ROLLUP: Why Solana is Down Bad | Avi Arrested | MicroStrategy Purchases $41M Bitcoin | Gemini Sued Over Gemini Earn

Bankless Nation, welcome to the very last weekly roll up of the year. Happy Friday morning to you. I hope you're drinking your cup of coffee while we cover the entire weekly news in crypto, which is always an ambitious endeavor, which is why I've pulled in my dear friend Anthony Susano to sub in for Ryan while he is getting his software updates for 2023. Anthony, welcome to the Bankless Weekly Roll Up.

Hey David, thanks for having me today. I love how you say Ryan's getting a software update just because there's that meme that he's actually a robot because no one had seen him before. I think permissionless, right? Like was where everyone actually saw him for the first time, but

Yeah,

including myself.

yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I love it.

Yeah, no, it's a it's a good meme and it stuck pretty damn well. Uh anyways, uh Ryan, like I said, uh oh he's actually out on vacation enjoying some some well earned breaks with wife AI, child AI. Uh so we're pulling in Anthony Susano to to sub in for for his help. So Anthony, thank you for for helping us walk through the news. Uh you ready to do it?

Yeah, let's go.

All right. So last weekly roll-up of the year, Bankless Nation, we are going to talk with some year-end market talk. We got roughly about 10 times the amount of charts that we usually do on a weekly roll-up. So we're going to walk through the year's winners, the year losers, and what the snapshot in time is going into 2023. So that's going to come up first. An extra large market section, some candy to end the year with. Coming in in second, got to talk about the state of Solana. Everyone is talking about it on crypto Twitter right now, so we're going to discuss that. Coming up after that, we also got to talk about the state of multi-coin capital, because it's not great. And then lastly, we're going to talk about the state of layer twos, because a report out of Banklist from our analyst Ben just came out, and there's always a bull market somewhere. So we're going to talk about the state of layer twos. Bankless station, you know the deal. Please like and subscribe, rate and review wherever in the metaverse you are listening to this content. That is how we get crypto back onto the top of the iTunes business and investing charts. And before we get to all of that topics, first we get to have to give a shout out to our strategic sponsor for 2023. All right, Anthony, are you ready to get into the markets? Let's start with Bitcoin, of course. Bitcoin started the week at the high, high price of $16,800, ending the week at the low, low price of $16,600, down 1%. Anthony, any takes on Bitcoin?

No, I mean this range that Bitcoin and ETH have both been in uh is just hilarious to me because I mean it is the uh Christmas period, right? And we're gonna be seeing very low volatility around this, and then you see these wicks on the chart of people just trying to kind of uh wreck shorts and wreck longs, and it's just like this little bit of a ping-pong going on. But yeah, volatility is is very, very low right now, uh, and this range kills both bears and bulls. I think when I look at this stuff, it reminds me of 2019, or I guess like parts of 2019 where we just kind of ranged forever and 20 and probably even 2020, and people are getting really frustrated with it, like, oh my god, start for volatility. And typically you see people go down the risk curve in that in that environment, which is kind of funny in a bear market to see people going down the risk curve. But yeah, it's it's an interesting dynamic because I think this time around we we have NFTs, right? Where people kind of seek refuge in NFTs, and that's why we see some NFTs still popping off, even though ETH and BTC are like sideways, basically, and everything else is basically dumping. So, yeah, it's it's kind of an interesting dynamic to see how people will move between different markets because they're they're kind of like starved, right? And you you go where the food is, so to speak.

