Weekly web3 news: Binance fined $4B, CZ out, Blur season 3 and Blast

Transcript

GM GM welcome to web3 Academy your one trusted source to capitalize on the next big phase of the Internet it's the weekly rollup where we make sure you don't get caught in the hype cycle I'm jird joined by my co-host Kyle reidhead and we believe that CZ is not going to change the world that's why we're carving a path for doers to confidently build and invest in web 3 big news week another one I feel like each week we're building and building as we enter into this bull market here you mentioned CZ that is the founder CEO of bance who is no longer the CEO of bance he's had to step down and pay a hefty 4 billion dollar fine we'll cover exactly what happened there blur season 3 is here

we'll also talk about what happened with season two and something new called Blast that they've launched they just they keep shipping and I'm actually somewhat bullish on them finally anyway the doj has threatened crypto and defi the SEC is suing Kraken markets are all over the place it's a wild wild ride right now and we have a resolution of Sam mman open the eye but we won't Touch Too Much on that because you all probably know what's going on there but anyway before we get into all that stuff the wacky wild world of crypto let's start with a little bit of gratitude Jay what are you grateful for yeah I'm grateful for today is opening day at Whistler the mountain is back open I can get out on my snowboard again for the

ski season there's snow in the mountains and yeah can't wait stoked opening day it's one of my favorite days of the year are you going today I'm going to go this afternoon yeah nice nice that's awesome well I guess we're both taking the afternoon off because my gratitude today is it's American Thanksgiving and although I'm Canadian don't necessarily celebrate that I do like football and there is lots of football today uh three big games I'm a Cowboys fan and they played tonight before and so I'm meeting four of my best buddies guys that I've been friends with since grade two which is crazy and so we're all going for just you know for some food and to watch the games and that so it's going to be a good time go Cowboys I love it go go Cowboys go Cowboys I'm a Jags fan go go

Jags I don't know if they're I've never a Jags life when when I was a kid somebody bought me a Jags like some paraphernalia by them and I just loved the logo like of a Jaguar you know it's very like cartoony sort of and yeah I was I always love them but I'm not I'm Not Die Hard J fan I'm more of a NFL football fan before WEP Happy Thanksgiving to all the Americans out there hope you enjoy your day happy happy turkey happy turkey hope you guys have I love that Americans take the full week off for American Thanksgiving we got a full week is it yeah it's quite common for them to take the full week off that's wild before we jump into today's episode we got an exciting announcement

two weeks from now is our eyes onchain event this is an event we do once a mon month in our Discord we bring our community together and we go through the most important stats and analytics that are happening on chain and right now what is the most important thing happening on chain prepping for the bull run and the bull market and knowing how to allocate your capital and what you should be doing and what you should be watching and how to do this with confidence and we don't want you to miss out because there's big big opportunity right now so Kyle is putting together presentation along with Pablo shout out to our onchain analysts with their top tips for the bull market so we're going

to create a framework for you so that you're aware of the dos and the don'ts in the bull market so that you don't get caught in the hype cycle but you also don't miss the opportunities so if you're not in our Discord go ahead and join link is in the show notes and this is open to everybody in our community so jump in we'd love to see you there and it's the two Tuesday at 12:00 p.m. EST I believe and we'll also do an AMA at the end so you come with all your questions we're going to be doing everything we can to help you succeed in this bull market speaking of that let's get into some market watch but before we do that let's take a second in here from our sponsors modern newsletters are built on paragraph that's right paragraph is a

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hell of a six months a hell of a year to date if you look at the the stats I have up on the screen here and so a little pullback here and there this isn't even really a pullback to be honest it's a pullback for ants and so this is just a brief brether in the markets which is honestly a really good thing I'll talk about why in just a second let's jump over to eth real quick so eth down 85% uh on the day down 66 on the week e actually had a bit of a stronger week than Bitcoin again same thing this is just all good all healthy salana had a big pullback at 133% but again that's literally nothing considering it's got up 78% in the last month it is down a little bit on the day but we're kind of just fluctuating at the moment not much

happening in the market we're really just taking a bit of a breather when I say that if you look on the screen what I have up here is this is a chart of Bitcoin and on the bottom you see this weird purple yellow lines here and these are What's called the RSI or the relative strength index and basically this is like a momentum tracker of assets and so when it goes above this like0 seven Mark here the yellow or the red the yellow is like a delayed trending line it's like a 20day or 50-day moving average and then the purple is like what's actually happening in real time and when it goes above this like s Mark it's called oversold or overbought sorry and generally at some point soon it doesn't mean it's going to happen right away but generally it means that we're going to lose some momentum

and it's time to come back down to like our mean like trend line there and sometimes it can last longer as you can see here this one lasted for a few weeks but we're starting to come back down we're dipping below that overbought area which is really good that's just kind of a reset it means hey now we can go back upwards probably it's going to come back down a little bit more but let's see e same thing this one we really needed to come down it's down back at almost the the mean trend line there at 0. five and soul which really needed this is also starting to come down the yellow still hasn't made it yet but it'll get there any day now so maybe we have a few more days of sort of just consolidation I think December is gonna be a big month

and so it's likely we are going to jump back up once these sort of reset these aren't perfect but they're just like a good way to sort of guide in terms of momentum I talked a lot about eth I think this was a few weeks ago where I showed this chart of Ethan sort of this like you call it bull flag you call it a descending Channel whichever it is again you might want to watching on YouTube on Spotify to actually see this but basically all it is is after a big run up this year of eth it's been in this sort of like downward trend for months and I flagged a couple weeks ago that we're soon going to break out of that if we do we'll probably jump up to 2,000 pretty quickly well that's what happened a couple weeks ago end of October is

