tl;dr | Infrastructure Bill, Pudgy Penguins, Element Finance, Lido, Optimistic Rollups (August 15th)

Transcript

hey bankless nation this is tldr where we catch you up on all the headlines and important narratives from around the bankless ecosystem for everything we talk about here they're going to be links down in the show notes so you can do a deeper dive into any of these topics before we get into it i want to shout out pool together defy's no loss lottery protocol pool together lets you deposit into any prize pool and get tickets for weekly drawings and you can also remove your funds at any time go to bankless dot cc slash pool together to learn more also fun fact we have leighton cusack the founder of pool together on top signal this week where the gang plays chess with alexandra votes and it does not disappoint the first thing we're talking about today is the absolute insane amount of energy surrounding the nft profile picture

avatar generative art game uh if you pay any attention at all to crypto twitter uh you will have heard about pudgy penguins which is absolutely taking over right now uh there are eight thousand eight hundred and eighty eight of these guys and they have taken off in the past week and i think their floor is like at three eth right now this these whole nft avatar games they are literally games of just like do we like the way these things look and like so like the fundamentals on these penguins are like they're really cute they're really cute little drawings that's like the fundamentals behind this project most of the buying and selling of these penguins is happening on openc which is doing a crazy amount of volume right now and thanks to eip1559 volume means that ether is getting burnt uh

open c has burned over 4 500 eth in the last week on its own so whether you love penguins or you hate them they are making eth more scarce so you're welcome and more broadly generative nft art has been around since 2017 with things like crypto punks uh but it really feels like the space is just getting started and i really think that there are limitless possibilities uh to what can happen when you combine d5 culture ownership and interactivity next up is the u.s infrastructure bill which was a huge topic last week but it definitely spilled over into this week too as the bill passed through the senate this monster bill is like 3 000 pages long and it included some really uninformed and frankly disappointing legislation about crypto uh it basically implied that every party involved in the

industry would have to register as a broker and report to the irs and the tldr here is that this would be super unrealistic to enforce and generally demonstrated that congress does not know at all what it's talking about when it comes to crypto uh it was cool to see the community rallying around us and it was encouraging to see the influence that like we can have when we all come together and coordinate around a particular cause it's not that we don't want regulation or to be like shadowy supercoder outlaws like elizabeth warren said it's just that we want clear thoughtful and effective involvement from nation states and to my understanding we're all on the same team here it's very clear that the crypto industry wants to move forward into a better freer fairer world and provide socio-economic opportunities and public goods for everyone on the other side of

the geopolitical coin we have china who it turns out is building infrastructure for a central bank digital currency or cbdc since 2014. the author richard turn came on the podcast this week and can explain this whole thing way better than i can central bank digital currency is in china is a tokenized form of money where i have a digital wallet like bitcoin like cryptocurrency where the tokenized version of money is actually resident on that digital device and held within the memory and here's the most important thing i can transfer money from party to party without the use of third-party services

and anybody who works in crypto is like yeah man that's why we love this that's why we've been using it for years what you guys are just figuring this out and it's like yeah well it's not a matter of the people are just figuring it out it's just that it's a facility that the fed is uncomfortable handing out because it means a fundamental change in the banking system and a releasing of power from the banks from this visa and mastercard from these third-party entities and it empowers people and that scares the living daylights because out of out of the fed and out of the banking system because it's a

fundamental change in perspective i thought this was a fantastic conversation but to be honest it kind of terrified me like china has this insane ability to mobilize uh and i think it's powered by the fact that they like lean a little on the authoritarian side you know they're like a single party state um and on top of that they're eyeing a smart contract platform on top of their already robust like fintech ecosystem with things like alipay and wechat and it just makes me wonder like what does the efficiency of the chinese state look like with financial superpowers that blockchains provide or what degree does it threaten us dollar dominance or like threaten the open permissionless world that we're trying to build out here uh ryan and david uh discussed this in

