SBF played us, Uniswap launched NFTs and Coinbase vs Apple | Roundup

Transcript

Andrew sorkiness this this question he's like what do your lawyers think that you should be doing and Sam's like oh obviously the lawyers don't think I should be here I'm ignoring all of the advice of my lawyers I'm just going to call [ __ ] on that I think Sam has a world-class crisis management firm and I'm gonna I agree Nick Carter tweeted this out I completely agree with it he has a world-class crisis management firm and legal team constructing a very specific very deliberate public narrative right now and I think he's using mainstream media journalists to promote a specific message here I think we're recording now uh welcome back to another episode of uh of Empire um yeah a bit of casual another casual week

in crypto coming off uh SPF talking to the New York Times and Sorkin yesterday um yeah Welcome Back Sunday how you doing man doing great uh we were talking about this just before about seems like it's still a fairly busy week but not as crazy as the past ones um and uh but yeah a lot of my days now have been spent talking to Founders and a lot of people reached out just I don't know I think this is the time where a lot of people just want to talk and reflect with close acquaintances and it's only been helpful for me like I've I remember doing this like in the past cycles of just talking staying close to Founders and people that you know um I think are are True Believers and True

Builders and uh you know this time around I've uh most of my day has been spent talking to them it's just a good reminder refresher um of uh you know the staying power of the industry and and why we're all doing this uh how about you good man I got really excited seeing the Spotify rap yesterday not not because I got to see uh we did a funny thing of block works we um uh someone had blockworks posted their Spotify wrapped and then everyone else shared their Spotify wrapped and I was like it was really funny seeing everyone else's Spotify rap but it was but actually it was really cool seeing how many people shared on Twitter like that's that Empire is their most listened to podcast and that was cool and actually I don't know if you clicked that link I sent you Spotify gives

podcasters a Spotify rap to show to talk about the audience and who's listening to your show and stuff like that and there are thousands of people whose number one podcast is Empire which was just a trip it was just crazy to see so I was yeah just feeling really grateful for to everyone who listens to the show yeah yeah thank you we always do this at the end but it means a lot like I mean certainly we're like I think when you and I started doing this it wasn't we didn't have like a specific oh we're not like at the top League table this is going to be deemed a failure I didn't come into this with a specific goal in mind to be the number one podcast in crypto gonna you know I just wanted to do this because education I think is super important and if there's like one

listener that's fine um but it's obviously nice to see that there are more than one listener there's one if there's one listener I don't know if I'm doing this show for a whole another year if we have one listener I'm kidding yeah I mean like I still remember there's a great great YouTube like Andreas Antonopoulos I think is one of the best Educators in the space and he's been doing it for such a long time another video you're talking about he's like he's in the world people are talking about Bitcoin yeah oh that's so good so good I always see I always think about that when I'm doing this stuff not that I compare myself to address and there's a whole new league and he's just uh but I think you know if we can help

one people one person or two or three or five that's all it really matters I mean it's like very rewarding to see that you know people are enjoying the show yeah got a big year planned we're almost done with um next time you come to New York now you should check it out we're almost done with our podcast studio so blockwork's got an office new office uh in Manhattan and we're almost done with our podcast Studio I just I just demoed it but uh it's looking it's looking real nice yeah so um all right here's what here's uh here's what's on tap this week SPF did this interview with Andrew Ross Orkin at the New York Times deal book conference so just want to get your takes on that uh talk about that a bit I've I've some thoughts on it um block by bankruptcy

unit swap rolled out uniswap nft uh their Marketplace uh Hut 8 is pulling out of some of their shutdown I think 20 of their mining uh their rigs are just turned off 20 of their hash power um Apple would not let coinbase uh ship their latest app release actually because of some uh because they want basically coinbase to pay 30 of the uh the the Apple fee they want to give Apple their 30 fee on the gas sure that's the gas fee that's the gas uh there's Tech layoffs and then actually Casa which is probably a lot of people don't know about Casa but I want to talk about cost as well so I doubt we'll get to all of that but where do

you want to start I think in that order sounds about right all right all right let's get creative with that so all right so Sam Penguin free did this one-on-one interview with Andrew Sorkin as part of New York Times the dealbook conference late on Wednesday um pulled out some quotes from from that conversation if anyone watched it first off he like he got on I thought he was gonna like look nicer he got on still looking pretty disheveled like he had this you know black t-shirt on that you know what you can tell when someone like choose the front of their shirt a lot because it's kind of like hanging down and stuff like he kind of had that look on the T-shirt within like 10 minutes his right arm was shaking a lot um his hair was looking kind of messy I thought that he would get the memo that

like he should have probably looked nicer um but uh pulled out some quotes here here a couple I'm just gonna read them the time I really knew there was a problem was November 6th he said I didn't come I didn't knowingly co-mingle funds he said I wasn't running Alameda I didn't know exactly what was going on I didn't know the size of their position said I made a lot of mistakes I never tried to commit fraud um so first off I think Andrew rossarkin did a did like a beep like a really good job actually I would say I would I will give Andrew Ross Orkin credit I think he did a really good job he has some hard-hitting questions there were times I wanted him to dig in a little more um but that's just I mean it's it's a tough interview I mean and I will give

him credit I think he did a really good job I mean Sam basically first off it was astonishing that he spoke first of all it was like just astonishing that he spoke I think that the I was really by the end of it I was pretty upset with the interview because he had the audience laughing actually which was the most important part of the whole interview that people aren't talking about he had the audience laughing at two different points um and so first he like had them laughing and then he started talking about his Charities and it kind of panned to the audience and the audience was like smiling like not like oh this guy's a clown but like oh yeah like this guy is a charity guy and then he had them laughing again and like man and then uh who is it Kevin O'Leary okay so

then Bill Ackman tweets out he said call me crazy but I think SBF is telling the truth then Kevin Uh Kevin O'Leary tweets out he goes I lost Millions as an investor in FTX got sandblasted as a paid spokesman for the firm but after listening to that interview I'm in the Bill Bill Ackman Camp about the kid ah man like I it's just really upsetting seeing those takes and they're just wrong it's just it's those are horrible takes in my mind yeah like I have considered myself a fairly optimistic like like an optimist by heart that's why I love technology but I think this year has been really tough perhaps tougher than like other bear markets because

