ROLLUP: Biden’s Crypto Executive Order | Sanctions & Commodities | Coinbase & MetaMask | Bear Watch?!

i thought we agreed during the break we'd stop saying the b word deal no we can't bowl or bear that's true not bold not bare but bankless hey bengal station happy second week of march david what time is it oh it's the friday banquets weekly roll up time where we cover the entire week in crypto this week not actually as crazy as as all the other weeks there are some very big headlines and not too much more other than that so definitely a week of

some big news headlines but uh a few just concentrated news this week concentrated news this one's coming at you one day early uh we've got some uh things scheduled so we we're getting this to you a day early so i guess maybe that's our treat but some topics of the week for you number one the biden executive order for crypto just came down the the pipeline this is a question much anticipated yeah i mean there was a ton of fun about this and we're gonna answer the question whether this is actually bearish for crypto as many anticipated or is it

bullish we'll talk about that the question ryan was oof question mark yes exactly exactly and it's still a question mark that's why you have to tune into the episode also commodity prices we got to talk about that we talked a little bit about that earlier in the week the week but uh getting crazy out there maybe threatening a global recession that's happening um update on sanction week more sanctions people freezing everyone's bank account coinbase uh the exchange we'll talk about what they're doing in the sanctions world also metamasking and fiora are they

sanctioning people too what's going on there oof uh david you got the last one there's some uh things going on in the nft space how would you characterize those things oh i would definitely characterize them as complete shenanigans writing uh not just one shenanigans story but multiple nft shenanigans stories uh so definitely deserves an oof there as well nft shenanigans guys before we dig in we want to tell you a little bit a bit about our friends at opolis okay they sponsored this message they wanted us to tell you about what they are doing for the

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tokens so long as you do that before may 1st uh which is a couple months away but it's going to come fast so go ahead and click that link in the show notes to get your bank and work tokens work tokens being the tokens of opolis which is a dao awesome dallas helping dallas that's what we're doing is bitcoin helping us switch to markets david bitcoin helping us confuse market i think i would i would call it confused market this week start of the week at 44 000 bitcoin price hit a low of below 38 000 but has since climbed back up to

just above 42 000 to where it is right now at 42 200 overall down 5-ish percent on the week yeah this is this is hopeful though this little spike is a spike on the on the live views but yeah i mean we want to zoom out though ryan and see what it looks like okay fine if you make me 30 days yeah do the 180 days 90 days 180 okay yeah yeah okay okay down okay all right but look at this line it's good

all right look at this okay it looks like we're actually up and here's a report from cnbc uh eight percent bitcoin up eight percent as biden announced his executive order on cryptocurrencies we're going to uh talk in depth about that when we get to the news section but seems like the market is interpreting that as uh possible bearish anyway yeah and positive news all right silver lining yeah we're gonna yeah we're gonna have to unpack that there's definitely um some optimism to be had about this uh executive order

you know what i could tell david you're feeling bearish aren't you yeah i'm getting my baby in bear mood you're never in a bear mood what happened what changed we'll get to the commodity section started the week at three thousand dollars hit a low of two thousand four hundred and fifty dollars uh and is currently at 2 720 down about 8 on the week eth down 8 on the week uh chris berninski i saw had a take on on that but that's actually to do with the ratio let's talk about the ratio first eat the

bitcoin ratio that's down on the week too what's happening here yeah we broke down below point zero six five we are at point zero six four four i think we're at point zero six seven last week so the eighth big tc ratio took a big hit um down three percent uh the bitcoin news had the uh executive order out of biden has uh where bitcoin jumped eight percent ether didn't follow suit so bitcoin responded more than the rest of the crypto market on the executive order news which is interesting so uh bitcoin up more than eath we're

back to where we were in february which was sort of a local below where we were in february we're now below where we were in february wow we're going back to where we were in uh what's this october october yeah and this bodes interesting things i think we've said on bankless before when each bitcoin ratio is going up that means second bull market i mean risk on uh this is what uh chris berninski says as well why don't you read out this tweet david yeah chris says bulls are celebrating bitcoin

