📺 ROLLUP: ETH DENVER | SEC Fines BlockFi | Canada Freezes Protester Funds | Geopolitical Chess

bankless never ever misses a roll up but then i'm going off to eat denver that's awesome man yeah so guys david is live he is our eat denver correspondent right now hey bankless nation happy third week of february it's roll up time david hoffman how are you doing oh my god ryan it's the best week ever not only is it the third week of february but it is east denver week which is what you can see going on behind me just a little bit vitalik just finished up his talk and there's so many more talks later

today that i'm really really excited for uh east denver as i've said before holds a special place in my heart so i'm excited to uh to bl blast through this roll up because bankless never ever misses a roll up but then i'm going off to eat denver that's awesome man yeah so guys david is live he's our eth denver correspondent right now before we get into kind of the headlines what we're going to run down in the roll-up give us a high level of like what's happening at eve denver over the next couple of days why it's important yeah so today is shelling point which is kevin o'waukee

and a few others uh day before eath denver event the actual east denver opening ceremony happens tonight at 5 00 p.m which i am the opening mc for along with jonathan mann who's got some songs to sing the song of day man oh man he's awesome yeah apparently he just had a i missed it but he had a song about vitalik which was very catchy so i'm gonna have to catch uh watch that on youtube later um but they all all of today is a bunch of uh really powerful talks uh all in the theme of uh regenerative crypto economics which is

what kevin owaki's favorite subject is uh and uh that's that's all of today i have my talk later today uh and then east denver kicks off tomorrow uh people have been here for the last 10 days or so hackers have been hacking away uh and just for just you know a little bit of context the first eighth number i went to was 2018 i think there was an ether 2017 before that ethereum 2018 had something like three to four thousand people and that's when eth price was like 600 coming out of the ico mania uh and then eat denver 2019 eth

price was like 100 except the energy and vibrancy of ether 2019 was like 50 bigger and and stronger than it was during the ico mania east denver and there was like uh i think another 8 000 people there uh and then uh eat denver 2020 uh was like even like right before the covet crash right before like the liquidation a bunch of people got coded right in denver 2020 not too many not too many that was east cc but like it was definitely there and

the energy at that denver was even higher even even like more vibrant and then boom east denver 2022 because we didn't have 20 21 because of covered ethanol 2022 15 000 people have tickets that blows my mind 15 people and so i'm assuming the vibrancy is about to be off the charts i just got here and into this podcast room to record this roll-up but i'm about to go experience it for myself uh i'm expecting there's a there's a lot of newcomers and and so like while all the previous east denver's were a lot of like you know the the bear market east

denver's this is a bull market east denver and so it's about to it's going to be a little bit different there's a lot of newcomers here i'm excited to to meet all the people all the newcomers uh and kind of here who steve see people where i was back in ether 2018 and hopefully uh so many new awesome projects get spun out of the inspiration that comes out of this well guys if you uh see david at eve denver make sure you print out your medium article and hand him a copy of your article because that's what you did your first eat denver you were like passing out pamphlets of your writing uh

it's a really cool story also yeah i also have a my own poe app there's people that have their own poeps you met me poeps and so uh if you meet me i'll have a poet for you that i met david without me so hopefully uh i'll get issued that poep at some point this year david um and bankless listeners we're going to probably follow up with some other content other episodes on eath denver so uh you feel like you are

getting in on the conference even if you couldn't attend in purpose in in person we'll uh we'll do that uh sometime next week but let's get to the roll saturday night live podcast on stage with uh me eric voorhees and kevin owaki the subject is transcending individualism with collectivism so that's gonna be okay fun show and that's just one piece i mean we'll have some other content coming out of eat denver before you try to offer the highlights um but anyway let's get to the roll-ups this week because we have to we can't not we're going to talk about a few things number