when you look at this is like first of all the the behavior of SPF and just fdx's it's like you lose a lot of trust in in like the good naturedness of certain human beings but then like the fact that he's been so able to just craft a narrative around his Persona in spite of everything this has transpired and like there's still a certain pocket of people that like I don't know having high regard it's it's just crazy to see uh and it like a lot of the conversations I've had recently are with people outside of crypto like you go to Thanksgiving dinner I'm sure a lot of people had a difficult conversation uh you know you go two years of having

great conversations you're the most popular person in a party because you're in crypto when you're in a bull market and then you're like oh sorry you're in crypto or people just like in Bear markets and now I think a lot of people like are asking these questions around FDX because there's a lot of retail that got hurt but it's just so crazy that like there is still some discussion around whether this was like fraud or not he's been like anyone that has just read that he's done like the first interview with a friend of his uh who was supposed to be off the Record like you just read that and how can you just come out of that and like still have sympathy for the guy and not think that he's an absolute like you know he committed he's a sociopath and a criminal like it's really difficult to

like being a room with people that still don't believe that or have some yeah hope that he was like doing the right thing or I don't know man it's very you almost wonder like this this is not inherent to crypto and it's just like yeah it's it's really yeah yeah so Henry Blodgett who was uh CEO of uh Business Insider for a while he he tweeted out this thing and just pissed me off he's like ftx's collapsed doesn't mean that someone committed a crime they were a highly leveraged financial institution their assets plummeted in value while their liabilities stayed the same this happens all the time uh is it incompetent is it Reckless is it stupid yes it's not

necessarily criminal this is the narrative that is being painted and this is why I think that's that SPF probably won't face time in prison or much time in prison which which just kills me and um this is the narrative that's trying to be painted so you have the Wall Street Journal article like New York Times Obviously horrendous coverage it's also a Wall Street Journal article that bemoan the loss of like charitable donations from FTX um you had Vox co-founder Matthew Iglesias um just kind of whitewashing his own entanglements by crediting uh SPS money with helping Dems in the 2020 elections um kind of sidestepping the fact that the money was probably was likely effectively embezzled but I think um

yeah there's like a lot of outlets right now that are describing and a lot of people then now starting to believe that like what happened to FTX was either a bank run or a run on deposits or that they were just over leveraged or that the company was disorganized and that it was a result of mismanagement rather than uh malfeasance and that is just categorically wrong this is I I think it's abundantly clear now that what happened to FTX and Alameda involved a variety of really conscious really intentional uh fraud fraudulent decisions that were intended to steal money from users and from investors and this should not be seen as anything else yeah absolutely like yeah I think it's criminal activity and

I haven't lost hope in the system um that at some point you know records will come out and the proper investigation is going to be done um so but I think it's important for for everyone to continue to apply pressure and demanded yeah the truth comes out and so I think um you know this is where like a lot of people come out and say well crypto and just investors have like a goldfish memory and like look it's only been a couple weeks and you know I don't want to say like we should talk about SPF all the time in FTX all the time but I do think it's important to like remember these things because you know less than a year ago you're like over a year ago you remember the

quadriga example right and like uh you know a lot of times it's like like when you dig deeper into the history of someone you're like whoa this person actually committed crime before and then he was able to somehow come back from the dead and like raise money through another venture and then rug again and so it's like fool me once like what is it shame on you fool me twice shame on me or something like this um like I don't know it's uh I don't know what we can do as an industry other than like of course keep applying pressure we'll continue to do this here and report on it and talk about it um I don't know what we can do as an industry but I will just say it's really frustrating seeing mainstream media

push this narrative um and like lean into this narrative like why did New York Times have him at their at their event well because hey the event there were 2500 tickets you could buy to the event but B to watch the thing you had to sign up for a New York Times account so it drove a lot of free accounts not subscriptions but free accounts the here Sam kept saying you didn't watch it but Sam kept saying he's like I'm ignoring he's like uh Andrew sorkiness this this question he's like what do your lawyers think that you should be doing and Sam's like oh obviously the lawyers don't think I should be here I'm ignoring all of the advice of my lawyers I'm just gonna call [ __ ] on that I think Sam has a world-class crisis management firm and I'm gonna I agree Nick Carter tweeted

this out I completely agree with it he has a world-class crisis management firm and legal team constructing a very specific very deliberate public narrative right now and I think he's using mainstream media journalists to promote a specific message here um and Nick had this good point he's like perceived intent matters a lot here right like manslaughter is a lot less worse than first degree premeditated murder and so Sam is trying to change the narrative from like you planned all of this this was malicious intent from day one to man I really really really did mess up this is horrible I feel so bad but like I didn't plan for it to go this way it was mismanagement we were

young and it's it's working it's it's working so um you know for anyone that uh I guess I'll try to be as objective as possible now go like as always but I think just look no further just read the transcript of that initial interview you did with box right that reporter who is a friend of his and you know we should probably link it in the show notes because just read it go go in there and and when he gets asked you know a couple of times like he's he's very cynical about like woke his hand and like certain comments around um you know why he's doing effective

altruism and basically kind of in a way just admits like this is just a full facade um and there's a person that has no regard for other people uh and and has sort of a distorted delusional view of what the right version of the world should be and he sort of has taken on a crusade and at all costs which include you know uh could include criminal activities just someone that is so self-absorbed in what he thinks is the right thing and has no regard for institutions for other people um and it's just verbatim from his his own kind of comments and so read that and and I guess the question is for listeners is after you you read that is this someone that you would trust is

this something that you would kind of believe anything he says after that and I'll just leave it to listeners to go in and do that on their own account and then reflect on that uh because I think that's very Talent yeah move on yeah I think so uh yeah I mean I think the the lot the only thing uh there's a couple there will be some hearings that are starting uh I think he's called it a Texas court on early next year around February I believe um several other agencies are probing uh I believe it's you know including the cfdc Department of Justice

