ROLLUP: Silvergate Trouble | MetaMask & Unity | Robinhood Mobile Wallet | ETHDenver 2023 | Bankless Ventures

Hosts of Bankless Podcast raising $35 million crypto venture fund. Hey, that's us, I think. What's this about?

Yeah, so Ryan, you and I and our friend Ben Lakoff are starting Bankless Ventures.

Bankless Nation, it is the first Friday of March. David, what time is it?

Oh, Ryan, it's the ETH Denver version of the Bankless Friday weekly roll up where we cover the entire weekly news in crypto, and so much of that news is happening at ETH Denver. So much of the announcements that we're going to talk about are being announced at ETH Denver. So if you don't have coffee, grab it because you're gonna need it to get through this weekly roll up. I definitely am.

Okay, so uh you're in Denver right now. I am not. But um the conference per usual, as is tradition. The conference hasn't officially started though yet, has it?

So it's different this year. The previous years at ETH Denver, it has been held in this venue called the Sports Castle, but we outgrew the Sports Castle by a wide margin last year. So we had to go to the Ethereum, excuse me, the Denver Convention Center. So the official canonical ETH Denver event does start today, but so much has already happened already. There are so many side events. There was this interoperability conference that was Monday and Tuesday. There was Wallet Con yesterday. So to say that ETH Denver hasn't started yet is missing like the forest for the trees, because so much of uh other events have already happened and have been ongoing all week. So ETH Denver week has definitely been a very, very big thing. Plus, the hackathon has already been going on. So the the canonical ETH Denver event starts today, but so much is already underway as well.

That's because when people talk about ETH Denver, it's really a shelling point for getting a whole bunch of crypto people together. It is now, yeah. What's the vibe? Like on the ground, what's the vibe? How are people and by the way, by the way, we're recording this Thursday morning, but this goes out Friday, so the official ETH Denver event will have started by the time you guys are listening to this. But yeah, what what are the vibes? Like what's kind of how are people feeling?

So uh the

it's very m much more diverse in in subject matter. Uh last year ETH Denver I think there was like thirteen to fourteen thousand people that came and the venue only held seven thousand so that was an issue.

And last year was in February when the market was like just riding all time.

It was

Totally very very close to highs. Yes. Okay. Uh I haven't we haven't gotten official headcounts yet because it's really hard to get an official headcount because there is no official headcounter. But people have given been giving me estimates of fifteen to twenty thousand people.

Are you serious?

Dude, I was at uh the what was uh the ZK Day, and it was it was all about zero knowledge. The room was absolutely packed. The ZK Day, the one day event about all about zero knowledge was more than ETH Denver 2020 as a whole. This is a bare murder. If you told me back in 2019 that there would be a single one-day conference specifically about zero knowledge stuff happening in 2023, I'd be like, well, I mean, I I guess that would why I'm here in this industry. I would expect that to grow, but like it's crazy, man. Yeah. So like you it's so large that people are subdividing into different uh streams, different talks, different tracks. Uh the energy is very, very large, and it's hard to keep track of everything. It is literally impossible to go to everything. You cannot, you have to pick and choose what you want to do.

Guys, uh, as far as content goes, I know David is gonna bring us back a ton of content. We've got a bankless, full bankless media team on the ground at ETH Denver. And uh we're calling this like a virtual conference pass, which is basically what we're providing. And I think I I like to think, David, you're doing this uh partially, you know, in service to people like me who don't go to these events. And uh you go and you record, you get some of the highlights, you talk about the takeaways, and we publish all of this on the bankless newsletter and of course on our YouTube channel. And for premium subscribers, we package this all up into some RSS episodes that you can capture as well. So uh I bet you're coming home with a lot of content.

That that's exactly right. I go to the content, Ryan, so you don't have to. At the Interoperability Summit, I recorded, I think, eight interviews with uh Sri Ram from Eigenlayer, with um with uh Sunny from from Cosmos, uh people from the Axelar uh layer one, which has piqued my interest, interestingly. Uh so many different people in specifically outside of the EVM Ethereum ecosystem, the the rest of the non Ethereum world, all about the interoperability summit. Also Ledger from Uponly, uh, he was there as well. So I got to meet him for the first time. And so that was eight interviews at that event. Uh Luke and the rest of the Bankless Media Team uh and I are gonna go to the actual canonical Etherm event today and tomorrow and probably do that again. So, Ryan, I might have like 16 interviews for you.