one we got to do a ranking of the top super bowl ads david a little game happened last sunday bull crypto was all over it maybe it's a crypto bull and advertisers came out and forced we're gonna rank those ads uh for you as well the sec is also finding block fi 100 million dollars is that bearish sounds like it or is it bullish maybe it is maybe there's a bright spot around this also crypto prices are going up maybe tensions are easing in uh the ukraine

with the russia situation we're gonna talk a bit about that canada is freezing protester funds without a court order what does that mean what does that mean for crypto and then twitter just rolled out eth tips david wow jack is gone twitter's doing that what we're gonna talk about that too so those are some of the highlights that we'll get into in the roll-up uh david before we get into the roll-up we should talk about notional finance all right because what they are doing is super cool it's a new d5 primitive that wasn't available a couple of years ago and now is in full force fixed rate

lending okay that means you can earn interest on your usdc earn interest on your die earn interest on your eth and your bitcoin using this protocol and it's not volatile so you actually get to lock in a rate for up to a year point in time uh david what else do you want to say about notional i mean this is just putting banks to shame isn't it like effectively zero interest rates uh versus over eight percent apy that you can get locked in for a year like this is just it's just so it's so easy these

days to talk about how silly and unnecessary banks are so uh this is the highest stable apy rate that i've ever seen before eight point four percent uh borrowing or you can also borrow and you can also lend you can also lend stable uh in um in a stable fashion uh so notional dot finance there's a link in the show notes if you want to get started go check that out too especially with the news of like block fi getting fined and freezing interest rate accounts you can still do these things in defy today so this is a way to do that you can

check that out at notional.finance we'll also have a link in the show notes so you can see that all right david let's get to the markets man what is bitcoin doing for us this week bitcoin started the week at 44 000 it is currently at the lower price of 41 900 uh hit a high of almost 45 thousand dollars uh some some chop this week but overall down four percent down four percent on the week and did ether follow suit what's that looking like on the week yeah followed even more so start of the week at thirty one

hundred dollars hit a low of two thousand nine hundred and fifty dollars its high was three thousand two hundred dollars and we are currently clocking in at 2 970 uh has dipped since uh i've woked up this morning it's been a down down morning so far overall down uh seven percent no uh three three point three point five percent on the week three point five percent on the week plain with that 3k number as well it's like whenever it's above 3k i'm feeling okay and when it's below 3k i'm i'm not feeling so great about the bull market and um it's just hovering around that

like you know 3k is maybe the new 300 a couple of years ago it's funny though you see the same trends in these markets it's just like 10x higher the next go around right well the the ether the ether at 300 meme only actually lasted for three months but i guess we've actually only been around 3k for for a similar amount of time uh the the reference is that in 2017 ether was at like 300 for a really long time while the market just moved around it anyways we're seeing it again fractals fractals

that's what we always see in crypto how about the eth bitcoin chart what's that hanging out at on the ratio the bitcoin ratio yeah not too much of a story here currently clocking in at 0.071 so relatively flat on the week hasn't really done too much crabbing out just crabbing out how about uh the bed product so that is one-third bitcoin one-third eath and one-third d5 looks like that's down on the week as you would expect no it's flat on the week flat on the week started at 115 and it ended at 115. oh wow so exactly flat huh yeah

that's funny okay um let's talk about why the market is doing what it was doing so i believe it was maybe last friday there was some breaking news about increased tension between russia and ukraine we don't have to we don't have time to get into all of the geopolitics of that but earlier this week crypto saw a price rise uh and that was on the back of putin pledging to partially pull back troops from the borders of ukraine so a lot of geopolitical macro tension that's

happening that is affecting markets and of course crypto prices as a result seems like maybe some of that tension is easing uh what do you think about this yeah this there was a statement that putin made about how like genocide is currently happening in ukraine and it's like everyone was making fun of him is like everyone knew you were gonna say that like you when we already knew what the script was and now like we're at that part in the show uh and so like this just seems like a bunch of except for the fact that there's actual like armies and tanks like it's almost