ripping on the executive order news uh wow meanwhile while the eth btc ratio which is a proxy for risk appetite and crypto grinds lower so this is a mixed signals right btc up on the executive order news but uh eth btc uh which as we've said before is kind of a bull market indicator is hitting new lows that it hasn't that we haven't seen since october uh which is one of the few things one of the many things that has caused me to not have my bull hat on this week okay

well i get to i get to be a bit more bullish than david hoffman this week uh so i i know chris has been bearish the last uh few weeks and months i would say and i i do agree with this eth bitcoin ratio being a proxy for risk appetite and crypto but doesn't eth or doesn't bitcoin generally have to go up first when we're breaking out of these uh bear market patterns like generally that's been the pattern bitcoin has a breakout everyone's like okay is it safe is it safe weeks go by sometimes months go by

and then other assets follow suit eth generally next in kind of the the classic cycle that we've seen again and again could that be what's happening here david that's definitely been the meme historically but i don't think we've seen that been a thing for the past like six months or so uh i think a lot of just like we are in uncharted waters and i think we have been for a for a while now uh crypto is in a place both in its development and in its global relevancy and in the regulation spotlight uh both

very good and very bad and just like a lot of neutral stuff uh that is relevant to the crypto markets that really just changes i think like all of our like previous models and patterns like oh first we would have bitcoin season then we would have eighth season then we would have altcoin season when's the last time that that happened ryan i think it was over a year ago i would say i would say the last time that probably happened was like um a year ago it kind of started and we had a good after d5 summer we had a nice strong bitcoin rally price rally and

then we cycled into uh and then it kind of skipped d5 and then we got all ones yeah straight to all l1's and then that like trailed off and now here we are uh so but you think it's different and i think probably the reason you think that is maybe because of the macro conditions which we'll get to uh in a few minutes with the commodity prices but before we do bankless bed index that's a third a third a third bitcoin ethe and d5 what are we looking at on the week uh it's about flat on the week start of the week at about 100 it's currently at 99 so flat

flat on the week a way to get out some of that volatility from holding one of those asset classes individually um all right let's get to a few other things on the on the bear watch bear market watch airwatch this is the second worst start of the year for us equities in 123 years that's the tweet um good good uh place to start the bear watch is in the equities market we generally don't talk about equities but look at this for context the 11 negative 11.9

percent drop in the first 44 trading days in 2022 that's what we've seen is only rivaled by the 1920 great depression and the great financial crisis those are the only two times something like this has happened in 2009 of course when we had the financial crisis and in 1920 when there was um the 1920 great depression uh oh right there yeah okay right here eleven point eight point one percent yeah but

then we got the roaring twenties david yeah it's 1920. yeah so like it's a little bit like one half bear watch but also it's like all right did we already express all the bear is the bear already expressed i don't know maybe maybe perhaps um but uh i mean also it's a little bit of just like a timing thing right like we hit the highs in the stock market right at like december january uh and then and then putin invaded like you put amassed his army uh we did a normal correction then a war happened so like

yeah there's a little bit of just like timing bias on this on this one uh but still at the end of the day uh down 12 percent is a big deal bad start to the year for all assets uh including equities including crypto of course um this is uh the headline title from the financial side uh times war in ukraine sparks a commodity crisis so let's dig into that let's dig into the commodity crisis a little bit more here is uh prices of various commodities and i'm looking at the one year here is that the thing to look at yeah

well i mean it just shows that spike at the end of the year so clearly where like in april of 2021 we had 60 dollars a barrel for oil we are currently up above 120 a barrel so like oil has doubled in the last like six months uh and we don't we don't have this tweet ready but uh jim bianco made a tweet where like every time that there's been a 50 increase in crude oil has triggered a recession like the hit rate is a hundred percent uh according to according to jim bianco

and like you can also see this in other commodities too uh like gold which i mean i guess isn't really necessary for production but still is an indication of just kind of um people being spooked out of equities and fiat and other currencies like gold is surging past two thousand dollars uh zoom out zoom out to like the five year on that one ryan here's the five year on gold yeah yeah setting almost setting new highs basically we're back to covid remember when it did a big run during uh kind of early coveted days right yeah and then bitcoin sucked all the air out of its uh

