WRU 1st Week Of September
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TIMESTAMPS & RESOURCES
0:00 Intro
5:24 MARKETS
https://pro.kraken.com/app/trade/btc-usd
9:36 Layer 2 Check
https://l2beat.com/scaling/summary
13:45 Anthony's Bullish Predictions
https://twitter.com/sassal0x/status/1696162071715422442?s=20
32:41 Grayscale Beats the SEC
https://www.bankless.com/grayscale-beats-the-sec
https://www.docdroid.net/vrehbKf/dc-cir-22-1142-01208547571-0-pdf
36:53 Takes on the Case
https://twitter.com/jchervinsky/status/1696544309699363201?s=20
43:27 Are NFTs Securities?
https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2023-163
45:59 IRS Proposal for Digital Brokers
https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy1705
49:37 US HOSTILITY TO CRYPTO
https://twitter.com/zkmattwyatt/status/1695190244516319564?s=46&t=2ZINVXJQKx6xO_6Wiiu_2g
https://twitter.com/AntonioMJuliano/status/1695160970111300053
54:29 Roman Storm Released on Bail
https://twitter.com/brianeklein/status/1694779420731658700?s=20
55:26 Farcaster V3
https://twitter.com/dwr/status/1695187576003645873
57:41 Lido Almost 33%
https://twitter.com/RyanSAdams/status/1696220879976284511
1:09:10 AMEX Gives out POAPS
https://twitter.com/mamb0san/status/1695458362237034957
1:09:46 X Gets Currency Transmitter License
https://twitter.com/BitcoinMagazine/status/1696587745089540494
1:11:47 DCG to Deliver Recoveries
https://twitter.com/DCGco/status/1696506972781138275?s=20
1:14:28 Bitboy Crypto Boots Bitboy
https://twitter.com/Bitboy_Crypto/status/1696184571279159401?t=R1qQjJ06kpariGkBKzbjrw&s=19
1:17:01 Instadapp Multisig
https://twitter.com/Instadapp/status/1696537797916799035?s=20
1:20:56 Questions From the Nation
https://discord.com/channels/615592155481767941/1058053004705669211/1145795932575760565
https://discord.com/channels/615592155481767941/1058053004705669211/1146193895345111162
1:31:13 Takes of The Week
https://twitter.com/neerajka/status/1346836020927619077?s=46
https://twitter.com/cburniske/status/1695583389167075822?s=20
https://twitter.com/RyanSAdams/status/1696618835518857610?s=20
1:35:29 What Are We Bullish On?
1:39:08 Meme of The Week
https://twitter.com/CryptoCred/status/1696041243061420108
1:40:17 Check out The Daily Gwei!
1:42:00 Moment of Zen
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Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠

What reinforces the harvening narrative is the ETF narrative because if they do get approved, it's going to be relatively close to the harvening.

So let's say they get approved in Q1, right?

It may be later than some people would expect, but they all have to get approved together because if they don't, then the SEC opens themselves up to more lawsuits.

So you have ETF narrative into harvening narrative, which is going to, in my opinion, be very bullish for the market generally.

Bankless Nation, it is the last week of August and it is time for the Bankless Weekly Roll-Up.

I have with me, not David Hoffman today, but maybe the David Hoffman of the Southern Hemisphere, Anthony Sassano from the Daily Gway.

I've never been called the David Hoffman of the Southern Hemisphere.

No, that's, I think that was meant as a compliment.

Hopefully bankless listeners will take it as a compliment as well.

And of course, Anthony, you've filled in so many times this summer for us as we've been on holidays.

So he's not climbing a mountain this week.

He's out enjoying himself at Burning Man.

And I have no idea what shenanigans they get up to there.

Have you ever had a desire to go to Burning Man, Anthony?

If there's anything that is the complete opposite of a desire that I have to do something, that would be Burning Man.

I am not about that, but I think it's David's scene.

Yeah, I totally see David fitting in there.

But Anthony, thank you so much for joining us today.

