August 23, 2023 - Episode #01 - Daily crypto news and updates for the terminally online.

If it fails, we'll call it a social experiment.

But yeah, I think that the framework that we're going to use is start by talking some news.

Today we're just going to be doing the news portion.

So maybe 15, 20 minutes, depending on how long we go.

And then we'll start booking people in the future.

Getting people in all waves of the crypto space.

So we should, I think, preface this with kind of why we wanted to start this.

You know, you see a lot of crypto content that is out there on YouTube, on Twitch, and there's not really a lot of voices from like CT or from kind of like the core community, you see a lot of kind of web 2 grifters that find their way into crypto and then use YouTube to exploit crypto.

And then a lot of the other good video content or audio content is more interview style where it's just getting on founders or builders in the space and talking about what it is they're working on.

But there aren't a lot of people that are covering the news daily and kind of what's happening on what's happening on chain what people are into and kind of following the attention waves and attention gravity and so we wanted to start something daily we'll be doing this Monday through Friday just kind of touching on macro news as DK said things happening on chain other fun things we hear about And if anyone wants to come on and join us throughout the week, you're more than welcome to shoot us a message and we'll find a slot.

So, With that being said, let's get started.

So it's been what, 2 weeks I think now since BASE has launched.

And so I wanted to do a little bit of a recap.

Now, obviously, Frentech is the major winner in the base space right now.

But looking at some stats, we saw that what Coinbase was hitting roughly 16 transactions per second or excuse me base was hitting 16 transactions per second which is more than aetherium was doing and considering that it's what base is currently sitting around 240 million in TVL theorems at what 22 billion just It's an interesting take.

I mean, I had thought that it was going to most likely be, as they say, on-chain summer.

Tell us about different stuff that you've been doing on BASE, Cozy.

Now just Frentech, but yeah, when I first bridged over, I was playing around with a lot of the shit coins, Bald, Toshi, Velocimeter, something like that But now just share just keys sorry just just a lonely key farmer

I mean everyone else is kind of covered frantic.

I think at this point what like well, we clearly know there's at least 101, 000 users.

But I think I saw something that the protocol fees are now up to like roughly 6000000.

Yeah, I mean, as you said earlier, we got in the wrong business.

It's still that like a majority of the volume on base right now is this, but it's also interesting to see like the different things being built on top.

We saw a perp market, which I thought was interesting.

Ribbon did a perp market on the total value that's locked in the smart contract.

Is the perp on the market cap of the protocol?

Because it's like more of a, if you were to take everything, let's say in Uniswap pools, right?

And like it was a perp on the total amount in Uniswap pools.

Of the method of doing it off of total market cap.

Because the numbers are easily kind of replaceable and can fluctuate, that it's Not a metric you should use to base the perf off of which I I agree, but I think it's cool that it exists right like it's something that people want abo is quick to provide that for people so I I mean if there's demand for it and demand is subjectional but if there's social demand for it I don't see a reason why you know you don't launch something and give it to the people What I think is cool is like friend max and then there's a new 1 I think like Friend or like st friend x or something like that that's about to launch that Is like I don't know another Perp thing maybe I gotta look into it.

I just I just got a message about it this morning.

But yeah, there's a lot of cool stuff being built on it.

I didn't think that that would happen so quickly.

I thought it might, you know, take developers seeing more feature sets kind of get built up before they started building on it.

I'm interested to see if they integrate Steelcam.

Yeah, it seemed like the next kind of step.

Like, you know, they started with SteelCam, what, last year maybe, or?

I don't even think, I mean, it feels like forever, but I think it was just earlier this year, maybe.

Now with the messaging-based substrate, and everyone wanting content and seeing how visual content fits in there, I think it's only the evolutionary step to integrate the 2 of those.

And once that takes off, it kind of, you know, falls into that, like only fans parallel that a lot of people have been making.

I was saying this to you earlier, but in the beginning I had kind of made the comparison to Big Cloud as well, but the more I began thinking about it and using the platform, you realize that the only parallel really there is the social tokens and like social token market.

Well, they're very different from 1 another going from like, you know, drilling all the way down from the style of launch that they had to the product that they offer.

I don't think they'll suffer the same fate.

It's more I think if they can keep features rolling out to keep the attention you know going because airdrops are 1 incentive and people are you know aware of points and the airdrop or there being a future airdrop because there's a button and a page for it.

But sometimes monetary incentives don't outweigh like the time value, right?

Like the amount of time you have to give over to doing something to earn an undisclosed amount.

But if you continue to like buffer that decay with feature releases, then you know you're able to maintain kind of your level of attention gravity, and pull in more of the masses.

I mean, they like racer and group definitely know how to make a viral or attention, attention grabbing app.

I like their like ship and drip mentality, right?

And they just, you know, release it as is.

Don't, you don't need to, it doesn't have to be perfect when it comes out.

Get people using it and then you can, you know, build up steam incrementally.

So, I mean, I think that the fact that a lot of people, A, within our echo level, so I've been talking about it, sure.

