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Speaker A: Hey, bankless nation. This is a special episode, actually, an interview we recorded with Guy from Coin Bureau about a month ago. So some of the prices, some of those details might be dated, but I think we talked a lot about the bankless story, David, so we thought you guys would enjoy it during the holidays.

Speaker B: Importantly, this is an interview of us by Coinhero. This is not a Bankless podcast, but we are putting it on the Bankless podcast feed.

Speaker A: Yeah. So I hope you guys enjoy. As usual, I was shocked that he did a podcast. I still, to this day, have no idea why SBF came on a podcast with an $8 billion hole on his balance sheet.

Speaker C: Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Coin Bureau. We have two very special guests with us today. I am deeply honored to welcome none other than Ryan, Sean Adams and David Hoffman, better known as Bankless, one of the best crypto podcasts out there. An invaluable source of information for not just all things ethereum, but all things crypto and beyond as well. I've been listening to Ryan and David for years now, and they just keep on getting better and better. I'm really glad that they've been able to join me today. It's pretty early in the morning for them. But guys, welcome and thank you so much for joining.

Speaker B: Thanks for the kind words, guy.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's a pleasure to be here.

Speaker C: It's great to finally meet you. Like I say, I've been listening to you guys for years now, and you guys have had so many incredible conversations with some of the top names in the space, and there's no way we've got time to sort of dig into all of those today. But I do want to get your thoughts on a few sort of episodes that you've done, a few people that you've spoken to. But I thought an interesting thing to do to start with, because one thing I've kind of noticed is that the crypto podcast world and the crypto YouTube world seem to be sort of quite separate polls a lot of the time. And obviously you guys have a YouTube channel, but I think you're sort of best known as podcasters. So I thought for anyone sort of unfamiliar, for anyone who sort of gets most of their information from YouTube, could you guys give us your backstory a little bit, like how you got into crypto and how you came to do what you do with bankless?

Speaker A: You want to start, David?

Speaker B: Yeah, sure. I think to start things off, Ryan and I are definitely podcast people. I would say we both are big podcast consumers, and I don't really know how anyone would start a podcast without having that as their foundation. Like, first we enjoy podcasts, and then we are like, okay, we could. We could start a podcast. And so that that's probably why Bankless is known as a podcast, is because that's where we came from.

Speaker A: Yeah. Like, David, how much, how much, how much podcast listing do you do versus YouTube, would you say?

Speaker B: Yeah, like, three to one ratio. And it used to. It used to be a ten to one. It's gotten. YouTube has increased lately, and I would say that's been on track with bankless emphasis on YouTube. Like, we've nailed the podcast game relatively early, but the YouTube game is still, like, new to us.

Speaker A: We stuck at YouTube.

Speaker B: Yeah, we stuck at YouTube. We're working on it. But we started first as podcast consumers and then podcasters, and that's really where bankless came to be. It filled this niche in the early days of Ethereum, where there were a lot of people that had a lot of shared ideas and understanding about what this Ethereum thing is and what it could be. And this was back in, like, 2018 to 2019, when it was very, very early, and no one knew what Ethereum was or where it was going. It's like we had just coined the words defi, and so we started the podcast to help articulate that story. And a lot of Ethereum people at the time were like, oh, thank God, finally someone is saying the words that I feel about Ethereum. And that's kind of where we got our first early foundations in the space.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think the perspective at that time, 2019, when we kicked things off, was we had just come out of 2017. And, guy, you remember this, right? The highs of 2018, the elation all the way, and we're going to change the world. And crypto is everything all the way to the lows of 2018. 2019 and the absolute despair. And so David and I were on a kind of a similar quest and journey where we were fully bought into this crypto thing. And we obviously, we had bags from 2017. So we were trying to figure out, like, oh, my God, are we wrong? Like, did we. Did we miss something? Did we screw something up? Like, so, for me, it was just going down to base principles and trying to figure out if I was crazy or everyone else was crazy. Bankless really began as a quest, right? It was just a couple of investors on the journey to make sense out of crypto. What are the use cases? What are blockchains good for? How do they actually accrue value? And so we basically open sourced this quest, and it was a series of conversations between David and myself. And then we'd bring guests on and we developed what we call the bankless thesis. Indeed, the name of the podcast is kind of a thesis for crypto, which is. What does crypto do? Helps us go bankless. Right. We have a money system, an alternate money system that does not rely on central banks or commercial banks in order to thrive. So even the name of the episode is kind, or the name of the thesis is in the podcast format. But, like, one other thing I'll say is I think that podcasting is a different medium than YouTube. Our podcast, the reason it hasn't translated so well previously to YouTube is just we tend to go on for a long time, long time. It's like deep, long form conversation and YouTube. At least my impression of YouTube. And I think there's some convergence. I think things change, but YouTube just give me the answers. Right? I want, like, I want to see 15 minutes, like, articulate something. And it takes David and I longer than 15 minutes to actually go through an idea maze and talk to a guest. That's why. That's why we're probably native podcasters rather than youtubers.

