ROLLUP: Saylor Getting Sued | Avalanche Playing Dirty?! | MERGETEMBER | Maker Drama

And uh David, before we get in, because it is merged tober.

Merg Tober. No, merge merge Tember.

Excuse me, merged temper. Oh, did I just curse this?

Yeah, you just

Hey Bankless Nation. It is the first Friday of September. Or David, should I say merge tember? Because that's what month it is. It is the merge month. And that means that all of the bankless episodes in September are called merge casts, not podcasts. How'd you like that?

I did not know this. I did not know this about our

Are you ready for that? Anyway, guys, this is the the weekly roll up. I said it this time, not David. What should people do when listening to the weekly roll up, David? What beverage should they be drinking?

Oh, of course

you know, I'm not saying that everyone has to be drinking coffee, but you know, it's the coffee that I drink when I listen to the weekly roll up every Friday morning because sometimes I do actually listen to it. You know, to catch up in the week in crypto.

That's the coffee that you drink.

Yeah.

I think you meant to say it's the beverage that you drink is coffee, but you said it's the coffee that you drink is a beverage.

Excuse me. Yes, that's what I meant. That's what I meant. Yeah.

Same thing.

Sometimes I mix up trillions and billions, sometimes I mix up beverage and coffee. You know how it goes.

Friday

Well uh of course, if you are a weekly roll-up fan, you will know that if you add anything to your coffee, David considers that a beverage, no longer a coffee. The only real coffee is black coffee. That's what I learned from David.

Coffee, espresso, water and coffee, that's how it works.

That's that's

I don't write the rules.

No milk. All right guys, we got some interesting topics this week. David, do you want to tease some of them up?

Yeah, we got some shenanigans going on this week. Uh first off, Avalanche playing dirty, question mark, using uh nation state legal systems to sue other alt layer ones in order to get ahead, kind of just like taking a hack at your opponent's legs as you try and run a foot race. Uh, you know, you know, not totally completely proven. Uh, so we'll go back on the details on that. Um, but also, uh, Michael Saylor getting sued in the District of Columbia for not paying taxes, perhaps creating a forced Bitcoin seller. We're gonna cover that, that drama. Uh, and then also, Maker Dow wants to depeg die. Uh, no longer one dollar equals one die, perhaps. Uh, at least these are the conversations going on in the MakerDAO discourse. We're going to summarize all this and more, but also a bunch uh rather than all the like the negative stuff, there's also some positive stuff, of course, also happened this week. Ryan, what what were some of the good things that happened?

Alright, you got the bad things. A few of the good things, some highlights are a new liquid staking token, ETH staking token, just launched on the scene, and it's from one of the largest exchanges. I don't know if you guys can guess which one, but we will tell you in the roll-up as it progresses. Also, a roll-up itself just upgraded and made Ethereum seven times bigger. That was the news this week. Uh starts with an A. Won't tell you which one until we get into the episode. And then Facebook and Instagram just expanded their NFT offering. So there's definitely a lot to talk about on the good side. And of course, if you like these roll ups, you're listening on your podcast player. Make sure you like it. Make sure you write us a review. Uh, give us five stars if you think we are worthy of five stars. And then also, if you're listening to this on YouTube watching it, I should say make sure you hit that subscribe button. And uh, David, before we get in, because it is merged Tober.

Merg Tober. No, merged merged timber.

Excuse me, merge timber. Oh, did I just curse this?

Yeah, you just remember.

September day one of September, and we're already off to a bad start.

This might redeem me with listeners, is did you know? Alright, David, let's get to the markets, man. What is Bitcoin doing this week?

Uh going down. It's going down, Ryan. Uh Bitcoin started the week at $21,700. It went down at 9.5% to where it is now at $19,600. We are below $20,000. Oof.

That's just about double digits, man. That's a pretty steep drop.

We're below 2017 all time highs.

Okay, and Eth, is that showing us anything better? Because the merge is coming, David.

Yeah. Yeah. The the mer the Ether also down. Also down. Down 10%. Down start of the week at $17,010, currently at $15,030, down a little bit more than Bitcoin. Yeah.

We're gonna talk about this in a minute, but this feels awfully correlated to the NASDAQ in the stock market coming on the back of some of Powell's recent comments in Jackson Hole as he gave them. We'll get to that in a minute. But uh how about the ratio? Is that giving us any signal?

Uh yeah, it did the same thing it did last week where it plummeted down to like 0.073, 0.072, uh, but it then recovered back to 0.0783. So it's overall down 1.3% on the week. It started the week at 0.079, currently down to 0.078, but it hit 0.073 intro week and and bounced back up. So still life in the mer in the uh in the ratio.

Still life in the ratio. How about uh global cryptocurrency market cap? Are we above a trillion still?

Uh barely. We are barely above a trillion. We started the week at one point zero eight five trillion and we are at one point zero zero two trillion. So twenty billion dollars away from one trillion dollars. No wait, two billion two two billion dollars. Two billion dollars.

Alright, so what is ETH right now? So it is 14 or 1500 something?

1530. Okay, so it's still floating above the uh 2017 all time high, I guess, or 2018 all time high. I don't even know if people care about that number anymore. Do you think that's like old news?