when we really did that or sorry beginning of November is when we jumped up like that and we hit this trend line here that you can see this blue line sorry it's resistance which is at 2,140 this is because we've hit it twice well I guess three times now this year and we can't seem to break through it once we break through it though in terms of technicals there's just nothing there all the way until 3,000 and so it's very likely that whenever we break 2140 we're just going to fly to 3,000 now it's not going to happen in the day um but it's going to happen pretty quickly and there's just not much resistance of things to hold it back so that's a big thing I think we want to be watching right now Bitcoin Sol have obviously had big runs eth is you know

starting to come back a little bit but it looks like whenever it hits at 2140 it's kind of game on for probably a few weeks to months there so that's a big thing that I'm watching right now the other big area that I wanted to to touch on was sticking into the crypto World here we'll get to macro in a second is um I wrote a pro report today that went out predicting the prices of Bitcoin eth and Soul at the end of the cycle or the top of the cycle now I don't expect these to be perfect but I use them as sort of a guide to help me kind of navigate the coming cycle and I wanted to just share a little bit of that here I won't share it all because you got to be a pro subscriber sign up to that if

you want to check it out to get more details but what was really interesting is one of the things I looked at was past cycles and so what I have up on the chart or up on the screen here is Bitcoin and its entirety okay and we just looking at the price of Bitcoin its entirety and we can see the tops and the bottoms of each cycle of Bitcoin there has been three real Cycles so far the green outlines the green line here outlines the top the red line outlines the bottom so so we can see we had it here in from you know 2014 we had a top 2018 we had a top and 2021 we had a top right what's crazy is if you measure these out the similarities between these Cycles it's just it's unbelievable so if you measure from the top to the bottom

back in 2014 you got 396 days between the top and the bottom if you do it again from the next cycle in 2016 2017 2018 you get 365 days and then if you do the last cycle what we were just in it's again 396 days identical to the one two before it and very close to the one just before it so that is pretty mindblowing to be fair we always say history doesn't repeat but often rides this is almost repeating which is crazy three times um and then if we look at the top to top which will help us sort of predict what could the top be for this cycle if we go the first cycle we see at 1,461 days and then if we look at the second cycle 1,400 days so about two months difference you know 60 days or so

off but still very very similar and so if we kind of average that out we look at the same thing and we sort of project that out into this cycle we're looking at about an October 2025 top for Bitcoin the entire crypto Market might be different ethereum usually lags about a month altcoins a few months after that ish but we're looking at around October 2025 for a top and then the bottom sits at about November 2026 again we have no idea if this will play out the same way as others but it's pretty telling when you look at this chart I'll tell you that I had recommend you guys look at this it's wild the other thing I want to share is if you then take that number and you throw it on the log chart of the total crypto market cap so I talk a lot

about Network effects and if you look at technologies that have Network effects they typically follow this like regression channel it's called if you can't see what I'm talking about here it's basically when you put the price chart of anything whether it's Amazon Apple Google they all follow the same thing when you put them on a log and you you you have this like regression Channel where it's just sort of like a straight line line upwards sorry diagonally and then you have like your trend line which is the gray one here and then you have one standard deviation two standard deviations like overbought above it and then oversold below it and it falls it usually goes somewhere in between that in these Cycles it'll go to the top maybe then it'll go down to the bottom it just sort of like flows along that for years and years and years

Microsoft Apple they've all done it for 20 plus years it's wild you can put Bitcoin you can put the crypto market cap on the same sort of regression Channel and so they it has f it within the same thing and so if you add 2025 October and you look at okay well what might we hit in terms of the total crypto market cap if we just stay along the trend line which typically you always come back to that trend line at some point doesn't necessarily mean it's at the top of the cycle but it just gives us kind of a a number to look at and the number we get here is almost $16 trillion do for the crypto market cap by 2025 October so maybe the top that's just the trend line for last cycle we hit over one standard deviation over overbought and the cycle before that we

had two standard deviations overbought now I got a feeling that we don't reach those levels again I think there's sort of diminishing returns with each cycle but who knows we have some ETFs this time around there's more flow that could come in but let's just say for fun if we go look at the one standard de deviation overbought we're looking at$ 37 trillion dollar in this market cap just so you guys aware we're currently sitting at 1.3 trillion so that would be just wild if we got two standard deviations again I don't think we will we're looking at $81 trillion now look again I do not think that that's gonna happen but what's really cool to look at here is like right now we're below one standard

deviation over sold okay which makes sense we're in a bare Market or at least just coming out of a bare Market let's say we just stay at one standard oversold for whatever reason we're still looking at7 trillion doll which is a SE a 6X from here so like still pretty good now I got a feeling we're gonna do more than that but hey let's see what happens here but a nicest little thing to look at here and gives you sort of a framework of where we might go something that's harder to understand when you hear those numbers without seeing it on this chart it really I think paints a better picture and helps you sort of see what's going on why does the total crypto market cap matter to you what does that indicate what does that give you in terms of confidence when you

think about your investments in the space yeah it's a it's actually a really good question I think the crypto market cap is just a good telling side of the total industry right and so you're not going to get every investment correct but directionally you can see that crypto is in an uptrend right and so maybe you want to hold Bitcoin because it's the most dominant of this market cap it generally makes up somewhere between like 40 and 50% of that total market cap eth is around 20% and so on and so forth but basically just it gives you a good signal of the industry in general if this market cap was going down and getting out of this channel Channel you might want to get a crypto right and so any technology is like this has these sort of trend lines here and