Rest that voice. Rest that voice. Do you hear it? A little bit. And I'm worried about you. Like, I so I I've been told that what you what you have to do in these uh look at me, armchair quarterback. I don't even go to these things, but what you have to do is like you speak with a lower, like a like a lower voice so it comes more from your throat. And that tends to exactly. It's totally normal. It's totally normal, David. In person, he sounds like an octodeeper or two. Uh anyway, we got a lot of things to cover too, and we got a short amount of time to do it. So, topics of the week Gary coming out swinging against crypto. Gary Gensler, of course, he thinks everything is a security, but not everyone in the rest of government agrees with him. Neither do we. What else we got, David?

Uh, things not looking great at Silvergate. Uh, the main bank of crypto looking pretty distressed. Uh, so we have to talk about that. And then the big news, which got announced yesterday, MetaMask, everyone's favorite wallet, has released an SDK to go with the Unity game engine, planting a very firm flag that gaming is going to be the next big wave of adoption, uh, servicing 2.7 billion people. Uh Robinhood released a mobile wallet, and I was actually able to try that out, so we got the details as well. But then there's already so many other announcements as well. DevCon gets announced in 2024. Uh, account abstraction is live on the Ethereum layer one, but I thought you needed a hard fork for that. We'll talk about that. Yuga Labs is doing ordinals. Uh, there's a lot to talk about. And Ryan, I have to go in literally under 90 minutes because I have a talk at Shelling Point. So we are going to race through this weekly roll up.

Alright, let's burn through. And before we do, we want to tell you about our friends and sponsors at um all right, let's get to markets.

Speaking of new cool interfaces, again, all crypto interfaces are way better than all previous financial interfaces. What we're looking at, of course, is the Kraken charts where we're gonna look at the Bitcoin price starting the week at $23,300. Exactly flat on the week. Zero percent up, zero percent down. Yeah, exactly flat.

Just doing that because you didn't want to look up the numbers, David. You're just that's flat.

No, it's literally flat, Ryan.

That's hilarious, man. Okay, how about ETH? Flat too?

Um flat ish, starting the week at sixteen hundred, ending the week at sixteen twenty five, up one point five percent on the week. I call one I call one point five percent pretty flat. That's yeah.

That's that's a bull run for ants. We're we're we're just noise. Who cares about this? How about the ratio?

Ratio, well, I think you can do the math on that one. Even I can. Uh, we are up 1.5% at.0697.

Well, thanks for making it clear and thanks to Kraken for these uh fantastic charts that you can find at pro.craken.com. Because I'm a pro. I'm a trading pro, David. I don't know about you, but uh these charts make me feel like it.

When I think Ryan Sean Adams, I think Trading Pro.

I know you do. That's uh that's a meme that's um you know real life too. Uh okay, global crypto market cap. Are we above a trillion?

Above a trillion, one point one one trillion dollars in total crypto market cap. Uh down two percent in the last uh uh week or so.

You know, uh let's talk about a few stats going on in the crypto markets. I I kind of skipped the the Fed this week, David, because like nothing's really going on in macro. At least this this is what I feel like the state of macro is. There's a lot of uh doom and gloom types of of things, like a lot of doomers out there. And um

Yeah, there are a few people who are predicting a a glorious recovery, right? But like

I don't think anyone really knows. It could go one way or it could go the other. So it's really impossible to talk about this week. But I do know that

Bulls and the bears are in perfect balance right now.

Yeah, that's why we're flat on the like the last couple of weeks, it's been flat. Um, all I know is I zoom out whenever I don't know the answers in the short run and look at the long run. And the government is going to continue to print money. Crypto is going to continue to eat the banks, and uh this is a decade-long long bet. So who cares about the short run uh noise? Who cares about the week-to-week prices that we bring you every single week on the roll-up? It's all noise, it doesn't matter. But let's talk about crypto, David. Let's talk Ethereum. It just had its highest month of earnings ever.

We love talking about Ethereum. We love talking about its earnings, but I I thought that this chart was really cool. Um, just seeing it depicted all the way from back in October 2016. This is the monthly Ethereum earnings, and you'll notice here, David, it's been negative.

Right.

Ethereum has been unprofitable from October twenty sixteen all the way

until when

Uh

the turnaround happened. Yeah.

