In this episode, Lawrence and Dan discuss recent events in the crypto space, including their experiences at ETHDenver and Token2049 Dubai. They also talk about their recent trades and the current state of the market. The conversation then shifts to various airdrops, including EigenLayer, Parcel, and Camino, and the potential value of these tokens. In this conversation, Dan and Lawrence discuss various topics in the crypto space, including airdrops on Solana, blockchain congestion, legal cases, and the future of crypto regulation. They touch on the challenges faced by Solana with network congestion and the potential impact of the Fire Dancer client. They also discuss recent legal cases involving fraudulent schemes and the need for clearer regulations in the crypto industry. The conversation concludes with a discussion on the role of Bitcoin and the importance of considering different perspectives in the crypto space.
Twitter: https://twitter.com/redcandleclub
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@redcandleclub
Dan Kazenoff: @DanKazenoff
Lawrence: @crypto_sieve
DISCLAIMER: This is not financial, tax, or legal advice. Hosts and guests may hold some of the assets discussed on the show.
In this episode, Lawrence and Dan discuss recent events in the crypto space, including their experiences at ETHDenver and Token2049 Dubai. They also talk about their recent trades and the current state of the market. The conversation then shifts to various airdrops, including EigenLayer, Parcel, and Camino, and the potential value of these tokens. In this conversation, Dan and Lawrence discuss various topics in the crypto space, including airdrops on Solana, blockchain congestion, legal cases, and the future of crypto regulation. They touch on the challenges faced by Solana with network congestion and the potential impact of the Fire Dancer client. They also discuss recent legal cases involving fraudulent schemes and the need for clearer regulations in the crypto industry. The conversation concludes with a discussion on the role of Bitcoin and the importance of considering different perspectives in the crypto space.
Twitter: https://twitter.com/redcandleclub
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@redcandleclub
Dan Kazenoff: @DanKazenoff
Lawrence: @crypto_sieve
DISCLAIMER: This is not financial, tax, or legal advice. Hosts and guests may hold some of the assets discussed on the show.
Hello. Welcome to Red Candle Club. I think we're on episode eight. So welcome back. It's been a while. It's been a little while, but there's been a lot happening in the space. So felt like it was a good time for us to come back and talk about some of the things that have been going on in the last week or so. So Before we start this is just for entertainment and educational purposes. This is not an investment advice and please consult the financial professional before you make any buying or selling decisions in crypto., it is a risky market.
Dan:So it's been a while. I don't know if we did Did we do a ETH Denver debrief at all yet? Or
Lawrence:Not really, because we had the, we had an interview after that, but we didn't really do one.
Dan:Yeah we do have some ETH Denver content still cooking. We've had like a lot of life situations to deal with over the past few months, so we haven't been able to. Finish editing and uploading those. But we do have some interesting interviews that we chatted with from hackers at the event. And yeah, I don't know if you wanted to just do a quick debrief even on, on what it was like for you at all or
Lawrence:like things that I've learned or found
Dan:out. Yeah. Just, just kind of a quick sort of takeaway on, yeah.
Lawrence:A lot of interest around D PIN. There's one thing that I've, I took away. I took, one thing I took away is R Weave. R Weave has really impressed me at ETH Denver. Just with like the, They seem to have completely pivoted and they went from just like decentralized storage into they're trying to build like, like overall deep in deep in cloud solutions, not just storage, but like everything. So I was really impressed with that project. And I really think that they're going to. I mean, I could see them reaching new highs a cycle just from the pivoting in that direction. What else? Some Cosmos representation, like Injective was there. There was definitely some interesting projects with Cosmos. Some Bitcoin L2 solutions. I can think of more, but you go.
Dan:Yeah, I think that. Yeah, the Arweave was interesting. I actually didn't like run into any Arweave talks or presentations, but I think that's definitely the right move to go in because a lot of the storage blockchains right now are like archival storage. You have IPFS, which is like easier or quicker to access. And, but it's not really like on a blockchain. You don't have, you're not getting paid to like store things on them necessarily at the protocol level. So yeah, that's cool to see that we're going to be aiming toward building more decentralized, like cloud infrastructure there. Yeah. I would say there was the, like the, the level of Eigen layer definitely showed up and seems like they put a lot of effort into sponsoring many different events. So I think they did have kind of like the loudest voice there. I don't know if it was necessarily like the most productive voice there, given that I don't think we've seen, we're starting to see like some activity on like the ABS side, but maybe it's not completely taken off yet. And I, the narratives have also shifted around very rapidly, but yeah, AI was another big one there, just trying to, you know, like story protocol who hoping to get on the show soon. I chatted with. One of the people there, so yeah, integrating to blockchain intelligent way. There's a lot of blockchains out there, but this one's actually substance underneath. Yeah, Bitcoin L2s, I definitely saw those showing up. I have yet to actually use a Bitcoin L2 yet, completely. I've seen a lot of controversy, I think they're ruins, but If it's actually going to be affordable to use or reasonable, I feel like this like the space discussed this in the last cycle, like the viability of Bitcoin L2s and whatnot, I feel like we're kind of giving like a new breath of energy now. So, yeah, AI, Eigen layer and some Cosmos projects, trying to integrate with all that and trying to like, you know, bring Cosmos energy to the UVM. So, yeah, good event is like very packed felt like it there's more energy events this year, maybe than last year, the main event was still like pretty crowded, but it was like a small stadium that last year. Yeah, definitely more of the Sunset events. Yeah, good time.
