ROLLUP: The Institutions Are Here | Vitalik & Brady BFFs | Verge of the Merge | Senator Warren, Sup?

Whoa wait, who said that? The metaverse is rendered at the periphery. Did we say that?

That's my line. Yeah.

That's a great line.

That's a David Hoffman original, brother.

Wow.

Yeah, you like.

That's great. No, I I love that one.

That's uh yeah, yeah, we should start a podcast.

Hey Bankless Station, happy fourth week of March, David. It's Friday morning. What time is it?

Oh, it's the Bankless Friday weekly roll-up, Ryan, where we cover the entire week in crypto, which is always an ambitious endeavor. This week's pretty tame. It's pretty pretty okay. It's gonna be it's gonna be fun though. There's a lot of interesting things going on. Uh Ryan, there are some hot headlines. So tell us what's going down this week.

Yeah, usually you're more intimidated by the length of this agenda, but th this week maybe feels manageable, David. Is that what you're telling us?

Yeah, this is a uh five out of ten on the crazy scale, which is modest for crypto.

Five out of ten. Alright, okay, so here's what we're gonna talk about. Yugo Labs, the apes bought the punks. Well, actually, that happened last week, okay? But this week, they just got $450 million in funding. Okay, what are they gonna do with this? They're gonna build a real metaverse. A real metaverse. And um A16Z is in on this, of course. Uh, and we have the deck. We have the slide deck. We know exactly what they are planning to do, so we're gonna comment on that. Also, Vitalik, Buterin, made the cover of Time magazine. This led to a lot of uh hilarious Twitter threads, I think. Hilarious Twitter interviews. Yeah, yeah. We're gonna talk about that. Um, also, GameStop released their first NFT marketplace. That's out. It's built on loop ring, and the loop ring community is absolutely stoked about this. Couldn't be more excited. Uh, number going up a little bit, so we'll talk about that too. And of course, more of our weekly cringe out of Elizabeth Warren. She's proposing new things in Congress, anti crypto things, shadowy super coder things. So, of course, you know we gotta comment on that because this sort of stuff can't happen in a free Western liberal democracy where uh property rights um should should count for something. So uh we're gonna talk about that too.

The consistency of cringe out of Elizabeth Warren is just it's every single week at this point.

But also, Elizabeth, come on the podcast because we're we're friendly and we

Don't bite.

it's true. Uh David, before we get in, we gotta talk about the permissionless conference that is coming up. We are on the road to permissionless right now. This is gonna be the DeFi conference of the year. Not just DeFi, also the metaverse. Also, we're gonna uh talk about like institutional stuff as well. A lot of people are gonna be there. Who are some of the speakers you're most looking forward to seeing?

Oh my god, some some of my best friends out there. Justin Drake, we're gonna be talking about ETH's ultrasound money, of course, on the verge of the merge, because this is happening

Is that a panel title?

We're working we're working to the verge of the merge, Ryan. Because this is getting the permissionless is in two months. Two months. You have two months to get your ticket. And in two months, we will be on the cusp of the merge. I mean, excuse me, pardon me, the verge of the merge. So Justin Drake is gonna be talking all about that. Of course, Chris Dixon from the famous uh Web3 Mental Models podcast. You guys know all about Chris. Nick Carter is gonna talk about stable coins. Eric Peter is Eric Peters, who's been on the podcast before, is gonna talk about uh some uh changing world order type content, I've got I'm guessing. Uh and then we also got J Ho from Axie Infinity, Jake Shravinsky for all the legal minds out there, Ryan Selkis, Stani from Ave. Uh it's going to be, I think, the the hottest event of the summer. Uh, and this is, of course, where Ryan and I will meet for the very first time. So it's gonna it's gonna be a fun time. We uh Bankless books their Airbnb. So Bankless has an Airbnb. There's gonna be the Bankless party. It's gonna be sick as um a lot. It's gonna be very sick, excuse me.

Uh and I'm I'm like

On Beach Florida, too. The dates are May 17th through 19th. And David said you have two months to get these tickets. You kind of do, but also you kind of don't. Because number one, they're probably going to sell out in the coming uh weeks. And number two, they just get more expensive over time. All right. So there was a time you could purchase these tickets for like $15. I don't want to tell people that, but like the price has gone up a lot since then and it will continue to go up until the date of the conference. So book now. Of course, if you have a Bankless Premium membership, you get a discount on this.

big disc

not a little disc

Yeah, is it

big disc

is it twenty? Twenty percent?

thirty percent, thirty percent,

Thirty percent

thirty percent

A generous, a healthy discount, so go check that

for your whole entire premium membership.

out. It really does.