just a bad joke uh and so like his statements are like rocking in the markets uh but also rocking the world while people's like people's lives do hang in the balance while like putin just flexes trying to get what he wants uh and so uh it's really kind of like putin's show at the moment like what's putin gonna do i feel like it totally is and for me david this meme summed it up okay so this is uh i think this is like from family guy and uh for people can't see it's like like putin pulling out some sort of weapon like a gun or something that looks very

very harmful and then being like psych nope it's just you know it's just a hanger it's something else yeah right yeah yeah it's something else that about sums it up for me but you know what's interesting on the back of this and i wonder if this is related so this just was breaking like as of 10 minutes ago as we're recording ukraine is legalizing bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies very interesting unprecedented so they are uh you know on the on the borders of potentially being invaded by a foreign aggressor and what's an

action that they take not to outlaw bitcoin and crypto but to legalize it something that most western countries and most countries around the world haven't been ready to do i wonder if that is somehow related right it's like if russia is going to invade their banking system may as well have a credible uh you know neutral public money system to to be sort of a backstop to all of that what do you think yeah if you're about to be invaded by an oppressor you might want to lean into the financial system that sets you free like the

contrast there is it's pretty obvious in my mind yeah or i mean maybe this is just a coincidence uh but like i don't know they're kind of ukraine's kind of busy at the moment and then they decide to pass a legalizing cryptocurrency law so i feel right kind of tells you their priorities uh and it's it's i guess it's kind of cool it's kind of cool and of course as we've said before right when you adopt crypto protocols you adopt crypto values so this is ukraine adopting a value of freedom for for their country excited to see david let's talk about some eath numbers

because we can't not and this is a another fantastic analytics screen that david mihal came up with this is layer two currently my roommate he's your roommate at denver well can you get him to uh throw in some other metrics that bankless has wanted for a while dropping a request yeah all right so this is really cool another cool dashboard it's layer two fees how much are rollups paying for ethereum security have you ever wondered about that one day security cost arbitrary is paying 100k

to get the security of ethereum what's so interesting about this of course these numbers will will go up over time we expect we expect um you know chains like rollups to be the big users the big consumers of ethereum block space overall but look at what they're getting for a 100k in one day fees a massive amount of security they're getting ethereum level sovereign nation state protection for their chain and they don't have to issue tokens in order to do that so if you contrast that with what many of the alt layer ones who

are going their own way are trying to do they are issuing a lot of tokens in order to get security right billions of dollars of tokens per year high inflation high token issuance most people don't look at those numbers but of course david mihal has a has another chart for that where you could see it um so that's what's fascinating to me about this l2 fees tracker and i'm glad we can we can see that data very clearly now any other takes from you david yeah something i've learned recently is it's hard to scale caring about decentralization there's a

core part of the crypto world that really cares about decentralization but if we want crypto to scale to the world more people are going to care about low fees we've learned this in 2021 more people care about low fees so do you care about low fees well then you can go use arbitrary optimism dydx et cetera but you know what those chains that give you low fees care about those chains care about decentralization so they give you high low fees and then they care about decentralization on your behalf in the background where it's supposed to be but do you know what's also cool is

those chains actually care about low fees all right and rather than issuing their tokens and paying billions of dollars in token issuance to uh validators they just have to pay a hundred thousand a day for arbitration to get ethereum level security so i totally agree it's like not the decentralization argument that will win over the masses it's actually the economic argument which says it's cheaper to run a layer two backed by the security of a main chain like ethereum than to go your own way and create a new

alternative layer one at least that's the bookcase for l2s which we are bullish on um this is my take that was related people say users don't care about decentralization i think it's such a myopic take okay because the future blockchain users there aren't people they're chains to win in the smart contract wars you have to sell a lot of block space to a lot of chains chains are the new users and these users care about decentralization similar to what you just said david um this is another interesting stat number of ethereum addresses holding point one eth just hit