so you know back to your original comment I think there's this is going to take time to do the full kind of forensics and uh the subpoenas and all that stuff and investigation from a number of agencies a number of jurisdictions I mean there's over a million creditors across the world and so including block by suing them we're guessing SPF for the entity that SPF used to buy a lot of their shares in in Robin Hood um because that's valued at a pretty meaningful account I believe blocks I had all of their assets or a lot of their assets up to 350 million stuck or has stuck in FTX and so they're going after that particular claim to recover some of the

funds uh because um you know block find lent against that so I guess this is a good transition into block buying because there's a few events that happen yeah let's talk about block five before that just on the hearings I'm I'm at the office today you might be able to hear some New York traffic behind me but I'm at the office and across the table is at one of our reporters and she's watching one of the hearings not an SPF hearing but just some something some hearing going on in DC right now and apparently someone said they're like we think that we should just stop the crypto industry until we can get a handle on regulation let's just pause everything it reminded me of when Zuckerberg was at that hearing and the regular and like someone who's like a senator was like oh

like how do you make money but your product is free but then how do you make money it's like there's just like such a level of gross uh misunderstanding of how things work anyways um yeah so here's the update uh on block five on block fight on Monday block five filed its petition for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection um after weeks there's obviously there's weeks of speculation that block five is going to be unable to continue operating in the wake of the FTX filing for bankruptcy on November 11th that people realize that probably block five is next to go um uh blockfi has it's come out that block file has more than a hundred thousand creditors they owe their largest their 50 largest creditors I think the number is 1.3 billion dollars uh it's estimated

that blockbust has about has between these are Big number Big Range here but between 1 billion to 10 billion in assets um that doesn't make sense that's that number well that number comes from the chapter 11 normal filing where basically the range it's just a checklist thing that you have to disclose of like where you fall do you have one million to 100 million 100 million got it yeah I don't think we have 10 billion I think it's closer to a billion for what it's worth but uh yeah yeah so um man there's a who's Ankara trust company they have a 730 million dollar unsecured claim so just looking at the creditors here the company's largest creditors

um include FTX us they have a 275 million unsecured claim uh the SEC which has a 30 million unsecured claim and then block five's largest creditor is Ankara Trust Company who has a 730 million dollar un secured claim who is on who is Anchor do you know I believe this is the shell um so it's encourages it's a Fairfield Connecticut based firm but I'm not sure I don't want to say it's uh the FD the FDX shell entity but uh no good question if you don't know yeah I don't know I don't know either so we'll figure that out we'll get back to

you guys on that one yeah um they also owe like 50 million dollars to a client so I think the four biggest creditors are 7 30 to Anchor uh 275 to FTX 49 million to a client 30 million to the SEC um yeah what is what he's had any thoughts on on blockify stuff I mean I can curious what you find if you find anything interesting here on the Block fight stuff yeah I mean blackfy is trying to sue FTX right now for Rob for their share of Robin Hood Equity I think it is um which is a pretty interesting deal yeah let me explain this because I tweeted about this earlier but let me pull this up because it's I believe uh here so block fly is a

creditor to FTX that lent to Alameda so Alameda lent to emergent which is a shell company owned by svf so emergent actually was the one that bought Robin Hood shares then they pledged that as collateral to guarantee to block by the loan to FDX so that was used to bail out block fi so uh it's a very big circular reference uh and it might be confusing to listeners but basically like um you know uh for that particular reason block fights going directly to and as or thinks they have a claim against

emergent which is a shell company that owns the Robin Hood stake which is fairly sizable what is it up to 400 million or so um particularly because those shares were pledged as collateral so when a little bit of History right you remember when blocked by initially got into trouble earlier this year right um a lot of it in part because of the gbt like through arrows blowing up blocked by had a bit of exposure to that um and so and of course now of course they also have a lot of exposure the gbdcr which three hours was doing so anyways they get into trouble FTX um steps in um to buy block fly the terms are not

disclosed but you know um they effectively took over blog fly and as part now it has come to light that they used um the emergence as collateral so the Robin Hood chairs is valued to buy block find teams the bailout block finds so um man untangling these clients untangling who has a claim to the shares is going to be an absolute disaster yeah it's pretty crazy um yeah you know I think uh what is this so block so block fi is a blockify is a creditor to FTX that led

to Alameda that lent to emergent which is a shell company owned by Sam that bought Robin Hood shares that those Robin Hood shares were pledged as collateral to guarantee to block fi the loan to FDX to FTX That Was Then used to bail out blockify so it's the so Sam purchase has taken Robin Hood via a shell company via a loan from Alameda via a loan from blockfi correct so so in a nutshell the SPF use or FDX use funds yeah with this whole goal of just to get eventually probably to get honestly

Robin Hood deposits to move on to FTX one day too yeah what would be really interesting here is to understand how much of in as particular the terms of this deal how much of that did FDX require block fight to move over um and for X like FTX to beat a custodian I mean sounds like FDX us was custody a lot of the answers to block crying so it'd be really curious to understand how much of that happened as part of this kind of bailout but yeah like it's no surprise that uh you know now it's it's fairly obvious what the strategy was it sounds like FTX went out and you know was bidding on these

distressed um you know deposit in institutions like Voyager block by really to get more deposits in the door um and continue to running this machine because they themselves were in trouble right and so um you know a lot of the some of these folks might have had ftt as collateral and they you know in order not to push the price down for ftt they just wanted to absorb that right and so that uh this all folks goes back to two very cataclysmic events it really started this fall of dominoes if you will and it was Luna um which was probably the number one cause for a lot of this

um you know stuff that went on after that a lot of people were caught really off guard Luna I lost a lot of money and then slowly over the ensuing months you know it just started to come to light who was really in deep [ __ ] and it started with three arrows and a few other fonts and then a few like Voyager block fi Genesis and you know uh and so and then of course you know ultimately FTX right yep um so yeah like the natural question now is like you know uh what uh what happens to block fi if they can actually recover a lot of funds FTX us seems to be SPF this comes actually directly from SPF