We always learn something new about crypto, new about Ethereum, and maybe if we're lucky, new about Australia.

So I told you I was gonna be late to this episode and you said, no wookers.

I think that's how you pronounce it, no wookers.

So yeah, It's funny that you didn't pronounce it right.

No, so it's said no wuckers, no wuckers instead of wookers.

Yeah, it's just weird Aussie slang that some people use.

I don't know how widespread it is, but I say it to my friends sometimes like, yeah, no wuckers.

Well, we got a lot to discuss this week, including something bullish, which I'm glad you are here for something bullish.

Federal court that rules that the SEC has no legal authority to block the Bitcoin spot ETF proposal.

Also, X, formerly known as Twitter, obtained a license to store, transfer, and trade Bitcoin and crypto.

Lido is almost at 33% of total staking market share.

Anthony, I want to ask you about that, if we should be concerned.

And we've got some news about Digital Currency Grip.

Apparently, they agreed to deliver 90% of the value back to Genesis creditors.

I'm kind of wondering if we finally cleaned up the mess from 2023, so we'll talk about all of those items and more as we get in.

This ETF news, we'll spend a lot of time getting into it, but does this make you bullish on the week?

So I think generally I've always, at least for the last few months, kind of acted with the assumption that these ETFs are inevitable over probably the next kind of 6 to 12 months.

So the Grayscale win just further solidifies that for me.

And I think what it also does for the wider kind of audience is solidify that for them as well.

It basically says, yes, okay, the ETFs, you know, they've been teased for so long now, many, many years.

There's been there's been kind of like teasing of a Bitcoin ETF in the US.

And now it finally feels like that actually really going to happen this time.

And I think that this this recent win from Grayscale just kind of like solidifies that for a lot of people.

You know, the markets are going to do what the markets do.

But I think that anyone doubting that an ETF is going to get approved at this point, you know, I wouldn't be taking that bet, to be honest.

And we'll also talk about how the markets reacted to that news, which was quite favorably.

But before we get in a message from our friends and sponsors over at Aave, I know Anthony, I'm sure you've used Aave many times, like everyone in DeFi.

And if that feels like old news for you, because that happened back in January, now Aave really wants to accelerate getting the word out because there is apparently

billion in Aave v3, but there's also a couple billion still in Aave v2.

And their message is to go migrate your assets to V3.

You can go to the app.aave.com site in order to migrate your assets from V2 to V3.

They've got some supply and borrow caps that limit the amount in pools for a particular token.

This is called asset isolation mode and of course, cheaper gas prices so you can stack your ETH rather than spending it.

If you're a builder as well, they're subsidizing Aave Grants towards their new stable coin Go, so you can check that out at the Aavegrants.org website.

There's a link in the show notes as well.

All right, Anthony, let's get to the markets.

These are the charts that Kraken is showing us on the week.

This is Bitcoin and we are up on the week, my friend.

Look at this glorious green candle right here.

I think that happened around the time of the ETF court decision that we were just talking about.

We are ending the week, at least at the time of recording, at

This green candle, is this all directly related to the court and the ETF ruling?

Oh, it's 100% correlated and related to that.

And I think that it's pretty much mostly traders driving this as well, because if you look at what the traders have been looking at over the last few weeks, pretty much all of them have been talking about the Grayscale decision because it'd been teased that every Tuesday and Friday people were checking the I think it was the SEC's website or Nobody not the SEC's website, but a website that would show you the result of the lawsuit And it wouldn't it didn't come for like, you know Last Tuesday last Friday and a few before that.

And yeah, every trader that I looked at was looking at the same thing.

Maybe if nothing happens, you know, if if if Grayscale loses their case, we go down.

But whether that actually results in any kind of long-term sustained kind of upward price movement, at least for the short term, it's hard to tell because I think I've been on here before and said to you last time we had a pump like this, which was the SEC case against Ripple, where Ripple won that case.

And we had that massive kind of pump on not just BTC and ETH, but everything else.

And I said to you, if there's no follow through, we're just going to sell back down.

And the follow through has to come from new money.