Yeah, and when there's no volatility in the blue chips like Bitcoin and Ether, when that that range gets really, really compressed and all of us like monkeys are opening up our price apps and being like, Hey, can I get some dopamine? Like, can you do anything? Go down even. Like, give me some excitement. Uh and so people's like trading ranges get compressed and compressed and compressed. And so they start to get like more or less more more bearish or more bullish inside of tighter ranges, and they start to play tighter trades, and it just makes the the field of play like tighter and tighter. And I remember, I think what you were talking about in 2019 was like the Bart effect that was just absolutely massive in 2019, where it would Bart up and then Bart down. And you could like sometimes just feel a Bart coming, and it's just like, oh yeah, we just Bart it up, give it like somewhere between 12 and 18 hours, we will Bart back down. And what Bart means, Bart is like Bart Simpson. Like, imagine like the Bart head go straight up, like jag around for a little bit, go straight down, and then you would do that inverse. Anyways, uh we're we digress. ETH price kind of doing the same. Start of the week at 1220, ending the week at twelve hundred flat, down about one point nine percent. And of course, the ETH Bitcoin ratio, uh pretty damn flat on the week, about half a percent down. Uh we are at zero point uh seven two on ETH BTC. Anthony, any comments on ETH BTC?

Um, I think it's just continuing to do what it's done all year is remain flat against Bitcoin, which is actually incredibly bullish for ETH, I think. Uh as people have said on Twitter, I've I think I've said it as well. Uh basically ETH didn't do this last bear market. ETH went straight down against Bitcoin last bear market. It dumped like 90% against Bitcoin, uh, you know, and 94% against USD. But this time around, it's basically flat on the year. We had a bit of a dip mid year uh when ETH bottomed in June because of uh 3AC puking all their ST ETH for ETH and then selling that ETH um uh fr from there. But we bounced back from that and now we've just kind of stuck in this this range for the whole year, which as I said, I think is incredibly bullish. There are people calling for ETH BTSE to actually nuke um maybe next year or something like that.

Oh I've I've heard people call for it to nuke like soon.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I've been hearing it all year from particular people, but I look at that and I'm like, well, look, if you're just looking at charts, maybe you can come to that conclusion if you're just looking at historical kind of chart data. But the biggest thing for me is the merge, uh, and that's what's affected ETH BTC the most. By removing that sell pressure off that we would have had from miners, uh, that's I why I believe ETHBTC is is so strong, at least. Uh, and there's other reasons as well, but I think that's a core reason. And if you're just looking at charts, they're not going to show you that. Charts, the historic historical charts will just show you Ethereum in the proof of work error, right? It's not going to show you Ethereum and the proof of stake error.

Yeah. Uh what do you make of this trend? So we have like this very long term trend from like almost twenty nineteen of ETH BTC just going up and to the right, but then we have the the short term trend of it coming down. I am not a TA charter person. Any TA person looking at the chart right now is gonna cringe. But just what do you what do you make of this like convergence of like kind of short term bearishness versus long term bullishness on the ETH BTC ratio?

Yeah, I mean I think since 2020, ETH has really come into its own thing. Uh ETH is viewed a lot more positively by the wider market. Now it is still viewed as more risky than BTC, though. That's why you'll see the kind of volatility here and you'll see things sell, especially in big sell-offs, you'll see ETH selling off harder than than BTC. But I I think more and more people understand the ETH bull case now than they once did. More and more people understand that Ethereum is here to stay, or at least maybe not even understand, but believe Ethereum is here to stay. Because believe it or not, even up until like the end of 2020, uh probably after DeFi Summer or during DeFi Summer, uh, a lot of people didn't believe that Ethereum was going to amount to anything, right? It was still Bitcoin, Bitcoin, Bitcoin. Uh, and I think there's a bit of parallels now with with some other things we're going to talk about later. But yeah, that that's that's why. Because I think Ethereum just has a much better story now, and there's a much better bull case for it than there used to be. And obviously, we just did the episode with um

With Justin Drake and DC and myself and you guys uh that that you put live there. But I think, yeah, people more and more people understand the bull case for ETH and Ethereum now, and that's helping there. But as well as those kind of flows that I guess Hellpress originally talked about due to the merge, um, I think people looked at that and were like, oh well, ETH is not doing very well against USD. It's like, yeah, but that's a bear it that's bear market things, right? In a bear market, nothing's gonna do well against USD, right? But look at ETH relative to other assets and look at its historical performance and look at its current performance. ETH is trading like it is basically the same risk profile as Bitcoin, which is quite something. That's never been like that before. Nothing's ever traded like Bitcoin before, honestly, in terms of risk profile. Bitcoin was considered by far the safest asset in crypto and was your flight to safety in a bear market. Uh, but that's not the that's not the um that's not the thing anymore.