and one of the interviews he says there's probably one-to-one backing FTX us you know deposits there um and there's like 25 cents on the dollar backing FTX International um and then and then of course once he filed for chapter 11 you just kind of freeze all of that and then he claims that like you know a few moments after he filed for chapter 11 which he didn't want to do but his lawyers were really pressuring him to do he got like four billion in the door and that would have like allowed themselves to continue operating business as usual yeah which I really find hard to believe um but you know yeah but by the way I looked up Ankara there it's not a

holding company it's an uh it's in uh an indenture trustee firm that represents a group of unnamed creditors so I think what this means like this is like yeah this is the kind of company that's typically brought in to represent the interests of others so I would assume the Creditor here is not Ankara it's um folks that just bundle together to bundle together yeah so I don't know I don't know any more than that but it's not a holding company so um yeah you know we've said it before but like the it really is uh quite surprising uh the lack of risk management from the risk teams of a lot of these places right yeah

um so yeah it's uh embarrassing um all right pausing I forgot to do this at the intro I'm gonna get punished by our marketing team um permissionless ticket sales are on sale um we basically the way the way that we do permissionless ticket sales for anyone who remembers this is uh we drop them like Supreme drops clothing we drop tickets we don't only we basically unlock 250 tickets every two weeks when the tickets sell out tickets are closed so our first batch sold out in six hours every two weeks the the next batch is always more expensive than the last one I think we increased the price like five to ten percent every single two uh every two weeks so batch number one was was two weeks ago sold out in six hours batch

number two um unlocked today we sold 65 tickets in 13 minutes um we so we've got like 185 of them left by the time we release this podcast tomorrow they might already be sold out so I'm sorry about that but you can join a waitlist so anyways that's that's your plug if you listen to Empire there's your Alpha go go get your tickets before they uh price goes up you gonna join us this year Santi or next year yes I think so it's it's in New York Washington right it's in Austin Texas in September that's from yeah permissionless in Austin yeah I love uh Austin's a great City we're kicking Point outside of the city so you guys gonna buy it uniswap nft Marketplace uh

they're like an audio Yeah there's a lag there's a lag man yeah yeah definitely unisaw penalties uh unit swap uh did launch their end of two Marketplace Wednesday morning um so here so here's the background so uniswap bought Genie um Genie and Gem were the two biggest nft aggregators um so basically they aggregate prices across a bunch of different nft exchanges um who bought Jean someone bought gem someone else bought gem did open C by GEM I think someone bought gem maybe not yeah I'm looking this up yeah I think so it was fairly controversial yeah yeah opencbox open C bot gem open yeah open to about Jam uniswot bot Genie so

basically uniswab launched their nft Marketplace on Wednesday morning uh so you can now buy nfts directly from a uniswap interface like I went to uniswap this morning you just click the nft tab and then once you click the nft tab you're gonna think that you just hit opencs page because it looks identical to open C but really you're trading on uh you're trading on use fob they aggregate liquidity from every major nft exchange I think there's seven or eight of them uh they also really interestingly open source their front end which is pretty cool um they open they open source the the actual interface not just not just the protocol um by the way like for those if you want the reason that you let that you like

aggregators um is because you're going to get the best pricing or you're gonna get the cheapest prices you might not have the best execution but you're going to get the cheapest prices so like uh Open Seas aggregator pulls prices from open uh excuse me unit swaps aggregator pulse prices from open C what is the X2 Y2 I've never used that one pseudo swap looks rare it all pulls into the use from all the different marketplaces yeah yeah it's going to be fairly interesting um I think uh over the last couple years over the last year we've observed people um other marketplaces eat into open sees dominance because it used to be rope and she was just incredibly dominant and now that has come down over time it would also be

interesting to see how many how much activity is increased because of these aggregators making it very easy to keep floors but um you know and the functionality of can you buy a specific nft because a lot of times I think they're very different types of collectors um you know whether you want to buy a specific nft and you just want that and you're like less price sensitive or are there people that are just doing it more so from like uh Hey I want to buy a basket yeah as long as zookies or punks and so anyways it's gonna be fairly interesting all this said to say it's fairly nascent and the other thing that uh I mean we we had the Salonika guys this week and we

interviewed the episode it's going to go uh out next week and it's really interesting I think the we talk a lot about obviously defy being in a bear market for the last two years all this sort of chaos that just happened because you know FDX and prices and volatility in the market but one of the interesting things that has been just observing the nft space is in large parts has been it's really been affected like volume and whatnot but like new collections launching across different ecosystems and it seems to me like a system been a fairly interesting quasi-insulated pocket of the crypto Market because I don't even think about nfts as correlated to the rest of the crypto Market I think it's just uh

it's just adding more diversity and type of users that uh you know it's been fairly interesting to observe um you know that phenomenon do I know if you would agree with that no I would agree I mean Solana nfts are hitting like all-time highs right now which is bizarre or at least maybe volume of nfts on sale on his all-time high and like mints are still selling out it's kind of wild also shout out permis the floor on burmes has gone up from 1.5 to 2.5 in the last 30 days like that's yeah it's just nuts to see this um I love the move by unusual I think this is genius I as a retail nft user they're like it's not unit swap's not the best place to go buy buy nfcs I think um