Speaker C: Yeah. Well, because, I mean, you guys have been. You guys have been working together for so long now, and, you know, you gel so well together. I think that's part of the appeal, isn't it? It's like, it's not just two guys who really care about what they're talking about and what they're into, but also just like, you know, really sort of bounce off each other so well. I think that's why, you know, I think that's one of the many reasons why it works, why bankless works so well as a podcast. Yeah, I mean, you know, from my experience of it, like, from my experience of YouTube, because, I mean, when we started. When we started Coin bureau, you know, all those years ago, we had to sort of. We had to kind of figure out YouTube as we went along. And it was sort of like, surely what people want is just, like, really short, like, you know, a couple of minutes. And then we were quite surprised when they wanted kind of, turns out they wanted kind of longer form stuff. But it's just, it feels like a lot of the time, it feels like the sort of goalposts are almost shifting in a way, because you're sort of trying to. You're trying to find that balance. Like, people do, like, longer form stuff on YouTube, but only. Only up to a point. And then there's a sort of moment where they're sort of like, no, this is enough. Like, I can't deal with this anymore.

Speaker A: Yeah, I was actually going to ask you, guy, because I think you do this really well with your YouTube channel and kind of your platform, but it seems to be there can be a challenge with anyone who is in crypto media with presenting candy to the audience versus presenting vegetables. Right. We like to say at bankless, what we're trying to do is, like, healthy candy. But, like, sometimes that's difficult because if you go by attention spans or narratives, then you're just talking about maybe the latest meme coin and what is the substance there? How does that actually help us change the world and fulfill the promise of crypto and actually go bankless? If you give the audience just the candy, oh, here are the ten coins that are mooning and you need to buy right now. Then I feel like you lose the plot. But if you don't do any of that, if you're just deep into the research and you're talking about ETH research posts all the time with big brain cryptographers, then you're not changing the world either, because you don't have an audience that actually cares about that. I'm curious, from your perspective, because you seem to balance this very well. How do you manage this, the candy versus the health foods?

Speaker C: It's tricky. It's a good question. It's that idea of calories or sweeties. Healthy calories, healthy candy, as you say, it's tricky. I think one of the things that we found that helped us grow was the realization that crypto is no longer in a bubble. And I think this was really sort of coming out sort of 2020, 2021. I think this realization that crypto had evolved from just this thing that a few people were interested in and only that kind of existed in and of itself. And suddenly it was much more susceptible to macro forces. It was a part of, you know, it was becoming a part of the kind of traditional system, which isn't, you know, which isn't great in many ways, but that's still. There's kind of cold, hard facts. And I think sort of, we pivoted a little bit to covering sort of more macro content as well in order to kind of flesh out the ecosystem for those who maybe sort of had a kind of passing interest in crypto, but, like, kind of like you say, they didn't want to listen to, like, a deep dive into the latest eips or anything like that, but they're still, you know, they've still got enough interest. They still want to know what's going on, but, yeah, they don't want the hardcore tech, but it is tricky because. And I think especially during kind of periods like we've just come out of. And I think this is why certainly here at Coin Bureau, I'm kind of getting the sense of it from you guys as well. Sentiment is kind of really sort of picking up because in a bear market, when things are really bad, it's so difficult to keep people engaged and entertained, and you sort of feel like, well, I should try and find some good news to cover. And then it's like, pivot AI, you know, everything sucks. Everyone's at each other's throats and all this sort of stuff. It's. It can be really difficult. So, yeah, it's, I guess, striking that balance between what you think your audience wants to see and what you think I. They should see and sort of try and give them both because, yeah, I mean, it would be very. It would be very easy to do, like, top ten. Top ten meme coins for October, even as a little piece of you dies.

Speaker A: I mean, we try to balance it out a little bit, but we will, like, still do a show on an entire Eip. Like, we did a show called Dank Sharding and, like, we didn't even.

Speaker B: No, no blob space.

Speaker A: So, like. But as it can't be all of our episodes, that's how we. We just do a portfolio. Right? So you get some vegetables mixed in with everything else.

Speaker B: I think that's where we've kind of settled is there's just an extreme amount of variety on bankless. So you get the one and a half hour long, very technical deep dives with Justin Drake. And at the end of that, you end up saying, like, I can't really regurgitate anything, but I still kind of got it anyways. And then.

Speaker A: And if you feel like that, that's how david and I feel.