Yeah, so I've got the uh Missouri chart screeners up, and we are looking at a comparison down from all-time highs. Uh bit uh Ether actually ahead of Bitcoin in terms of down from all-time high by a whopping 0.6%. So ether is down 0.6% less than Bitcoin, which is unheard of compared to last cycle. Uh, if you go and inverse this and see who's down the most, of course, we have Terra Luna, Terra Luna, of course, followed by BitTorrent, followed by Lido. Some of the start from the some of the starting points of these are all kind of arbitrary, right? Why is Zcash down technically 100%? Yeah. It started off that out at this weird price, but we're gonna go into some some winners and losers. Uh so but but first I want to actually look at Bitcoin and USD in yearly charts. This is the last weekly roll up of the year. And sometimes people forget to zoom all the way out and see what things look like on a yearly basis. And so what I've got on the screen here are both the linear and logarithmic charts for Bitcoin with yearly candles. So each one of those candles that you are seeing is 12 months of time. Uh, and you can obviously just see a secular bull market in Bitcoin unquestionably up and to the right. Like there's actually only two red candles on the screen, uh, which is kind of insane, actually. Uh so one, two, three, four. The first four years of Bitcoin, it was green on the yearly chart. Then uh in twenty sixteen.

Mm-hmm.

No, wait. Oh well this is actually isn't the full the full chart for Bitcoin, excuse me. Two out of the one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine last years of Bitcoin, only two years have been read, and we are of course finishing one right now. Uh Anthony, what do you make of this uh of this chart?

Yeah, I mean I think this is what people will talk about when they say four year cycle for for Bitcoin, right? Where you'll have like uh some you know a red year after having a few green years, right? But it's it can be kind of arbitrary. Like you can actually get an an all-time historical chart for Bitcoin. It's called the uh the BLX on Trading View, it's uh the brave new coin Bitcoin index. Um and and the four year cycle is pretty pretty uh prominent in that. And I understand that because of the hardening cycle and all that sorts of stuff. And maybe that's been true in the past, but I don't think it necessarily is going to be true going forward. Um I have a lot of opinions on Bitcoin that I won't give generally here, but I I I think that the the comparison here between Linear and Log is quite important as well. Linear will show you.

The extent of I guess the movements and how wild they can get. You can see on the linear chart, there's a massive wick for Bitcoin in uh in in in 2021 there that's come back down, and then you've got obviously the red, but the log will give you a better long-term picture and a better smooth picture of what things look like. Uh and and traders use both. I I've seen traders use linear a lot actually because they like to see the because they're more short term oriented. They like to see the pronounced movements there because it'll show you it more violently. Um, like yeah, especially on the ETH chart, right? Uh, but uh, but yeah, I I prefer to look at log charts just generally though.

Yeah, that that ETH chart is even more volatile looking than the uh than the Bitcoin chart. But uh both charts are just looking absolutely up and to the right. Of course, uh Ether's actually got much more red yearly candles than Bitcoin does, and and but um that's also just because this is also picking out Ethereum's uh earliest years as well, because this one actually does go back to its its first year of existence. Uh and then of course here is the ETH Bitcoin yearly candles, which also is just up and to the right. So it's it's just important to know that no matter what you look at in crypto, Bitcoin, Ether, Ether uh BTC, uh things are always up and to the right. Uh that's not probably true for every single asset. Of course, there are many and many assets that came during the 2013 bull market that aren't around. Same thing with 2017. But over time, we're starting to collect more and more assets in crypto that when you zoom out and go into the yearly candles, everything is just up and to the right. Any final comments on these yearly charts before we move on?