so you could look at the total market cap of technology to see is technology still a thing you can do the same with commodities to see is Commodities in general in a bull market or a bare market and then with that you would look deeper and you go oh it's in a bull market now may I want to look at what commodity same thing here you can look at this chart go okay crypto is obviously in a bare Market due to this chart but we can see that it's coming out of that bare Market that means big signal now I want to look into the crypto industry and see what do I actually want to buy so it's just a good like kind of overview of the direction of the entire industry let's quickly then just touch on macro there's not much on the macro side first this is

actually still in the crypto world but somewhat macro a big sign of a bull market is when stable coins and this is we've only had stable coins for one cycle so this isn't like a perfect signal by any means but it just theoretically it makes sense is when stablecoin uh numbers start to go back up it has been going down all bare Market that's because people leave the crypto EOS system they go back into the Fiat World they get out of risk assets and they go into things like treasuries right and so just over the last couple weeks here we've seen the stable coin market cap start to go up and it's now up almost five billion dollar in the last couple weeks which is huge most of that's coming from tether but this is just a big sign that because it's five billion it's not retail this is

institutions that are not in crypto but they're on the sidelines and it's much better to be holding uh stable coins than it is to be holding dollars because you can quickly using Unis swap or coinbase or whatever switch your Stables into Bitcoin eth Etc you can't do that with fiia you got to actually move things and when it's billions of dollars it's harder to do so this is just a good sign that the interest is really peing or starting to to to peak in the institutional world and they're now able to flow into crypto much easier and so likely what we'll see is this as long as this the signal is correct it's just going to continue to go up and up and up and up and up and that's a really good sign when that starts to go down that's a good side that okay maybe we need

we're going back into a bare market now this is generally a a lagging indicator right we've been kind of in a bull market here for a couple months whereas this is just the last couple weeks so it's not like the best thing to look at but it does give you like a good signal hey things are looking pretty good here and then the last couple things there's not a lot in the macro world we haven't had any unemployment updates or inflation updates or interest rate changes or any of that kind of stuff that will come in the next few weeks so not much to go with there uh one thing to point out the Dixie which which is the the US dollar versus other Fiat currencies as I've said a bunch of times when that gets weaker that's generally a really good thing for risk assets uh and

that continues to get weaker it was at 104 last week it was at 105 the week before that it's now at 103 it almost got to 102 a couple days ago it's sort of ranging between 103 I would expect that to continue out it won't be a straight line down but we're sort of changing into sort of a secular let's call it like a bare not a bare market for the dollar but a downward channel for sure and I think that that will likely continue and then the last thing just to help solidify our approach that hey the bull market is back on I'm going to go back to the the NASDAQ which I talked about last week the cup and handle formation that we were talking which is we were at alltime highs back in December 2021 that we came down big over the year started

to form back up and that created like a cup looking indicator and then you have this handle that comes out where we're going back downwards and this is when everyone's like oh my God it's over the nasdaq's done stocks are over and we were like ah this is actually forming something super bullish last week I was like it just broke out and if it breaks out this thing is going to fly over the next few months and you can just see this massive monthly candle here literally following the the line that I put here this is it's not going to follow this line for forever obviously we're going to move to the next month the next month but you can see how high we're about to go we are now just in terms of one of the calls I made two months ago when everyone was screamed

that NASDAQ is going to nothing I said that we're probably going to go to alltime highs by the end of the year and we are currently 4.3% away from alltime highs in the NASDAQ and so I would almost guarantee that we're going to get there by the end of this year and why are we talking NASDAQ NASDAQ this this is tech stocks this is your Teslas this is your apples your Amazon Etc and this is risk assets so if these assets are doing well crypto is doing well and so it's a really really good sign that the NASDAQ is also doing good if the NASDAQ was doing bad and crypto is doing good we don't know what's going on in that world that's a weird world and I don't think we to be there not right now and so this is just a everything seems to be

really pointing towards we're heading into a bull market it's time to buckle out let's go very very bullish signs all across the board even when it's a volatile week when Lots is happening with binance and the doj and Kraken getting sued and we're going to jump into all of that now Kai thanks for the market watch update and keeping us all confident in our investments okay first up binance what happened with binance well we'll get into why we think this is actually a good thing but let me just first tell you what happened so binance was under investigation from the doj the Department of Justice in the US and was

found guilty of a couple of different charges three different charges specifically and as a result of that they agreed to pay a $4 billion fine to settle that charge now let's be clear $4 billion for binance is basically a slap on the wrist it's not a massive fine for them they have over $67 billion in onchain assets alone not to mention who knows how many hundreds of billions of dollars they have offchain in their bank account that we can't see now as part of this the big news was that they pushed CZ out CZ the CEO of binance had to step down from binance and remove himself and agree to no longer have an operating

role within binance basically he had to admit fault for these charges and he also is potentially going to be given a jail sentence there's a sentencing coming up in the future he could be sent to jail I would say unlikely that he actually gets sent to jail but we'll see how that sentencing goes right now it he could be sentenced to up to 18 months in jail and he had to pay a bond to be released right now so out on bond look in the end we're talking about the biggest crypto Exchange in the world that really had the potential to I shouldn't say had the potential but there was a lot of fear that we could have an FTX repeat event here and that

type of Black Swan event is scary for everybody in the crypto space when we don't really know what binance is doing they're not under any jurisdiction they're not regulated by anybody anywhere in the world and so there's a lot of fear and really what this event does is it removes that fear I don't know about for you Kai but for me I have much more I sleep better at night knowing not knowing that CZ is out I don't think CZ is necessarily a bad guy I think maybe he he crossed some lines but all within a range that's kind of acceptable when you're playing in the field of new technology where there's no clear regulation so but the binance piece I feel much more confident that