the podcast debrief uh available to premium subscribers and definitely recommend it on the more optimistic side of things uh there was this really cool conversation on our state of the nation with optimism developers carl florsch and ben jones uh and if you remember ben jones uh recently made this banger dumping is a tragedy and pumping is a crime wall street but transparent and decentralized but bin is also working on one of the coolest and most important projects in the whole space and that is basically scaling out defy without sacrificing the values that make ethereum cool in the first place slaying moloch is something we discuss all the time and i thought carl's takes on it we're really fascinating and big brained and his energy is off the charts as we

know throughout throughout history power tends to corrupt why are you optimistic that this story is different well is the game a hot potato you can't hold the ring you have to destroy the ring you have to go venture and throw it into mount mount doom right like we are in a very key moment in history that will potentially bring us to good things potentially bring us to absolutely terrible things we are building all this open source software we're all ideologically motivated we're like moving towards this one direction but there is a corrupting force and that is money that is short-term profits over long-term profits and that is a real

issue so what are we going to do about it well one we as an organization are you know very clear and up front this is a power that we have this is a corrupting force that we have we are trying to get rid of it it is terrible and we hate it if we're going to get to that you know uh slaying moloch moment we need to literally be saying every day i am slaying molag i am not going to try to do funny business and get together you know make sure people don't do that funny business you know another project we covered this week is element finance which is pretty hot right now and has been pioneering the space of fixed income in d5 and in the legacy world fixed income is

an industry worth well over a hundred trillion dollars which is a lot uh people really like yield and they like dividends and they like those things to be stable and reliable and that's what element finance is seeking to do for the ethereum space as these products get built out they will sink and become pillars of the defy economy and as they gain trust and legitimacy they're going to be attracting institutions and big money and the ceo of firebox michael shawloff talks a lot about onboarding businesses into the world of digital assets and the next bankless podcast so definitely keep an eye out for that the last big topic we cover this week is lido lido is a protocol for democratizing access to staking in ethereum 2.0 is proof-of-stake consensus mechanism now

to stake on your own to be a validator you need a hefty capital investment of 32 eth which is going for around 100 grand right now as well as good hardware and tech savviness because operating a node is not easy and if you do a bad job then your initial investment can get slashed glydo seeks to make this entire process easier and is competing with other decentralized staking providers like rocket pool as well as centralized staking providers things like coinbase and gemiini we all want a robust democratic fair ecosystem and i think a huge part of that as we move into proof of stake is keeping access to staking like as permissionless and decentralized as possible so we'll definitely continue to watch projects like lido as we approach the proof of stake merge either

towards the end of this year or early in 2022 so that about covers the major points of bankless content this week but i wanted to offer some final thoughts it seems like the space is speeding up every day and it's already going so fast we turn through memes and current events like at the speed of the internet and our ability to coordinate and share information happens so instantly that it feels like you can't even take a breath feels like you can't look away from crypto twitter without messing some massive event in the space i would just encourage everyone to like be mindful of this and know that it can be a lot for anybody i think it's important to compartmentalize things uh topics like the infrastructure bill and the state of regulation uh are far too nuanced to squeeze into a single tweet especially if it's like me and emotionally charged

so don't attach yourself to like one-dimensional opinions and be thoughtful of how you're consuming information if you are missing out on the penguins frenzy like take a step back and remember why you're here in the first place uh fomo is a natural response to all of this and it's not easy out here so with that none of this is financial advice ethan is risky d5 is risky but we're headed west it's the frontier it's not for everyone but we're glad you're with us on the bengals journey thanks a lot i also want to quickly shout out our sponsors jim and i balancer ave and uniswap we are really privileged to have sponsors that um we believe in and are happy to promote and of course this wouldn't be possible without them so thanks a lot and i'll see you next time hey we hope you

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week in crypto and other fantastic content thanks everyone for watching and being on the journey as we build out the bankless nation