🎙 Griff Green | Layer Zero

welcome to layer zero player zero is a podcast of unscripted conversations with the people that make up the ethereum community crypto is built by code but it's composed by keep people and each individual member of the crypto community has their own story to tell cypherpunks understood that the code they write impacts the people that use it and layer 0 focuses on the people behind the code because ethereum is people all the way down and it always has been today i'm speaking with griff greene who has a fascinating story of a journey through crypto and i think the

the story really uh starts in many many places but it starts with griff uh living off of the grid and choosing to use gold to store his value in order to live a bankless life before bitcoin was even a thing or a bitcoin had entered his life griff was off the grid being kind of a a hippie communal type guy kind of traveling the world that really got turned off by some aspects about society so he just yeted himself out of society traveled the world got rid of all his belongings put everything in a backpack and started using gold to

store his value and then of course found his way into the world of bitcoin and then ethereum later on griff has the most fascinating story about the dow as somebody who had front row seats of the the dao the 2016 dao we spend uh at least the second half the whole entire second half of the episode is going through the story of the dao and that's actually the first time i've heard that story in such granular detail um so that really was just the the absolute highlight of this interview in my opinion i had a fantastic time like

speaking with griffin getting to know him a little bit more so without further ado let's go ahead and get right into the interview with griff green but first a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible bankless is proud to be supported by uniswap uniswap is a new paradigm in asset exchange infrastructure instead of a cumbersome order book system where trades are matched with other humans uniswap is an autonomous piece of software on ethereum which is what ryan and i call a money robot no human counterparties or centralized intermediaries just

autonomous code on ethereum input the token you want to sell and receive the token you want to buy something brand new in the uniswop ecosystem is the uniswap grants program is now accepting applications for grants we have been saying this for a while and we'll say it again dows have money and they are in need of labor if you think that you have something to contribute to the uni-swapped dao apply for a grant to uniswap just look at the size of the uniswap treasury it's almost 3 billion dollars this mountain of capital is looking for labor do you have something

of value to contribute to the uniswap dal no matter how big or small your idea is you can apply for a uni grant at unigrants.org and help steer unit swap in the direction that you think it should go that's exactly what we did to get uniswop to be a sponsor for bankless and you can do the same for your project thank you uniswap for sponsoring bankless the era of proof-of-stake is upon us proof-of-stake systems like ethereum terra and solana allow the industry to move away from the hot loud and wasteful proof-of-work systems and

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hey griff how's it going hey ah fantastically man how are you fantastic also fantastic always fantastic it's a fun always a fun time to be in crypto so the last time we talked was in colorado after mcon and i have a little uh a funny story to tell you about it because i was talking to you asking you a little bit about your background in your life uh and then i went on a plane ride to new york and i started listening to matt lysing's book about ethereum and then he talks about like the parts of the dow hack and talks about like this this guy

griff green that was part part of this the the you know the damage control for the dow hack like wait griff green i was just talking to that guy in colorado now he's like in the subject matter of this book yeah matt matt did a that had a lot of fun with that book for sure is it was uh it wasn't as accurate as some of the other books that are coming out on ethereum it was definitely like oh hey let's make let's have this be like more adventurous and more fun but uh yeah it was it was it was fun it was fun talking with him over the years too he's been

writing that for a while yeah it was just fun from from my perspective about like oh i'm going to this uh convention at a meta cartel convention and then i'm also just meeting the people that these kind of sci-fi stories about ethereum are being written about and it's it's crazy like how much like literature has been made so quickly about this industry and then all like it's also like still happening right the stories are still unfolding at the same time oh yeah so much man and yeah it's a you

know theorem's been around for a long time surprisingly there's been a lot of chaos a lot of adventures and i have to say i've been in a lot of them a lot of these like crazy crazy times so and that's definitely the some of the stories i want to um get told on on the show today but but i think uh in order to tell those stories we have to just go all the way back and hear a little bit about um griff green so griff who were you as a kid what were you interested when you were growing up what captured your attention and and how did griff green come to be griff green

uh let's see as a kid i mean i was just a normal kid my mom was like a waitress my dad was correctional officer uh actually my dad was my stepdad i met my real dad when i was like 12 and i i ended up having about six parents right and so that was really fun having this like family of families so many grandparents so many socks at christmas you know and i i was uh i i i mean i we can zoom through it you know i used to coach my little brothers and