we're not going to get a Black Swan event from binance now so that makes me feel better that yeah we're not going to have another FTX event here yeah I always felt pretty good about binance it was I know institutions were scared and even I think the SEC this was one of the things SEC needed to figure out before they can improve something like a Bitcoin ETF because they just you can't really go hey America we're down for you guys to invest in Bitcoin and eth but there's this like multi- multibillion dollar company that has a lot of control over this space and we don't know what they're doing or where they are it's like I think this was the last thing the SEC needed to actually give the go- ahead for the ETF so I think this is

actually quite bullish on that side and then also just for institutions to then enter the space and not think there's another FTX that's going to happen here so my take on this is one for those that don't know CZ the guy's been in this space for a long time he's been in I think since 2012 he said he started bance in 20 I think it was maybe 2017 2016 and it's it's the biggest exchange by long shot like I'm talking its daily volumes are forx coinbase coinbase is actually people don't realize this but binance is 150 million users coinbase is 108 like kyc users or active users and binance has 4X amount of volume as coinbase and there's uh I think okx and biit are both higher than coinbase

coinbase isn't actually as big as we think it is over here in North America it is Big obviously but Biance is just a massive massive massive thing anyway C has actually been a a big when I say role model I'm not sure if you want to use the term role model but he's done so much for the space he's been an innovator he's been a like inator he's onboarded more people to space than anyone he's been a net positive for the space no doubt and I just want people to realize like this is very different than what happened with FTX the media headlines right now if you listen to TV or you look wherever it's like they're saying this is the same thing as FTX it's not they were not co-mingling funds they were not leveraging users funds to do things look I actually think what

they did they kind of had to do it crypto is this new industry this new asset class it's not regulated there are no rules right there were just sort of getting rules and so when you want to create an exchange in 2017 you don't know what rules to play by there are no rules you don't know what protocols and processes and systems to use because they don't exist right and so you either had to go super slow and do nothing I mean coinbase basically stuck around in the US that was it and just basically followed like trafi uh rules and just just didn't do much else but bance was like look we want to get the rest of the world is because they need this we need South America in here because they have are the ones with the currencies that are inflating we need Asia we need

whatever and you have to kind of it's not even break rules but bend rules I guess because the rules aren't actually there and so as a startup this is kind of what you got to do is you got to just like go for it and then ask for forgiveness later right instead of asking for permission that's what they did and so like of course the us could pick them apart and find things that they did that were not correct and find them for it but it's like you kind of had to do that to get to where they were and we needed that to get this industry as big as it is so like I still respect CZ completely it sucks that they had to he had to do this to me this feels like this is the US just wanting to take control right you have this like

sort of parallel Financial system in crypto that's outside the jurisdiction of anyone the US hates that because they are the control of most of the financial world and so just like they do with every and anything new when it gets big enough they step in and they start taking control they've done it with the banking World they do it in the tech World they do it everywhere and now they're saying okay crypto's here to stay we got to get these like we got to get the big players to be under our control and let them know like Hey we're the boss and you're G to do what we say and this is what they do they do it with the bank industry too and I Jay just pulled up a tweet here JP Morgan paid 13 billion dollar to the doj in 2013 Deutsche Bank paid 7.2 billion in 2016

Goldman Sachs 5.4 billion in 2020 Wells Fargo 3.7 billion in 2022 this is just the price you pay to deal with financial stuff in uh a us-led world so there's just not much you can do about it like there was some shady stuff going on of course with many these Banks But ultimately they all still are in business none of them have had to shut down the US is just like hey you can do whatever you want basically but like you're going to pay us and like tighten up you know and so I think that's what they're doing for binance this is a net really good thing I think I think this moves the ETF forward I think it moves the industry forward and takes that looming dark shadow of what's going to happen with binance off so overall I think this is really really good news

and the markets sort of have shown that since at first there was a scare and it sort of sold off and then now it seems to be back on so all good the interesting thing from all this or one funny thing anyway was the doj had an announcement on Tuesday I think it was when this all happened Tuesday yeah yeah 3 o'cl and so Janet Yellen who's from the treasury in the US uh and the members of the doj came on and they spoke and they announced you know what happened with binance what happened with CZ and then at the very end we have this video up here of Jay Yellen who's this 90 I don't know if she's 90 but she look she's 76 I looked at her I was curious 76y old why is she not retired why is she working what are you doing

you're 76 yeah go retire like what this makes sense anyway she just out of nowhere so this whole announcement had to do with bance not a a defi thing this is a centralized exchange that has nothing to do with like Defi and she just comes up and says let this be a message to all the Defi and decentralized finance institutions she calls them that are out there that they need to play by the rules if you want to come into the US and provide services to us people and whatever whatever you've got to play by our rules and so she basically sent a threat the defi world to the crypto industry which like binance is the centralized exchange it's nothing to do with with d but just

ridiculous and again this just shows the US wants to control is what it is she had the mic you know secretary Yellen gets the mic she's gonna let those young DJ know that she's the boss she also keeps sign is she's surrounded by old white dudes you know she's like the one thing I will say though in this press conference she uses the word currency a lot in reference to she calls them virtual currencies I don't know why she the word virtual it's very old person word to use but she's using the word currency a lot which is a real positive I think for us that there is recognition on their end as hey these are currencies yeah yeah which I mean some of them are

some of them are not currencies they were something completely different but uh she won't wrap her head around that because she's 76 years old so go retire please J moving on Kraken sued by the SEC again yeah again this is tough so I guess we would call good news with binance though like debatable there but then we have Kraken who has been you know a good a great Exchange in the US has been around for a long time as well probably not on the same level as coinbase but but trying to be not as big for sure but in terms of like being a reliant Exchange in the US they've done a great job here and so they went through a lawsuit earlier this year and they ended up sadly so this was for their eth staking service so basically you could give eth just you can do in