Melton had this great piece that I have referenced on a couple of shows about like the institutions are coming to nfts I think what unisoft rolled out does not solve that um like the execution is probably maybe subpar I think like but I think they're gonna win an nft I think they'll do really well in the nft space and the same reason they did well in the deck space right like other dexes might be more technically efficient at specific things like Mev protection or like LSD liquidity or like have better token better token economics but like I think Uni's brand and vertical integration is gonna is gonna just be really powerful here and I think folks will end up using unisoft for to buy nfts I I love the move I think it's a great move

so when are they rolling out their app do you know their mobile app Unison yeah I think they've been public about that yeah no clue I mean it's a great question because we were now coming up to a pretty big contentious debater around apple and how guarded and difficult they've made it for certain players or all players in the industry including today you know we we now learned that you know they're charging 30 on coinbase wallet and you know there's been a fair again in the salon episode we covered this a lot of the reason of existence the launch a phone is for this reason right to like

really circumvent and get away from you know really the it's not just crypto firms I mean a lot of other developers outside of crypto found it incredibly difficult to work with apple and around Apple was like really tough and oftentimes like just unnecessarily difficult policies procedures and sometimes they don't give you straight answers and you know the crypto Space is really suffered I think um on the mobile side of things um because you know just Apple has such uh you know an important gatekeeper role here um so but I don't I don't know when unit swap is launching their their app yeah um one of the interesting things that

the last thing on this point is yeah that I learned from the Solana episode was you know obviously they're building the the hardware through like a you know kind of like a normal manufacturer their real focus is building this like mobile stack SDK initially purposeful for Solana but Anatoly did say you know if we wanted to integrate other chains like ethereum or had you know um evm support certainly possible so yeah I think this is going to be a huge you know positive for the space apparently it's launching soon I mean there's a few out in the wild but they were saying this time around next year they plan to have you know anywhere from 58 he said having a hundred thousand kind of like phones out in the wild

would be kind of like a a huge success so uh yeah it'll be really interesting how that changes the dynamic uh and how Apple responds to that pressure yeah yeah very much so um I thought it was pretty funny that open C just uh excuse me uniswab kind of blatantly copied open C's design as well have you looked have you pulled it up if not you should pull it up you go to uniswap and pull up nfts it literally literally looks identical to openc it reminded me of um like when when Microsoft basically comes gets into the software game they're never first but they basically just copy pasta what others have done and um if you look at what Mike like when Microsoft launched their version of notion it was a literal

copy pasta of of notion same with slack right when they copied Microsoft teams um basically one in the same you know just throw the Microsoft logo on there yeah you know it comes Full Circle Sushi copied and a lot of other amms have copied to front end of unismot because people are just really familiar with it and now they're go out and copy the same so look it's the world of Open Source uh good design gets copied there you go um let's go into the app the Apple nft coinbase nft I just want to read the coinbase Tweet let's see let me pull this up um I was a coinbase wallet tweeted out earlier today uh recording this on Thursday uh you might have noticed you

cannot send nfts on coinbase wallet iOS anymore this is because Apple blocked our last release until we disabled the feature Apple's claim is that the gas fees required to send nfts need to be paid through their in-app purchase system so they can collect 30 of the gas fee I'm laughing because if you understand how nfts work this is not possible Apple's proprietary in-app purchase system does not support crypto so also they couldn't even comply if they tried right and as coinbase points out this is akin to Apple trying to take a cut of fees for every email that gets sent over open internet protocols which actually yeah oh never mind never mind I was going to say that could be a good idea because it would prevents spam

emails but never mind not going to go there here's um here's a hack what's that yeah so here's a hack guys if you're a team out there and I've said it before I'll say it again give people that are on mobile a free nft or a free air drop and gasless to claim so that you don't have to work around or have even a payment of sorts and then or have them like just visualize like oh you've earned a badge you've earned an nft or you can claim an airdrop in order to claim it you can only do it on desktop and this is what musk is doing with Twitter right the Twitter Bloom subscription he basically disabled that on mobile I understand and you can only sign up on desktop purely to circumvent

this egregious like 30 feet right and so in the same similar manner if you're a game if you're an nft collection people are mobile they're getting increasingly just try to do something mobile and interact with these things you know send them out give them an incentive and design your flow so that you you have a sufficiently strong hook on mobile for them to go to desktop claim it and do the whole metamask experience or whatever Phantom wall whatever you're using uh whatever so so then you kind of because I don't think it's going to be as much as we complain about this I don't think that apple is going to meaningfully change their stance on

crypto just you know certainly like acid trust chats and you know they might get pressure from regulators and yada yada but as far as I can tell this debate has been going on for years and it's not just crypto a lot of people and developers have complained about Apple just making their life difficult because if if an opera won't seduce yeah if Congress wants to do something useful here they would open up the app stores instead of uh trying to regulate crypto here they would they would unlock the app store so uh it's just funny because like that's not this is not even if they wanted to do this this is not even technologically possible no uh it just it yeah it just feels funny because like apple is always so Advanced with tech like I I got the got the new iPad yesterday actually and

it was like just this amazing Tech experience they just they've never been able to have a good take on crypto they've never been able to understand it or actually they've obviously never mind that's a bad take they do understand that they just want to control it so it just feels like they want to be basically an Overlord on on crypto transactions yeah I mean too this is also the innovators dilemma right they have no incentive to going first no incentive to support crypto when they can you know they don't want to jeopardize their big business right crypto is still a very small drop in the bucket for anyone right yeah so yeah it's like yeah classic innovators dilemma also you I mean you you probably see the same thing too there's a lot of companies that are dealing with this in crypto right now but nobody wants to

talk back to Apple is a like big shout out to to coinbase for for actually posting this thread most startups are too small to to want to air their grievances against Apple at the risk that is just to could be too detrimental to their business to not ever be able to launch so Mo a lot of companies are dealing with this they just don't air it out in public so yeah yeah maybe apple is basically trying to be the ultimate you know Mev extractor right yeah by sending entities on mobile they're taking a 30 cut I mean that's uh yeah maybe they're on their own validators by the way this is a sign that like I don't I don't know I was really bearish on the Solana phone getting more bullish and you'll see we

had this conversation with Anatoly and and Ben uh from Solana drops on Monday um got a decentralized not just the software stack but the hardware stack too so okay absolutely yeah alrighty what's next how to eat or Kraken or Casa let's do hot 8 for a second and then we can move past it so how to use a public Bitcoin miner they were forced to according to them they were forced to turn off 20 of its of their total hash power about 5800 miners they'd turn off 5800 miners what they said is is due to a disagreement with an energy provider um