Speaker B: And then, and then there's, like, the 45 minutes shorter forum episodes where we're specifically talking about market movements and, like, kind of doing the dopamine content that everyone in crypto pays attention to, whether you're, you know, an Adiq degen who just got in or you're Justin Drake. Like, one of these, like, both. Everyone kind of pays attention to, like, market drama no matter what. Maybe Justin doesn't.

Speaker A: There's plenty of market drama. Isn't there always all the time in.

Speaker B: Crypto, I would say in. In the YouTube game. And this is something that we identified pretty early at bankless, I would say. We didn't. Our. The first podcast episodes were no video, just because we didn't have that set up. The technology wasn't there, and we weren't very good at, like, we could have done it, but we weren't very good at it, but it was something like that. You tapped on to guy when you said, just like, the. The chemistry between me and Ryan is really, really good. A lot of. I say, like, content producers as an industry, when people watch content, they kind of want to just catch a vibe. They want to feel things. And one of the ways that we, me and Ryan, got traction in the early days is that we were able to articulate some of the grand visions of crypto in the grand scheme of things and the fullness of time. And you put those into words, but that was an articulation of the way that a lot of people felt about this industry. And then we're also doing it. Like, me and Ryan lean, inherently optimistic, and then we also kind of have this, like, we think similar, similarly. So we can bounce ideas off of each other.

Speaker A: Yeah, but I. David is gas and I am brakes. Yeah, we're saying contrast, too.

Speaker B: Yeah, but you have. The difference is in you and me, which is, like, the gas and brakes, and, like, you're a business background, I'm a psych background. But these are actually complementary, not like they don't conflict. And so, like, the bankless brand just makes people, like, feel things at times, sometimes negative things. Some people don't like us at all.

Speaker A: It's very negative things.

Speaker B: But, like, the idea is, like, the. The people do feel stuff, and we have, like, leaned into that a little bit.

Speaker A: It's not an apathetic brand, by the way. You could tell that David and I are still podcasters because we have these big ass headphones on. We were just talking about. David just sent me.

Speaker B: Yeah, I want to. I want to get the invisible headphones. I want to get.

Speaker A: At that point, you'll know that we are trying to like more with YouTube when we get the invisible headphones.

Speaker C: That's the moment you transition. The headphones come off, and suddenly. Suddenly you're a youtuber, and it's all good. It's all good.

Speaker A: Yeah. Is it better on the other side, guy? Is it better to be on the YouTube side?

Speaker C: It's okay. It's okay. It has its moments. It can get a bit weird as well. People can.

Speaker A: Well, you guys deal with some characters on YouTube that I just don't. I don't think exist in the podcast game. Like, there are some absolutely, like, crypto YouTube personalities.

Speaker C: I would say there certainly are. Sometimes you just find yourself kind of, what is going on? Is this real? Am I actually seeing this? Am I actually. Am I actually a part of this world? Yes, it would seem that I am. Good Lord. It can be very strange. There's never a dull moment. But yeah, I mean, going back to what you were saying, david, I think the chemistry that you guys have is really sort of tangible. But I think, like all the best podcasts, I think when it's two people talking, like, you know, you feel like you're in the room with you guys. And I think that's. But I think that's the big attraction for, you know, for people with podcasts. You know, I think most people tend to consume podcasts like, you know, when they're, when they're kind of, you know, walking or going, you know, kind of going about their day. And I think that's part of the joy of it because you can just sort of, you know, you can get on with your day whilst also having. Whilst also being in the company of these people talking about blob space and all this kind of weird stuff. Because I listened to you guys on my way into work, I got one of those electric scooters because I thought, I'm not going to go down the Dubai route of buying a big supercar and getting stuck in traffic. So I listen to you guys on my scoot in and it just makes the time go beautifully. But obviously, YouTube is a kind of different medium entirely. It takes a bit of cracking, but yeah, it's rewarding. Come over to the other side.

Speaker B: We're working on it. Our team is corralling us over there and they're doing a good job.

Speaker C: Okay. You just have to lose it at some point and just give over. Give over to the nuttiness of it all. You'll enjoy it. I wanted to, so, like I said earlier, you know, there are so many great episodes that you guys have done. I want to take you back in time, if I may, to sort of just over a year ago, because my wife Katie and I had just moved into our house here in Dubai and she'd set me the task of building the bed that we'd had delivered. And I noticed that there was a bankless episode on and it was the debate that you guys hosted between Eric Voorhees and Sam Bankman fried. And I kind of put it on and my wife came up about an hour later and found me just sat on the floor surrounded by a completely unbuilt bed. Just sort of, you know, she was like, please tell me what is so fascinating that you completely failed to do this. But, yeah, I mean, I remember that was such an incredible. An incredible episode to listen to. It was an incredible debate. I just wanted to. I just wanted to get your guys take on it, you know, after everything that's happened. Obviously, we're talking in the wake of SBF being found guilty. He's looking at, you know, possibly. Possibly 100 years plus in jail. But looking back on that time, do you guys. What do you guys make of all that? I mean, I think it's. I think it's fair to say that Eric kind of won that debate hands down.