coinbase and then they would stake it and give you the yield the difference was coinbase actually has a native way where they actually stake it and they give you CBE eth whereas Kraken wasn't really doing that technically they they could take your funds and do whatever they wanted and give you yield they were likely just doing the staking but we didn't know it it wasn't written in their policies so anyway that's why they got taken in they had to pay a $30 million f as a result of that and then they thought okay things are all good we can move forward well now they're sued again this time for being an unregistered crypto platform or exchange platform and and basically the uh SEC is saying now they're allowing for unrested Securities to be on their platform and they're enabling users to exchange them

and they listed off salana and madic and decentral end and whatever else 15 different tokens that are unregistered Securities which again is [ __ ] it's the same lawsuit that they put on coinbase the same lawsuit they put on binance it's really really annoying that they keep doing this because again they didn't include e they didn't include Bitcoin but again they won't make clear what is and what isn't uh Security in the space so it's a bit of a joke and again a bit of a power struggle Jesse Powell obviously was not happy about this he's the founder of Kraken he said we've already paid them three million now we're gonna look it's gonna be something like already paid 30 million yeah sorry 30 million and now he's looking like this is going to cost another hundred million for this one and so he said if you can't afford to get

your company out of the US war zone it's the US is like they're like a mob they're like oh you want to come in our territory all right give me some money you know what I mean it's like and we'll find any way we can to Skirt the Rules to make it look like you need to give me money and it's just it's terrible it sucks it's the world we live in the US government is a mob there is just no doubt about that um they have control and they make use of it and you got to pay your taxes which really sucks and when I say taxes these aren't normal taxes this is taxes to the Mob Jesse Pal's not happy about it he said the same thing in a tweet calling them the mob as well and just was like you know this is just doing business in the US

and if you don't have to be in the US get out of there because it sucks wow very bearish on being in the US right now terrible I I hope I hope I mean I I think that this is just the way the US has chosen to be in response to this Innovation that quite frankly they don't the people that are in governing power don't understand right but it doesn't mean long term that they can't figure it out I still hope that they can figure it out and I think that thankfully there's a lot of good Business Leaders good crypto leaders Brian Armstrong coinbase and many others who are actively campaigning and being

involved and working with politics and trying to teach them in order to create regulation so look I think we'll get there not at the pace that we would like but I think we'll get there yeah I'm optimistic as well I I always am but it just I feel bad it just sucks just sucks way we have to do it just a but like ultimately we need to get through these hoops for things to improve it sucks that these hoops exist in the first place all right next up blur has finished season two and their token price has gone up Jay Kyle that's not what you guys said to me you guys told me that when the blur season 2 airdrop finished that the token would go down well you know what we were wrong we're not always right and we're very

willing to say that here and the token price has gone up so okay why why did the token price go up what's going on here let me explain so blur season 2 lasted about nine months it started in February it ended on Monday of this week November 20th and there was an airdrop as a result of people who had activity lending buying selling on blur over 100 million in tokens was distributed as part of this airdrop at the same time a few other things H happened that I want to just touch on here and then I'll explain them later Pacman the founder of blur also announced blast which is a new layer 2 blockchain that provides native yield that is by the same team basically

behind blur and then they also announced blur season three starting so a lot of things happening here and this is what is going to impact why this price of the token has not dropped as part of blur season 3 you can earn points in the same way points are what gets you more of the airor drop you list you bid or you lend on blend their nft lending protocol and then you earn points but then they added an extra thing this time in season three if you hold blur you also earn points so what did this do it actually caused the token price to go up not to go down and this is where you got to

give it to Pac-Man and the blur team they airdrop Casino Geniuses I'm not sure what category I would give them whether you want to call it Pony nomics or what but they are geniuses at getting at marketing to degens and at getting degens to put more money in not take their money out now what's impressive about this is the way that blur did the airdrop claim was very smart so when you go to the blur website to claim your airdrop you go to a page where first of all it celebrates the airdrop and tells you how great you were and what we did for the ecosystem and how

blur became the largest nft Marketplace ecosystem and you were a part of that so it's very inspiring very exciting it's almost celebratory in nature and then it takes you to a page to claim your airdrop and once you claim your airdrop it takes you to a page where it shows you what happens if you leave your tokens in blur you will get Rewards for season 3 and these rewards for season 3 for holding blur tokens so it's sort of like staking it's not exactly staking but it's that idea of if you hold token you will get rewards later in this case it's not yield you get rewards in the form of a future airdrop which is undetermined exactly what you get so

there's definitely risk involved there the key is the way this worked was right away when you claim this airdrop you're marketed to by saying hey don't take this money out of blur don't go sell this don't go trade this you're going to get rewards if you leave this in and you can see points tallying up right in front of you it's literally looks like a slot machine like it's very Casino Vibes right what does that make you do that makes you want to keep your tokens in blur not only that it probably makes you want to add more tokens to blur and buy more blur tokens because you're going to get more rewards more dopamine hit more excitement instant gratification all of that and that's what the blur team has

done here and as a result their token price has gone up not gone down since the air drop yeah I must say you know what let's let's explain blast and then I think we'll talk about the whole ecosystem together and so blast is a new layer too that the blur team has just launched as Jay mentioned it is not live it is actually not even a layer two right now it is just a smart contract that's controlled by a multisig of five people and what's Wild is basically they've said again they're doing another air drop here is this part of season 3 as well Jay or is this something completely different so Blast has an airdrop blur has a season three airdrop they're two separate aird drops but they are connected as well because if you participate in blur season 3 you also