Yeah, I mean I I think it's also important to I guess understand outlier bias here uh because as you said like there are many, many, many, many assets from those previous market cycles that never came back against USD, let alone ETH and BTC. So always good to keep that in mind when looking at things and trying to say, oh, well, you know, ETH and BTC did this last cycle. It means my favorite asset can come back. It's like no, that doesn't that's not what it means. There's no guarantee of that. Um, I understand why you would say that, and it's fine to believe that, but don't fool yourself into thinking that that's a guaranteed thing, right?

Mm-hmm.

Take a snapshot of the NFT markets right now, since this is again the last weekly roll up of the year. So to end the year, the Board Ape Yacht Club coming in at a 73 ETH floor, taking the number one spot, followed by the Crypto Punks at 65 ETH, followed by Mutant Apes at 15 ETH. Those are the one, two, and three NFT projects to finish the year. Anthony, you want to talk about NFTs or you want to keep on moving?

Uh I mean I don't pay too much attention to NFTs. I always find it funny watching the spats on Twitter, especially between the bored apes and the crypto punks, uh with the floor price. I mean, now being quite close. They used to be, you know, quite far apart. Uh but I always find that that kind of entertaining. But yeah, I don't really pay much too much attention to it generally. It's just not my scene.

Yeah, I think that board apes might have actually flipped back over to number one this last week because CryptoPunks were in the in the lead for the two or three weeks prior to that. But unquestionably, board apes were in the number one spot for the vast majority of 2022. All right, so we're gonna look at some Tradfy. We got Tesla and Amazon on the screen in his charts. Absolutely wrecked. Uh these are some of the Amazon's going all the way back down to its March of 2020, its COVID, uh, COVID lows, and we are that is where we are now. So imagine that Amazon is back at the same price it was at the bottom of the March COVID lows. Kind of insane. Uh Tesla is an absolute free fall coming in at $123 when it used to be almost as high as almost $500, but definitely over $200 for the last uh almost two years now. Uh Anthony, any comments on Tradfy?

Yeah, I mean the trend here is quite funny because it basically just shows that everything that happened during the COVID period was just funny money, right? Like all the assets going up, it was like an everything bubble. But in saying that, if ETH was back at its March 2020 bottom, it'd be $90, right? We are like at 13x from there. And and Bitcoin went back to like, you know, what it was at like under 4,000 or something. So when you look at it like that, crypto, oh I mean ETH and BTC, not all of crypto, but ETH and BTC have done remarkably well, uh, which is which is quite funny. And you know, it also speaks to that narrative of inflation hedges as well. Like you could still make the argument that, hey, look, Ethan BTC have acted really well as kind of those inflation inflational debasement hedges. Because if you look at stocks, I mean, Amazon is a big ass company that is very, very profitable and is uh, you know, is growing year on year, but their stock price did nothing the last two years now, uh, when looking at this. Tesla's a different story. I think Tesla got way, way overvalued from where it was supposed to be. I mean, I don't have a great read on the stock market, but just doing naive like price to sales, price to earnings, and then

Pricing that in the future, you can you can see that. But seeing something like Amazon, you know, raise all of its gains from from the that bottom is is quite something. And you know, I I think that because of that, it makes it makes the market just much more healthier, generally, too. And I think that that's what the Fed was looking for when raising rates. They wanted the market to reset itself to prior to the COVID stuff. Uh, but you know, we've still got inflation relatively high. We still want to see that come down, all that sorts of stuff. But generally, the macro environment is very hard to study because it's not our scene, so to speak, uh, being in crypto, but also it is much more complex, I think, than crypto. It covers so many different things across so many different uh countries and and places around the world that it's hard to see. But yeah, it's funny seeing just like Amazon erase all of its gains from it's like something as profitable and as as big as Amazon erase its gains.