Lawrence:Yeah, it was a good time. I, I, I liked some of the after parties. Barachain had some good events too. So Barachain had a pretty big presence there. Yeah,
Dan:they definitely did.
Lawrence:Mm hmm.
Dan:Yeah, DYDX also had, had a bunch of events. So yeah, just the protocols that just have nice big treasuries. Just, yeah, we had like a base alchemy event. I think that was the night we had the dinner. Mm hmm. It's like for the dinner.
Lawrence:Yeah, they had a big party, right? They had a big booth too. Bass had a giant booth. They had a pretty swanky booth. A lot of people were there. They were having talks in their booth. So that was also Near. Near had a really good booth too. Yeah. Did you see that one? That hero is through his death. Yeah, I, I
Dan:feel
Lawrence:like that's why they're doing it because they're like, please, please look at us. Please use us. Please care. And I just don't hear anyone really using it that much. Yeah, man, sad. What are you gonna do? And Solana, Solana had a booth there too. Oh yeah, they did. I gave them a lot of credit for that. Because that's kind of brave. You know, to go to an ETH event. You know, as a Solana group, it's kind of like, there's like this rivalry. But they had a little booth there. They were having some little talks.
Dan:Yeah, I'm trying to like, you know, convert people like, Hey, you know, solidity, like check this out. So
Lawrence:yeah,
Dan:I think, I think that was cool. Yeah, it's, it's good to have more people checking out salon. I think there's, I'm seeing more developer activity there and interest. They've been having like some chain issues recently. Which yeah, I'm also maybe interested to like discuss at some point, maybe this episode just to like,
Lawrence:yeah, for sure. I could talk about that a little bit because I was having some issues with the chain a few weeks back. We don't have to do it right now though, but we could talk about it later in the episode if you want to do some other stuff. Then,
Dan:then the other, maybe like the last thing on ethenver just like the RFK turning out there, that was interesting. So we're starting to see like candidates. Enter these presidential candidates enter like crypto events, I'd say starting in the last year or so getting more attention there. Obviously we had like the Trump NFTs, we've had the Biden administration going like on the attack generally. And then I would say, yeah, RFK showing up here doing a speech, which he did get, like heckled that pretty hard. Like, I don't know if you tried to watch any of the video, but it was, it was kind of like unwatchable is
Lawrence:I saw some of it. Yeah. It was a little cringy or something. Yeah, it was a little, it was a little bit cringy, but that's. I mean, politics, man, brings out the crazies.
Dan:Yeah, so yeah, man, that was basically the East Denver vibe this year.
Lawrence:Yeah, it was a good event. I had a good time. Denver is a good place to have it. The weather was Really nice actually for the time of year end of February. It was like 50s 60s. It was it was gorgeous there So, you know nice weather It's a nice cool city to have it into so it's just like a nice getaway from the winter here in the Northeast and go Just talk crypto with people for a few days
Dan:and then shortly after that token 2049 They just, yeah,
Lawrence:that, that was crazy watching that on Twitter, just people's pictures of like cars just submerged underwater and stuff like on roads
Dan:around on like the package dollies like to like cross. Yeah.
Lawrence:That was some wild shit, man. I. I. I. I, I don't know. And yeah, and then people were like talking about how they changed the weather. They see the clouds or something. So there was conspiracy over like, did they cause this? And I was just like, Oh God, this is wild. Yeah. Crypto Twitter was fun those few days. It was, but I didn't hear of anything of the actual event. Like, did the event take place? Did they
Dan:heard nothing? I didn't know who people that went, but I didn't care. I didn't ask them what they do. They're just like, So we were
Lawrence:just hanging out,
Dan:came in a week with like extreme fun, that did like, right.
Lawrence:Geez. All right. Well we can start getting into the meat of this thing. So do you want to talk about some, I mean, we can talk about some of our trades like Tao has done decently. Well I got in around two 40 and then that went up to, Like almost 700 at one point. And then it came down to three 50 recently. Now it's hovering around four 70. So I might get more, I might pick up more here. I bought some at 500. It kept going down, but you know, it's still a good, decent price here. There's some other AI tokens I'm interested in as well. Like net mind seems to be at support levels right now. So like I'm. You know, that's like another it's like the Chinese version of Tao basically is how it was sold to me They got hacked a month or two back too. So the price dropped a little bit But you know, I mean hacks, you know hacks don't stop projects, you know As long as it's fixed. It doesn't mean that the projects over So that's really it. I'm just kind of looking at some I'm not making too many Big purchases right now just cause I not sure where the market's going to head in the next month or two summers. Usually kind of not the best for crypto. I feel like people just go outside and touch grass and the markets just kind of hover, you know, so we'll see.
Dan:Yeah, I've recently definitely, I think the last booze I made was frenzy, just exploring different bots and just, yeah, kind of getting caught a little bit in that, but obviously there's a few major, major success stories with that. with that, but I do feel like probably 99 percent of
Lawrence:the
Dan:experience with me and coins is just getting absolutely destroyed.
