ROLLUP: Satoshi Exposed | Unichain | FBI Token | Permissionless III | Hoffman vs. Warwick

Bankless Nation, happy second week of October. David and I are live in Salt Lake City at Permissionless.

Permissionless.

The third permissionless conference. Uh, and we got a weekly roll-up to bring to you live.

David's at a separate desk, and he was like, I feel so far away from you. I'm like, dude, we're usually like hundreds of miles away from each other when we're recording this. So uh, but this has been a big week for crypto. We gotta start with talking about the uniswap reveal. So the unicain is coming to crypto. A new chain for Uniswap and DeFi. What does it do? Is it good for the Uni token? Those are some of the questions we'll talk about.

I think also, what does it mean for the Ethereum rollup centric roadmap? I don't think it's gonna change the roadmap at all, but how do people feel about the rollup centric roadmap now that I think Ethereum's biggest app is now a chain? I think with big implications. I think people are gonna be chewing on this one for a while, including myself. Also, did HBO just figure out who Satoshi is? People coming into Bitcoin for the first time and deciding, and they're telling us exactly who Satoshi is. They found them, not us.

I'm sure they figured it out.

And then also, is Ethereum going to cut down on block times? Are we gonna make the L1 great again great again? There is a brand new EIP endorsed, thumbed up by Justin Drake, as well as others. We're gonna talk about uh what all of that means for Ethereum.

Uh David, you know the FBI launched a token?

Yep.

The FBI token.

Uh it's not so fun, okay?

Wait, do I wanna buy this or not buy this?

You don't want to buy it. Unless you want to go to jail. Also, uh, Gary Gensler sent another NASIGram to a crypto company. Which company is it gonna be? And

It's that's every week.

That's happened at least six times this year, but they are fighting back, which is the good news. Also, let's let's go over a few metrics on the US economy. It's kind of feeling good out there, and I want to share with you. So it's not looking like the crypto I was promised, at least it's not looking like the October I was promised in the markets today. So let's talk about the Bitcoin price. And I need these prices for you. You've been busy at the conference, so hopefully they're right. But what what are the pricing? Yeah.

When Ryan Ryan Ton Adams puts in the prices, we all should uh everyone check out your own prices just in case.

Yeah, plus or minus 10% here.

10%. Nonetheless, Bitcoin started the week $60,000, 300, down one and a half percent. Not terrible, but below the $60,000 mark right now at the time of recording, $59,545. Ether price starting the week $2,330, up a percent and a half. Uh $2,366 is where we are currently. But the real alpha is actually in the stock market. Okay. Stocks are once again at all time highs. Uh I own fewer stocks, Ryan, than I own crypto. Uh so my portfolio is not at all time highs. But

Pivot to stocks a year ago, David.

yeah, right, when people are saying pivot to AI, yeah.

Yeah, pivot to stocks. S P all time highs. NASDAQ, like pretty much all time highs. So this recession that everyone is talking about hasn't hasn't come. You remember the the yen uh trade scare that happened?

That was that was for gone. That's the blip in the chart.

Was that late early October? I don't even remember. Neither does the market. That's the good news. Should we check on uh in on the ETF? So the Ethereum ETF flows. David, there were a number of days that were like straight zero across the board.

Zeros. Yeah, call it a wash for the past like, I don't know, until since October 3rd, like no meaningful inflows or outflows. Um uh same with Bitcoin. We had a very big inflow days of $230 million on October 7th, but uh a couple days of $20 and $40 million outflows. Uh nothing terribly exciting happening in the uh ETF lands. Although I will say we have known this for a while, but here at the permissionless conference we had uh notable ETF uh experts, including Samara Cohen from BlackRock, kind of confirming our uh ideas about who is really buying these ETFs.

Yeah, who is it?

It's us.

It's us.

It's us.

It's you and I.

It's uh people it's crypto people taking Bitcoin Ether off-chain and putting it into BlackRock, into uh Bitwise, into Fidelity. Okay. Uh and you know, that's I think kind of was against expectations. People like, oh, once we open up the ETFs, the boomers are gonna come, this is gonna inflow all this retail. Turns out it's like tax advantage accounts. Uh you can actually get uh yield on your Bitcoin ETFs. Uh pr in in uh you can do security lendings with your Bitcoin ETFs, and people I think are scarred from Celsius, and so that has actually attracted, you know, retail crypto native capital, but it's actually crypto native capital here, which you know there's one take which is well, that's bearish because we were hoping it was outside capital. Yeah. But my take, which is bullish, is that well, the outside capital hasn't even come yet. Oh, we're still just us. It is the idea of the best ETFs, the top two ETFs of all time, and it was just us.

This entire time, and we've still been early. That's great. Do you want to uh talk about the ETH ratio or or skip that on the week, David?

Uh.0397, trying to get back above 0.04, but other than that, still still in sad zone. Uh total crypto market cap, where are we at on the week? $2.21 trillion coming in uh still kind of low. I want to I want to see 2.5. I want to see 2.5.

Um are you looking at these jobs numbers? Let's let's switch to Trad5 markets.

Looking at these job numbers.

Okay, jobs numbers have been pretty good, apparently. So we've got a um the the US added far more jobs than expected in September. So analysts, I guess, were expecting a forecast of about 150,000 net new jobs, and we got two hundred and fifty four thousand instead. So nice

Is that why stocks are at all-time highs?