But then you start to see some other groups that are starting to look at it that maybe are a little bit crypto native, maybe have done like NFTs in the past.

They're looking at different ways so they can like you know monetize access to those individuals.

They've already started to like you've seen Faze Banks.

Yeah you've seen some of the OF girls and and kind of like e-girls starting to cross over.

I think there was an NBA player that like set 1 up like you're starting to see this this crossover into I don't want to call it the Web 2 world, but normal, everyday users who are big on social media, big into marketing, big into digital marketing.

It's cool to see that it's already kind of breached into that category of users.

I hope that it continues to do well and people keep using the app.

I think that my best advice would be to just keep building through the FUD and all the noise.

So there's been some back and forth on Is the financialization of everything in our space bad?

And my perspective is like Web3 natively is the mesh of economics and some other element, right?

It's where that's kind of spread out, and it's fundamental to our lives, and now it's kind of fundamental to everything else that we're building in the Web3 space.

Now, if this becomes the Trojan horse app to bring people in outside of like the traditional speculation space.

But what are your thoughts on the like, should we decouple web 3 technology from the financialization of everything?

I don't think that the financialization should happen to everything where there is, you know, centralized bodies of control.

That just means that we are a digital version of what already exists.

And like, I see a lot of that that, you know, projects kind of pivot towards, like making tradeoffs and decentralization in order to like push a product out quicker or maybe for a marketing tactic to be able to say that they're doing something that you know you wouldn't really be able to market if you were using the decentralized services.

But I think if like we're going to and we're moving the route where you financialize everything then quote-unquote like web3 or crypto you know is the way that you do that.

Like, I don't know if everything should be.

There are certain things that I don't think should have prices on them and should be traded on public markets.

That's where the financialization of everything starts to get into maybe how I feel philosophically about certain things and where there's conflict.

There's conflict, you shouldn't put a price on anything and everything.

Yeah, there are some things that like, I think, you know, have infinite value.

And I think when you start putting prices on things like you, you like add a layer of nefariousness and evil to markets that didn't exist previously, right?

And that's where some things get kind of Black Mirror-ish, even like, you know, CCP-ish.

So It sits strangely with me, but it's like an inner battle because I believe that if it can be built, it will be built.

And as long as it's launched properly, then who am I to make a fuss about it?

But there are things that kind of cross like a moral or ethical line to where then you don't really have a choice but to say something.

Let's move on to more OP stack type things.

So Farcaster announced that they'll be moving into the optimism world.

I think that it's kind of silly, but I don't necessarily love Farcaster's approach.

And ideologically, me and those guys don't align necessarily.

I'm someone that believes that a blockchain should be used, I'm not a small blocker, right?

Like at heart, I'm like a big blocker shit coiner.

And I feel like the Farcaster guys have a small blocker mentality to them.

They don't believe that everything should be on chain.

I believe you should put everything on chain.

Lens, what I really enjoy about Lens is that there's a lot of products being built on top of it.

So Lens has kind of, although it started as just a social app, it's now kind of a substrate for other apps to be built on top of.

Even right out the gate, I mean, there were like, I think 4 or 5 apps that I got test flight links to and was able to try out.

I will defend Farcaster in that they, I mean, I got access to Firecaster easily and I got access to Lens just from like a beta testing perspective, right?

It took me forever to get a Lens profile.

And I think they stopped, Firecaster stopped supporting the desktop app because it doesn't work for me anymore.

And my handler is like super nice, but I have a feeling they're gonna get rid of that regardless in the future.

But yeah, there's a decent amount of people that have been building like streaming platforms and different stuff on Firecaster for quite a while.

And like, they have been building on-chain, it's just they use Gwerly, right?

And now that they're moving on to optimism, whereas like lenses on polygon, if I'm not mistaken, I mean, they've both been on chain.

They've both been building a lot in the space.

I think that maybe what has helped people from joining Forkaster is you have to DM the founder on Twitter to get access.

And it seems from like a personal perspective, he's been like, you know, pretty okay.

But from like a, we tried to do it on a business account once and just ignored it.

So I think that Lens is easier access in that regard.

But I think that there's decent amount of building in both the spaces.

To be fair, I had to do the same thing with Lens.

I had to just DM Stani and say, hey, let me get on Lens.

I love when projects are, projects that have been building for a while are still around.

It always gives me a reason to go back, see what they've been doing, see what's changed.

Especially if like, you know, they've pivoted and they're building somewhere else now, or they've integrated, you know, some new tech stack.

So I need to make sure that I don't lose that.

It's with 2 eyes, but 1 eye on anyways All right moving on balancer yesterday released a Announcement that they had identified an issue with their v2 pools.

20% of the pools are still affected, which is roughly, I think it was

I don't know, it was a minimal amount of the total value, but they said that the issue hasn't been exposed yet, no one's been using it, but the pool is they could not fix to move over.