Lawrence:Yeah.
Dan:So I'm just like kind of hanging on the sidelines right now. I'm still basically holding everything. I have not really sold too much and I'm just, I have like macro concerns generally, but I'm curious, like where you think things are right now in the market? Like is, would you say things are just kind of finding a little bit of support at the moment? The free fall that feels like we felt recently is kind of like frozen a little bit or
Lawrence:yeah. Well, I think some of it is well, so the fed meeting happened last week and the big takeaway there was that they, they're, they went a little more dovish than we were expecting, which means basically like supportive of asset markets. They didn't change the rates, the interest rates, but they did say that they were going to reduce the balance sheet expose balance sheet roll off I don't really know what that means, but it basically, it would go, it's going from 60 billion to 25 billion. So basically they're letting less of their bonds mature. I think, all right, that's the most I'm going to say on that. Cause I'm probably going to sound stupid, but essentially they're, it's supportive of markets to let, to have less assets get off their balance sheet. So that surprised the markets a little bit. I think that's why we bounced last week and we had like a nice jump in crypto assets. And equity markets. But really like crypto markets tend to, it seems like it's all about global liquidity. And that right now is it's, it seems to be struggling. We're having less global liquidity, so I, it's not like super supportive of markets, at least in the medium term. So I don't know if we should expect fireworks over the summer. Basically. I think we could probably neutral or slightly down, you know, as, as Until the fall hits, like maybe August, September, and then because of the election and whatnot, like, they're probably going to juice markets to get people to go out and vote and whatnot. That's, that's how I see things going. But yeah.
Dan:Agreed.
Lawrence:Yeah, I really don't see markets moving much over the next few months. I don't.
Dan:Yeah, I think we're in a tough spot right now.
Lawrence:Yeah. And some of the ETF flows have been having struggles too. Like Bitcoin had a lot of, you know, a lot of the excitement has died off now. And I think people are just kind of, you know, the, like the, it's, we started to see some outflows this week in the past couple of weeks. And we had a day where there was no inflows at all. I remember like a couple of weeks back. So, yeah, I think people are just kind of it's just taking a pause, you know, it's not over, but it's, it's, it's taking a pause. The first movers got in and now they're just, you know, that the weak hands are getting shook out and just need to wait the next move basically.
Dan:Yeah, yep. So it's hopefully we're not entering tough times in our, like globally right now, things are, seem to be pretty hot and I think there's some trepidation possibly getting pulled in from that standpoint. And I think just the fact that the interest rates are so high and I think the government is in search of new revenues. So I think, you know, where there's all these, like. Very spicy headlines around like taxes and like, there's like a Bitcoin tax that came out a few months ago that was proposed and there was also that we realized gains tax and increasing just regular capital gains tax to the highest rate or the highest marginal rate. So I think that is kind of speaking to the government's need for additional.
Lawrence:Yeah, for sure.
Dan:Difficulty in maintaining
Lawrence:things. Yeah, there's also a little bit of fear of inflation going back up again, too, which, you know, we, we could see some bad numbers over the next few months, you know, it seems like we bottomed with inflation and now it's going to start going back up a little bit, not saying it's going to go back to eight or 9%, but, you know, we could see, you know, we could see four or 5%, you know, which would be right around the interest rate levels. So that's, you know, it's not exactly like catastrophic. It doesn't mean that they're going to raise rates. But, you know, we could see, we could see some bad numbers, which would, is going to put heat on the market or like a weight on the market, basically. Yeah, dude, fat food is, I mean, I don't know what the value is of fast food anymore. I feel like if you're going to go there and pay almost as much as it costs to like sit down or like get something healthier, like what, yeah, I don't know. It's like, yeah,
Dan:it's pretty upsetting, but it is what it is. Nothing much to add here, just kind of weird.
Lawrence:Yeah, I mean, we were expecting this, right? I mean, inflation, you know, it wasn't going to go right down to 2%. It's going to take a long time for them to get back down to that. I mean, so, I mean, ultimately, it's probably going to have to be like a full on recession for it to get down to those levels again. So, I mean, you know, it's inflation is going to hover here and, but I don't think they're going to raise rates until after the election if they need to. But I could be wrong.
Dan:Yeah, I think that makes sense. Maybe we should jump in next to the airdrops. Yeah. A lot of
Lawrence:airdrops, a
Dan:ton of
Lawrence:airdrops. You want to go over Eigen first? Eigen is a big one.