Speaker B: Oh, yeah, certainly.

Speaker C: Yeah. What did you make of it all at the time? Did it feel as surreal as it kind of came across to listen to?

Speaker B: Yes, definitely. And there's. If you go. If you look at. I mean, only we can see it, because we only. We have the back end to the particular episode, the analytics, but you can see the chart of viewers, concurrent viewers, who are watching the live stream. Like, it spikes up, as all livestreams do, and then it hovers around some flat line for a little bit, and then the debate really picks up, and you can see the moment when friends are texting friends or people are sending out tweets, and they're like, yo, everyone, get in here and watch this. Eric is dismantling SPF. And so it's right around halfway through, and the viewership triples very, very quickly. And at the same time, everyone talks about this huge episode that banklist did that you guys produced. Ryan and I stopped talking about one third of the way through the podcast, and we had a mid roll sponsor break that we do for every single live stream. And I'm texting Ryan's, like, text. We should be doing sponsors right now, but we can't end this. We just have to let this roll. And so we just went hands off. The episode wrote itself. SBF, like, handed Eric his jugular, and Eric was like, okay, thank you. And he proceeded to just dismantle SBF. Yeah, it was a surreal moment, I think, for the entire industry.

Speaker A: I think it was. And I think that this was part of the unveiling. So let's remember, go back in history, rewind a bit further. So this happened in the end of October 2022. But if you rewind to January 2022, the three smartest people in crypto were do Kwan, SPF, and Suzu. Okay? These were the legends. These were the people we put on a pedestal. SBF, this phenom that built an exchange faster than Brian Armstrong. He was so big at the time. And then, of course, we saw the downfall of Do Kwan. We saw the downfall of Suzu, but who is still standing in October 2022, the savior of crypto sand bankman freed. And so this debate actually happened twelve days before all of the shit went down and everything came to light. And so we were actually, first of all, I was shocked that he did a podcast. I still, to this day, have no idea why SBF came on a podcast with an $8 billion hole on his balance sheet. That, to me, does not make logical sense. That is some kind of, like, SBF level hubris.

Speaker B: Well, we didn't yet know that. SBF didn't shut up. Like, he had. He had just entered that arc of I talked.

Speaker A: He does not have the shut up gene. And I think we saw that in court. He decided to testify on his own behalf. Like, he just. He's got something that most human beings don't have. And so the reason he came on was because he was pushing forward this anti DeFi legislation in DC behind closed doors in a way that would effectively pull up the ladder from the decentralized exchange front ends and accrue more power to his exchange. And so we were like, SBF, come on, talk to us about it. Engage with, yes. And then Eric Voorhis wrote a blog post about the same issue. So we're like, you know, what's even better than us talking to him is Voorhees talking to him. And so that was the genesis for the conversation. But I thought it would be a bit more equal, like, sparring back and forth. But at the time, the piercing moral clarity of Eric Voorhees, just to kind of like, why are we here? Like, what are we doing? Sam juxtaposed with the kind of, like.

Speaker B: Compromising faustian bargain that was SPF.

Speaker A: It was so clear even at the time. And we didn't know that he was short $8 billion, but we knew he was short, like, values. We knew he was short, like, the reason we're all in crypto.

Speaker B: And I think Sam articulated, like, I am here not for decentralization.

Speaker A: I'm a mercenary.

Speaker B: I'm a mercenary.

Speaker A: I'm just going to make as much money as possible, and then I'm going to give it away.

Speaker B: And I think people were okay with that until he stepped into Congress, until he, like, started to play into the regulatory arbitrage game.

Speaker A: Anyway, the other interesting thing about that episode, David, is, like, when we were going through it, SPF seemed, like, shaken during the time. If you watch, he was unable to articulate in the same way that he usually is.

Speaker B: He started to fall apart.

Speaker A: He started to fall apart. And.

Speaker B: I speak English, but I'm guessing if you didn't speak English and you watched that episode, you would understand that. Like, yo, that the Eric guy won the debate. Like, you don't have to understand the words that were said to understand that. Like, Sam Bankenfree just, like, fell apart.

Speaker A: I don't know. What did you think of it, guys? So at the time, of course, the entire industry didn't know that what, what SPF was up to behind the scenes. But, yeah, what did you think of that when you were trying to assemble that bed?