I I think so. It's part of it.

When we have more jobs,

jobs are going up, people is it yeah, people are getting more jobs, and that is indicating a lack of recession. And now that we are having uh cutting interest rates and people are getting more jobs, that is indication that the recession is just not likely, less and less likely, which is why the stock market is going up. Is that is that the analysis?

I mean, the market's looking pretty good in general, right? So inflation looks like that uh has come down. Actually, um, let me go to this. Did did you catch this uh Noah Noah Smith blog post here? I did not. The title is Let's Pause to Appreciate the Remarkable US economy. And he goes over a few metrics. I thought this was pretty valuable. So uh number one, he talks about the job market. Okay, he's not looking at unemployment in this metric, he's looking at uh the employment population ratio. And apparently this rate is holding at 80.9%, so above 80%, which is higher than before the pandemic, and is in fact the second highest rate in US history. Okay, and this is even a better indicator than unemployment uh for who wants a job. So pretty much everyone in the US right now who wants a job has a job. So that's one metric. We've got some other metrics here, he uh goes through. Of course, inflation. We've been talking a lot about that on bank list. That's basically back to normal, right? So we have uh CPI that is sort of back in the the two to three percent range, which feels pretty good from that perspective. So we got inflation, we've got jobs going well, wages and productivity are both up.

So this is a chart of labor productivity output for all workers in the US. And if you're looking at this, you could see, I mean, we're kind of like

close, close to a a a fairly good range and uh, you know, pre-COVID type ranges from a productivity perspective. And wealth, I mean, this is you know, some people look at wealth and they see inequality, and that's also true, but like wealth is cruising towards all time highs as well. Um, housing prices, a lot of good things in the US economy at this point, including this. America is beating the world at this point. So this is real GDP growth in the G7 countries.

America's growing faster than any other country.

Yeah.

Has been for like since COVID.

And like fairly significant like significantly fa faster as well. I mean it's just not uh not a small thing. They

Second place is Canada. Shout out America's hat.

Yeah, shout out Canada. Uh doing okay as well. Anyway, the entire TLDR of this post is the US economy is doing pretty well. Maybe we should pause and appreciate it. He does point to some storm clouds, which is deficit. Look at this last chart, David. This is federal surplus or deficit as a percentage of DDP. And we are like looking like the 1940s, you know, wartime sort of deficits. So the question is hey, how much are the deficits actually contributing to all of these good times? Right.

The economy's going super well, but the government is spending a lot. Those are correlated.

You'd also think that would be good for crypto.

Not yet though. We just have to wait for it. Maybe not October. We'll see. We still got a long month. David, we also

feel frothy.

It doesn't feel frothy. The recession is feels sort of like a distant thing at this present moment. The only thing that's left for crypto is for people to care about crypto again. Yeah. Which is still a hard problem.

I mean we'll talk about the permissionless conference, but that's been the vibe of the conference that we're attending as well. It's like not too hot, new not too cold, it's like just right. This is we're in the Goldilocks zone of crypto and I I think that's a a good place to accumulate. Uh but we always say that, don't we?

What we say. Coming up next, the UniChain finally here. How will it change DeFi? Now that the Uniswap, the biggest app on the Ethereum layer one, is going to its own layer two inside of the Optimism Super Chain. HBO releases their Bitcoin documentary revealing who Satoshi is. They figured it out. No one in the Bitcoin space figured it out. HBO figured it out. Wow. And also Ethereum got a proposal for lowering block times that uh might not compromise staking whatsoever. So we're gonna talk about all this and more, but first a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors. Some people claimed it was inevitable, others said it would never happen. But nonetheless, this week Uniswap announced the UniChain, a brand new layer two designed to prioritize the needs of DeFi users and protocols. It is a layer two on uh the OP stack inside of the Optimism Super Chain, developed in collaboration with Flashbots and Optimism, of course. Flashbots, huh? Flashbots, yeah. I mean, it makes sense. We'll get in, we'll get into the flashbots element in a second. Uh, but some key benefits here very fast block times.

Yes.

Uh two hundred to two hundred and fifty millisecond sub block times is what they're targeting. It's currently uh the test net is currently clocking in.

Real fast, right?

One second block times, that's very fast. Arbitrum uh has 250 millisecond block times. Solana has 400 millisecond block times. Uniswap is going for 200 to 250 millisecond block times, which if it comes faster than Arbitrum can speed up his chain, would make it the fastest chain in crypto period. Uh that's pretty cool. Uh they and this, of course, uh actually Tim Roughgarden, uh who is the uh crypto economics expert out of Colombia, I believe. Really smart guy. Real smart guy. I'm dropping a Tim Roughgarden take, actually measured that when you lower block times, you strictly uh lower aggregate MEV, which is important globally, but it's especially important for the liquidity locus of crypto at large. So when Uniswap has its own chain with very fast block times, we are materially uh reducing the amount of MEV that is getting extracted from the users and from the protocol, which is pretty cool. Uh they've also got seamless multi chain swapping because they're gonna be part of the super chain, and the super chain is gonna come in with their interoperability plan soon. Swapping on the Uniswap will be very seamless inside of the super chain. And then I think what's the how this is gonna work is they're going to fix perfect interoperability inside of the super chain.

Yes.