Dan:Yeah. Yep. So basically slightly old news, although they've modulated a couple of things in the last couple of weeks, but basically Eigen layer is launching a token and they're calling it the universal. Subjective work token. So they had initial white paper when they first launched the protocol. And then they came out with a new white paper describing how they're going to be adding utility to it. There was some backlash as there always is around protocols launching a token and they announced a snapshot. And there's always concerns around not allocating enough towards the community versus the team. So Eigen layer, I remember jumping in their discord when they announced it. And there's just a ton of. Massive amount of hate, like every message just like flaming the team. And it was like pretty overwhelming actually, just like all the negative sentiment. And so, I mean, there's, they basically capitulated and offered to release more tokens. I believe that the final token amount is going to be somewhere like 1. 66 billion tokens. And I am curious, like what the, the fully diluted market cap is going to end up being. Shaking out to be in the end, but yes, I mean, let's see a couple points on what the token is going to be doing. So it will basically be you know, trying to add programmable restaking permissionless elements to it. Basically allowing yeah, Ethereum to play a larger role in more or the theory of security to play a larger role in more protocols and programmability across the blockchain without having to roll your own blockchain yourself and try to get your own validators to, To support the chain, you're going to be plugging into Ethereum. So they're going to basically be plugging this into their Eigen DA layer as well. So the Eigen DA is going to be a pretty core component of, you know, the whole ecosystem around restaking and they're going to be using Ethereum as this secure data bus layer. For communication across all these different protocols. So we have a lot of fragmentation right now and Eigen layer would hope to, I guess, combine things together. There's going to be slashing penalties. At the moment, there are no slashing penalties. And what else do we have here? Yeah, so we're going to have to see how it will actually shape out. In the final implementation of it all, but yeah, it could be, it could be cool. We'll have to see if you want to check out if you're eligible for the airdrop. Cause I know there's a lot of difficulties there around geographic restrictions. So I think there's like 50 or so countries that are just restricted from even accessing the airdrop page, which is very unfortunate,
Lawrence:but you
Dan:can
Lawrence:see United States being one of them. So
Dan:United States, Canada, traditionally sanctioned countries. So you have a fine list if you can. You can go to their terms, terms of service, and it should show that where you can like search on Twitter, like graph see. But if you wanna see if that you're eligible and you happen to be from one of the restricted geographic locations, you can go to defi llama.com/airdrops and then go to check airdrops for dress. And you can basically put your address in here. And I guess they are probably making a direct call to a smart contract. You could likely go to the Eigenlayer smart contract yourself on EtherScan and do the whole query situation. I'm not sure what the Eigenlayer airdrop token address is. At the moment, but yeah, DeFi Llama will allow you to scope that out so you can see. So I think the token might be launching a 10th.
Lawrence:Oh, wow. It's soon. Damn this next week.
Dan:Yeah. Yeah. The distribution event is made.
Lawrence:Oh boy.
Dan:So getting
Lawrence:ready for that shit show.
Dan:Yeah. It has 15 billion TVL at the moment. Wow. I don't know what you think. I was looking, trying to find like comps for like other, you know, Tokens in the space that have like a TVL associated and like what's what's their token value? I think I saw yesterday Lido has around like 30 billion TVL locked up which is insane, but their token is only like 1 billion So I think maybe that could be reasonable That actually
Lawrence:does sound
Dan:shapes out.
Lawrence:Yeah, I feel like this is going to be a very highly valued token. I think fully fully diluted valuation is going to be like, I wouldn't be surprised if it was over 10 billion you know, for at least, you know, when it comes out and then people are going to dump it, of course, and then it's going to go down. But you know, it could, it could be a big number.
Dan:So these perps, does that mean that this is sort of what people are expecting?
Lawrence:Yeah, basically it's like, yeah, it seems like futures, but I don't know how you could trade futures on something like this without being an insider. I mean, how would you possibly value this? I don't know, but it's going to be, I mean, this is a big deal. I mean, this I've been in Eigen since its first, for the first you know, restaking thing that they did last summer. So I've been in this for a while and just waiting for, you know, I've been getting my points, but I'm not expecting a huge airdrop. I'm, I'm a small to me. I'm a small potato with the big whales. I got into this. I'm, I'm like a nobody. So I'm expecting like 200 bucks if I even get it.
Dan:Yeah, I think at that. Floyd, I would mark out like 10 to 15. It might be like around three to six bucks. Yeah. I'll have to check. Essentially there's just 1. 67 billion.
Lawrence:Wait. So it's set up. Wow.
Dan:Yeah. Just divide the number of tokens. For the Floyd down, let's see, 10 billion, six, seven gets you like six bucks. We'll see that friend friend took it.
Lawrence:Yeah. Friend tech. So the airdrop happened. A lot of people were speculating whether it was going to be real or not, but it's here. People, they got flamed cause the token dropped a lot initially, but I mean, I don't know how you can be mad at that. That always happens. Like literally every airdrop it's it's but if it's a bull market, it'll go back up and eclipse the highs usually that's which we are. So I don't think that it's a big deal if you have it. I mean, I'm not a financial advisor, but I would just hold it you know, don't don't get too crazy, but I think this has potential if they, if they build it out into something, if they actually, like, if they win, you know, there's a lot of competition, but, you know, this, this is, this could be, this could be a big deal
Dan:right here.
Lawrence:Yeah, yeah. It's 3.
Dan:Yeah. It's hot off the press came out May 3rd.
Lawrence:Yeah, it dropped to like a dollar 50 people got pretty pissed and then now it's, now it's back at three. So, I mean, I, I mean, this is a, this is a competitive market and we haven't really seen like a good social media crypto project yet. So if they can do this, you know, it's a big deal. So, but I haven't used it much. I don't have too many. Oh, but what's bunny swap. I don't even, is that their like decks? I don't know. I don't even know what that is. Yeah, I'm not sure. Oh, Jupiter has Jupiter has, you could buy it on Jupiter. That's kind of weird. Interesting. Cool. Yeah. I haven't played too much with it. I S I signed up to friend tech. Maybe I should look, see if I got an airdrop, but I like, I didn't really play with it too much. Yeah. I remember being all the rage last summer,
Dan:summer 23.