can get boosted on blast right get or blast and likely they'll end up putting blur on blast very soon I'm sure obviously so that people are paying the fees that they're paying on ethereum L1 and so basically what they're asking now is if you bridge money over to this L2 and I say that in quotations because it's not LT right now one you'll get yield whether it's eth or stable coins if it's eth it immediately puts it into like a li rocket W type thing and you get your yield if it's stable coins they put it into treasuries and they give you the yield which is kind of like what we talked about with usdm before and I think it was in a pro report anyway so that's like it's a great idea I love that Innovation we'll talk more about that in a second but just just reached I

think something like 90 do we have the numbers of what that is now what the tvl is in there oh yeah tvl is 330 million4 th000 users that is insane he guys it is not an L2 it is just a wallet you're just sending your money to Pacman's multisig wallet $300 million worth this industry is nuts absolute nuts anyway if you want to do it go for it you're gonna Farm points you're gonna you know get some yield but you can do the yield thing on your own but just understand the risk here now obviously they're backed by Paradigm a very reputable company Pacman's been around for a while so like you'd hope they don't do anything but like we all thought Sam bman frea was great too so just understanding the risk here now

ultimately though what packmate understands is two things one liquidity is King you need liquidity for anything in crypto whether it's nft trading whether it's you want to run an L2 you want to be like a chain or an ecosystem whether it's you want to be a DEX like whether it's lending you need liquidity and blur has done an amazing job at incentivizing liquidity that's what season one and season two have been about which is trade sell your things put your things up for sale on our platforms or take out loans against your uh nfts on blend that's getting liquidity now they have an L2 what are they doing they want liquidity over there send your [ __ ] over to us get it in on our chain because if you have it on our chain you're more likely to use the products that we do on chain and so

they're just masters of that the other thing Masters at as you said is incentives and this this whole airdrop idea I've always been against this and I've realized over the last few months mainly this bare market like I think speculation does have a place whether that be like speculation Plus or just speculation in general because there's a lot of people that like to gamble and speculate think of sports betting think of casinos Etc like it's a big growing industry and I think Pacman knows his audience he's got a bunch of degens that love to speculate and so why not give them what they want right for that audience it's smart if you were like if Instagram was to go and launch something they're not going to do something like this it's not a good plan for them but for something like Pac-Man that has these dgen type audience I think it's a

very smart move and I mean he's proving that working well now to be clear on the blur token they're just kicking the can here there still is no actual utility for the token the only demand to buy right now is that you can get more of these tokens which is in super inflationary okay so you need to understand that at some point if they don't find a way to burn these tokens or create more utility then this token price continues to go down this is a short-term current um demand we'll see how long that goes for maybe it lasts the entire uh season I'm not sure let's see um but eventually they got to find something now my guess here is that the L2 is a great way now to use blur tokens

or blast tokens um because they're gonna now have two of their ecosystem four fees right maybe you can use either one it'll probably burn some of them slash if you stake your tokens and help secure the network maybe you're going to get some more tokens too so that makes people want to buy it and hold it to stake it and then also every time you use blend blur blast you're going to pay fees I also think they'll probably by the end of this season turn on platform fees on blend in on blur and maybe they'll burn you know maybe those fees will beat in the blur token and they might burn some or put some in a treasury or whatever they're going to do they'll find ways to sort of like sync the token and that way it'll even out if they don't do that stuff they have to

keep kicking the can down the road right which is like hey Keep Holding On keep holding on until we figure something out so anyway love the ecosystem they're building love the tactics they're using for their specific audience I don't think everyone should use this and then we'll see what they can do with their token but I think there's a lot of other examples out there of how we can burn and make favorable tokenomics which I think they can do plus we're about to go into a bull market and so they have another two years of just demand demand demand so they don't need to figure it out right away so these guys they're doing a great job I'm quite impressed the last thing I want to know let say that you want to add on this Jay I want to talk about the L2 side of things

yeah go ahead okay so the other thing I want to say is this idea of native yield audio L2 is super smart I think this is a really really cool thing look is blast G to be the next big L2 like I don't know don't really care but I do think this is a cool idea there is a lot of wasted yield out there right now people that just have eth doing nothing people that have stable coins that are making nothing and they can be making things in a risk-free way and to have your platform just automatically do that through smart contracts is super cool now the stable coins is still going to treasury so there's centralized risk there so again the specific ways of doing this is not perfect yet but seeing this as a new Innovative way for l2s is really cool and I think something a lot

of people haven't thought about of like how much more Innovation can we do on l2s optimism arbitrum these are great but they're basic we can do some really cool stuff and have some really cool use cases at the protocol layer which I just think is super super super interesting so excited to see where this goes and I think this creates a lot more Innovation for l2s in the future yeah I think just to wrap up quickly on blur season 3 and blast so just so everyone knows dates blast mainnet is set to launch in February 2024 we'll see if they actually launch them but that's their target date blur season 3 is set to conclude in May 2024 and the bat blast airdrop is also set for May 2024 now these are all you

know approximate dates so we'll see if they stick to all these would I go and farm blur season 3 or blast no I wouldn't because these are Casino like games right you do not know what you're going to get there's also huge risk in putting your token into blast because as Kyle said it's centralized it's not an actual you can't withdraw there's no bridge out you can't withdraw exactly you can't withdraw until the air drops so there's taking your liquidity and using it to build their own company which like shout out to them incredible job of figuring out a model to raise capital and raise liquidity but I wouldn't be doing it that's for sure or if I did do it I would do it with a small amount just because I wanted to have fun basically right so go ahead