Speaker C: Yeah, it was like, you know, the more that it went on and the more, you know, because Eric just sort of killed him with logic and clarity, like you said, didn't he? It was so. It was so clinical and it was sort of like, I don't. I. You know, when, you know, when you sort of feel like. You feel on edge, even though you're. Even though you're completely, you know, in agreement with. With the party that's winning, you're like, Eric is absolutely right here. Like, wow. It was still kind of. It was still sort of painful to listen to, in a way, because even though right was winning out, it was still like, this is. I mean, this is embarrassing for SPF. And I guess at the same time, you're like, wow, hang on. This is someone who was the JP Morgan of crypto a few months before that, as you said, the savior of it, or so we thought, guy, I'm.

Speaker A: So glad we did that episode and that it's on the record. I'm glad on behalf of bankless, but I'm also glad on behalf of the crypto industry, because I think I, after that, crypto has been painted in such a light that it's full of sbfs and scammers and people who don't take accountability for their actions. And indeed, we had an episode with SBF even before that, in March of that year, where it was just like, we've had CZ on the podcast, we've had Brian Armstrong, we've had the Winklevoss twins, where you've got a big exchange. Let's talk about your vision for it. And so I am so glad we had an episode pre FTX collapse where there's someone in crypto who represents, like, why we're here, calling this man to task, like, on behalf of our industry. I feel like that is evidence we can point to you as an industry and just be like, no, we knew something.

Speaker B: He was not. Wasn't our guy.

Speaker A: He was not one of us. He wasn't us.

Speaker C: Yeah, I think it's so important. It is like, people outside of crypto think that the whole industry just sort of exists to scam people or whatever. I think it's really important to have a record of that, to have a record of people in the industry going, hang on a sec. No, what's going on here? You have to explain this. And I think Eric, around that time, was talking about this idea of having industry standards as well. The industry itself, saying, this is acceptable, this is not. A lot of it, I think, was going to be around exchanges and proof of reserves and solvency and things like that. And it was such a great conversation to have because it's like, yeah, how can we expect government agencies, people, outsiders, to come and regulate us if we can't sort of clean out our own house, if we can't, you know, try and draw up. Try and police ourselves, try and draw up regulations for ourselves? And that's. Yeah, I mean, that's one of the reasons why I wanted to sort of discuss that episode with you, because I think. I think it is a really sort of important moment in the history of crypto, really. It's like, you know, not only was this guy sort of the whole facade started to fall apart, but it's also like, you know, here is evidence of it. Here is evidence of the industry sort of, you know, policing itself to an extent.

Speaker A: Well, absolutely. And I don't know if you read a post from Balaji Srinivasan who makes this, this point. So it wasn't just that bankless episode. It was crypto media who actually, like, broke the story. It was like that coindesk article from the reporter who revealed the balance sheet, and then it was crypto Twitter that was looking at kind of, oh, what's this money going on in the blockchain? Let's look at Alameda's accounts. Let's look at FTX's accounts and see where's the money? Right. It was these citizen journalists. It wasn't traditional media that actually broke this and disclosed. It certainly wasn't Gary Gensler who had had multiple meetings with SBF earlier in the year. It was really the crypto industry that revealed this. And so that's another untold story. And I hope, guy, I hope these stories make the Hollywood movies and the documentaries when the social network comes out for crypto, I hope they cover it in the right way. But if they don't, then I think the real ones know people who are in crypto at that time. They know what actually happened.

Speaker C: Yeah. And I think, well, it's so important to pass that lesson on, isn't it, to go look? Because that's another thing I wanted to ask you guys, just on the subject of that interview. Do you think crypto has kind of, as an industry, has kind of learned its lessons from that whole saga? Are we, are we older and wiser, or do you think there's still a likelihood that we're going to make the same mistakes again?

Speaker B: I think this last 2022, the year of just terrible price action and blow ups and fraudsters being revealed as fraudsters, that was pretty unprecedented in crypto. We had some pretty undesirable behavior in the downfall of 2018 in that same kind of era. But it was not at the same level of the gaping hole that was 3 hours capital or the absolute just toxicity that was the Do Kwan army and do Kwon himself, followed by the level of fraud in 2022 was quite unprecedented. And I think a little bit of that was because there had been fraud in the industry before, and no one had really gone to jail yet. And so it was perceived as a. Crypto is an industry where you could get away with fraud and you could make billions of dollars and walk away without ever, like, being tried by a justice system. So I think 2022 was useful in the fact that, like, no, actually, if fraud is fraud, no matter where you are or what industry that you're in. So now that we have this precedent, I'm optimistic. I'm happy that we have that foundation to stand on. I'm also cautious about entering a bull market in which people's values tend to be forgotten. And it is the moment, it is the time in which leaving your values behind is the most profitable. It's the most profitable time to do that. And so crypto is more mature. If we do enter a bull market, people will do less than desirable things, but at least we have precedent of people. You will go to jail if you do anything significant. So check yourself. So I'm mixed.