Lawrence:Yeah, that was back in July. It was like all anyone was talking about.
Dan:Yeah. And layer, layer zero labs.
Lawrence:Yeah, they, they just took their first airdrop snapshot. So if you're, if you use layer zero a lot, you're, you're in now. So they took a snapshot. If you haven't been using layer zero, you could, you should start using it. They'll most likely take a second snapshot. If, if, you know, if they're using language, like, well, let's see, is it?
Dan:Snapshot. Okay.
Lawrence:Yeah. So it's hinting that there'll be more. So if you haven't been using layers, it's a zero start using layer zero. Like what, what, what is layer zero on like they're underneath a lot of other projects, right? Yeah. So like they're an infrastructure project.
Dan:Yeah, they're an infrastructure. I guess they're kind of like competitor to wormhole. Let's see. Where is your labs? Remember they launched a test net bridge for getting girly Ethereum or like other test net tokens where you can like pay to like get the test that token. So I recall using that flat for,
Lawrence:yeah, they also got massive funding too. So I feel like this is going to be a, a big airdrop. Right?
Dan:Yeah. So I guess they're exactly this infrastructure later. So they, Enable program programmability around communication at different blockchains. So I'm not sure which blockchains within the ecosystem, but yeah, it seems like they have coverage across the chains. I'm not sure if it's permissioned or permissionless to add new chains. I'd imagine there's probably some permissioned elements, but I would need to take a deeper dive on exactly everything they're doing, but that's pretty cool if you need to push tokens, check them out. You also have what, Oh, let's see. So
Lawrence:parcels next. So parcel is one that I I've been participating in. It's basically like a real estate trading market. You could trade different real estate markets basically. So like, if you think you know, the New York real estate market goes up, you can long that or short that if you think it's going down. So they had an airdrop where all you had, I mean, you get points for different things. Like if you trade, you get points. If you provide liquidity, you trade, you get points, which is what I did. Cause I'm Lazy and I don't trade that much. So that's what I did. And you could also buy an NFT and they call it an HOA NFT and you get 25 percent bonuses on points. And you also can use referral codes, which also gets you. bonuses on points. So I did all of that. The first airdrop came out April 16th. So they, they already had an airdrop, but there, it does seem to be like they're hinting at more airdrops. So if you are interested in this project, you could still get in and get points. So they, they may do more airdrops in the future. I assume that they will so that they increase usage on the platform, but I like parcel. I think it's a really interesting project. It's one of the only. It seems to be like one of, you know, the only player in town for this type of product, which is like betting on real estate markets. So, I mean, it's kind of interesting, I think, you know, but it's, it's, it was a decent airdrop. It didn't seem that, that risky either. And then finally there's Camino, which is another, and this was on Solana, by the way, parcels on Solana not Ethereum. Camino also came out recently. Camino is also on Solana. Really just like how do I describe Camino? Like. Like you could do liquidity pools on it. They have vaults for liquidity pools. Yeah. Lending and borrowing. So like they, you know, it's, it's, there's a lot of products that are similar to this. It's kind of like a competitor to margin fi really. If you could think of it as a competitor to margin fi and they, they had it. They also got flamed because their token dropped. But again, like this is very normal for a part, like people, when they get airdrops, they're going to sell it. We just had taxes paid recently. You'd like. People need money, right? So they're going to sell their airdrops. They're going to buy it, you know, the first movers are going to sell the first people that get it and then they're probably going to buy in when it goes down again. So, you know, it's, it's not surprising to me but I got to clean my airdrop. I got one. So I got to see what what I got. Yeah. So, I mean, there's probably other ones. There's, there's a ton of airdrops happening, but these are the ones that we pay attention to. These are the biggest ones hitting the news. So and there's a lot more to come too. I'm sure there's a lot more projects out there that like, like drift, I know on Solana is going to have an airdrop eventually. So also Phoenix, which is a decks on Solana. There's been speculation that there's going to be an airdrop there, but there hasn't been any confirmation of anything, but. Given how much funding they've gotten, it's a dex, it's a, it's a dex that has both like on chain and off chain components to it. And they're, they're located in New York city. I actually went to their office like a month ago cause they had like an after party or a, not an after party, a happy hour. Yeah, that was pretty cool. I met Jerry, the founder. He's, he's a cool guy. He used to work for Solana. And there were a lot of like other ecosystem players there, like Drift was there. Let's see, there were a couple of, I think, I think some guy from Margin was there too. So that was a pretty, pretty neat event. And they, they're going to new offices soon too. So they, they got, they're rolling in the money, especially with all this trading. For a startup and how many people they have, they're, they're doing really well. So,
Dan:yeah, that's pretty impressive. Yep. Yeah. It's
Lawrence:a pretty, it's a pretty interesting project. All right. What is you want to talk about blockchains going down? That's always fun.