sisters basketball teams and i was really into basketball and ended up getting uh a chemical engineering degree the university of washington uh griff is really tall by the way for listeners that don't know that he's a pretty tall guy yeah i mean i'm not that tall guy for sure he's got me by by a mile but yeah i'm okay it's fun on the screen right to come out of the screen and meet everybody in person and be like who's tall who's short it's a it's a fun game like who's in tall dow who's in short

dao oh man that might be a fun game i've been trying to poke the crypto twitter sphere to start creating tall dow in short dial but i don't know actually where short thou starts like where would you think short thou should start i don't know man that's shorter than me no okay so the the we'll keep on zooming through your background but you said you you had like six parents six like uh people taking care of you uh because a lot of the times i've heard you talk you

have very communal vibes about you um definitely yeah do you think are those two things connected you think maybe maybe i'm definitely a sharon he's caring kind of guy but uh i don't know probably i i definitely like the family vibe and you know it's just but it's the same thing it's like divorced parents and stuff so it wasn't all communal it was it wasn't wasn't one set of one family appearance of sex yeah yeah exactly the tribal polyamorous like no it was just more more muggly than that you know pretty

normal lifestyle um yeah and i don't know i don't feel like there's too much interesting things i grew up in spokane which is uh like part near in washington state near idaho you know nothing wild there i went to lived in seattle for like eight years and where actually seattle did you live uh in north seattle uh all over north seattle i went to uw for four years so i was in the youth district in lake city and uh yeah just all over maple leaf yep green lake yeah yeah just

dancing around that's where my family is is maple leaf yeah oh really wow do you know pattaya uh payatai cuisine it's like a an apartment building on 90th and lake city way hmm i definitely have driven right past it a bajillion times but no i don't know it there's a strip there's a strip club there called oh yeah yeah yeah yeah that's still there yeah passed by ricks and i drive up to my dad's house nice yeah exactly right well there's uh that apartment building right across the

street i lived there for like two years okay yep yep yep yeah no we're we're from the same part of the woods man nice nice yeah i love seattle um actually i i um i cut i'm like i'm really more of a community organizer in the theorem space and i cut my teeth with the save our sonics there's this like remember of course yeah seattle supersonics so yep i was a huge sonics fan like out of this world sonic's fan all i had a whole room like uh when i was a

chemical engineer and i like moved up to a decent like i shared a house with another kimmy and we got like a really nice party house for a little bit and uh i had a whole room dedicated to the sonics it was just wall-to-wall sonic's gear right and i had a i would carry a gary payton rookie card in my pocket everywhere i go and like cut out the the only days i didn't wear sonic's gear was the days after they'd lose a game because i was in mourning you know it was like

i had all these traditions built around it my whole life purpose was basically to get courtside seats uh of the sonics and and then uh they were bought by a basket by like this guy in oklahoma city who said he wanted to keep them there but also before he bought the team he was like i'm bringing a team to oklahoma you know so everyone knew that it was a scam he he sold off all the good players and then got a bunch of rookies and stuff and good draft picks like kevin durant and russell russ brooke and then uh

like because the team sucked he was like oh well hey either we get a new arena or we move because this is how it works and uh and so for two years i was like general of the fans working to keep the team in town so this is like my political movement you know and uh it i was already kind of an austrian economist like i i kind of came from that side of of the scene uh hated the banks hated all the like all of the um all the taxes and these

sorts of things that would that were i don't know challenging to like individu individual freedom and uh i kind of like put some of those values on hold so i could try to like get taxes for an arena and uh and then we actually were about to win there was this court case that we that we levied where they we had paid for uh some improvements to key arena which they were playing basketball in at the time

and uh they had a 15-year contract that had a closet that's like special purpose like they have to stay in seattle and play games in that arena uh according to this contract for 15 years and only been 13 years so it's a pretty clear-cut case and the and we held a huge rally like that i that i organized it was like 3 000 person rally in front of key arena and you know i had to get the permits and all that crap uh and gary payton and sean kemp were there you know and it was

like it was basically this huge it was a huge thing and then the day the judge was going to give their ruling that was going to like keep the team there for two more years and it would have basically forced the guy into selling the team because we had rallied support against him all over the place uh the mayor held a press conference right before the ruling and said actually and we're just going to sign away the team and uh they're going to give us like 60 million dollars and that's it yeah and it was like i had worked you know two