I think there's definitely some solace in this because if you weren't going to be a crypto investor, the other asset class that you would probably probably would have invested in is like high growth, high risk tech stocks. And so like they also got wrecked too. So if you're feeling like wrecked by crypto, well, I mean, if you compare crypto to like tech stocks, it's almost the same. Uh and so like the like if you compare how

And BTC are relatively like doing so f so bloody well compared to to these other stocks, right? It's just crazy.

100%. Yeah. So I've got I've got coin, Coinbase's equity. Uh absolutely wrecked. Uh coin is down 90%. Not even from the top tick of the 400, almost 440 price that it reached on day one, but of the price it originally came out at 380. It is down 90% from its original price of $380 down to $34 right now. I kind of think that coin is like a generational buy right now, man. Like it's uh it's gotta be worth, I think this makes Coinbase worth seven and a half, eight billion dollars. Like, that's pretty insane.

So

My thesis on coin, the reason why I didn't buy it and probably won't buy it still, is that one, it is directly correlated with the health of the crypto market, right? Because Coinbase's revenues are directly correlated with the but also you have coin trading in TradFi world with people who don't understand crypto, right? People do not trade this as if they know what's going to happen with crypto. They do not trade it with the assumption that there's going to be another crypto cycle. They trade it with right now, coinbase coin is trading like crypto is dead, because that's what TradFi or that's what people outside of crypto believe. So by that measure, you like I can't bring myself to buy coin over something like ETH or even I mean, I wouldn't buy BTC, but like when you compare it to BTC or even some other crypto assets, because if coin is going to do well, it's going to be when the crypto market's doing well. And by the time the world believes the crypto market is doing well, there's already been a lot of gains had by both ETH and BTC and other assets that you are still probably going to be better off buying those than coin. Now that's not investment advice, but that's the way I look at it. And I don't think that's going to change anytime soon because the TradFi outside of crypto world, they find it very hard to understand crypto. They're going to trade based on pure marketing narrative, just general mainstream noise. And we usually see that come when crypto prices are already at the all time highs. Like when Ethan BTC are back to all time high.

You know, that that's when I would suspect some big moves to happen there. But yeah, I mean that's just just my general thesis I've had on on coin for a while.

Yeah, that's definitely a a fair take. I will also just point out the vast difference between the seven point nine billion dollar market cap of Coinbase right now versus the two hundred and twenty-ish billion dollar market cap of Ether. Like there's there's some alternative risks to reward there, I'll say.

Yeah, there I mean it's it's definitely yeah a a uh a a better maybe it's a better risk reward play buying coin here than than buying ETH depending on your time horizon, depending on how you look at these things. But I think generally yeah coin is d just looks like to me it's like it's trading uh like the rest of the world thinks crypto is dead, which they do right now.

Right.

Yeah. Uh and then of course we're got Solana. Here is the yearly Solana like candles. There's three of them. Uh and the first one is a tiny, tiny little green candle. The second one is an absolutely gargantuan green candle with a huge wick all the way up to $280. And then the third candle, where we currently are, is an absolutely gargantuan red candle, which goes all the way back down to the base of the green candle. We're gonna talk about Solana coming up next, so I'll save some of your takes for it for that, Anthony. Uh, but I want to get your take on this one. Uh this is a tweet from uh Sour Hog. Last FUD of the day, Soluna Avax traded at $600. Soluna Avax is an index of Soluna, Avalanche, and and uh

Solana. I said just said Soluna. Soluna Solana, Soluna and Avalanche. That the index traded at $600 and now is worth $21. That is a big oof. Anthony, give me your hot takes.

Uh

I have

Should we save it for the Solana sec section?