Dan:Yeah. Oh yeah. Let's talk about that. So, I mean, there's been a lot of stuff going on past few months. It's hard to even like name the exact dates at the moment, but I would say Ace has been down, Solana has been down, Polygons, CKVM has a lot of down moments. Curious, I know Solana right around maybe like the last third of like the meme coin frenzy, there was a lot of failed transactions, extreme difficulty doing any sort of dex trades. And I think the whole blockchain was just basically built in. We've seen it. Other people we know are doing business or marketing related to Solana, there's projects there that were basically halted their business because they could not launch any sort of token on Solana.
Lawrence:Yup.
Dan:In fact, they're failing. So, curious if you've dug into what exactly the cause was of all this working issues.
Lawrence:Yeah, so my, my, so I, I had, it didn't like, you know, what we're seeing with Solana these days, it's not completely going down, but it's kind of like having soft outages where the chain gets so congested. That just can't move and you have failed transactions and you basically have to like spam transactions until it gets through. And you know, the fees are not as cheap anymore as they used to be either. Just because they have these new fee markets on Solana now, which was supposed to combat the chain outages, but, and, and has, but the bad part is that it's, there's a lot more traffic on the chain now, especially with all the meme coins and whatnot, that it's, it's, it's. You know, we're, we're just, it's just having trouble handling the load. Basically. It's just, it's just congestion. It's it's like it's scalability of the chain is coming into question. So. I really, you know, they have released some upgrades in the past month or so to fix this. So they've, you know, they, they've been, they've been on it and they've been delivering updates and fixing it. So again, like I have a lot of confidence in this chain of solve problems. They have some of the smartest people in crypto working on it. And Anatoly is a amazing founder. And I really think that he is. Really like probably one of the best examples of a crypto founder that we have right now just like following his Twitter. He, he's just like very level headed about like the issues and you know, like he's still like involved in the engineering discussions too, which is pretty cool. So, yeah, they're, they've been struggling. I'm not going to like. Ignore that they, they've definitely been struggling. And I think that hopefully we get some like this fire dancer client, you know, I know that there's a lot of hype around it, but if, if they release clients that can move transactions faster, then it's it's, it's, it's going to be a big deal for the chain. But yeah, it, it ultimately it's, it's not the worst problem. Mike. It's actually a good problem. Like there's so many people using the chain that it's, they're having trouble processing transactions. And the fact that people are still willing to like spam transactions and use the chain, even after all these issues, to me is a really bullish sign. To be honest, it says that people are. People love the chain so much that they're willing to deal with all this stuff. And so I think it's a good thing to be honest. I know it's like a weird perspective, but I would rather have a chain be going down because it's being used too much than a chain that never goes down, but nobody uses it. Like you're not using it for anything, right?
Dan:Yeah, I think
Lawrence:so. It's
Dan:an interesting foil to Ethereum at the moment. Ethereum is, it's functional, it's extremely expensive to use, so it's really not worth it. Should for most majority of users, you do have these layer twos, but these are also expensive. There's a lot of fragmentation across layer twos. So Ethereum is, and I would, I think it's fair to say they innovate generally pretty slowly at Ethereum, which is good if you want stability and you want like a stable platform to build on, but it's concerning when you are trying to be a general purpose blockchain. And you want to like. Bring in as much as you can to the ecosystem, but you do have like these extreme barriers. Fire dancer is also cool. I'm following that closely to see, I think it's still early, it seems. And I think it uses some core. Solana client characteristics in it. It's not like fully its own thing yet, to my knowledge, but right, not yet make it more, yeah. Like affordable to run a Solana client, maybe. And like, right now I was checking if you were still being quite expensive. It'd be like,
Lawrence:Oh yeah.
Dan:I think if you, so
Lawrence:yeah, I think it's probably going to be like a next cycle thing, unfortunately. I don't think I, I would be very surprised if they got it out. Before the cycle was over. Just because it's such a big move. I mean, they basically are rewriting Solana in. In C so, you know, that's, that's hard you know,
Dan:yeah, I think another interesting thing, speaking of node clients, I don't know if you saw this came out pretty recently, Reth, so I did see this building this theorem client. They basically rewrote GIF entirely into Rust and they added like a lot of different characteristics regarding parallelizing various components of the client and just trying to be like as efficient and low level as possible with the with the entire every computation of a call that would Utilize gas on Ethereum. They're trying to make this client much more efficient than the traditional clients that would be used. So they basically come up here and the client's developed by paradigm and they've been, it's been in beta for a while, although I chatted with a lot of protocols and people at youth Denver that are using it in production today. So I thought that was pretty cool. And they're trying to basically maximize this, like gas per second. Concept that they're talking about. So they're making a claim that everything is too focused on TPS and not gas per second, which is gas per second. It's more, I guess, accurate as far as like how much compute can you put on chain in a given unit of time. So they're claiming that they're poised to get to a giga gas per second. Right now, the best you can do with like optimistic BNB, it's like a hundred mega gas per second. So that would be two orders of magnitude greater than the fastest thing we have at the moment. I think right now they're, they're about 100 to 200 megabytes per second. Yeah, so you can see that vertical scaling, horizontal scaling. It's a very interesting read. They have a lot of documentation, thinking about building out the client. And this could, this could be very cool. For theory. Yeah. Performance for sure. I So if the infrastructure Yeah, they implement it. No,
Lawrence:it's a good, it's a good move. I think it's a good move. I, I mean, and this is one thing that like, this is what Rust is actually good for. Right. Like Rust is meant for this type of stuff. So I think, you know, Go is a very fast language and Go is good for, it's fine, but Rust blows it out of the water in terms of speed. And, and, you know, so like, this is something that Rust is actually much better suited for and C so, you know, like the, we should be writing these systems in Rust and C The problem is that it takes a long frigging time. Like Solana was written in Rust, right? And that's why it worked so well. So like, you know, it, it, it, it's a good thing to, that these things are being rebuilt in these sorts of technologies that are better. The problem is that speed to market's also fast too. So like, you have to, you know, starting off with Rust is a big. Is a big ask, and I think that might be why like Solana had some issues is because they were writing it in rust when, you know, rust is much more mature now than it was when Solana was getting started. So, like, maybe they didn't write it in the best way, but I remember when I was using Solana a few years ago that a lot of people said, like, the rust code is shit and. Like they wrote it in rust, but like not the best way. So I think like, as we learn more about rust and we learn the better way of like writing things, it's gonna, it's just going to get better and better. So yeah, no, it's great. Yeah. We're, we're using rust at my startup. We're yeah. And it's, it's a hard language to learn. Like I, I, you know, it's, it's, I mean, I love it for the performance and, and all that stuff, but the learning curve is quite massive and. You know, it's, it's, it's just like C in that regard, right? Like, C is also difficult, but for different reasons.