Speaker A: Yeah. The way I would answer that is we will make the same mistakes just in different ways. I think that if you look at the parallels between icos and all of these futility tokens and all of this money that was raised in 2017, that was the mistake that was the cardinal sin of the 2017 bull market. And then if you look at 2021, 2022, it was quite obvious the cardinal sins were there. Algo, stablecoins, margin trades with hedge funds, pumping these ecosystems that really didn't deserve it, and ultimately centralizing all of our private keys and trusting the blockfi's and the Celsius. Alex Mashinsky, God, he doesn't get enough shame. Alex Mashinsky, and all of those people that stole our funds. We will make mistakes that are fueled by the basic human psychology of boom, bust of bubble, every cycle, but we won't make them in the exact same ways. I don't think we will trust another Alex Mashinsky who's wearing a shirt that says, don't trust banks and is himself the least trustworthy banker in existence. Maybe. Well, actually, maybe not in existence, because he had quite a list of other untrustworthy crypto bankers at that time. And in fact, Dave and I just did an episode. I think you listened to it, Guy, because you mentioned this before. We recorded with an investor who's outside of crypto, just a tradfi kind of investor named Morgan Housel. He wrote a book called the Psychology of Money, where he's just like, the reason it will never change is because human beings don't change. We're running the same, like, homo sapien software that we always have. And so we're going to have these envy, greed filled booms and these busts that we have to live with. We're going to throw the crazy, wild party, and everyone's going to get drunk, and then someone's going to have to clean up afterwards. That's just how it is. And I guess I've come to terms with kind of accepting that. And my belief is, and I think our hope is, and the optimist in both David and I is like, well, the benefit at the end of this is going to be worth all of the painful hangovers and parties that we've had along the years, because we are building an open, permissionless money system for the world. If it was all neat and orderly, if it wasn't chaotic, that would be an indication that it was a centralized system. It's almost like it has to happen this way. If it's bottom up and decentralized, that's how you know it's new and it's a movement from the bottom up.

Speaker C: Yeah, I was listening to that episode that you did with Morgan yesterday. And can I just say to anyone watching, if you listen to anything before the bull market starts. You should listen to, to Ryan and David speaking with Morgan Hauser. It was such a good episode. Obviously the psychology of money is a wonderful book and I haven't had a chance to read his new one. That was what you were discussing, wasn't it? Same as ever. I think it was called same as ever.

Speaker A: And he just talks about the timeless principles of life and investing things that don't change.

Speaker C: Yeah, it reminded me of something my grandmother used to say. She always used to say like, if something is easily got, then it isn't worth having. And I think I really felt that with listening to that discussion. It's like, yeah, it has to be hard because as you said, we started from zero, we started from Satoshi, started from 00:15 years ago. And I mean, that's no time in the grand scheme of things. And we're still kind of, we're still building, we're still making mistakes, we're still screwing up. Some things are working, some things are collapsing into dust. But that's the way it has to be. Otherwise you don't get progress from that.

Speaker A: Yeah, I completely agree. I don't think there's an easy path here. The volatility is the price of entry. That's another thing that Morgan Hausel said. If you want something to five x, the reverse of that is you have to be comfortable with an asset losing 80% of its value. Thats the trade off that we make. And so, yeah, we dont get to have our cake and eat it too. In crypto, it cant always be infinite up. Thats not how life works.

Speaker C: Yeah, well, of course, because that was the point he made, wasnt it? About this idea of people years ago trying to figure out how to stop recessions. Its like, well, you cant. If you never had a recession that would create the perfect conditions for an absolutely massive recession.

Speaker A: Well, I just think, I imagine how much worse our industry would actually be if we didn't have 2022 and we still had an algo stablecoin that was rather than 30 billion, it was now 300 billion. Okay. And then actual retail, non crypto retail got involved because some fintech app started offering it. And we had Sam Bankman Fried, who had grown to the largest exchange in the world with FTX. And he was, it was larger than binance at this point in time. And it wasn't $8 billion in lost private keys, it was $50 billion. And then we had Alex Mashinsky and Blockfi. And all of these things were continuing to grow. Imagine that like, to me, it's. We dodged a bullet. Honestly, it was like, 2022. As painful as it was Washington, the best possible thing that could have happened to crypto.