an all-time high i think this is a good marker for uh distribution it's something that bitcoin has has um promoted about like the distribution of bitcoins is a very good metric to see go up any thoughts on this yeah we i was wondering if this is including people that are holding point one eth on layer twos as well as the ethereum main chain because point one eth on the ethereum main chain is gonna cost a lot to move to the l2s uh so i hope those people are accumulating more because disproportionately that the transfer to an l2 cost like i think like point zero

three or point zero four um but like we do we do like it's expensive dusk it's expensive yeah but we do like the distribution distribution's very good um let's talk about this last metric so somebody actually did the market cap of the ethereum ecosystem and i've never seen these numbers before it just takes a little finagling to uh to get to them we've seen we of course know the market cap of of eth right which is all eth outstanding i don't know what that is now david something like 40 in the 250 no it's like 300 billion i think oh it's

300 300 billion something like this okay uh and then um but that's not the total market 350 billion so that's not the total of the uh the ethereum economy because you also have to add all of the erc20s all of the synthetics on top of it this chart doesn't even add the nfts which would be another layer on top of it but when you add both ethereum the market cap of ethereum and then all of the tokens built on top you get to something close to 600 billion dollars so

585 billion dollars at the time these numbers were computed and that is the total value of all of the assets within the ethereum economy which is uh which is quite stunning i mean this gets to like nation state levels and i think this is going way higher right so i think there's going to be a time where ethereum absorbs so much we're we're in the you know um double-digit trillions in the next 10 years i can easily see how we get to 100

trillion dollars with when you combine eth and then all of the tokens all of the digital assets built on top of it any uh takes on this yeah two two comments here it's actually a a very i think it's going to be a very interesting uh scientific uh question process uh analytics process to actually figure out the correct way to calculate this uh the market the value of all assets and tokens on ethereum that aren't eth it's not an easy calculation it's not just going up to coin gecko and summing the totals because you not all evaluations of all tokens are the same

right some tokens have significant outstanding supplies with low liquidity uh and so their market cap is super inflated so adding up all the tokens is not a trivial process and that is going to be um an ongoing scientific endeavor i think for the rest of ethereum and then the other the other comment i have is this really shows the importancy the importance of the security of ether the asset we have ether the asset market cap roughly matching the value of all tokens outstanding on it now we that i think that means we have plenty of room

for more value of tokens i think something like 20 percent first 80 um 20 market cap of ether versus 80 supply market cap of the value of the tokens on top of ethereum is about the right ratio uh but but you can't have something like 99 to one because that one percent of the value of ether is securing the rest of the 99 of the value of the token so there needs to be a balance there yeah you know my take on that last one is it also uh depends on what sort of erc20 token it is so some erc 20 tokens

are super crypto native and they settle completely on top of ethereum there's no outside corollary whereas other erc20 tokens right they're actually just representatives of dollars in a bank account somewhere say or you know stock certificates somewhere not secured into ethereum not secured by ethereum so it's different settlement right like usdc is not completely settled on ethereum it's actually settled in a bank account somewhere and ethereum is just kind of the tokenized representation of that so

there's even more complexity there but to your other point too imagine doing all of this but then also trying to add up all of the tokens on various layer twos which this doesn't even get into right it's going to be quite the task to put all of this data together into size the economy but proportionally you can see if you just take eth right now and all of the erc20s it's about the market cap of bitcoin like the economy size is the market cap of bitcoin right uh anyway super interesting this is why we think these things are more than just

money systems they're economic systems they're like they have gdp they have taxes they're like like digital nation states decentralized digital nation states and it's really cool to see the data coming out about that economies in the cloud economies in the cloud um this is cool david i i just think i know we routinely go over kind of like why buying and holding is is the the best and uh low time preference paying your future self but like holding is such a skill in crypto that people really need to