years every ounce of time that i had was dedicated to this uh i was championing this cause and then with one stroke of a pin some politician just said i [ __ ] it you know uh i swear on this oh absolutely yeah is that your is that your um uh blizzard work nerfing the warlock spell that created is that your mo moment for you absolutely i i was i basically lost it you know and it's of course you know the worst things that happen to you are always the best things that happen to

you you know if if we would have succeeded and kept the sonics in town i probably would just be an overweight chemical engineer like with courtside seats just you know sitting in a cubicle hack building power plants for the man right uh but instead i was like [ __ ] all this i asked to be laid off in 20 in 2008 when all the layoffs were coming right when when was the whole sonic story when did that happen again i should not have a lot of my friends a lot of my friends were at that rally by the way

oh yeah yeah that's so cool yeah we were in middle school at the time yeah i guess the sonics would have happened in 2009 and then uh that would have been like summer of 2009 i think and then uh the layoffs happened at the end of 2009 so it's like a few months later and that already kind of like it was just like in my mind like i don't want to do this anymore there's also some stuff with the chemical engineering i'm a pretty ethical um i'm a hippie straight up right and i had to design uh an aeration basin for

the pollution that was coming out of this aluminum smelter and like i so i was working for a power plant company that was doing mostly natural gas power plants and also some renewable energy power plants and i felt fine with that because natural gas is basically a waste product you know they often just burn it after so drilling for oil so it feels like you're taking garbage and turning in electricity people can use i felt okay with that and super clean

uh but this specific power plant that i was designing and and working on was fueling an aluminum smelter it was my job to take the pollution from the aluminum smelter and you know make it prepared well enough for the ocean the problem is prep the pollution for the rest of the world the secret to chemical engineering a dirty little secret the the solution to pollution is dilution so the real question was how much sea water do i pump into our pollution before you just dump it out into the

ocean yeah can we turn it can we turn it into not waste by diluting it with a lot of things that isn't waste yeah i mean it's still poison but you know hey at least it's diluted so it's like oh um and so i actually was you know there's a lot of um buffers there's a lot of interesting things with ocean water it's not like clear cut if you bring in this ocean water how will the pollution react with the ocean water and and so i kind of cheated a little bit and i made the the specification a

little conservative on what the ph would be the regulations in abu dhabi were horrible and it was like the ocean was a ph of 8.4 and the the pollution coming out the regulations said it had to be a ph of six and that's that's a logarithmic scale so that's like the the pollution can be 300 times more acidic than the ocean water itself that's not cool you know like a little and so i cheated and i was trying i had like one calc over here and then

the calc that was the official calc that would like say hey look an engineer said this would give out these results and i kind of just like tweaked it so that the ph would be about seven which is rainwater and totally great but then the sea water pumps were so big that it didn't really wasn't very cost effective and my boss basically told me to redo the calf and fix it because it's not right like that's just not real right and i was like ah [ __ ] and so i should have said at the time if you know i was i was a lot younger than i am now i just

said i actually don't feel good about this and he just makes someone else do it but instead i fixed it and you know did the math right and then now there's a pipe in abu dhabi that's like little fish are swimming in front of and going ah it burns and then you know and so uh that plus the sonics i was just like i'm done with chemi i'm done with all this chemical engineering stuff i just want to like sell everything i own and become a hippie right yeah so society just turned you just got turned off by society from the left and the right totally totally it's just like this is i

wanted to exit the banks exit the american system and the american way of materialism and and the classic things and just so i just sold everything i own i bought a pop-top van and uh drove around the states for a little bit had a great time uh went to burning man for the first time this was 2011. and uh because i was doing a lot of stuff i had started a little moving company and i i was doing all sorts of random you know under the

table basically started craigslist businesses right all over the place just gig work you were just like doing a bunch of different things to scrape some dollars together just so you could keep on doing what you're doing right yeah yeah exactly and i was living off savings you know i was a chemical engineer i never really bought a lot of things i i was always pretty cheap and uh and also i was buying i was storing all of my value in gold and silver and eventually i avoided even having a bank account and so i just had gold silver bars and i would go and go to a there's