Dan:Yeah. Data Structures at the school was based on C and I remember just like, Getting wrecked by it. Just like,
Lawrence:yeah, it sucks. Yeah. It's not fun. I mean, when you saw segmentation fall on your screen, like that was like the end of the, I hated that and like, there was like no clue as to like, why it was just like your shit died and figure it out on your own and it's just like, thanks man. Whereas like rust rust gives you, you know, the rust compiler is helps you a lot more with that. Like the rust compiler will tell you before you run it. Like this, this is where your memory is messed up and you have to fix it. So the idea behind rust is by the time, you know, you, you get much less runtime errors because the compiler just so much work for you to figure out beforehand. Whereas C plus plus doesn't. So you do, you get a lot more runtime problems with C plus plus, because it doesn't tell you like where your memory is there and not there. Anyway, just some geeky stuff. You know, I'm a programmer, you know, well, kind of so so yeah, I mean, it's But it's good that we're using these languages. They're really meant for these types of things. So
Dan:absolutely. Yeah. And if you're a developer listening and looking to get into crypto, I'd say rust is,
Lawrence:yeah, yes, you're, I would definitely take the time. If you're young, you're trying to figure out how to make a lot of money, you know, rust, take the time, learn it, get good at it. You'll have a job, not just in crypto, but like finance, high frequency trading, like their Rust developers are paid very handsomely right now. So, and they, I continued, I foresee that being the case for quite some time, but you know, so just cause it's such a hard language to learn and use. So, absolutely.
Dan:Yeah. What do we got next? I mean, I think we could maybe. Touch on jail time. Yeah. I need anything. So it was fun. But yeah, I mean, yeah, basically since our last meeting that we've had here, there's been some interesting cases that have closed for various people. Lawsuits from advancing. So yeah, SBF we've seen, this is a bit old news now, but he's, yeah. Basically sentenced to 25 years prison. So it's, I guess this was like somewhat controversial. Some people, yeah, I guess the prosecutor's one 40 years beyond 25. There was too many things on this. I feel like that's pretty significant. Yeah. Sure. What the Like, how much people actually watched it. It's very significant. It
Lawrence:should definitely
Dan:be
Lawrence:watched. I mean, I, it's a lot of time, right? I mean, by the time he gets out, he's going to be old, you know, almost really old, you know, he'll be almost 60 by the time he's out of prison. So, I mean, I mean, what, what do we, what do we want to see here? Like, do we want him to die in prison for this? I mean, I, I really, the most important thing to people is if they get their money back from FTX, like if you get your money back from FTX, Like fine, like, you know, he'll spend 25 years in prison. I think that that makes sense. The most important thing is getting people's money back if they can from, from this, you know, F, you know, cluster F. Yup. Do
Dan:Z. So it appears the charges were related to negligently allowing money laundering to occur on Binance. And, yeah, it's not too dissimilar from the cases that have been settled.
Lawrence:This one was weird, honestly. I felt like, when I saw this, I just don't know what the point of this is. I feel like it was just a signal by the government that, like, they're doing something, you know? Like, oh, look, we're going after the bad guys. Like, okay, he's gonna spend four months in prison. So what? I mean, what kind of, how is it going to be treated? Like, I, I don't know. I just feel like this was a virtue signal saying like, we're, we're going after the bad guys, but yeah.