develop and why don't you read out this tweet because i think it proves that point yeah so this is uh this is uh rug pulling the dollar as a frame of reference and instead using iphones and ether to measure value and so this is iphone launch date costs and e so we go like iphone 6 iphone 7 iphone 8 and then how much ether it cost to buy those things at the day of the iphone launch so the iphone 6 it costs you 690 ether to buy an iphone 6 when it got released iphone 7 it only costs you 52 ether iphone 8 it only costs you two and a

half an iphone 10 3.3 and an iphone 11 3.7 to where we are today at iphone 13 which is .0.24 ether so like it kind of shows if the ether deflating this is a deflationary asset granted it only started actually deflating with eip-1559 recently but the demand for ether and also the the generalized promise of deflation in the future has made ether a highly deflationary asset this is that instantiated in a tweet it's also kind of sad because now i'm

regretting my iphone 6 like what the hell man look at this it's a really expensive iphone i ryan but this is really the way to look at it it's all opportunity cost uh when you denominate in something like eth and i think it's another another lesson for us like you don't have to be a brilliant trader in crypto in order to do well all right the verbs you need to know the two verbs the only two verbs you need to know buy and hold two verbs you need to know okay never sell the trading for later never sell

maybe the third might be steak okay so once you buy once you hold learn how to stake and if you get real fancy you could do stuff with like notional and you can start to lend and earn interest that way but like trade that's the advanced stuff yeah like you don't even need to do that that's a hobby trading is a hobby that you don't have to partake in stop buying iphones buy more e that's what i learned from this pretty soon it'll be denominated in just way you know if you way you'll be able to buy the iphone 20. uh all right david we've uh we've got

some more stuff to cover on the releases side of things of course we're going to get to the hot news items but before we do we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible if you're going bankless you need metamask this is your tool to unlock the world of defy without giving up custody over your private keys metamask is both a secure in-browser wallet and also a secure bridge for your hardware wallet you can now trade tokens on any decks or aggregator metamatic swap gathers real-time pricing information across all the defy exchanges allowing you to select your best price while getting all the metamask benefits of self-custody

lower gas costs and increased transaction success rates metamask also has a fantastic mobile wallet that i use when i'm out and about which i use to collect po-apps nfts and do all my defy things while i'm away from home if you haven't downloaded metamask you gotta try it out web3 wouldn't be the same without it download menomons for desktop and mobile at metamask.io and load up your trezor ledger lattice or keystone hardware wallets so that they too can get into the world of web3 the layer 2 era is upon us ethereum's layer 2 ecosystem is growing every day and we need l2 bridges to be fast and

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design the fair fair launch of a cross if you want to bridge your assets quickly and securely go to across dot to to bridge your assets between eth optimism arbitrarily or boba networks bank list is proud to be sponsored by unit swap unit swap 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 that lets you trade any token at the current market price 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 the uniswap grants program is accepting applications for grants do you have something of value that you think you want to contribute to the uniswap ecosystem no matter how big or small your idea is you can apply it for a unique grant at uniswapgrants.org and help steer unit swap in the direction that you think it should go thank you uniswap for sponsoring bankless all right guys we are back with the heart releases of the week david we have to start here because uh bankless

just released a new podcast it's my favorite thing cast network it's my favorite thing bankless release another podcast what is this one david this is green pill this green pill coming out of kevin owaki uh and so green pill is all about regenerative cryptoeconomics uh regenerative cryptoeconomics comes out of degenerative crypto economics and so kevin milwaukee is obsessed with public goods and how we can make people's externalities in the world regenerative rather than uh you know uh their externalities be positive rather

than negative negative externalities are like when factories spew like carbon into the air or dump storage in the water that's a negative externality how can we make social structures and social systems that have positive externalities as in when we use them the world actually gets better it's like an upward spiral of of economics and so kevin owaki is exploring this subject with his gran brand new podcast green pill which we are helping him produce out of the bankless ecosystem oh who's this guy right here vitalik buterin who just he this is his image of the talk that he