Because if we don't have new money, it's just traders.

And all the traders are going to do is they're just going to short it back down.

Because all they're looking for is that short-term profit.

They're literally playing a different game to investors.

That was the SEC ripple court case happened another week while David was out.

Every time he leaves, something bad happens to Gary Gensler.

And I don't know what he's off doing, but maybe he's like killing, like, hunting down horcruxes or something.

But yeah, we need him to stay away for another week and then maybe Gary gets fired.

But so, so you're just saying this, this pump is basically traitor action and what we're going into this court case.

Like, Do you think people were over or under Grayscale beating the SEC?

What were kind of the odds in the sentiment going into this?

I really do think it was a coin toss for a lot of people.

And I think a lot of people in crypto definitely don't have a very good read of the legal world.

I think they basically learn about it because of these crypto cases and myself included, to be honest.

I mean, I don't live in the US, so I never really had a reason to pay attention to it.

I was like, you know, it's a coin toss, it's 50-50, I've got no idea.

But then the judgment came out, and as we're gonna talk about, and it really kind of was less than, it was, sorry, it was much better than 50-50 in odds of gray scale.

It should have been like 90-10, you know, 90% that we're gonna win, 10% that we're gonna lose just based on the kind of result there.

But for traders, I feel like you can see over the last kind of like week or 2, it was just completely flat and just pretty boring.

And that was because all the traders, I think we're waiting for this signal in particular, which is kind of wild when you think about it, but at the same time, there's also not much else going on.

As we know, there's not new money coming in right now, in terms of market activity.

The innovation side and the technical side of things is different, But market activity, yeah, it's really just a kind of trader game right now.

Well, let's look at a few trader numbers to ETH is up on the week.

I believe we're at 1715 at the time of recording.

So up less than Bitcoin, as you'd expect.

Bitcoin kind of leading this because this is about a spot Bitcoin ETF, but still up nonetheless.

And total crypto market cap, 1.14 trillion on the week.

By the way, this is about a, if we're looking at the 1 year view, a 12 percent increase on the year in total crypto market cap But here's the charts that you were referring to that that maybe are even more exciting and not just for traders But for long time crypto settlers this is L to total locked value and the scaling factor for aetherium This looks at all of the the interesting metrics around our L2s and you tweeted this out earlier in the week Anthony aetherium layer 2 activity continues being up only what bear market and here you're looking at a chart from l2 beat which shows the Scaling factor that is activity on a theorem at a multiple of a theory and main net of 5 point 24X Which is absolutely massive and you can see I don't know what the time is.

No, this is the the entirety of the last year.

And we've just had A5X in transactions over the last year.

Well, yeah, I mean, we're basically you can see there's that blue kind of section that a blue squiggly line.

L1 TPS, which isn't going to go up because Ethereum L1 is already at capacity.

And then you've got the red above it, which is showing all the L2s that L2B is tracking and their TPS just going up over time and basically being up only over the last year, at least.

Anthony, that is an interesting question.

It's like, so what is the capacity right now for this red line?

So of course, main net, the blue line has just 16 transactions per second.

It's kind of the full capacity of Ethereum and gas fees start getting wonky and we can't go over that.

Tell us about the pre-protodank sharding EIP

Yeah, so it's always a difficult thing when measuring TPS because not all networks are created equal, of course.

And I think what L2B tries to do here is normalize the TPS as well, because there are different kind of ways to measure it depending on the layer 2 that you're looking at.

So that's what they've done in this chart here.

I can't give you like an upper bound number of kind of total TPS across these L2s as exist today, but I can say it's a lot higher than here.

We're pretty much nowhere near capacity from from from what I can tell and what I've been able to research.

And then after EIP 4844 goes live, that goes up by at least 10X from kind of what I've seen here.

It's kind of funny when measuring TPS because the way Ethereum works is that, or at least Ethereum L1 works, is that it has what's called a gas limit, which is the block size of Ethereum L1 blocks.

Now this gas limit is taken up by various transactions and each of these transactions has a different amount of gas that it uses.