No, I mean I I I can give one on this on this in particular. I think people are gonna call me an ETH Maxi no matter what I say, so I'm just gonna give my honest takes here. Um this was perpetuated by people who were mercenaries, right? This was perpetuated by Three Aris Capital, this this meme of Soluna AVAX, uh, which was funny because they didn't really have a soul position, but they had massive Luna and Avax positions. They didn't care about fundamentals, they didn't care about how uh like uh terror was built on a house of cards, they didn't care about Avalanche just being an EVM fork and only really having any traction because of the bull market. They they just cared about making money. And it's kind of an irony that they had so much money that they made and they lost it all. But when when looking at stuff like this and and looking at it happening in a bull market, you really need to remember. If you're a first cycler, you won't know this, but next cycle, you need to remember that people pushing this narrative do not care about you at all. All they care about is making money, they don't care about the projects. So I'm not surprised at all to see it come down like this because we already saw this happen last cycle. If you were around for then, we already saw similar things happen. Um, but uh, in terms of speaking to the fundamentals of these projects, yeah, it it's it's never in line with that. And as we saw, Terra went to zero. Uh, you know, Salinas don't have enough great time, and no one talks about Avalanche anymore, at least from what I see. So, yeah, but anyway.

Yeah, I haven't seen anyone. So Avalanche has not shown up in my feeds either. Although people in the bankless Discord do say that there's exciting stuff there that I should explore. Something I'm not going to explore, though. I thought this was pretty pretty funny. So Hex, uh the Richard Hart's baby, down uh 97%. Of course, a very polarizing coin on crypto Twitter. Uh there's definitely an army of hexagons out there that are gonna come on to my mentions just because I brought it up. Uh, but I thought I'd just put this tweet out there uh just because I thought it was pretty funny. Um we can move on though. Uh here's a here's a uh take I uh or a tweet I want to get your take on. This is uh Ben. This is the Ben, the analyst over at Bankless, our our our guy our our analyst Ben. Uh RPL up sixty seven percent against Lido since the November seventh or excuse me, November ninth bottom. Interesting. Any takes on uh RPL versus Lido?

Yeah, I mean I'm become so biased recently towards Rockerpool because Yeah, we're we're both

Rocket Pull.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I joined as an O Dow member, Bankless is already an ODAW member. I've spun up mini pools. I think the Rocketpool community is so closely aligned with Ethereum. It's it's basically the same community. Um, but my my I guess like most level-headed take here, not not bringing my Rocker Pool bias into this, is that Lido is already worth a lot, right? And it kind of has grew really, really quickly. But I think there's a belief in the market now that Lido's growth has topped out, right? At around 30%, and that post-withdrawals, they're actually going to lose a lot of market share due to people reshuffling their ETH around and due to uh Rockerpool being in a very, very nice position and going to be in an even better position around time of withdrawals to grow. So when it comes to LSDs, it's hard to bet on anyone. Uh, and maybe betting on Lido historically has been a good, relatively good bet, I guess. But yeah, I mean RPL, the token from what I've seen, has been very, very resilient. It has an actual defined use case within the protocol itself. It's not just the governance token. Um, and I think the community is one of the best in crypto. Uh so yeah, I mean, I am a Rockapool maxi at this point, but uh that's my most level headed take that I can give.

Yeah, no, I I share those sentiments as well. I I think Lido captured a massive amount of the market, and asking Lido to go up 67% is much harder than asking Rocket Pool to go up 67%. Uh the winner of the year, the best token, the best crypto asset to hold your money in this year was unquestionably GMX. Uh if we scroll all the way back out to the one-year chart, it is up on the up on the year. A lot of chop. Uh started at $20, currently ending the year at $42, $43. Uh, so and doubling on the year. Uh, but actually, most of that doubling happened in the first few months. It was then a flat for the rest of the year. Uh so congratulations to GMX and all GMX holders, because you guys did not lose in 2022, and that made you winners. Uh, here's a chart that I thought was pretty interesting that's actually not the price of a token, but it's actually the price of a stable coin. And this is uh the chart I saw of Rye in relation to other US dollar and other fiat currencies. Uh, and so Rye, of course, is a it's a stable coin in the sense of the word that's meant to, it's a coin that is meant to be stable, but not stable to anything in particular. Uh it is uh it is opposing market forces. Uh and so how that works, it's out of scope for this. It just attempts to maintain some sort of soft peg to the US dollar, not follow it in particular. And if you look at this chart, uh it's probably the coolest and most simple and most stable asset to hold out of all fiat currencies. Uh Anthony, what's your take on this?