northwest territorial mint which doesn't exist anymore but down in tacoma so i just make a run down to tacoma buy a bunch of gold and silver and then like you know that's where i would put my money that was your bank account yeah and i was doing that be when i was a chemical engineer too so before you and before crypto was even a thing so you were had had gone bankless before bitcoin hadn't even mined its first block yeah definitely and then when i heard about bitcoin well no i still had a bank

account i probably went bankless in 2011. like i had no bank account and maybe even 2010 somewhere in that time i didn't have a bank account and i didn't have a bank account for years actually what motivated because that's a big pain in the butt like i want to break up with my bank just as much as like ryan does and as much as i say that i do on on the podcast but like also i still need to like you know pay rent and stuff stuff like that so like where did the mo it just like not having a bank account would be like really cumbersome i would imagine

where did the motivation come to just like ax your bank account i you know at the time it was like occupy wall street was going on there's a lot of things and and really this idea of uh banks being the root of all evil you know like could we have war without banks fun payrolling it you know the whole banking system being this uh being something i didn't want to support i didn't want my energy to be part of that world you know i i just wanted to escape and i was living in a van right i was

uh totally off the grid i didn't i wouldn't do any i was doing craigslist deals back and forth you know and just playing the the playing the free market without governments and banks that was like where i wanted to be so i made that reality right so you weren't you weren't a gold bug you didn't really believe in gold like going up in price you were literally just using it as a tool yeah i mean i i did i was a gold bug of sorts but i really was just like the

fiat like you the federal reserve note is garbage so what can i keep my value in you know gold or and that's the thing buying and selling stuff on craigslist that i thought was a good deal that i could like you know hold on to smaller things and enlarge things and then put it back on and try to make some money here and there uh improve the craigslist ads basically you know so i i would store my capital in things that i thought were good investments that were not part of like not amazon stock but you know whatever i

could uh yeah and so it just and then stuff original nft flipping yeah a little bit yeah you're trading physical goods on craigslist and the way that people are flipping nfts on openc right now yeah 100 i said nfts on opencs so much better oh my god you know you don't have to go talk with someone and cash and then they're probably like they're half the time they're a scammer and just a time waster i think it's crazy how much of your uh pre-crypto life actually resembles what

crypto life is nowadays i think that's really funny and and that's how i got into it right like i saw a trace mayor video when bitcoin was five dollars and then i was like oh this is so cool you know uh i can't believe they made it money outside of the banking system i want to see this nerd money you know um but then it was like to get it you had to wire money to somewhere in japan mount gox right mt gox and i just i was like no i'm not going to do that

how's that even not that cool since yeah and it's just wiring i don't want to talk to the banks that they don't exist in my world right right so but then eventually one of my buddies figured out how to get bitcoin from coinbase up uh this is in 2013 and at that time i had left the states completely i sold my van and i started traveling went to went to south america uh in ecuador and i love latin america and i uh

fell in love with that area of the world and then came back to the states went to burning man again that's 2012. then i went to asia i went to india for a few months went to kumbamela the largest gathering of humans every time it happens every 12 years a hundred million people oh the bathrooms were gross man oh wow like a tin roof like kind of cubicle thing with just [ __ ] smearing a little bit oh no oh it was yeah it was

it was atrocious but interesting for sure kind of like a spiritual burning man where uh there's uh yeah there anyway i can keep going and then there's uh then i went to thailand and while i was in thailand my buddy i was just talking to my buddy he's like yeah he was buying drugs on silk road right and uh he told me he could he was using bitcoin at oh my god dude i want some right i had some gold and silver stored with another friend

in this in the states and he would sell it and then wire me money and that's that's how i was traveling okay so because you had a bank account no i didn't have a bank account he would wire me money i'd pick it up at a at a like uh western union or whatever unions yeah yeah some places and uh and then and he would sell the gold and silver for me usually he'd just buy it from me and then sell it a little later whenever he felt like it and then so i he's actually gave my friend three grand worth of gold and

silver just about 50 50. and then my buddy sent me three grand of bitcoin and i instantly turned that bitcoin into half bitcoin half litecoin name coin purecoin prime coin a terra coin feather coin you know everything that was on uh on btc btc-e right uh which was the exchange i was holding my bitcoin on and this is like oh this was right after this is uh the cyprus riots you know and there was this uh in april 2013