So for example, if all of the transfers on the Ethereum, sorry, all of the transactions on the Ethereum network were only ETH transfers, so transfers of ETH the asset to and from addresses and things like that, not smart contracts, just to and from addresses, The Ethereum network could do, I think, upwards of 40 transactions per second just doing that.

But because Ethereum L1 does a lot more than just simple ETH transfers, obviously we have smart contracts, we have DeFi, NFTs, we kind of level out an average of 15, 16 TPS or something like that because those other things take up more gas, which means that the gas limit fills up quicker per block by those transactions, and that's how the TPS is measured.

The same is true for a lot of L2s as well, especially the ones that are EVM compatible or equivalent.

But as I said, because there are certain L2s that aren't like StarkNet, for example, they're pushing like hundreds of TPS right now, but their TPS is measured in a different way that you would measure it on an EVM chain.

And that's why I said that L2B in this chart tries to normalize it so that it actually is as close to equivalent as an L1 Ethereum TPS measure as possible.

This is also another screenshot from a new website that we just kind of uncovered.

It's called growthepie.xyz and this is another measurement of the layer 2 metrics.

This is actually built by someone in the bankless community so it's really cool to see this.

But another resource for you in addition to L2beat.

Anthony, let's talk a little bit about some of your predictions, actually, because this was a tweet thread that I came across and wanted to include in the market section.

Now that we have you as a co-host this week, it makes even more sense to talk about it.

You said earlier in this week, it was Monday GM bulls and happy Monday.

I know that it may seem dark and gloomy in the markets right now, but there are always bright spots over longer time periods.

And I'm here today to share some of them with you.

And so then you go over some of those bright spots over the next 12 to 18 months.

Here are the outsider bullish narratives.

You mentioned the Bitcoin halvening in April 2024, the potential ETF bonanza, which may be That it's interesting because that prediction is already coming true.

You said this on Monday, now by Wednesday, we have this fantastic ETF news.

ETH staking becomes very attractive to TradFi because of the passive income yield.

There's some positive US regulatory stuff, maybe a stable coin bill, which is kind of interesting because we've had a lot of bad regulatory news up to this point, I would say.

Maybe you're saying that's going to start to shift.

TradFi companies keep playing with and adopting crypto, Visa and PayPal.

Those are all of the outsider bullish narratives.

Then we could get into the insider bullish narratives.

You're feeling bullish it seems like Anthony.

Tell us about the big picture and then any of these outsider bullish narratives that you think are most relevant right now?

Yeah, I'm definitely feeling very bullish for the next kind of 12 to 18 months, especially.

I have kind of operated under the assumption for this year, 2023, that we're basically just replaying 2019 in terms of kind of market action, general sentiments, all the stuff that happened in 2019 that laid the groundwork and kind of like the bedrock for the bull market of 2020 and 2021.

And I'm feeling the exact same thing play out right now.

So if you were to take that to its kind of logical conclusion, you would say that 2024 is like 2020 and then 2025 would be like 2021, hopefully with a lot less fraud because unfortunately there was a lot of fraud that ended up happening in the last bull market led by of course, SBF and some other kind of actors in the space.

So I looked at the kind of the big picture here and kind of tried to articulate why I'm bullish and bucketed it into 2 categories that you mentioned, the outsider bullish narratives, which are things that the outside crypto people can get excited about, the things that are easily digestible, the things that we don't have to spend, you know, a whole hour explaining to people for them to actually understand what's happening.

Now, the cool thing about the outsider narratives is that the crypto natives can also get excited about the outsider narratives just as much as they can get excited about the insider ones.

So we get like a double whammy by being crypto natives.

But on the outsider ones, I looked at the obvious things.

The Bitcoin halvening, it's kind of a meme or a pretty strong narrative that after every halvening, the market pumps, right, BTC pumps.

And then we get a bull market within basically 6 to 12 months of that happening.

And that has happened every time so far, 2012 into 2013, 2016 into 2017, 2020 into 2021.