is total speculation I'd my take would be that this is not due to a disagreement with an energy provider but it rather it's just because mining Bitcoin right now is not profitable with where with where bitcoin's price is at I I really don't know anything that I could be totally wrong but in general it's been a rough year for how to eat right they haven't they had I think a 200 million dollar market cap around there they their stock has dropped more than 85 percent this year um they reported a loss of 23 million Canadian dollars compared to a profit of 23 a profit of 23 million a year earlier um they have I don't know it's like we talked about in that episode a couple months ago like what really hurts Bitcoin miners is when they when the people running the company

have this like huddle huddle huddle mentality that's not a treasury management solution um HUD 8 has publicly pledged to hold on to all of their Bitcoin despite the tough market conditions it just like feels like a funny thing to do it's like that you don't need to huddle huddle like just take take care of your business yeah I mean it's like a it's like an energy producer like uh storing and holding on to their natural gas or oil like it I've always found the mining business incredibly difficult and not as attractive as holding the underlying I think if you were to do run certain returns around investing in minors or spinning up your own mining Farm

requires a lot of capital A lot of capex investment into A6 the depreciation schedule of Asics and these specialized Hardware to mine Bitcoin is fairly short you never get a sense that you have an advantage because the manufacturer's bit Mains of the world probably are like mining Bitcoin ahead of you and then selling you like you know the equipment after you're also exposed to like wild fluctuations and energy prices and Regulators clamping down on you because uh you know the narrative is super strong right anytime Energy prices go up they blame the miners this happened in Pennsylvania this happened in New York probably Ontario teachers pension fund is putting pressure as well right so it's never like people don't really

understand how energy gets produced and like how energy storage works and how actually miners have played a huge role in like taking unused energy in the grid to then mine nonetheless a huge rant all this to say is I've never found the mining business really profitable like if you look at the oil and gas sector back in my days in Investment Banking like the the most profitable like places to invest along the Continuum of like from exploration to distribution it was never like like it was never like what the miners do you think it's really like a lot of the transportation and refining of the Commodities where a lot of the value gets made in this case what does that mean for crypto exchanges

distribution right they take the raw commodity and then they sell it and they distribute it right um and so I think miners just really take a beating right because it's very hard to manage treasury you know manage that Treasury um and it's increasingly competitive and it's oftentimes you're competing against jurisdictions like in Mongolia and Siberia like in Russia like it's it's a minority Circle it's like very very difficult so yeah uh we talked a little bit about the minor uh Dynamics and also in the Nick Carter episode that aired last week so you know for anyone that really wants to listen to that they should uh they

should um yeah they should listen to that because the natural gut reaction is wait a minute minors are having a really hard time oh [ __ ] this means of like the Bitcoin network is going to go down and it's false it's not there are certain adjustments in the difficulty rate and whatnot and we've seen these moments before where miners have a hard time and there's an adjustment so and a relocation minor so good in China too do you see my Twitter you see my tweet about Bitcoin security model yeah and well I did by the way that you should yeah why don't you talk about that because we've talked about it a number of times in other episodes yeah who was it when we talked about it with Eric Voorhees right

he's yeah we talked about and he basically was like no like this is something that is too far like let's just kick the can down the road and I don't think that's gonna be the case the deal I mean we should I actually really want to do a Bitcoin security yeah I I want to do a Bitcoin security episode actually um spend two minutes on it now I mean here's the deal so the so at the Genesis of Bitcoin the block reward was 50 Bitcoin every four years that gets cut right so 2012 there's the first having the block reward got cut to 25. 2016 they have any cuts the block reward to 12.5 2020 having cuts the block order 6.25 there's another happening coming up in 2024 cuts the block order 3.125 every four years

it gets cut in half again right so 2028 it'll be 1.5625 then 78125 and it just keeps getting cut now the reason that that's not in that hypothetically that that is not an issue is because the price of Bitcoin keeps going up right so then people are still incentivized to get this Bitcoin so maybe in 2016 12.5 Bitcoin uh what was worth you know a thousand bucks or like 300 bucks um now when you mine for Bitcoin until you only get like 6.25 but that's fine because the price has gone so up so much that it still makes it worth it my question that I asked on crypto Twitter I said Can someone explain how this

security model scales if bitcoin's block space doesn't continue to accrue demand maybe that wasn't the right question I think maybe the best question is just like if bitcoin's price doesn't keep keep going up um and I honestly I was not very impressed by a lot of the answers that I think got like hundreds of of comments I was not very impressed munib had a really good answer I thought um munib from from block stack but there weren't really that many good answers so I don't know what was his answer though he said settlements from Bitcoin layers here's so we need this whole thing is like people are going to build on top of Bitcoin right so set his which I don't agree with but but it but you can't say like that's a thesis you know yeah so

his what he said is that settlements settlements from Bitcoin layers can and will drive up demand for Block space you know he's saying that because you know he's saying Lightning's already doing this the stacks layer is already doing this he said Bitcoin base layers for settlements and not payments um the reason I mean somehow people are gonna believe that Bitcoin is super important to secure and continue and they'll be altruistic players like exchanges and maybe countries or large whales that like subsidize the security of the network which to me is like a very unsatisfactory answer when you consider that the whole fundamental

premise of crypto is to build systems that don't rely on altruism or trust of any kind and it feels to me like the Bitcoin Community should just look themselves in the mirror and have an open hardest debate and really think about these things today not in 10 years not in five years but simply today and look I'll reference again one of the best things that I heard from Anatoly when we in um interviewed him this week was he said we've taken a beating because we asked him look you guys have faced a lot of criticism and he said you know what that's open source and we've taken a lot of the criticisms and it has actually helped us

redesign pieces of the network that were just flawed and I'd rather hear that I'd rather be part of a community part of an open source Network that like constantly understands it like design is not perfect and constantly wants to patch certain things and I understand the Bitcoin Camp has always been we cannot be as flexible or as or as fast moving as ethereum or other networks because Bitcoin is like this hardened thing that we sacrosanct we cannot touch marginal improvements it's like the way the Central Bank communicates right we do the central bank doesn't communicate like an investment like a you know like a public