Speaker B: Yeah, we did clean up all of the mess in 2022, in 18 months. I mean, it was one year of time between the fall of FTX and Sam, like, being charged guilty. I remember one of the very early takes that I heard in the middle of 2022, I think right after the fall of FTX, was from a friend of our pod, Nick Carter. And he said, that is Nick Carter and Matt Walsh. And they said that we're not going to be able to have a bull market until we clean up the fraudsters and the scammers and we throw them in jail. And I remember listening to that take and, like, not wanting to believe it. This was, like, November, December of 2022. Because I was like, man, Doe, Kwan's still out there. SBF just. We had new one, right? Like, 3 hours capital. They're. They're still running free. Like, we have to, like, according to this take, we have to get every single one in jail before we can have a bull market again. And, like, it's obviously not perfectly correlated. Like, we could find some internal, like, catalysts, like Defi summer to have a bull market. But just like, the sentiment of, just, like, we will never be legitimized as an industry until we throw away the scammers and fraudsters. And then on the dot, the week that SPF gets charged guilty, like, tokens, pump 50% off the ground. Like, the take was super prescient. And again, correlation, not causation, et cetera. But I thought it was a. It was a great take. And also, at the same time, we can now feel good about prices going up rather than bad. Like, I wouldn't feel the same if SPF was walking free. And, like, do Kwan wasn't in jail. And 3 hours capital is still being 3 hours capital after all of the harm and fraud that they caused, and then we just had another bull market with them. That would not make me feel good.

Speaker A: Well, I'm actually curious from you guys. Are you surprised that this is happening so soon? I mean, there's an element of me as, like, this is my third cycle here, and I'm just like, wow, we've recovered from that.

Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. And, like, I do feel like that.

Speaker A: You said it at some level, I'm like, it was only a year ago. It was only a year ago when we had that conversation with SBF. And so much has happened, and now you're saying we've healed and we're back to bull market. Like, too soon.

Speaker B: It seems fast, but also, it's the same exact time as last cycle. And I think time just goes faster now because we're older. We've done. We've seen this before.

Speaker A: Okay. I know first cyclers are like, what are you guys talking about? We went through so much pain that last.

Speaker B: I don't know.

Speaker A: I'm just like, wow, that was quick.

Speaker C: Yeah, well, you guys were talking about this the other day, weren't you? Because you're like, there's always that. There's always that thing in the back of your mind. It's like, okay, so it goes in cycles, but is it really gonna. Are we really gonna have another cycle? Is this actually gonna be that easy?

Speaker A: If everyone thinks it's gonna go in cycle, it's not gonna go into the cycle, right? In a four year cycle.

Speaker C: Yeah. And then it's like going back to.

Speaker B: The Morgan household thing, right? If it's. If it's easy, it's not worth doing. It's like, yeah, the four year cycles, if you. If they really play out that way, that's super easy. But come on, you had to live through 2022, and 2023 wasn't great either. Like, those weren't. That was hard. That was a hard thing.

Speaker A: That was hard. You guys earned it. Hey, if you're still listening to Coin Bureau, if you're still listening to bankless, it's likely you were. You lived through all of that, and I feel like you have. You've got veteran status now. All right? You are going to be the OG for future generations of crypto. I mean, we are still, like, one fifth of the US owns crypto. We are still on the early side. I mean, barely anyone is using Defi and actually has possession of their own private keys and is actually bankless. We're still very early.

Speaker C: I couldn't agree more. I couldn't agree more. And it's like that OG status is kind of hard earned, isn't it? You really have to walk through the fire to get that. And, I mean, I guess you look back to some of the trio, like Eric Voorhees, who was there sort of almost at the beginning and went through Mount Gox and went through all that sort of stuff. It's like these guys have earned a right to have an opinion through years of just kind of putting up with, I guess, what might be termed even worse back in the day. Like, Mount Gox sort of was almost terminal, wasn't it. I remember getting into crypto about that time. I heard about crypto sort of late 2013, and then I think it was sort of early 2014 when Mount Gox started crumble. I was like, whoa, this, hang on a sec. And then it survived and I was like, okay, wow, this is more resilient than I thought. That was a moment for me. But to have been someone in it, invested in it, or like, I speak to a lot of people who had money on Mount Gox and they were just like, yeah, I remember trying to do that. I remember trying to get it off. It was. I remember just like trying to email Mark Carpelis directly and it was like, it was pretty wild. You guys have earned it.

Speaker A: Yeah, we've come such a long, I mean, that was a magic, the gathering, like card trading exchange that converted to a crypto exchange. It's like we have come so far since then, we have real companies here. Ten years. I mean, it's not a long time.

Speaker C: No, we have, yeah, we have real companies. We will have ETF's before too long. It's crazy to think touching on the ETF's. Obviously you guys are not solely focused on Ethereum, but ethereum is a large part of bankless focus. So can I just get your take on where Ethereum is at the moment? Obviously it's been kind of in, in bitcoin shadow a lot recently. Network activity has been down, ETH went inflationary for a bit. Again, there's a lot of fud flying around about Ethereum, which I think is sort of always the case. I don't think that's necessarily anything new. And then of course, suddenly we're now talking about Ethereum ETF's as well. So yeah, I just wanted to get your guys take on it. Has Ethereum still got quite a lot of work to do before it can really join the party? Or are you sort of more optimistic?

Speaker A: Are you ready to cope, David? You cope.