I think it's more of a nothing burger, but it's good that hopefully this was given to them via a white hat submission, which I think that the landscape in vulnerability disclosures has completely changed.

Most black hats, unless they're probably Lazarus, they'll take the bounty now.

I know that from our perspective, we've gotten 2 criticals, white hat submissions, And it's been fruitful.

So if you're a DeFi developer and you don't have a bug bounty up, you need to have 1 up because you're exposing yourself by doing this.

And don't be afraid to throw some money at it because I think that the 1 way to get the death knell of your protocol is to lose all your users' funds, right?

Like there's really no coming back from that if you look at historically.

Small shill or big fans of HATS protocol.

If you haven't checked them out, you probably should.

It allows you to set up your own bug bounties, and they have a nice little network of hackers that will help you find exploits.

Yeah, and they're privacy-forward like ourselves.

They don't enforce stuff on the developer side.

I really like their infrastructure too, because they have PGP between the submitter, vulnerability submitter, and the actual devs.

Whereas some of the other bug bounty programs is like, you know, the vulnerability is submitted and then like, you know, their entire team can see the vulnerability, right?

All right, other news, Binance US can do deposits again.

Has anyone have been trading on Binance US?

It was always like pretty liquid compared to other markets.

But Moonpay, I, in a different lifetime, I did work with them as a partner.

They have been just like killing it over the last like 5 years or so.

You know, with all the NFT stuff they were doing, they seem to be the gateway for a lot of non-custodial apps for fiat to crypto I know that back in the day they were using I don't want to say them.

I think that third party apps, especially mobile, were allowing like Apple Pay, Google Pay so that you were kind of able to, it allowed you to not have to resubmit additional KYC because you've already KYC'd with Apple, all your information's there.

So you're able to use your registered Apple Pay.

I think most of them take Venmo now, Cash App.

I want to even say this was like 4, 4 and a half years ago or so when that first started popping up.

You could do like, I think, under 5k, maybe less now.

But Yeah, they seem to have kind of, you know, worked their way up from their days of being software wall integration for crypto to fiat.

Also related to Binance, this is, I I haven't done any fact-checking on this myself, but quite a few have reported that Binance has been selling Bitcoin to defend the price on BNB.

Now, I think I read somewhere that it was potentially some sort of liquidation that they have, or someone has, but someone's been aggressively selling BTC to defend this level.

If I was Binance, I probably wouldn't be doing this because it leads into like the FTX type territories.

Like it's because there's a bunch of you know margin that's locked up that's built on you know rainbows and good intentions.

And this has been going on for what, like 2 weeks now almost.

There's a rumor going around that they're getting hit with like a 7 to 10000000000 dollar fine.

Yeah, I think they have that like cash on hand.

right, have you messed around with like Eigen layer was I can I generally I can layer

we were just talking about that not me and you I was talking about that This morning with some people?

Yeah that the cap reached It's like a hundred each in the top 200000.

I remember Sinas was saying something about, he used CB ETH because The traditional ETH was difficult to hit the cap way early.

So, CB ETH was the only thing that had not hit cap yet.

I think that it definitely has room to grow.

It's 1 of the primitives in DeFi that this is the reason that DeFi exists.

So you can stack all these different components together.

So you have a yield generating ETH, and then you use that to then reach consensus, or validate, or whatever the case may be on top of that.

So like having a dual purpose use for your yield bearing ETH makes total sense.

And I think that, especially when we get into like what does the Sequencer landscape look like?

What does a decentralized Sequencer landscape look like?

Or how do we utilize the base layer assets to then further enforce the roll-ups?

Yeah, all right, let's keep on moving on.

So NFT space, Vinny Hager is releasing a 100 NFT drop of, I'm a big fan of like, like Doodle-based, right?

Doodle-based NFTs, but he's doing a dual release between physical and, what's it?

All right, when you say Doodle-based, you're not referring to the doodles NFT, right?

You're referring to like the style, like a Scribble style kind of.

But yeah, so like this is his style, right?

And he's doing a dual release on OpenSea on, I think the 7th.

You see that Jordan and Snowfro are releasing a new art block that's like, I think from my understanding, it's digital and physical.

And you can build those blocks in your little editor, and mint it, and then you get physical pieces that you can then reconstruct

Have you seen what Async does with like their layered stuff?

Whereas like, I think that their like initial launch was like Da Vinci, The Last Supper type of style, but you could replace the people, you could replace the background, you could replace what the table looked like.

And so they have like, so it's like different layers and you can either have your main 1, like whatever you like that is meant to, there were some things are random, but then you can buy like expansion packs on top of it.

So if there's 1 artist that wants to come in and does like an expansion pack of 3 different stylistic characters, like the full set of characters, and you can replace with those 3 different layers, right?

I think that as a concept, it makes a lot of sense to me, maybe not as like a core piece of art, but more as so of like, if you were to have a game with like an avatar and have like these different layers of what your guy kind of looks like and being able to play around with that and fully integrate to the NFT space.

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Eden Aesthetix : Episode #01