out of the the out of its sails uh and then of course corn and wheat are are up bigly as well uh corn and wheat setting basically new highs again um uh yeah and like that that really matters because that's food prices right corn and wheat is food prices and it's not just like food prices going up like 20 to 25 at home which is probably what it could happen if these prices sustained their higher levels but it also means just like perhaps a

famine for africa because apparently some economists are saying like yo like so much of the african continent is dependent on russia and ukraine for wheat that they have to are going to have to rethink where they're getting their wheat from because there's there's absolutely zero way that a cycles worth of crops is coming out of ukraine right now and so specifically specifically wheat because ukraine produces a massive amount of assets for the world so commodity prices are jumping this is a commodity indices from the dow jones

as well and i think we can see that uh if i can pull up the uh yeah yeah so these are all commodities right and you can we're going all the way back from april 2021 but even with a five-year you can just see the commodities going for going from uh where it was like 500 this is an index so these numbers are arbitrary 500 where it was at 27 in july of 2017 to where it is now at 1260. so i think when commodities go up in price over over a

doubling over that four year four or five year period so like four or five year period that's that's uh a very large time in crypto terms but in commodity terms and manufacturing terms and production and food and just the cost to produce things the commodities of the world have like over doubled in a four-year period so like how is that does that make how many businesses are no longer viable because the cost of goods are higher uh and and so much of this run has come up in the last like three months and so like if these high commodity

prices stay sustained for a long amount of time it can cause significant disruption in so many businesses that consume that need to uh to consume commodities to produce their products so this is this is part of like bear mo bear mode david right now and it's some of these uh niche commodities as well like things like neon gas which is an ingredient for semiconductors like which parasites are in everything right including your coffee cup yeah including my coffee cup um

you know and uh um fertilizer for for crops apparently that's a that's a product that uh belarus has a commodity ingredient which is now sanctioned a country that's now sanctioned so we can't buy that anymore palladium that's a a key commodity for cars i believe and other manufactured goods like that um so it's just like a ton of different commodities and we've never we've never seen uh crypto during this sort of a you know macro backdrop so is this what's giving you

the bear market vibes this is this is a very big part of it and i think the story really hangs on is that how much of this are traders just speculating that commodities are the trade right now and like forcing commodities up and how much of this is actually going to be sustained broken supply chains uh eastern europe disruption uh cascading contagion domino effects of across the globe or is just this just a blip like are we going to return to more like normal levels in a couple weeks or is this actually going to cause significant

disruption because like if commodity prices are high right now like like when the wind lumber spiked a lot of like at the beginning of covey when lumber spiked like construction was just like paws and people waited for it to come come back down uh and then people just resumed business as normal as soon as just like the the markets cleared if the if it hadn't spiked however that would have caused significant disruption in construction and so that's basically what i'm looking at right now like is this a spike is this just financial markets being financial markets or is these high commodity prices going to be

sustained uh and and remember at the end of the day while there is a big difference between currency inflation and commodity price asset inc like valuation increases for the average consumer it doesn't really matter because it still makes your milk more expensive or still makes your construction more expensive or driving your car more expensive how many how many individuals can can stomach like a 10 to 15 increase of the goods that they consume on a monthly basis like it starts to like raise the water the threshold line as so like what is

viable in the world do you know do you remember that episode we did with lynn alton i think that was like during the summer and uh we're like lin what what should people hold during the the 2020s uh because it's going to be a chaotic decade and she was like you should hold commodities like cold commodities she did say that uh very interesting that that's that's what's kind of coming through when fiat is unstable when there's uncertainty in the world commodity prices just shoot up um not necessarily crypto commodities though right ethan bitcoin as commodities but consumable commodities

yeah you can't you know fill up your stomach on each gas right so it's a different type of commodity class that is not following suit here but we'll get more into that a little bit later i think the commodities story is something that we'll be talking about a lot over the next uh weeks to come probably on the roll-ups as well but we put out an episode with kyla scanlon on uh fortress russia and commodity prices as well including the the r word recession we talked about so go check that out it was published earlier in the week we'll include a link in the show notes as well