throw in a few hundred bucks because you're like I wantan to I want to have fun I want to try this but the main takeaway for me is everybody needs to be watching this stop stop saying that you know blur is a joke and Pac-Man is is a um Pon nomic Master like who cares these guys are doing something they're using an air they're using airdrops in a way to build community to build a product and we all canity yeah and so I don't think everybody should go lean into speculation but there is ways to use speculation there's ways to use an airdrop there's ways to use the claiming experience to make a great experience for your users and to build liquidity so

don't throw this off I think everybody should pay attention I might do a pro report coming on this because I think it's very you definitely definitely should all right let's jump to the open AI Saga and just get you guys up to speed on what's going on there I'm sure you guys have heard a ton in other places so we're not going to go deep I do want to touch on why this matters in terms of decentralization in the crypto world but basically in case you've been living under a rock or don't live on Twitter Sam mman the CEO founder of op AI was fired from the board on Friday afternoon last week then some craziness happened where basically all the employees the the M Microsoft who didn't know this was happening and a few of the investors came back to the board like you need to

rehire him this is insane then you have until 5 PM on Saturday to do it they didn't do it Microsoft said screw it they hired Sam Alman for their new AI project as well as one of the board members and so he was an employee of Microsoft for a few days until 90 I think six% of all employees said that they are going to leave and go to Microsoft if they open AI board doesn't hire them back and so ended up on Wednesday the entire board was fired Sam mman was rehired and they got a whole new board over at open aai so just a absolute wild wild week in that company but here's the interesting part that I took from this open AI chat gbt is a platform right we think of it as an app that we all use but it's a platform there are hundreds

thousands of companies that have built on top of chat gbt and open AI they use apis they've built their own businesses like using open a tgbt if those go away their business goes away similar to like people who bu built on Twitter people who have built on Facebook in the past Etc and they have been rugged in the past there was a nonzero chance that open a chat TBT was GNA just implode here in terms of the company we didn't know what would happen to the tech maybe someone would just bought it out like we didn't know what was going to happen here and if you were running a business on open AR chbt that relies on it you would have been screwed your business would have been gone just like that because of four people on a board which is just Why right and so there was a

tweet that was put out of I forget the name of the person but he was like today I'm really thinking about centralization versus decentralization and Elon Musk commented on it and said me too here said same which really got the industry I think at least the web 3 Industry excited because hey decentralization is important and this is just something to think about like technologies that are lower on the tech stack protocols let's call it they need to be decentralized and not controlled by one person or one entity because they need to be here for ever you don't want to build your company on real estate that might be gone tomorrow this is a massive massive thing that like big events happen over time and we continuously realize this and learn this Twitter when it turned off its apis years ago shut down

hundreds of businesses thousands of businesses and so people realized whoa this doesn't make sense when we look at Technologies like ethereum and salana and Bitcoin these are decentralized protocols that we can build on top of that can never get shut down and if the founder goes away if a big team from that goes away there's still many other teams that are keeping it running and that is just so key to a strong future for businesses and for technology and it's just something that we need to continue to push and obviously blockchain web 3 is at the root of all that and so I think this just shines the light of how important what we're building in our industry is so that was my takeaway of this whole this whole Sega yeah I'm just glad to see that they worked it all out because open ey is a

great company that is building amazing things and I don't know I like I don't want to see them all go go to Microsoft I like you know I know Microsoft owns a lot of open AI but it's kind of nice to have a little bit of Separation there we don't need more Mega giant tech companies we need so I I invest in Microsoft so I was I was not mad about it that's only because you can't invest in open AI exactly 100% all right next up last on the big news stories is Argentina has a new president Javier Mele I believe is his name and the crypto World got pretty excited about this the reason is people are calling him the next crypto president kind of like na president yeah I can't remember his name El Salvador's president where

he's basically made Bitcoin legal tender in El Salvador they also are on the US dollar there so the big thing here is in Argentina their peso has been inflating over 100% a year and they have a lot of controls on their their money in Argentina and so it's very difficult for argentinians to get access to US Dollars and it's very costly to do that when they switch over it cost cost 10 20 30% of their value just to switch over to another currency which is insane and should be like illegal and should never exist but that's what they have to deal with and so they've had these sort of like controlling presidents and finally they have one that cares about Freedom cares about capitalism and hates the peso and so this is a really good thing for Argentina he's never really said

much about crypto other than he thinks it's great in terms of like it's freedom but he's never said anything about making Argentina go on like the Bitcoin standard or any sort of crypto he's actually just said that he thinks Argentina will go in the US dollar which is actually not bullish at all for crypto and it's actually the complete opposite right now because it's hard to get US Dollars crypto is a Lifeline stable coins are a Lifeline even Bitcoin eth is a Lifeline even though it's super volatile it's a Lifeline for um argentinians who you know have pesos when they move to the US dollar and it now becomes easy to have US Dollars well they don't need stable coins anymore they don't really most people don't need Bitcoin in ethereum at that point yes of course it will go up for US dollar but

like most people in the world don't know that don't understand that and don't care about that most people in the world don't invest people were buying Bitcoin because it was an escape to freedom but when you can get the US dollar at that cost well they don't need to do that anymore so I actually think this is more of a maybe a bearish thing short term anyway the one thing I would say it's good is if they bring in capitalism more of that more companies will go there maybe they'll be more friendly to crypto exchanges and to crypto companies and they can have a thriving like economy there which of course that's a great thing so i' would say like I think crypto people Bitcoin people mainly just got too excited here Brian Armstrong we have a tweet up here where he actually reached out to Javier he lived in