So it feels like we're on track for that to happen again.

But what reinforces the harvening narrative is the ETF narrative, because if they do get approved, it's going to be relatively close to the harvening.

It may be later than some people expect, but they all have to get approved together because if they don't, then the SEC opens themselves up to more lawsuits.

So you have ETF narrative into halvening narrative, which is going to, in my opinion, be very bullish for the market generally.

Could you imagine, Anthony, so like BlackRock gets their ETF approved and into the halvening, and then they're starting to pump the halvening meme?

Is that, I mean, that's something that could happen, right?

In order to attract capital to the new BlackRock ETF.

The thing about the ETFs is that there's not just 1 of them.

And I think this is important for people to kind of keep in mind.

There are multiple ETFs and they're all competing with each other.

And the start of the product is the most important because they wanna show that they get the most inflows.

Like you wanna show that you're the market leader.

You're not gonna start when it's approved.

You're gonna start now reaching out to your clients, reaching out to your high net worth clients as well.

And you're going to be telling them, Hey, you know, there's this thing happening.

There's this thing happening, the harvesting, blah, blah.

And you're going to give them the bullish pitch because you want them to put their money with you as soon as that ETF gets approved, because you want to be the market leader so that you can just start that flywheel of getting more money in.

I had not put that together, this kind of this stacking of timelines here, but you're exactly right.

It almost seems like it's orchestrated quite brilliantly.

They're like, it almost seems like the whole thing's just manipulated and orchestrated.

And I'm like, it does to an extent, but then you also need to consider that the 4 year cycle is also the political cycle in the US, right?

I actually think Satoshi did this on purpose, to be honest.

So Yeah, I have a thesis that's never going to be proven or disproven, obviously, because we don't

I feel like the timing is on purpose because election years are always kind of, I guess, like a pretty fun year.

You can say that when you're not living in the US.

And I think that these other things around it just act as more positive narrative catalysts because The narrative is what matters for the market, at least over kind of like the bull market period.

The fundamentals don't kick in until like the longer term.

And I think the narrative is going to be very, very strong next year.

At least, you know, the outside narrative, but also the inside 1.

But that's my general view on the outside of stuff.

Okay, that's the outsider stuff Bitcoin ETF in the having a big thing here We also talked about some some positive US regulatory headwinds the stable coin bill It could totally see that and we've talked so much on the roll ups about Visa and PayPal now has a stable coin.

But this point on the outsider bullish narratives, I want to dig into for 1 more second here.

So everything you were just saying about kind of like the black rocks of the world and Wall Street getting on board here.

You also think simultaneously they will start to understand.

Trad Fi will start to understand ETH staking.

I mean, I think I believe that too, but I'm wondering if you have any like evidence for that or any thoughts on why that happens?

So I think that they're already kind of tried 5 players getting involved with each staking, to be honest, they're definitely doing it through the providers that are seeing them and things like that, because they have to due to regulation.

You know, they're not gonna go with Rockerpool, for example, at least not right now, because they probably just legally can't.

They may not even be able to legally go with Lido, for example.

So they're probably going with these other providers, maybe Coinbase.

There's Alluvial that recently got announced.

They're targeting more of the kind of like enterprise kind of stuff there.

But just generally, Tradfire loves yield, because they can sell that product to their customers very easily because the customers love yield.

There's this obsession that people have with yield, and I get it because it sounds nice, but I have my own opinions on yield generally, but I'll leave those on the table.

But generally, I think when it comes to e-staking, what people forget is that in a bull market, the yield is gonna go up because we're gonna get more activity on the chain, which is gonna result in more fees, which is gonna result in more yield for all the stakers, which is gonna result in a flywheel of people being like, holy crap, the yield's so high, I need to stake, right?

And we're gonna get such an inflow of ETH stake.

And I do believe we're gonna get an ETH ETF as well.

I don't know how long after BTC gets approved, we'll get an ETH 1.

I can't imagine it's gonna be very, very long after that.

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What Grayscale's HUGE Win Means For The Next Bull Market