Yeah, I mean I like Rye. Um unfortunately it has some limitations on it that will that mean that it can't actually grow that fast and it can't actually be used within DeFi like other stable coins can. Um and the biggest limitation there is capital inefficiency because you have to collateralize it with ETH. And this is why DAI went multicollateral, is because it was very hard to grow with just collateralizing it with ETH. But I think that all of these kind of stable coins, even ones that aren't tied to USD, uh specifically tied to USD, I don't know. I feel like long term I I kind of hope that we get currency, like we just get like ETH that becomes the de facto currency and and we start measuring stability against ETH rather than trying to mimic fiat currencies. Uh, because yeah, I mean fiat currencies lose purchasing power just like any other currency does. But if we have one that can maintain its purchasing power over the long term, like something like ETH does, I think that'd be better. But yeah, the the stable coin stuff is going to be a massive kind of immunity of thing still going forward. And I'm excited to see if Rai can actually grow. Um, but but generally, yeah, it still suffers from the same kind of issues I think that other decentralized stable coins suffered from.

Yeah, certainly, certainly. All right, Bankless Nation. That is the snapshot of the year in markets. But we got some more conversations ahead. Uh next up, we're going to talk about the state of the Solana ecosystem. Uh it's depending on who you ask, it's either in a meltdown or it's moment of solidarity or something. We're going to talk about Solana, also gonna talk about multi coin capital and the state of layer twos coming up next, but first a moment to talk about these fantastic tools from our sponsors to help you go bankless. Bankless Nation, we are back and we are looking at uh the chart of Solana, which started in May of 2020.

About below a dollar, and then in at the top of 2021, 2022, it was $270, and now it is eight dollars and thirty-six cents, coming almost full circle to where we are now, down I think something like 94% from all time highs. Uh, this is the talk of the town on crypto Twitter right now. Everyone's talking about it, and the the tweet I put out, which I won't read here, is that uh the Solana community is trying to bolster morale, the ETH community is saying it was vapor all along, the trading community tells me how bad the chart looks. Anthony, what's your take on the Solana ecosystem right now?

So my my take has remained the same from when I first heard and learned about Solana. I think that people kind of look at the stuff that maybe I'm saying and other Ethereum people are saying and being like, oh, you're just dancing on Solana's grave, you know, you're just throwing shots at Solana because it's down so much. And it like I've been throwing the same shots at them that I've been throwing since day one. I just don't think the Solana architecture is long-term sustainable. I don't think Solana is going to win against Ethereum and its L2 ecosystem from a fundamentals perspective. The price action, I think, is in a different kind of realm, and you can talk about it in a different context. But I'm not surprised at all because like Solana was had support from SBF and FTX, right? And like now that they're gone, and now that SBF isn't funneling all the money that he was making or I guess stealing from customer deposits into Seoul, Seoul is going back to basically the price that it started at. Like when my problem, you know, I don't think it's gonna, I don't know if it's gonna go back to $3, but it's basically erased all of its gains. Like it's down more than ETH was down in ETH's 2018 bear market, and ETH was propped up by ICOs, right? And that's why it came down so much. But when you have something like that, such a big force propping up your thing, it's gonna come down very, very hard. And ETH went through that in in 2018, and that's what Solana's going through uh right now. Now, in saying that, I think people are, and this is one point I really wanted to hit on. I think people are making the false equivalence between ETH coming back from that 2018 bear market and Sol coming back from its current bear market. There is no guarantee of this at all, right? There is no guarantee that your favorite thing is going to come back just because uh someone else's favorite thing came back. And let me put this in context for people. Like there were thousands of tokens issued and assets issued in 2017-18. Uh, maybe 1% or less of those actually went back to their USD all-time high, and none of them went back to their Ethan BTC all-time high, I believe. Uh, except maybe BB. Uh, I think BNB might have been the only thing, right? So you can't just look at previous performance of other assets and say that your thing is going to do the same thing. Now, the thing you can do is look at the actual ecosystem behind your favorite project and be like, okay, is this sustainable? Is this going to grow? Are we going to be able to come back from where we're at today? Um, and I think for Solana, it is an extremely uphill battle, just like it was for Ethereum in 2018. But the problem for Solana is that Ethereum didn't have any real competition at all uh during its uh Renaissance kind of period, and Ethereum led its own Renaissance period. Solana has competition from everyone else, every other layer one, all these other layer ones like Aptos and Sui and Say and stuff like that, but also Ethereum and its layer two ecosystem, which actually exists today. It didn't exist back in the day, but it does now. So if Solana can come back from that, I'll actually be bullish on it, right? Like I'll be I'm I'm serious, yeah. I'll be bullish on Solana if we can come back from this because they're basically starting from a very, very, very bad position right now. Um not from uh uh not only from tech perspective, but also from just general sentiment perspective. And if they can manage to build an ecosystem out of that and go back to all-time high, which I think is just near impossible, right? Um, I'll be impressed and I'll be bullish. But at this point in time, I I just can't. And and I've got so many other thoughts on this, and I'm not just saying this because I'm an ETH maxi. Uh, I believe this about pretty much all the L1s, and I have a lot of thoughts on L1s generally, but I'll I'll I'll leave that at that and you can maybe give your your take there because you did say you were gonna back the truck up at $10, and I don't think you did.