Argentina for a year is hoping to speak with him so like sure there's going to be good things happening here but it's just he's not the next Bitcoin or crypto president by any means though fun fact he has a big foll on Instagram obviously he's a president of Argentina I think it was last year two years ago for whatever reason shilled some random shitcoin like the shittiest of [ __ ] coins like it was a pure actually wasn't a coin I looked it up we he he shied a a digital finance company they didn't have a coin but he shied their company it was called the coinx world he did this I think in early 2022 or late 2021 during the bull market when everybody was throwing money at any

digital Finance Company even though this wasn't even really a crypto company I don't think and the company later was like raided and shut down and all the investors lost their money well thank you for correcting me on that I had just saw some people talking about he was Shilling some shitcoin but I guess it's just a [ __ ] company not a [ __ ] coin so that's good news either way if you've seen this guy he's very Trump esque not in terms of like him with the things he says although like he's very outspoken and pretty aggressive in the things he says but just like he's wacky and all over the place and weird dude it looks like to me he's a marketer he's a character you know and that that's what wins in politics now with all media going to short form content across

social media is we just want viral content and the president who yells the most and is the most ridiculous on camera is the one who wins apparently yeah look I think like you said it feels like a step in the right direction for Argentina a country that is in a bad economic situation so hope the best for them yeah and hopefully they they are you know open to crypto and are and and enable that and and try to build that because obviously it would be better than the US dollar and I hopefully he realize that I think you will but let's see I'll be in Argentina for a month in January so I will do my best to speak to Javier and let you guys know what he thinks love it love it okay for fun this time we're g to do the quick hits a

little bit differently Kai I'm gonna take you through we talked about blur and blast I'm going to take you through some opinions about Pac-Man blur and blast and I want you to tell me if you agree or disagree with each one of these oh okay sounds good put me on the spot first up this from nft stats this is punk 9059 he says double crown we are witnessing one of the best entrepreneurs there there is in Pacman and a single best Ponzi preneur the world has ever known agree or disagree I would say I disagree I mean Ponzi prer sure although I would say Matt off is is a way bigger pzi preneur what did he do like billions of dollars

and so probably better I think what Pacman's doing is amazing but I still think he needs to like he's done some really cool stuff he hasn't actually done anything that great just yet like he needs to show that this becomes economically sustainable then I'm like whoa you did some amazing stuff but like this still could fall apart at any point and so I don't think he's really achieved much just yet there's only a couple like tens of thousands of people using his [ __ ] so it's not that big big keyword this [ __ ] okay next up Macky big brother said [ __ ] blur and [ __ ] Pac-Man agree or disagree I disagree but I get why he agrees he lost Mack is the big big like Farmer on yeah nfts and he lost $14

million farming blur he made 2 million from his airdrop but lost 14 million so he spent 16 million farming and only got 2 million ouch ouch wild okay next up from domain Shane on Twitter no offense but I'm betting on Pacman bler people are betting Millions on teenagers running 40 yards in a football game but don't like people gambling on nfts he knows the abilities of the blockchain and your nonability to stop gambling don't hate the game hate the players I agree 100 I agree 100% on here this is the realization I had this spare Market is you know what I get we don't necessarily love it for certain use cases but there's a lot of people that love G a lot of people love

speculating it's fun he's the best at that I would say that for sure okay last one this is from brain genius this is what Paradigm does now Ultra gamification on some [ __ ] you don't need but that you'll use in hopes of an airdrop well that and an undisclosed me extraction through Beaver build yeah so Paradigm has invested in a lot of airdrop type companies they invested I believe in frch obviously in blast and a bunch of others it seems that this is what they too but like I don't know I I do think they're doing it in ones that are not pwn teams that are actually trying to build real apps friendtech I as much as I don't use it I think they're trying to build something and same with blur blend blast and so like I think they're investing in aird drops

but I think it's for a purpose and I think it's gonna be a good thing and something we're going to use in the future yeah I think Paradigm sees that there is billions of dollars held by djents right now and DJ like to gamble and like to play games and get involved just go look at the blast website right airdrop is the first button in the nav airdrop literally the first button then leaderboard it's all about and and get your invitation token and or sorry get your invite code and get in this is all very much gamified like it's gamified to the max and I think Paradigm sees that and they're leaning into that because look it's a

big opportunity right now and I don't think it will last forever because there will be much more stable ways to I I mean look actually you know maybe I'm wrong maybe this will last forever because there will always be people who want to speculate and play there always people want to speculate maybe it's more so there will always be very high-risk individuals who just want to play games of course there is there's going to be tons of them and more and more I think too well there you go so can't believe it for the first time ever we are actually saying that we like what blur is doing we're not telling you to go get involved I want to be clear here we're just more so as business owners

ourselves as people that are aiming to help you learn what to do on chain blur is one to watch because they're doing things that you can only do on chain hey this is an industry and constant transformation which is what we always say we have to also allow ourselves to transform as well oh good one let's go good one look at us look at us evolving grow that's it well thanks so much for listening in everybody Happy Thanksgiving to all the Americans out there if you aren't in our Discord yet make sure you join two weeks first Tuesday in December we're going to be meeting up to give you the top tips that you need to capitalize on the coming Bull Run don't miss out see you around

thanks so much for listening have a great weekend thank you for listening to web through Academy your one trusted source to capitalize on the next big phase of the internet if you enjoyed this episode please share it and subscribe or follow so that you don't miss the next one while you're at it there's a link in the description for our free newsletter where we provide timely and relevant web three insights so you can confidently build and invest in web 3 make sure to subscribe today one final note this podcast is for educational purposes only and nothing we say is financial advice crypto and web3 are risky and you should never invest more than you're willing to lose thank you friend and see you in the next one