Some no-brainers there. Also, another no-brainer. Connect your wallet to Xerion. Xerion is like the best. Like uh when I first discovered Xerion getting into crypto, right? It's just like, oh my god, I can bring my assets to the interface rather than being locked inside of the interface, like with a Wells Fargo account. And they were adding features all of the time. Some of my favorite features that they've added recently is like multi-chain support, Ethereum, Optimism, so L2s, Avalanches, alternative L1s. They also have Phantom support, the just added Solana support. So this is like their first non EVM chain. So you know how you have your assets scattered all over the crypto universe here? Uh you can organize that. You can track them all in one single mission control center user interface for your DeFi antics. Also, David, there's some uh bridging capability here.

Time to be

I knew you liked a bridge. Yeah. So w what can you do here?

Yeah, so we're going to be in a multi-chain world. Uh whether with uh multi-L layer one, multi-v uh layer two, it's going to happen. And there you shouldn't have to go to the Optimism website or the Arbitrum website to go and use their portals. You should just go to Xereon because they got it all for you. Uh you may imagine just like, you know, a triple monitor, five monitor setup, and you have like all this is what Xereon does. It's your battle station for the multi-chain world, and it makes it extremely easy to bridge to all the other layer twos. The one of the fun stories I like to tell about why people should load up their uh address to something like uh Xerion. Like the first time I did it, Ryan, uh you know.

Covered things?

Yeah, you know how you sometimes you you discover twenty twenty dollars in your pocket. Yeah, like Xerion will tell you everything about the state of the tokens that you have. So there's a decent chance you have tokens that you don't aren't even aware of. So go check your pants pockets by loading up your address into Xerion.

All the all that change in the cushions of your couch. Yeah, sh shake all that out. Go go find it.

Go turn it into ETH.

Yeah, I honestly I found some NFTs this way too because they have an NFT viewer. These are not my NFTs, but I was like, oh, I own some okay NFTs and they're actually like worth something, which is kind of cool to know, especially uh NFTs aren't worth as much as they were maybe a month or two ago. So

Then what happened next was Ryan pulled out his tax document and started up with it.

that's true too. True story.

Anyway, guys, go check that out. Go connect your wallets to Xerion and uh get this all in one place. Of course, we will include a link in the show notes because that's what we do for you. Market time, David. Bitcoin.

Mm hmm.

What do you got to say about that?

Happy Bitcoin. Happy Bitcoin. Happy crypto prices this week. Yeah, Bitcoin started the week at $41,000, ending the week right where it is right now at $44,000. Up 7% on the week. A little bit of chop from A to B, but here we are at $44,000. So how are we doing that? The bulls are bullish.

I thought we were down only. How are we doing this? This is like almost, you know, it's rising above some of these uh local peaks, the last like early March peak. Is this a pre is this a pre-uh war conflict peak here?

That's exactly right. We are starting to get higher than where we were pre-Russian invasion of Ukraine.

That is crazy. And how about ETH? What's that looking like?

Same week. Same, same. Yeah. Start of the week at $2,800. Uh that was the low. And we are currently just below $3,100. Basically call it $3,100. We got up to $3,120 right before recording. Dipped a little bit down right below it. But again, uh chop between the A to the B at the start of the week to the end of the week. But you know, overall, when you zoom out and look at it smoothly, it's a it is a lineup.

You know, I I I think I've told you before that like that 3K number is really important to me. Anytime it's above 3K, it's a good day, right? It's like feels it feels bullish. Uh feels like we're escaping bullish.

Yeah, the pull of the bear market. So uh wow, up on the week. And is this on any news or anything, David? Like, why are we going up?

Uh there's a bunch of reasons I could I could hypothesize about. Um

I th but I don't really have any strong conviction about any of them. Uh so I think like the the trade, if you're a trader, putting on your trade or hat is just an overall mean reversion. So like uh Ryan, zoom out to like the the four month four month time frame or something like that. Oh three months, yeah.

Yeah, so I I guess that the mean reversion trade has actually started to already kind of play out, going from 2600 to like 3200. But there's also the mean reversion trade of going from like 3,000 back to 4,000. Uh and so like two different trade time frames uh for trades on the menu. But you know, sometimes people are like, well, the the sellers just got exhausted and there's not enough sellers to keep on making prices go down. And even though macro or macro is still super bearish, uh crypto, like whenever crypto disassociates from macro, it's usually to the bullish side. Um and I think that's perhaps what's going on.

Yeah, that's um at some point I'm definitely far from calling this sort of thing, right? I still believe we're very much in like kind of like a crab crab market season sideways action. But like at some point

prices get high enough, it does break the back of of the bear market and the bear market fears. I don't know what price point that is for ETH. Certainly,

Only higher than