need different constructions. And when you have a single monolithic blockchain, you force every use case to just operate under the same structure, the same monolithic structure. But the Validiums, Volition, ZK Rollups, Optimistic Rollups, they offer different components that you can piece together as you see fit that is optimized for your specific use case. And so having this modularity allows Ethereum and all of its layer

twos to be constructed in a way that is optimized for that specific use case. And one thing that Ethereum does very, very well is it maximizes choice for the developers and for the users. And when choice is maximized, innovation explodes. Guys, if you're having trouble with some of the terminology like ZK, roll-up zero knowledge, or validity or volitions, never fear. Just keep tuning into Bankless. We will have some episodes for you that dive into these topics in detail. But David, end of the show, almost end of the show. I got to ask you the question we always talk about, which is, what are you excited about?

about this week. When you have modularity, you get to optimize for that specific module and what it is good for. So let's put the consensus module in the consensus corner and optimize for that. Let's put the execution in the execution corner and optimize for that. And give all options available to everyone how they want to construct their layer two. Uh, and so we are all, we've been hammering this from the beginning of bankless is

like, eventually we are all going to live on layer twos and these layer twos are going to have different flavors and eventually all of the flavors to do what Ethereum needs to do to put the entire universe on Ethereum. That has always been the goal. And a modular blockchain is how you become expressive enough to allow for optionality for everything to eventually become, uh, uh something on ethereum that's what i'm excited about that's cool man what are you excited about I'm going to plus one on that. Oh yeah, you're excited about modular blockchains? Yeah, I'm just going to riff on that. It's like a different way. So I think one of the things we've been able to do is identify things a little bit early, at least some things. So back in 2018, we're telling everyone that ETH as a monetary asset, as a store

of value is undervalued. That's when we come up with ideas like ETH as a triple point asset, right? Staking, you know, EIP-1559, all of these other characteristics that would be built in would turn Ethereum and Ether as an asset into a bond, into a very valuable store of value that is likely far more valuable than even Bitcoin. So we identified that early. And it was underrated at the time. No one believed it at the time. Here's the thing. Massively underrated, yeah. Massively underrated. No one believed it. I believe we're at the point in time where Ethereum's scalability strategy is just as underrated as ETH asset was back in 2018, 2019.

I'm just going to say it. I think Ethereum has the best scalability strategy in crypto right now, and nobody knows it. It's driving me crazy. It's driving me crazy, okay? Because people are saying, "Oh, ETH can't scale, and that's why X chain or Y chain, or that's why we need all of these things." No, it hasn't compromised on decentralization security, but it is scaling, and its scalability strategy is far more robust and far more achievable and actually far more scalable than any of these other solutions. It's just taking the time to do it right and keep things decentralized. Pauli Naya, 15 million

transactions per second is a rough estimate by the end of 2030. It's coming. There's cryptography magic, like ZK rollup, ZK sync. It's all coming. People just are impatient. And and they run and they chase the narrative and they run they chase the next eth killer and i think it's going to cost investors uh some money but like if you don't believe ethereum is scaling today To your point earlier, David, go try DYDX. It has the deepest liquidity. We just had Antonio on Bankless this week. The deepest liquidity in all crypto. This is not just decentralized exchanges, crypto exchanges too for some of their assets, the deepest liquidity. They're doing like 8 billion in daily volume, 8 billion in daily volume, all secured by Ethereum. Don't tell me Ethereum

is not scalable. It's scaling now. You just haven't put in the effort to actually make it scale and you haven't waited until some of these scalability strategies come online. And the reason I like this is not because people will say, oh, he's an Ethereum maximalist, right? All he cares about is Ethereum. No, I care about decentralization, the ability to run your own node. Bitcoin preserves this, okay? Ethereum preserves this. There are a few, if any other networks that are focused on security and decentralization right now. I love Solana as an execution layer. Fantastic for a roll up. Avalanche too. Hell, they can all come to the party. They can all play. They can all be execution layers and roll ups. But let's not sacrifice the only thing that makes crypto

great, which is its decentralization, its security, its self-sovereignty. That is why we're here in the industry. And yeah, I think it's massively underrated right now. People will wake up a year from now, two years from now. That's how long it took for ETH asset to be publicly recognized. And they'll realize that this is the case that, oh, well, back in 2021, when everyone was saying ETH is not scalable and ETH is dead and some other chain is far more scalable. They actually had the best scalability strategy the entire time. That's my prediction. Right. And the reason why it's not here yet is because when you don't cut corners, it actually takes longer to get there.