bitcoin i was watching bitcoin and it had gone up from you know 50 to about 250 and then crashed down to 50 and right at the crash uh is when i made the trade and so i was able to buy bitcoin at about like somewhere it was i bought it a few times at around 50 uh 58 was the lowest price i got and most of it was around 90 the average price was about 80. and so i had like three grand at 80

dollars and then while i was eventually i went back to the states and i got a girlfriend in la and so then i was living in west hollywood i learned to become a thai masseuse in thailand and so that was what my profession was going to be i figured and so i was giving thai massages in beverly hills i had a like a nice a clientele that liked me as a bear right i had like i passed my card to this one guy and then he passed it to a bunch of friends and it

was like all these gay guys in beverly hills and that was like my big my big money so i was getting paid like 200 of massage to go in and like you know it was a little awkward sometimes i'm sure i'm sure there's definitely i'm sure there's stories inside of stories inside of stories yeah we can keep it we can keep it pg we don't need to go there yeah that's that's fine so when you traded your gold for bitcoin what was the motivation on that was it that it's literally a digital form of gold so it's

like the ux for you and your life is better or was it more speculation it was like i think this thing could go up in price a little bit of both but mostly speculation i mean it had just crashed from 250 to 50 and and i had seen it when it was five dollars so i had a good feeling about it to say that okay okay and uh but the idea the and the promise was there uh but honestly it didn't work for what i wanted to do because eventually i had to even interact i had

to get a bank account bitcoin actually made me get a bank account it's so brutal i know isn't that sad right so sad this is this is why we talk about why we need d5 but that's the subject for a different day yeah i mean this is 2013 2014 d5 was a gleam in vitalik's eye to say the least sure so uh i mean ethereum didn't even exist in fact it was an interesting time you know i i was so bitcoin i was in west hollywood and bitcoin went from

you know a hundred dollars to a thousand dollars and it blew my mind because i turned three grand into 24 grand mostly litecoin money was like where the big profit was yeah i bought litecoin at two dollars and fifty cents and it went to forty two dollars right and so it's just mind boggling and i so i turned three grand into 24 grand and i'm like i could live off this for a year like well what is this stuff you know i'm gonna stop massaging

massaging and just research bitcoin and i'm a chemical engineer i have a technical background i'm not a dev uh but i would but i'm a community organizer and with some technical understanding so i can like a dove in and then the deeper i went the more value aligned i found myself and at the time bitcoin was a mix of all there was no blockchain no one talked about blockchain they just talked about bitcoin and all the ethereum people were in bitcoin you know right because

there wasn't ethereum at that time right yeah there was no ethereum there was no there there was uh master coin was coming up nxt was coming up there were these other like 2.0 coins what they're called uh vitalik called these uh swiss army knife coins right like it's where bitcoin is like a knife all these other coins came out like were swiss army knives where they did a bunch of things um but no one had yet cracked train completeness yet no and a lot of people

i you know there were a lot of forks of other of bitcoin too they were just i mean dogecoin honestly was like my favorite community by far uh there was lots of fun stuff going on and people had high vibes everywhere else it was so much money money money money but there were pockets of the bitcoin community which turned into the theorem community honestly that we're talking about the revolutionary aspects of how you can use this currency to and and currency creation in itself to actually like change the way we coordinate as a

society and that's where i just was like yes yes yes we can do you know here we can start doing things so this moment in your life to me seems like the the counter moment to you tapping out of society after the sonics and the oa crisis and and also the the whole like uh nuclear power plant thing or not maybe not nuclear um uh yeah it is like this so like the one ejected you from so you chose to eject yourself from society now with discovering the ethos behind

bitcoin you're like oh this like i want to go into this society i'm like i'm ready to get back into the world of of the the world is that a fair description absolutely i wouldn't say get back into that world but get back get into the crypto world right yeah exactly into the crypto world i'm like how do i do it right and actually uh i never i have very little faith in the educational system and certain i always thought certifications were [ __ ] but uh because i'm like i want to get into

crypto how do i do it i took i made two choices uh number one i broke up with my girlfriend because she was jealous of bitcoin i was given too much attention i was obsessed with bitcoin and she wanted my attention and i was just like i love you but i can't i'm obsessed i'm a man possessed right wow and i think there are any uh crypto wives or crypto girlfriends listening to this might absolutely buy uh empathize with that yeah yeah i i feel bad but it wasn't gonna happen so i i broke up with her and went