ROLLUP: SBF in the USA | Visa Ethereum Payments | Trump NFTs | Binance Buys Voyager

SBF coming home, extra dieted to the US. Prison wasn't so great for him, so he wanted to, you know, work his way home. Uh Brian Armstrong makes regulation proposals that we wish that we had, and also Visa steps into the Ethereum frontier. What does that mean?

Bankless Nation! It is the Friday before the holidays. David, what time is it?

Oh, it's the Bankless Friday weekly roll up, Brian, where we cover the entire weekly news and crypto, which is always an ambitious endeavor, and we are almost at the finish line of 2022. Thank the Lord. Yes. Jeez. And so if you have not yet grabbed a morning coffee to enjoy the weekly news and crypto with us, please do.

Put some put some Baileys in this one because uh you know, let's get festive today. Why not? All the all the calls I've been having with people have been like they've been at their parents' house or something, like visiting family this week.

And uh and you are there too, right? So you're on the West Coast today.

I I am uh freezing my absolute tail off in the bottom of my sister's house with a sleeping baby in the next room. So this is a different kind of weekly roll up.

Guys, I I want you to know this level of dedication, all right? This is what David Hoffman does on his holiday while he's with family, sleeping babies. It's the crack of dawn when as we're recording this on the West Coast. There's no sun out, and we're still getting a weekly roll-up to you. Of course. Um right before I I take off myself. All right, David. So what are we gonna talk about this week? What are the topics?

Of course there are some SBF updates. Uh he is no longer, Ryan, in the Bahamas. He is in New York, uh with hanging out with the FBI. Uh so that's what's

Visiting family too.

Just visiting temporarily, uh, or perhaps more permanent. Uh so we'll we'll talk about all of the SBF drama. Caroline Ellison apparently cooperating with the Fed, so we'll talk about that too. Uh Brian Armstrong proposes crypto legislation that we wish we had. Uh so we'll unpack all of that. And also, Visa is taking a big step into the frontier of Ethereum protocol development. We'll talk about all of that and more.

One of the things as well that's going on this week is Binance is talking about bailing out Voyager, doing the thing that SBF promised to do, but was never able to manage. So that's an emerging story as well. David, let's get to the markets, man. What's Bitcoin doing to us today?

Uh it's going down. Uh it started at 17,740.

Exactly. Yeah. Okay. We are feeling the Bitcoin. Yeah, it is at 17,700 at the start of the week, ending the week at 16,700, down about 6% on the week.

Down six percent. Okay, so

Yeah, this is a little bit of a m the timing of the measurement. We just happened to start last week at a little bit of a high, and now we're kind of back to like two weeks is flat.

I mean, but like sixteen hundred, that doesn't feel great, does it?

No, it does

I mean we are below the twenty uh the twenty seventeen all-time high aren't we for Bitcoin.

by a lot. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

How about ETH? Uh that's also below the twenty eighteen

Yeah.

all time high. Yeah, what's what's what's ETH doing on the week?

Down six percent on the week as well, twelve hundred seventy down to twelve hundred, a little bit more than Bitcoin. Uh Bitcoin was a little bit less than six, ETH is a little bit more than six percent down on the week.

Guys, I don't think we're gonna get uh our bullish recovery, our V shaped recovery in twenty twenty two.

I feel like that's a safe one to call, huh, David?

Yeah, people were

And down.

people were kind of bullish for uh a green December, but December so far seems to be pretty weak.

And we're pr we're down on the year. Like if we look at the point in ETH. What do you mean we're down on the year?

Well no, actually, so no what ETH ETH was like at the start of this year, so December 23rd of last year. I remember it being in like the eight hundreds, something like this. So I I think we're up from that at least.

Wow.

I know that seemed like a long time ago.

No, no, no, no, no. You're you're skipping. You're two years. You're thinking in two years right now.

Am I really?

Yes, you are. Yeah, because ETH was four thousand dollars in December of last year.

Guys, the years are

okay.

Can't

was wrong. Screw it. I was

I was thinking about twenty twenty.

December, wasn't I? Yeah, you got you got confused because we were recently talking about this when we were doing our ETH uh bull case or ETH with the bulls that we recently did, which I believe comes out Monday.

Yeah, it does. You were thinking in two year time frames. Sorry, brother.

Alright, so we're up on the two year though, David. That's the silver lining. But look at the one year. Wow, we were

One year is literally down only.

we were 4K last year at this time on ETH. Um definitely down, definitely a tough year.

In complete denial of the bear market. Yeah.

Yeah, I basically was subconsciously for a minute there. Uh how about the ETH Bitcoin ratio? What's that looking like?

ETH Bitcoin ratio down one and a half percent. We are down to 0.0718.

Uh we shaped off a nice uh two trillion dollars this year in terms of crypto market cap, I believe. Uh and we are under a trillion dollars. What's this number this week, David?

Yeah, we are we are at roughly 900 billion in total market cap last week. 837 billion is the total market cap this week. Oof.

Yikes. A few trillion down. But I want to say to everyone listening to Bankless, and uh we know you guys have been with us through this uh mighty fall from 4,000 all the way down to uh to twelve hundred. Uh congratulations to you because you have survived 2022. Yeah, it's almost over. Uh this is a market that, as I just mentioned, is 2 trillion down from the top in crypto. That's uh that's a lot of zeros um down. We've also suffered the worst inflation, David, in over 40 years. Uh and we had the death of one of the three largest crypto exchanges this year. FTX just evaporated. SPF is literally in jail right now.

And not just an exchange, an algo stablecoin. All of the biggest like lending platforms Celsius, BlockFi, Voyager, the biggest hedge funds in crypto all evaporated last year. And yet you, you are still here, you are still listening. You survived. And I think that is worthy of some holiday celebration. Congratulations for surviving 2022. You've definitely earned it.

Yeah, that's it's worth noting that like it was not easy to do that. It was not easy to get through 2022. And this is one of the if you zoom out as to what crypto is going to do for society and for all markets, all financial markets, like

holding on to your crypto assets from now into 20 years from now is not easy. Like people get whipped off by volatility, they get enticed by leverage, they play in the shitcoin casino. If you are still around, congrats. That was not a hard thing to do. That took mental resolve.

That that's the thing, uh w when you say David it's not easy, you're absolutely right. It is not easy. And yet, David, it is so, so, so simple, isn't it?

It's not easy.

It's just like a whole bunch of things you don't do.

Yeah.

Yeah, just hold. How about that? Just hold rather than going margin, rather than playing in kind of the shitcoin casino, rather than like aping into you the latest NFT, right? You just hold for the long term, and you would have uh been fine through this as long as you can bear like these kind of uh you know 70 to 80 percent

downs from from all-time high. Um, but there is a silver lining here, and that is DeFi is rising. Look at this. This is the decentralized exchange user growth across all chains. And this starts in um January of 2020, over two years. Uh look at this the number of DEX traders over time on Ethereum. We're above five million now. We're we're closing in on seven million, and that was basically nothing two years ago.