tl;dr | How Infrastructure is Huge for Crypto (Week of August 22)

Transcript

[Music] hey bengals nation this is tldr where we catch you up on all the headlines and important narratives from our own bank list this week as always there are going to be links down in the show notes for you to do a deeper dive into any of these topics all right so first we should talk about dows we had an awesome panel this week with kane from synthetics trach from yearn and cooper who's involved with basically every dow out there so the same way that crypto is flipping finance and economics on its head dows are doing the same thing to companies communities or any organized group really and we're seeing fundamental changes to how we can coordinate in groups so historically the most effective way that we have organized as a species is through top-down imposed order and what we couldn't do before now is coordinate

through bottom-up emergent order and i think this whole dao movement is how we change and improve what power structures look like in society and the key is emphasizing community and ownership and the relationship between those two things the way i live my life now is ownership stakes and all the products that i contribute to so i'm slowly supplementing any form of consistent income on a fiat basis to just ownership stakes and networks and i think that principle of going into a community and being able to earn a significant ownership portion for the value you contribute it's extremely scary but you know as they started to pan out more and we saw specifically this last year those ownership stakes become valuable i think that it's easy to recognize if you go into a network and you start working for ownership over capital there's going to be a path forward there you know i think

that the single most important thing to do for dao's is putting people into the right pockets together and then helping to coordinate that effort and so a lot of my time is basically identifying who are the key contributors in that dow how do i make sure that they're actually owning things that matter and how do i make sure they're touching base with all the other people that know what matters so that the ball is moving forward and they're communicating that to every other member of that down so with that i want to shout out tracer dao which is launching decentralized financial products starting with their perpetual pools in september they're looking for dow contributors and governors so if you're looking to get involved and make a difference join their discord and find ways to contribute so on the bankless podcast this week we had michael

shawloff the ceo of fireblocks they recently raised over 300 million dollars at a 2.2 billion dollar valuation and they are building infrastructure to help businesses use crypto so this is more than just companies buying crypto and putting it on their balance sheet fireblocks is facilitating the use of actual d5 protocols things like ave and compound and this is exciting the reality is that new technologies can be raw and exposed and difficult to use unsettled land needs rails roads electricity whatever and infrastructure improves an ecosystem and makes adoption way easier i'm actually looking forward for the world where my clients are not necessarily only wells fargo or jp morgan but my

clients are airbnb and you know uber and booking.com and spotify and all those guys that are internet companies there is unbanking for the retail but there is also unbanking for the businesses and speaking of infrastructure uh the us infrastructure bill remains an important topic for us jake cervinski has been a key voice for crypto regulation and he came on the state of the nation this week to talk about where we are with all of this and there's definitely good and bad here the good news is that there is a growing crypto lobby and the people involved are clearly smart and thoughtful and they're making real headway that is the good the bad is that this bill passed through the

senate without the amendments we wanted and it's increasingly clear that this is not going to be an easy fight for the crypto industry the key thing to note here is that this is by no means the end of the fight it's the beginning for both the bill specifically and regulation as a whole and i think it's even bigger than that here's what jake has to say about the stakes of all this this is the conversation we need to have with the administration and it's not an anti-money laundering question or tax compliance question it's a national security question and it's a geopolitical foreign policy question right where are we positioning ourselves when we have one of our greatest foreign adversaries china trying to take over the world through the global financial

system right and they have a very clear path that they're that they're trying to sort of push their own interests through the digital yuan that they're trying to spread around the globe we need to have a a policy to address that concern and i think that is really where we're going to make progress in dc is talking to those folks who understand the more important u.s interests at stake more so than is there someone who traded on uni swap who we can't identify who like sold matic at a 10x and isn't paying their taxes right i think that's the conversation we have to start having i wanted to clip out this entire episode so you should probably just go watch it and we'll be continuing this conversation with ryan selkis of masari on the next bankless podcast so

definitely check that out too next up is nfts openc is still doing crazy amounts of volume and while trying to wrap my head around this whole jpeg frenzy my gut reaction is honestly this is dumb this is speculation there are no fundamentals here there's no real value this is a distraction and while yeah there is definitely some of that there's a more nuanced take here trading volume and mainstream attention are good things it's good for eath holders and it's also a way to bring more folks into this space it's also an early look at the intersection of crypto and culture and i really like what david said in our market monday post we are absolutely in the early days of the maturity of the nft side of ethereum and i think crypto

has stumbled onto its first real accessible use case for nfts digital novelty collectibles and the energy surrounding it is astounding it's simple and clearly effective and it makes me really excited for what's going to happen as more utility and use cases are plugged into nfts so the bankless tactic for this week explores some of the different projects that are out there tackling liquidity providing on uniswap v3 when v3 launched earlier this year they introduced the idea of concentrated liquidity for market making the tldr is that it's more powerful and precise but the double-edged sword is that it's a raw technology that requires time attention and skills to use it effectively when you're an individual so now there are products out there that automate this whole process exposing you

to the increased capital efficiency of concentrated liquidity without the hassle of having to manage it yourself uniswap keep things minimalist by design and when hayden adams came on the podcast five months ago he talked about how money legos needed to be built on top of uniswap to fill out the ecosystem and it's been really cool to watch that happen in real time another topic we cover this week is signing in with ethereum if you've used d5 you know that the process of signing in to defy apps is surprisingly simple and elegant you connect your wallet maybe sign a quick transaction and off you go you don't have to have a separate account for every service that you use although web 2 is getting better with this things like signing with facebook or google your accounts are still controlled by

the service provider we like it when the power of tech giants is reduced and i think removing god mode over your accounts is a big piece of that this is an unintentional value proposition of web3 but i think it's a reflection of a more general principle that crypto is really good at putting the power back into the hands of users as well as creating the design space for an overall better user experience something we've discussed a lot on bankless is how fundamental analysis works for d5 protocols you don't need speculation or macro takes to develop a thesis for a particular token you can just look at the project's value flows which is how we say cash flows now this week we did a case study on maker dow to quantify its prospects as an investment it's a really

deep dive with some interesting takeaways first traditional metrics work to analyze crypto projects with income this means that institutions who are less likely to be down for raw speculation will be more willing to invest when they can see actual quantifiable fundamentals the other takeaway is that these traditional metrics are just the tip of the iceberg and there's a world of innovation in financial theory ready to be explored so that about covers the major points of bankless content this week but here's a final thought so the current state of the internet is a world of endless choices and the future of the internet will give users even more freedoms to do watch ape and spend time doing whatever they want with that freedom though i think comes a lot of responsibility it's easier than

ever to waste time on trash content or get stuck in ideological bubbles or become complacent and i'd encourage you to think about what's important to you and the world around you and pursue that as much as possible so with that uh none of this was financial advice ethan's risky d5 is risky we're headed west it's the frontier it's not for everyone but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey and i also wanted to quickly shout out our sponsors arbitrarum matcha ledger and uniswap it's really cool to be able to sponsor things that we like and use ourselves and of course this wouldn't be possible without them so thanks a lot and see you next time hey we hope you enjoyed the video if you did head over to bankless hq right now to develop your crypto investing skills and

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