just a good episode to get a recap on everything that's going on in the world something that is down as far as commodity price though is either block space okay either gas fees dropped to a six month low uh the decrease is likely related to a cooling off of the nft market is the subtitle here i've definitely noticed way prices down here lately uh is that some solace to you david bear market david i mean no like when

ethereum block space demand is low that's an indication of the bull market it's not i wouldn't say it's a predictive indication it's a lagging indicator but it's just like another signal that like things are just quiet in crypto land and as we know like it's kobe put out that article a while ago that was like basically everything in crypto hangs on attention right like things only go up when people have attention on them and what i'm seeing is that the crypto industry has less and less like attention on it other than the regulators which isn't like the best kind of attention that you want um nft

attention going away is bad because that was what sustained a lot of the bull market and that's actually kind of the the graph that we have up up next is like we all know that the nft search terms on google just like when scott gangbusters during nft summer but like how long can it be sustained and right now we're back down to roughly september 2021 levels of nft search volume um so six over six months ago i think so so much of that block space demand for ethereum and for other chains came from nfts and people are starting to care

less and less and less about nfts does this little uh this little graphic here in the search bar does this remind you of 2017 at all icos it reminds me exactly like 2017 i'm just feeding into the bear market david this week i'm less worried than david for bankless listeners but um i i do think that this could mark a turning point as well uh i guess we'll just have to see but you know you know what's uh if you if you don't laugh you you're gonna

cry you know um this is the gas price i saw this is a screenshot from somewhere outside of la and we're talking like seven dollars a gallon in the u.s for gas god damn and contrast that with way free fees right so like real life gas up yeah but each gas price down um that's the world that we're living in right now i don't know give us a give us a case to be hopeful though what do you what do you think what's what's um something that gives you some

bull market vibes well it's one of those you maybe if somebody of your preferred park podcast is bearish maybe that means that the bear things have already happened and so uh there there was a line that i heard i can't remember where i aware it was said but like people oh yeah i was actually in ray dalio's book which ryan got me on where like people will keep on buying amazon stock at every single price level because it went up so much therefore it's it's it's clearly a good buy forgetting that like when you're buying it at the top it's

not a good buy it's an expensive buy uh and so perhaps this is just like the inversion of that like if so much of this bare niche has already happened maybe that means all these stuff is cheap and the bearish just has already manifested um however the whole contagion crypto the commodity contagion thing still looms in the back of my head like we really need that to not trigger a bunch of other breakdowns in other parts of the world i do think it's funny that the the only thing that really um concerns me at

least in the short run in crypto and the short to medium run let's say in crypto is macro events like the fundamentals of everything else are just like so strong always i mean the the eth merge this year right like that's gonna be that's a massive catalyst how can it not be and yet if that happens while we're still in the in the slumps of the bear market maybe i mean uh when you have good news during a bear market it just like doesn't move price and that's an indicator of the bear market so i think in the next you

know three to six months we'll actually see what type of market we're in for real including when uh when the merge happens and when that ships what happens to the price of crypto will that be a positive catalyst or will it just like fall flat because that's a massive fundamental event that hasn't been priced in maybe it won't get priced in if we're in the backdrop of all of these macro events we will have to see i think that's exactly right and if you believe the bitcoiners that about like how uh the four-year cryptocycles that we've historically had are all triggered by

the happening events typically the habiting happens during a bear market and only bitcoiners would care they're like oh happening yay but then the mainstream media is like we don't really care about that uh but then because of the supply issuance reduction coming out of bitcoin would get have there would be miners selling less bitcoin on the secondary markets and then slowly bitcoin would start to creep up uh and it would creep up for like a year straight and then people would realize it and then they would turn into a bull market uh and so if you believe that these the supply happenings out of bitcoin triggered bull markets anywhere

between like 12 to 24 months later you would definitely expect that same thing to happen to ethereum during the merge because it's three happenings all at once and so like maybe a viable path forward is that like we are we are in a bear market as bear market david says that we are and then the merge happens and the mainstream media just doesn't care about ethereum they forgot about crypto no one's paying attention it's quiet uh and so the the merge happens we get a small little blip in price but it doesn't nothing really happens but then for the

next like 12 to 18 months eth just slowly just grinds up and grinds up and grinds up because of the supply issuance reduction like this isn't something these are patterns that we've seen before that that i could totally see playing out if we are in the bear market though like um let's say this repeats similar like a fractal of of 2018 and 2019 uh there's some like periods where things stay steady and then there's like a series of drops yes you get a 50 drop and you're like okay that was it that was the fifth and then you get another