I think one thing that Paul and I had said, and the reason why this, uh, weekly rollup is the blockchain modularity rollup because Pauline Naya's writing has just recently come onto the scene, at least for you and me, Ryan. People like Anthony Sazano have tapped into this a little bit earlier. But they just make it really, really accessible and understandable. So definitely recommend reading his blog post if you want to get into the details about why we're so excited about this. I think the big point that Listeners should understand and i'll do my best to explain it here you're gonna need to read his own writing to understand why it's true is that When you optimize for decentralization and you put decentralization first under a roll-up paradigm that the more Decentralized you get actually scales with how scalable you can get right and so you

typically previously when you optimized for decentralization you also you actually reduced scale and Those are the same spectrum. You can either have scale or you can have- - That was the trilemma. - That was a trilemma. Now, under a blockchain roll-up paradigm, the more decentralized you get, the better your node architecture is and how many nodes there are, gives roll-ups stronger assurances as to their settlements. And so you actually are able to increase throughput on layer twos by adding decentralization at the layer one. So more decentralization, more scale, which is completely like paradigm shift with how scale should be thought of. And anyone that thinks that you scale

a blockchain by scaling at the L1 should understand that sacrificing decentralization at the L1 sacrifices the ability to have layer twos. And layer twos are where you go from, you know, going from like 45 transactions per second to 100 million transactions per second. 100 million transactions per second can only ever happen at a database layer, a one of one nodes or on layer twos. And the way that it happens on layer twos is if the main chain is maximized for decentralization, you actually get the bajillion transactions per second without sacrificing decentralization. This is the way blockchangers are scaling. This is...

technology that's independent and agnostic of political alignment. Rollups are not an Ethereum technology. Like I said earlier in the show, Tezos is also going by the same roadmap because developers have come to this logical conclusion as this is how a blockchain should work. And so that is why we are excited about this. Tezos, Nier 2, a number of them have discarded the monolithic blockchain strategy. I think that's what it is for us. Bottom line is long-term games, right? I think this is the long-term game and the short-term game are these monolithic blockchains right now. All right, David, on less serious matters, we got all serious for a moment, okay? Meme of the week. What's the meme of the week this week? Let me display it. Why don't you tell our

listeners what we're looking at here? - Yeah, so this is actually one of my favorite comics. The format has been changed, but it's two stick figures. One is in a therapy chair, the other one is the therapist, and the therapist is writing some notes. The guy laying down on the chair says, "I just don't see any value in JPEGs." And then you see the therapist scribbling some notes. And then in the second panel, you see that the notes being scribbled are not gonna make it. it's fatal all right we got two memes of the week though yeah this is the meme of the week that is uh very much a part of the theme today yeah we earlier talked about how all the altair hard fork is coming for the beacon chain to prepare for the merge so we have a black bear and a

polar bear black and white eth1 eth2 changing the names from execution layer to consensus layer tip of the hat to modular blockchains and when these two bears touch fingertips in the way that they are they come together to be a panda bear which is ethereum a black and white bear uh yeah Yeah. Cool. Also cute. Ethereum, the Panda meme. Will the Panda replace the unicorn? I don't know. I don't think so. Unicorns are replaceable. This dude has the meme on his shirt. Yeah. Ben from Teku, I believe. He's the product behind Teku. I hope that's right. Actually has this as a shirt. That is awesome. All right, guys, that has been the weekly roll up.

Of course, none of this has been financial advice. ETH is risky. Bitcoin is risky. So is DeFi. You could definitely lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot. And if you are listening on the YouTube, here is your moment of Zen. When you think about the institutions that are thinking about or talking about Ethereum and Ether, is it because they've already allocated to Bitcoin or do you see some of them coming in and they're basically actually skipping over Bitcoin? You know, I think there are some that are skipping over Bitcoin. Hello, darkness, my old friend. I've come to talk with you again. Hey, we

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