Yeah, I'm not sure. I'm not sure.

Yeah, it feels kind of old news.

Alright, um this is a prediction for the merge date, which of course we've explained is is somewhat uh changing, ever changing. What is this showing us?

Yeah, so this is Bordel.wtf, and there was another merge predictor website that we showed last week that predicted the merge had like moved up to like early morning September and it even flashed into late uh Tuesday. Um but that was one calculation, and here's Bordel.wtf, which is a more conservative calculation. So this one moves a little bit slower. As hash rate comes and goes, the merge date changes. Uh and so like people don't really know. Uh and so the other the calculation that we showed last week was pretty like aggressive in how much it updates based uh based off of recent uh hash power. Uh the bordel.wtf site changes a little bit slower. Uh and this one is still showing that we are going to likely merge around Thursday noon UTC time, which is about 8 a.m. Eastern time. Um, we will see.

Alright, so um what happens with the hash rate? How is that related to the merge date, whether it's like sooner or later?

Yeah, so total terminal difficulty. This is that TTD number. It's the replacement for block height. So rather than this is why the date hops around every now and then. We didn't choose a block, we choose chose a TTD, a total terminal difficulty. What the hell is TDD? Uh you don't really need to know this. Don't like carve out space in your brain. This is really like the one time thing that's gonna be relevant. But it's basically the raw number of hashes. So total number of hashes that goes into proof of work. Once the total number of hashes hits that TTD number of 5, 8, 7, 5, and then what looks like 20 zeros after that. I'm not don't even know what number that is, uh a significantly large number, uh, then we merge. Uh and so the faster, the more hash power there is, the more that miners come online and do proof of work mining, the faster we grow the hashes, the faster we approach that TTD number. If miners drop off the network, then we approach that number slower. Uh and so it's a function of like how many miners are mining on Ethereum. And as that goes up, merge comes sooner. As it goes down, merge goes further away.

I wonder if we'll see any drop because if we see some drop like hashrate go down as as the Thursday of September 15th, excuse me, Merch Tember 15th approaches, then um like that could extend it into like Friday. I personally I'm I'm hopeful it it um hash hash rate uh goes down a little bit so that we get like you know like two three p.m. or so in the afternoon. It's just nice and casual, right? We could just kick back and relax and this doesn't go super early into the like wee hours of the city. I would like to have a margarita

While the merge happens, yes.

same.

Yeah.

Just like afternoon, early evening, that would be so relaxing.

Mm-hmm.

Uh but yeah, there's nothing we could do. I guess we don't really know what the hash rate is going to do. Is there any reason to believe that miners might drop off as as the merch gets closer?

It makes sense for miners to not come online as we get closer to the merge. So that that makes sense to me. Uh like if you have late no one's investing in in Ethereum proof of work now. That's too late. And so it only makes sense for it to stay the same or drop off. Um it's one of those things that there's a little bit of game theory behind this, right? So if like 50% of miners the day before the merge just like, all right, let's like pack up shop, uh, well, then you're actually making it twice as profitable for the 50% of miners that stick around for that last remaining day.

Right.

Uh and so like I don't know. I kinda think mm the if you will have a miner miner the only reason why you would want to shut down your mining rigs is to sell your GPUs before the rest of miners sell their GPUs. But I don't really know how liquid the GPU market is or how relevant that is. I don't know. I don't know.

So it's probably likely they'll they'll just stay and and continue to squeeze the the remaining proof of work juice out of this uh extremely

Profitable it would be a miner, so.

Yeah. Uh all right, David. Let's get to our Fed watch. That was our merge watch. Uh coming soon, man. Just next couple of weeks, of course, the merge. But the Fed watch. So as I said earlier, Jerome Powell was out in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. He gave a policy speech. And this sent markets tobbling. Here is a CNBC article. Powell warns of some pain, in quotes, ahead as the Fed fights to bring down inflation. The Fed chairman, Jerome Powell, on Friday, pledged, that's last Friday, that the central bank will use our tools forcefully to attack inflation. It's still running and it's running near its highest level in more than 40 years. So he he gave a speech. He said it would take some time. I think the TLDR of this is Powell is saying the Fed Reserve, uh the Federal Reserve has to continue raising rates and even hold them at the higher level that's coming soon until at least inflation is under control. And that's at the cost of jobs.

Uh possibly. So unemployment could continue to rise. And Powell is saying he'll continue to be to be hawkish. So even though he's saying that though, David, what's interesting is the market is still predicting that rate cuts will start around summer of next year, June of like 2023. If you kind of look at the like what the market is pricing in. So today the Fed rate, uh, the target rate um is between you know two and a half uh two and a quarter to two point five percent. And the market is pricing it a 70% chance that we increase by another 75 basis points September 21st. Right. So that would be the next time the Fed might increase rates. So Powell continuing to be hawkish. Of course, this sent markets for a tumble, the NASDAQ, the SP, and people are blaming this on the crypto dive as well. This is why ETH is down 10% on the week.

I think uh the other take I heard was that we had one month of uh uh inflation that didn't get higher. And then everyone was like, it's reversing. It's over. It's over. And then people are like, wait, no, that was just like one month worth of data. Like we're still in