just uh gave here at uh uh shelling point uh 99 warlock yeah exactly so that's the first podcast first podcast with vitalik buterin the warlock himself uh and he's also got like eight other podcasts already lined up there's carl flores he's also got glenn weil uh and so i'm really excited for this podcast uh it's really just true to the core of what it means to be crypto uh and kevin is also just a fantastic speaker and i think he's going to become a fantastic podcast co podcast host um and i'm excited to

listen to it i i think um this is a good podcast to send to like your more collectivist minded uh friends right maybe people more on the kind of the traditional left anti-authoritarian left um people who think crypto's hyper capitalists don't want anything to do with it yes and this is this is very um you know it gets out of the fixed pie mindset that some people fall into in crypto where it's just like let's just uh grab as much crypto as we can and hide in our bunkers and let the world screw itself over right this is no how do we enter

the world and how do we improve it so i think it's a good message for people who need to hear that and kevin gets really practical i mean there are projects right now that are that are helping reduce climate change and there are there are mechanisms that we can employ to uh to make the world a better place so kevin's gonna be covering all of that uh what's the action item david should people subscribe how do they subscribe is that their rss there is yeah it's an rss feed you can type it into uh you can type green pill into spotify or apple wherever you get your podcast ryan i just sent you a link and zoom you can

actually pull up a qr code so people watching on youtube can just say yeah yeah in zoom so you can actually just scan this qr code uh and it'll take you right to the podcast wherever you want to subscribe to that uh fancy magic right there uh remind me of a super bowl ad david yeah that's exactly right that's exactly right uh so yeah subscribe to greenpeal also if you want to do us a favor and give us a give it a five star rating and review uh so we can get this thing bootstrapped um that'd be fantastic let's screen pillow the world guys uh it's awesome what crypto can do

um all right oh i almost disclosed my me of the week ignore that ignore that um all right so let's get back to the next item on the list which is uh orbit a layer two roll-up um let me find the link here david uh what is urbit though while i'm looking for that urban is uh a self-sovereign server it's something like you can take a hard drive and pop it out of your computer and then you can pop it into a different computer and your same computer is like ready to go right out of the box and

there's much more to it than that it's actually a very complicated subject but it's um it's a it's a self-sovereign corner of the internet it's a self-sovereign operating system that you can make for yourself uh and so kind of like a myspace page for the self-sovereign cryptographic age where your myspace page is actually like a hard drive and it's also your computer at the same time it's a crazy subject actually it's a crazy subject it's super complicated as well but but like the net of it is um it's trying to reduce reliance on aws and all of the centralized servers and

like redesign the internet uh it's almost a new operating system for a decentralized internet if you will and what i remember from this project is bitcoiners have historically been super excited about it as they should be and i think any decentralization maximalist has been pretty excited about it i haven't seen much you know practical use of it yet but maybe that's because the technology is still super early but none of that's the news the news here is that they are launching on a layer two roll-up on top of ethereum so orbit on a layer 2 roll

up david what uh what's the tweet say yeah it says uh it's a technical triumph and it cus cause cuts gas costs by almost 200x making planets more affordable and transaction fees nearly trivial planets is a urban technical term they use the like solar system terminology to describe um describe like the ecosystem like your i think your server is a planet for example uh and so they are now integrating uh their their ecosystem with a layer two roller that's really cool to see uh also launching this week is lobby three so we

had andrew yang on the podcast who was really advocating for crypto in washington and he said he was going to do something in the space he said you know basically that classic line if um if you're not at the table then you're on the menu right and referring to the crypto industry how they needed to participate in washington lobby uh groups or not crypto would die but like innovation in the u.s would have a much harder time and so he has launched a lobby group to actually bring the voice of web 3 to

washington is what it says and you can join as a member of this group what's super cool here is david they've got membership levels and of course the the proceeds go to the lobby 3 lobby effort which is pro crypto crow pro web 3 making some actionable uh differences and the membership levels they're all denominated in eth okay so you become a level one member at 0.07 eth right now and that gets you access to all sorts of various things uh