The merge. Yeah. Proof of stake makes blockchains profitable. So really when I see this chart, I just see proof of work versus proof of stake. And so if you want to have a expenditure positive blockchain, you need to have proof of stake. And that is what we are seeing. And so this is another way of saying the burn. So instead of talking about uh instead of being on the website of ultrasound.money, instead we are at this one. We tricked you. Well, it's a different way of looking at this thing, right? And so burn is at all time high. Monthly Ethereum earnings is at all time highs as well. Uh but this chart is just really putting it into perspective as to what that means in in uh comparison to Ethereum's history.

Yeah, what's uh what's also in stark contrast is a lot of earnings reports are coming out for equities and securities and they're all kind of down, like profits are down. This is funny because Ethereum profits are up. When you look at issuance as kind of the cost and you look at transaction fees as the reward, Ethereum's profitable right now, even in a bear market. Um David, this was a really interesting take from Hill Dobby about NFT royalties that we've been talking about for a while. And uh, this is somebody who dives into the the data. There are a few discoveries here that I think bankless folks should know about. Um, what is Hill Dobby saying here?

So Hildobby's walking us through the royalty stats on Dune Analytics Boards. By the way, shout out to Hildobi and all of his amaz their amazing uh Dune Analytics boards. A lot of the time when I go to Dune and I find a board and I find a good one, I go look at who made it. It's always Hildobi. Not always, data always also comes to mind. So quick shout out there. So Hildobi is walking us through some data analytics about creator royalties. And the the big theme lately has been the royalty wars and how royalty percentages are going to zero as a result of this fight between blur and open sea. And so while that what's interesting here is while percentage of royalty pay uh is going to zero, so like oh, the percentage of what is paid on an NFT transfer is going lower and lower and lower because margins are getting compressed, total aggregate royalty payments are actually at all time highs. Surprising, right? How does this how do you square this? Well, it's because even though percentage on a per transaction basis is getting compressed, total volume is going up. So while uh royalties are getting compressed, total actual royalty payments are at all time highs. And that is a result of competition between these two major NFT trading platforms. So an interesting alternative look at the royalty wars.

Yeah, it's great, it's great news for creators. Royalty revenue is actually going up, which is uh cool to see. David, we got a lot more coming up. What's on tap?

Gary, the destroyer is absolutely unhinged. Uh right, we had the uh b the bankless uh meetup uh yesterday and uh Mike Sarag was there. Uh no, Mike Sellig, the the our our our nice uh securities lawyer who got on a couple times was there. He dropped some comments into my ear, so I will share them after we talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible.

Gary the destroyer, he is on the attack. It seems like he's on a mission to destroy crypto. I don't know what's up with Gary, but what's he doing this week, David?

Uh declaring everything a security. So in New York ma in the New York magazine, he's made some statements which basically summarized as everything is a security except Bitcoin. Every company in crypto out there is in violation. Crypto is pointless, but blockchain is kind of neat. And this is this is a summary from Alexander Greeve, who finished it up. Hard to argue you're acting in good faith if you're admittedly trying to stamp out an entire industry. I saw another tweet, I can't remember who tweeted it, but it was basically like the meme of the Wright brothers discovered.

Planes and flight and every other plane after the Wright Brothers is illegitimate. As in, like Bitcoin is decentralized, but every single other chain after Bitcoin is not legitimate. We're just a big Bitcoin maxi.

It is. But it's like, is Gary a Bitcoin maxi?

He's acting like it. He's acting like a Bitcoin maxi regulator. And I'm not and I'm and I'm not saying this to like to say that this is what Bitcoin Maxis believe, but like if you were someone who only only wanted to like fence and protect Bitcoin and attack everything else, if that was your agenda, that would be Gary Gensler's agenda.

I don't understand. So I was bored yesterday while uh you guys were at the the party. So I went on a tear of a uh did you see this tweet thread from the banker?

Who's doing this?

So I was just in a parking lot somewhere. I was waiting for uh one of my kids to get uh done with something, and and so I was just like going through all of the potential things that Gary might consider in the real world unregistered securities. Here's a Chili's gift card for $25 that you can buy in any local gas station. David, if the Paxos BUSD stablecoin is a security, I ask you, my friend, is a Chili's gift card also a security?

That's a question I would pose security against.

Okay, we got a security. Here's another example, Pokemon cards. Are they security?

Oh profit? Profit of others

Upside, yeah, yeah.

Efforts of others?

Big time.