ROLLUP: Friend.Tech | SBF to Jail | SEC vs Coinbase

Now Ethereum's going to become Uber. Now Ethereum is going to become decentralized Twitter. And it just never seemed to kind of click for me. We made some progress. We did episodes with like Farcaster, for example, and Lens cautiously excited about those and bullish on those when I when I started seeing them. But the question is always how do we get mass adoption? Friend.tech and this experiment again. I'm not saying it's going to be friend.tech, guys. Okay, don't hear me. This is a this is a POC. Okay. This experiment showed me how it can work in the same way that CryptoKitties showed me how NFTs can work.

Bankless Nation, happy third Friday of August. David, what time is it?

It's the Bankless Friday weekly roll-up where we cover the entire weekly news in crypto, which is always an ambitious, never yet. We persevere nonetheless into the frontier. How are you doing, Ryan?

I'm doing fantastic. I'm excited to talk about friends, how you sell your friends this week, because that's what you've been doing.

How do

Bottom Ryan shares. Yeah, and then you sold them right after it.

you that's right.

That's topic number one. It's this app called friend.tech that hit uh I think Friday after we recorded the last roll up, and everyone on Crypto Twitter was using it. Uh I used it. It's kind of interesting. We're gonna talk about that. Number one friend.tech. This new app is it a fad or is it a new paradigm? What else we got, David?

Coming up next, we got SEC back in the hot seat after six law professors, A16Z and Paradigm, who both employ lawyers, all uh voice their disbelief about how the SEC ought to approach crypto and proposes something new uh in lieu of that.

Also, SBF is on the move. Uh it seems like David, you might now be neighbors with Sam Bankman Freed.

That's exactly right. This is a factual statement.

After that, we'll talk about PayPal, Visa, all making moves into crypto this week. And then Coinbase futures. Coinbase getting some futures. What does this mean? How is this changing Coinbase's international strategy if they are allowed to roll their own futures here at home? All of this is coming up as we get into this episode. So make sure to like, subscribe, rate, and review wherever you get your podcast so we can get the good gospel of crypto to the top of these iTunes charts or Spotify charts or YouTube, wherever there's an algorithm. Give us those five star reviews so we can push it up to the top.

Guys, before we get in, want to tell you about our friends and sponsors. But first markets, want to thank Kraken for showing us the market charts today. And I gotta ask you, David, what's Kraken with Bitcoin price?

I never gonna do they were two in a row on this one. Uh 29,500 is where we started. We are currently experiencing some red candles coming in at below 28,000. Are we below 28,000 right now? This is a moment where I'm gonna have to ask the Bankless Nation to please pull out your price checker app uh to check out the prices because they're probably outdated. 27,700. Wow. Uh these numbers have updated in the last like five seconds. Uh we are currently dumping uh down below five percent, negative five percent.

Look at this red candle. Why are you

That's a

jumping on the red candle?

I don't know, buy more sellers and buyers.

Alright, well at least it's not flat for the past three, four weeks.

Yeah.

Uh Ether doing the same thing. This looks like an equivalent chart.

Yep. Yeah. So ether when I put these numbers in was at 1740. We are now at 1730. So we are down six percent. Six percent.

Alright. Might have to find out afterwards. Also the ratio. Down?

Ratio is doing normal.

No.

It's flat.

Okay. Pretty flat. Total crypto market cap. We're still above a trillion. 1.16 trillion. Uh tell us about layer two beat, though, okay? So this is the total value locked. Um tell me this number's going up at least.

That number is going up. We are at 10.1 billion dollars TVL on layer two with the activity. The activity uh passed 5x ETH layer one. So combined uh Ethereum throughput on this layer twos, if you want to hit that activity tab, Ryan uh is now five X. Oh, we're down to 4.92. It was five earlier. We broached we breached five for the first time. We are now at 4.92. Although I will

X of what?

Of Ethereum.

Minus.

So ratios of Ethereum's throughput to the Ethereum layer one. So layer twos are doing five Ethereums collectively versus the Ethereum layer one.

Uh base is now included, I believe, in all of this TVL and activity, which we'll talk about in a little bit how the base launch has gone so far. But before we get there, I want to talk about the trad markets for a second. Oh boy. This is this is the thing that caught my interest this week. This is the Atlanta Fed. And you know, when they say Atlanta Fed, the Fed is um has all these different I'm gonna call them chapters. They're not chapters, but you know, geographic, you know, bank banks. The Atlanta Fed apparently has a model which predicts uh GDP for the US. And their model is currently predicting five point eight percent GDP growth in Q3. Uh, it seems wildly optimistic, uh, and yet

That's that's annualized over the year, right?

Five point eight percent annualized over the year, but just in Q three.

Right.

Okay? So five point eight percent.

Gargantuan

That's a big quarter. That is a good one.

quarter.

You have to take this with a grain of salt because it's a prediction model. And as more data comes in, it will probably go down. All right. But a lot of the market indicators of GDP have been up, including industrial production uh print, which showed factory output uh jumped 1% in July. Uh so it looks like GDP ain't too bad. I don't know if you ever look at this chart, David, but let me show you. This is um on the St. Louis Fed. They keep track of a bunch of the GDP numbers here.

Yeah, it's a

Uh this is GDP over time. Look at that.

So you see COVID right uh down 30% on a coin Q2 2020. That was a bad quarter.

negative thirty two percent

We popped up. But we did pop up uh to positive in Q3 2020. Positive from the previous. Anyway, this is where we are right now. Maybe I'll circle in on uh you know

zoom in. Yeah, that's a that is an up into the right chart.

right

Wow.

now. Um so I guess the the end of the story is uh GDP is not looking so bad these days. And uh

Yeah.

It is insane, actually. Like that

are you surprised by this? This is why I put it in here because I was like, oh, I haven't been looking at GDP for a while because you know,

other numbers are more interesting, but these numbers are better than I thought they'd be.

Yes, this is a I will call this a flash, as in this is a single point of measurement. Uh it's it really matters with if this thing continues. This is a this is a one of those charts where it's actually the area under the curve that is the big thing rather than the single point of reference. Um and so the longer that this is sustained, the better it gets. But man, coming in at 5.8%. That is crazy. Where is all this GDP? Where are we getting this GDP from?

Uh

What couch cushion did we look under?

yeah, that's probably uh a subject for an entire podcast. But what's interesting is um I don't hear the R word recession being said very often these days. And a year ago that was uh kind of a different story. Um

all right. Well let's let's uh actually talk about what BASE is doing because uh no recession in layer twos either. And BASE launched recently, was that last week, the week before?

Yep, that was awesome.