50 drop right right and you're like oh my god okay that was it and then you get another 50 drop that's one of the things that's got me into bear market mode it's just like every time these crypto prices come up to an inflection point it always goes down like you can predict it's like well if we're in a bear market it's gonna go down and then it goes down yeah i um i you know it's i think it's a different orientation certainly looking at how to how to invest during the you know the bear market but um i mean the thing that remains true is like don't sell when the market is panicking

right that's the absolute worst time to sell and uh so you can either hold through these types of things you can have some dry powder on reserve to buy aggressively the dips that could happen or this could be sort of a fake out of some sort and we're not repeating 2018 2019 given the strong fundamentals so impossible to tell um but i've noticed that the uh the super cycle believers have been quiet recently well the thing is like i bet you if we like zoom to all-time highs in

like three to four months people will be like oh super cycle it's like it's like narrative follows price guys all right not the other way around that's exactly anyway we got a lot more to talk about we're going to cover the releases we're going to hit the news of the week including including that biden executive order but before we do we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible bank list is proud to be sponsored by uniswap 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

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liquidity when you trade your crypto assets hey guys we are back with the news of the week now we got the bearishness out of the way let's talk about what's getting released i said news of the week but first we got to cover what's getting released starknet that's some good news this year okay layer two is coming layer two is here this is a stark net hyphen hyphenecosystem.com website look at all these projects on starknet or either live or on the roadmap in beta version of some sort alpharoad arjun x

bitmapbox brick uh dydx of course is already there dope wars uh it's a cool game diversify we know diversify their their immutable x the ecosystem is getting larger and larger so i expect this website to fill up with tiles what do you think about this oh i think on the other side of the bear market ryan we're gonna come out with five second five cent transactions and instant finality and everyone's gonna be like oh ethereum solves the scalability problems during the bear market it's gonna be great sorry we're supposed to leave the bear market behind david's recovered though that's that's

bull market david talking just might take a few months um let's talk about this too the tally wallet what are they up to yeah tally wallet that's a new metamask competitor now has the swap feature ingrained into the tally wall inside the tally wallet all the fees go into the community multisig and they have apparently half the cost of a metamask swap fee and then they finish up the tweet saying you'll want to give this a try before the dow launches dot dot dot i wonder what that means ryan what do

you think that means you'll want to give this a try before the dow launches hmm i don't know what hint they're dropping here dave what do you need to launch a doubt there's literally only one thing that you need does it start with the t it does start with a t and it's not tally okay we'll let bankless listeners uh derive what this tweet could mean for themselves but uh hopefully you can read between the lines there a little bit i will say that uh when you advertise

the shmersh mop that's coming uh it generally becomes crowded it definitely becomes a crowded thing so why not why not say it everyone knows everyone else is going to do it as soon as they can as soon as it makes sense so why not just yeah uh this is cool this is not something that's being hinted at from our our friends at ledger they wanted us to let you know that there's a new ledger

uh device that's out this is ledger the hardware wallet um i don't have one of these yet but i want one and the reason i don't have it is because it just came out this is the ledger nano s plus so maybe you have a ledger nano s you probably do maybe you have the other version of uh of ledger's as well ledger nano x the ledger nano s plus is a new ledger device that has just been released bigger screen more memory more stuff you can do on the wallet side of things

including when you plug it into ledger's software the ability to manage your nfts send and sign your nft transactions with full transparency in ledger live so this is like taking the ledger that everyone knows and loves and probably already has and like upgrading it making it better yeah so this is like uh for the right mental model i think for this is like this is the new shiny iphone se is what the ledger uh ledger s is it's like the more affordable version of