Uh I did back the the Tonka truck truck up today. Uh so I bought a few sole, a handful of sole at below nine dollars.

But uh do but did I do that because I'm fundamentally bearish or bullish on the Solana ecosystem? No, it's because of the same reason why I said what I was saying when I tweeted that out in the first place is just like I know what it's like to be in this position. And the the thing that stands out to me the most is the fact that the Solana community seems to be taking this as a challenge to themselves, which of all the reasons to be bearish about Solana, and maybe I'll just go through with the I'll put on my ETH Maxi hat too and go through those with you. Uh, you're totally right that like Ethereum had like this privilege of being the only Ethereum in the room when it came back from the grave in 2018 to 2020. There were no Ethereum competitors at all. Uh and like Solana has to come back wow, faced with a an Ethereum that is already one cycle ahead of it, with all of its layer twos, which are in a bull market right now. That's part of the topics that we're gonna talk about. And one thing I've always said is like, I won't really be bullish on Solana until I see a frontier of developers pushing forwards in a new direction that Ethereum isn't. Uh and I'm I'm yet to yet to see that. That's always been like, all right, David, you are so bullish on Ethereum. What will it take to change your mind? It's always the answer to that has always been when I see developers doing things on other blockchains that are not being done on Ethereum, and those are frontier new level technologies. And I'm I'm yet to see that. Uh and then also

I mean and even even I was gonna just on that note, even if that exists, there's no guarantee that that's gonna push Seoul back to its ridiculous all time high. Because just to give context for people, Seoul started at about fifty cents, I think, and it stayed there for a little while, but then quickly went up. It went up to two eighty. That is a bigger run than what ETH did in twenty seventeen. ETH went from ten bucks.

Yeah.

Exactly. ETH went from $10 to $1,400. It's 140X. Uh Seoul did much more than that, right? And as we've seen, it was because of the SBF and FTX uh kind of money funneling in. So where's this money going to come from to get it back to the Altimer? Even if Solana is providing value to people, even if they have users, even if they have developers building cool and interesting stuff, again, that does not necessarily translate into price. And I mean, the the reason it did for ETH is something that we could talk about, but it's an aside there. But yeah, I just wanted to make that note for people. And I think this applies to so many different things as well.

Yeah, a hundred percent. I I think m my mind it goes back to like the the one bullish thing I see about Solana is the community seems to be taking this moment not to capitulate, but to rally. At least that from a very cursory glance from what I'm seeing on on Twitter.