Speaker B: Yeah. Like you said, ethereum always kind of occupies this uncanny space in which it never really seems to be popular. I think from January of 2021 to May of 2021, Ethereum was in vogue for the moment of time in which I thought, okay, finally it's getting the recognition it's deserved. Like Defi is now being recognized, nfts are now being recognized, finally. And then people just went down the market cap stack into more shinier objects. And this is where the whole Sol Luna avax trade came about. And it's like, oh, let's find the even shinier object than Ethereum. And Ethereum's roadmap and what it wants to do is so incredibly ambitious and multifaceted that it, like, not most people, don't have the whole entire scope of it able to, like, be realized inside of their brains. Like, it takes a lot and a lot of knowledge and a lot of appreciation for the many, many, many moving parts of Ethereum to really understand the grand vision of the whole entire thing. And so, and then also at the same time, Ethereum's market cap is big. It's $300 billion right now, $250 billion. And so it's not a penny stock anymore. And so when so much of crypto is kind of like the craps table and rolling of the dice and like trying to, trying to get the ten x, the 100 x quickly, like, ethereum doesn't really occupy that space. And so it's always there. There's that one meme of, like, the guy up against the wall and there's like 50 swords pointed at him that always kind of felt like a theory.

Speaker A: You know what movies that from? That's from David. Yeah. Tangled.

Speaker B: Tangled.

Speaker A: Tangled, yeah, sure. All right, fun fact.

Speaker B: Yeah. And so, like, Ethereum occupies the space where, yeah, it's getting the Ether ETF because of its size, but then also just the ambitiousness of the roadmap is too long to be realized and catch that dopamine hit of people in the short term investing cycle. That is a bull market to be interested in that. So it's just always occupying this, like, uncanny valley of just like, like, it's too big to be a fun speculative bet, and it's moving too slowly in its roadmap to satisfy a lot of the now now investors.

Speaker A: So I guess that's good cope, David.

Speaker B: Good, thanks.

Speaker A: Here's my cope on it. So, first of all, I think things in Ethereum are going just fine. I think it is executing incredibly well from a fundamentals perspective. And you just look at the growth of layer twos. And also it's doing pretty well from an institutional narrative perspective. There will probably be two ETF's that we get this bull cycle season, one of them, sorry, XRP lovers, it's not going to be XRP, unfortunately, that was fake news. But it's going to be bitcoin and ether. And those are the two ones that I think, well, get institutional capital attention. But what I think is going on is this reminds me a lot of 2020, and if you remember 2020. So this was like when we were just starting to recover post Covid. It was about this time back in 2020. And the things that were pumping were smaller cap defi tokens and bitcoin, not ethereum. And so there was very much this narrative of Ethereum is just a gas token. It's just for payment only. What does it really do? You want to own a store of value, which is bitcoin. You want to own your money, and then you want all of these DeFi tokens, which gives you exposure to the DeFi economy, the neo banking system, and that's all you need. And as David was saying, ethereum in that world, in that narrative world, just gets left behind. It's the stepchild that no one loves. It's just like not even part of the appetite in that kind of world. I think something similar is playing out right now, but it's not defi tokens. It is bitcoin and all of these very fast alternative layer ones. And so what's interesting to me is actually what happened in the aftermath of 2020, because anytime price runs up, like, so high, remember what we're actually doing. Of course there's the narrative reason it pumps. But if you still believe in fundamentals, and. And I might be one of the last guys in crypto still that believes in long term fundamentals, but if you think that the world of fundamentals is a real world and that narratives are shorter term, but fundamentals are the things that last, what happened with Defi Tokens is they pulled forward a whole bunch of future expectations. And I'll admit I got caught up in it, too. The thesis for DeFi tokens in 2020 was that these governance tokens would pivot into governance would vote in profit share, essentially, so that you'd have on chain revenue and on chain profit associated with these Defi tokens. And so what happened? Massive run up. The whole market realized that this would be huge. And so Defi tokens absolutely went on a tear. And all of these future expectations, hopes were pulled into the present. Okay? What has happened since then? It's been completely flat.

Speaker B: Three year bear market in Defi tokens.

Speaker A: And let's talk about the reality. Very few Defi tokens are more than governance tokens today, okay? Very few of them actually pay back token holders with on chain profits. Very few of them have actual solid fundamentals. So a lot of the expectations that was pulled forward at that time turned out to not be true. And I worry a little bit about this alternative layer one run up, because I don't know that a block space is as valuable as people think it is, or at least what's happening is a lot of future expectations are being pulled to the present. And I don't know that these tokens and assets will be able to sustain that over the one to three period of time, a year period of time. I don't know, maybe none of that matters. And by the way, if you're a narrative investor or if you're a trader, honestly, it doesn't matter.

Speaker B: It totally doesn't matter.