CEO they need to be really guarded in caucus and you don't understand part of that but it's also like I think it's a very existential crisis here and if you're holding if you're a Kathy Wood thinking bitcoin's going to go to a million I just think Kathy doesn't fundamentally understand this conundrum because again as an investor you discount everything you know to today and you say wait a minute I'm increasingly find it very hard that today 99 of all the security budget of Bitcoin relies on block rewards that are just going to go down in an exponential Manner and fees haven't really gone up me

hmm and I have basically no real strong footing to understand how you're going to bridge that Gap other than maybe someone Kathy Wood of the world or in exchange or as easy decides to bail us all out well you know what folks I don't think crypto is designed to be bailed out or rely on altruism look I I don't want to I don't want to fight Bitcoin too much here because I'm not [ __ ] it I'm just no I no I know I know I know um here's my here's my frustration with the thing I tweeted the overwhelming response was Bitcoin is a global neutral currency with a immutable monetary policy how would you say that that is not worth

expending effort to earn forever I'm like that is it's really important to keep that going but like what's the monetary incentive to keep that going um someone's got to be someone's got to be incentivized um at the end of the day people are rational economic beings and if they can transition over to another Network and make more money you're going to do that now this is not to say that ethereum is perfect look there are some very valid criticism around proven stake and censorship and and concentration of validators like I understand that and I get it and we we will talk it's not the right kind of episode to talk about it but I think as we look forward to next year I think this should be an ongoing discussion around I agree how does your network accrue value and how does your network

have a sustainable security budget I think private State networks have certain Tendencies towards clustering and centralization I think any network in general has these tendencies but we need to kind of think about at least perfect stake to me is always felt a more aligned system that actually has a viable security model but then you also have to focus on okay censorship and and working around like you know when you have nefarious actors and validation of that and censorship of transactions totally get it and we should talk about that but from a security budget perspective I think you're at least working from a solid foundation that the network

can be secured I'm moving past it moving on we're going to do some episodes on bitcoin security because I'm curious about it all right last two things I want to talk about one is Kraken did some layoffs uh heart goes out to Folks at crack and they lay it off a lot I think it was 1100 people um about 30 of the company Jesse Powell tweeted Out rough day of Kraken head count rolled back 12 months macro was already tough we held out a recent industry wrote recent industry was diminished near-term optimism about a crypto rebound or better position now glad we were able to take care of our former colleagues I think he's referring to like Severance and benefits and things like that it's a bit of her privilege to work with you all right uh

David sacks had this tweet actually I won't show that basically David sacks said this week he said for the last decade per per seat pricing has been a huge Tailwind for software companies as seed expansion was the norm that trend is going to go in reverse over the next year see contraction becomes the Baseline um this other guy dare obasanjo had a tweet Tech sector layoffs are high relative to other Industries because every other industry shrank during covid while tech companies grew as people use Tech products more during lockdown we're simply seeing a reversion to the mean and an elimination of pandemic hiring spikes so I think there's just big reversions I mean going on right now everyone's doing layoffs yeah um but yeah shout out to Kraken folks people are taking a hint at elon's Playbook of

coming in cutting a bunch of the workforce and then saying okay how bloated are these organizations now yeah Kraken I think has been I don't know intimate the Krakens bloated I think the crypto Industries has been hit harder yeah create a playbook for creating a profitable uh creating a profitable tech company and I think people are going to follow suit yep um I look at Mike dudas had a great tweet it might might can be pretty uh to the point and like in a very funny way and he said uh uh the what is it box has been you know the CEO box has been fairly critical of crypto and he claims to have all the answers uh and basically all they all revolve around web3 as a scam but

somehow his company's never been profitable in all its years of existence so hey maybe just just focus on your goddamn unit economics instead of you know [ __ ] on this industry because I'll tell you what name for what it's worth uniswap a company uniswap Labs with a handful and I'm talking like 20 30 less than 100 employees I think 50. and the scale that they got and our points in time having more volume and speed generation Revenue generation and certainly profitability per head count then coinbase and that is a power like anyone that comes out there any web to CEO listening okay guys let's have a debate pound for pound a web 3 protocol

I don't want to call it a company but a protocol is infinitely and as in web3 protocols have been proven to be highly more scalable profitable out of the gate than any other kind of web 2 company like like period yeah you call you and then they're gonna they're gonna take a stab at oh this is all speculation and casino money guys it's a business model gaming we sell nfts we sell games we just sell the people the ability to swap assets whatever but the profitability and the scalability of web3 on a unit economic basis Beats 99 of what two companies and this is the power of permissionless you know distributed Networks

um that reach the entire world in a very frictionless way that's what people might call our regulatory Arbitrage but still it is a very like uniswap is a very viable business model um more so than a traditional exchange and yeah so anyways we're back to fundamentals of like we need to focus on unit economics and I think all I'm trying to say is web 3 businesses have really interesting web like unit economics uh for any fundamental everyone now is putting on their fundamental investor hat okay guys I came into this industry being a fundamental sales investor and I found unit economics to be one of the more

interesting things and less talked about things in this industry but I hope it gets more attention because it's really fascinating what you've observed in all these protocols uh open C even too it's like you know hybrid company last thing then we'll wrap this up uh Jameson lop and the casa team big shout out to Nick over there too announced uh an expansion and I'll I'll just read Jameson's thing uh today Casa is excited to announce an expansion in our self-sovereignty as a service offering we're bringing our Best in Class user experience to cold storage for etholders why is Casa adding each support why now due to demand from current and prospective clients that's why there's clearly a gap in the market for folks who have a need to easily and safely self-custody significant amounts of value across b2c and eth Via one

seamless interface so for those who don't know so Casa is this great platform love I love Casa um great great platform to be able to self-custody your Bitcoin make it really really easy to create a to create a multi-siga self-cust to your Bitcoin they never had anything else they never let you do eat or any other asset and one of the reasons for that I would assume not kind of just reading between the lines I've hung out with Nick and Jamison a little bit but uh just reading between the lines here is they've got there's the the their user base are these like hardcore Bitcoin Maxes so if you are running the company you have to make a decision do we do we expand assets get eth people on board and risk really

making our core user base angry or do we just focus on our core user base and this is Casa saying we're willing to make our core user base some of these hardcore Bitcoin Max he's angry to expand um and this is just one of the cool things about the industry like about bear markets is that people I think people do what's right for their business um and and also and also protocols come together and the industry comes together so cost of supporting eth is I think representative of that um and just like man I just these Bitcoin Maxes are a complete joke in my mind I'm just going to say it like I'm reading some of these people were not just pick one Maxis just Maxis in general people are [ __ ] people are

[ __ ] on casa I know that team decently well at this point amazing people like they're tweeting out like I'm just gonna read some of these sacrificing your morals is absolutely not acceptable like like how you know Jameson like you like you're you three years ago was telling you're so upset about this I'm like oh my god like people are like [ __ ] Casa a bunch of larps called it since the beginning like you and I'm like this is absurd I love Casa Shadow Casa I used to use Casa actually but I stopped because they didn't support eth so maybe I'll maybe I'll use it I hope this is a part of a bigger Trend which is de-politicizing the industry

we've become so I think I understand we're all trying species inherently and we we have affiliations it's one thing to be tribal it's another to be just a toxic maximalist really rigiding your thinking and I hope we like we move away from that if we can learn something in this bear Market is let's just go back to fundamentals and the the principle The Objective should always be furthering decentralization no matter what shape or form color it comes in um and I think the fact that cost of signing support for ethereum is positive for ethereum it's positive with the decentralization of ethereum and I think that is that is the most important thing if you're a Bitcoin you don't necessarily have to believe in

ethereum to believe in why they're doing this is to bring more diversity in an ecosystem that needs it and I think anyone can get behind that so I would say that if anything they're distinct crew there are morals of enabling people um to self-custody um and hopefully you know and that is positive for the space and so anyways um yeah I hope we can be less tribal less less Max less like toxic coming out of all this bear Market I think that this Market is humbled a lot of people and they think uh you know I'm not I'm not saying we have to all experience pain to learn but you're seeing other people really uh you know experience pain and so take that

and learn from that and hopefully we can all you know I don't want to say Kumbaya band together but just remind yourself of the morals and why you're doing this and I mean I think the Casas mission and what why they're doing this you know it's not a betrayal in any way shape or form yeah and bull markets us for them is protocol versus protocol and in in Bull markets it's uh protocol versus protocol and bear markets it's crypto versus everyone else so um yeah yeah up again what are you watching back there what's on TV what am I what am I I'm like enjoying this is that Biden it's Bloomberg I love Bloomberg all the time huh all the time all the time I

love it in fact this is why uh it's been now more interesting in the whole FTX drama they've their coverage of crypto has gone up dramatically and I've been fairly surprised of the commentary like a lot of they have a crypto like every day to have a crypto sequence like a show dedicated to crypto and I think you do a fairly good you know coverage and um unlike the New York Times in the Wall Street Journal they've yeah they've increasingly like really I I think I've been fairly impressed like they've been calling FDX like and understanding the difference between that and decentralization and why decentralization matters like yeah Bloomberg's done a really good job of it

other media companies have not done a good job I think I have a feeling we'll see uh other media Brands lay off their crypto teams as well like I think the um crypto editorial teams and like crypto reporters at mainstream Publications are going to face some tough times over the next several months as those teams I mean we saw it in 2018 2019 is going to happen again the way it works by the way is like if you're a I'm gonna make up names here but like a Vox or a Business Insider and you launch a crypto team you're going to go to like an etoro or an exchange and like sponsor that the year of ads for on like your crypto on your crypto Pages um they're they're going to struggle to sell those ads to crypto advertisers right now and they're gonna not be able

to make a business uh business case for having crypto teams same thing that happened in 2018 2019 so yeah yeah the other publication has been fairly you know objective or increasingly so is the financial times basically all non-us um non-us well I mean of course block works but you know main like not crypto native uh news outlets I think Bloomberg Financial Times really good yeah yeah cool man should we rap yeah I think so by the way a shout out um well one recommendation not a book um I recently started watching playlist on Netflix which is the like a mini series on the founder of Spotify uh it's

really good actually um it's a it's a pretty good uh history of uh of music the music industry Spotify I think crypto people would love would enjoy it you know how I met yesterday was um Alex Bloomberg he started gimlet and they sold to uh they sold to Spotify he's telling me some interesting stuff about Spotify it's uh it's a tough business model but yeah yeah Pioneers in the wrong right I think back in the day yeah on Spotify yeah um I'm reading I'm reading River of doubt about Teddy Roosevelt going down the Amazon uh exploring the Amazon really interesting you know who inspired me was um man long week been bad with names

recently um who's the uh one river guy Eric um Eric Peters survival guy Eric Peters yes he uh remember at the end he's like yeah my favorite books are survival books so I read yeah I read I read uh I read River of Doubt by Teddy Roosevelt I'm almost done with that really good Buck definitely recommend it Teddy Roosevelt absolute stud yeah one of my favorite uh speeches of all time actually my favorite is man in the arena fantastic man in the arena and I guess on Survival books endurance this the story of Shackleton oh yeah um like unbelievable probably one of the best uh yeah all the like Antarctic and

North Pole Expeditions or like I have a I love these things but yeah I think it's still available if not you can go to the page and get the way get on the wait list um Santi I hope you got your ticket no way you're getting in free after you ride this last year um what okay okay all right okay I deserve it I guess it's the first of December folks so uh you know we're coming into the end of the year we're gonna have some really good episodes coming up including prediction episodes well end of year reflection to see how bad my predictions I think worse than probably anyone's been including Jason

beat me to this and then a look uh we'll attempt to do a crystal ball into next year uh but look at this space we can't even predict what's gonna happen tomorrow so anyways guys it's gonna be a one episode but yeah yeah I hope you all have a good weekend uh good rest of your Friday if you're listening to this on Friday good weekend and we'll see you Monday for the episode with Anatolia and Ben from Solana [Music] foreign