Dan:100%. I think I've been listening to that illegal analysis on this more significant space that we've seen was the Sam wallet co founder, I think it was two developers maybe were, were extradited. Or one of them was arrested in Portugal or something, so I haven't used this before. It's been pretty controversial. I'd say maybe the most controversial story execution a couple of months, but basically it was this, this privacy application for Bitcoin and supposedly facilitated more than a hundred million dollars in money laundering. And supposedly it did 2 billion. And unlawful transactions, although I apparently that that 2 billion number, the only funds that were tracked to actual crime was the a hundred bill, a hundred million number. So in theory, there's as far as like traceable crime associated to the wallet, it's like 95 percent was legitimate activity. Less than 5 percent was. This confirmed illegitimate activity. And I guess they, they got some tweets or DMS from him that didn't look great where it seemed like they were leaning more toward trying to serve as the dark side of crypto rather than the light. Sure. I don't think that's necessarily like cremating to say it's just like, is, are your actions in support of this directly? Be the, the marker, but I guess there's concerns around a war against privacy at the, just, just having, just using a mixing service doesn't, should not mean that it's illegal if you're able to, like, of course it's, it's a controversial area, but there are a lot of cases where you'd want to have on chain privacy. There's a million legitimate reasons why you would wanna have not identity tied to your wallet. Everything's so traceable and so public. So if, if you're to use these things, or for example, if you wanna donate to a cause in a country that is censoring tracing where you're donating money to, and we've seen this, a lot of sanitarian countries that certain causes, they can rescue you. So if you're able to donate crypto, you link to that. That's a key use case as well. It's just general. To do chain visible to the world. If you had to be is so definitely use case for these mixing services for sure. But I don't believe that just using a mixing service is a transaction.
Lawrence:Exactly. Yeah, this is a tricky one. This is Ricky one. I yeah, I mean, this. What, what was that at the bottom? The, the bottom of the article? Berman oversaw, okay. Yeah, actually, this is another big one. I'd forgot about. Abraham Eisenberg. He was he was thrown in prison as well for Exploiting mango markets. So that, that was a, that was a pretty big move, I think. Yeah. I mean, he basically single handedly took down mango markets. He, which was a a perp, the biggest decks perp decks on Solana at the time, back in October, 2022. And he basically like took out, I forget exactly how it works, but he basically was able to take out like an infinite loan on mango and, and just like tank to the whole, the whole exchange. So yeah, he, he, they got him and they, they made an example of him. So, like, I'm very torn on these issues because, like, on one hand, I'm glad that they caught this Abraham guy and they did something about him because people shouldn't be allowed to just, like, do this stuff. You know, and take people's money and, you know, like get away with it. Right. But on the other hand, especially with like that, that mix in service, it's a little harder because we should be able to use privacy services, you know, it's, it's kind of like, you know, like, should I go to jail because I use the browser that blocks advertisements because I don't want people looking at my browsing activity. Yeah, or
Dan:VPNs, VPNs are kind of another analogous case here. I would say, yeah, that's concerning for developers. I think like that tornado cash fall into this bucket. And I do think it'd be valuable to have like a legal expert on sometime to chat about this in more detail. Is there more to the story than just building something? Because I think to be able to build something, Should not be an indictment at all. Like people build stuff all the time and like it's used for nefarious purposes, but if you're building something, just writing code for it to like learn and understand the technology, that should absolutely should not be a crime. So I think there's concerns around like. What, what happened beyond development and like how much of it was just them being developers, like running a project versus facilitating criminal transactions. I think this is a hairy area because the government wants us to just track every transaction no matter what. So they want you to be. Registering as a money services business and doing KYC and all your users. That's just not feasible for small projects that are working with like open finance. So there's like a lot of controversial regulatory action being performed here. And I guess it's defense was like, this is the guy that was just like
Lawrence:utilizing the code as long framework. Yeah. That's a little different. I feel like that was a little more justified. Then because like that, that, I mean, there was a lot of good stuff happening on that chain and there was a lot of honest money going through there. And that guy just, he saw an exploitation. And instead of, you know, he made a decision of he, he could either reported it and, and just like kept the chain, you know, made the change stronger. But instead he said, I'm just going to take all for myself and screw everybody else. And that mindset sucks. And you know, that that's not the same mindset as someone who builds a privacy service then wants other people to use it. Like that's giving, whereas this guy was taking, so I feel less sympathy for Abraham, much less like none, you know, versus the privacy service guys who were actually building something like this guy isn't building shit. He was just, he was just trying to take from everybody. So, I
Dan:mean, I think that it will probably set interesting precedent here, which may or may not work to the community's benefit. I think there's difficulties around you know, could we, could the chain have just like forked back to the previous state and just ignored his, his hack or is it best to just, you know, deem what he did as an actual crime? I guess.
Lawrence:Yeah, well, if mango had their own chain, they probably could have, but they didn't, they were using Solana. So yeah, I mean, they would have had to roll back the entire Solana chain, which I don't think would have been worth it. So, but that's, I mean, this is part of why they, this is part of why exchanges want to build their own chains, like the YDX, right, is building their own chain, you know, so they have, they could do stuff like that. Where with this, it's like, you just kind of screwed. So, yeah, I feel bad for mango. I really do because they had, I mean, they're still around now, but it's not, I mean, drift ate their lunch. So just go use drift. You know, mangoes just floating along really.
Dan:So I'll be able to claw this back somehow. Maybe they already have to some extent. They'll just kind of put it back in. I mean, I think the takeaway for me and based on what I'm seeing as well, cause I was also involved in a doubt, I think I was telling you before that was subject to an apparent fraudulent scheme. It seems like based on an investment that Dow made, and I think there's this misconception in crypto that like, because it's crypto, like, you know, there's no rules and you can just do whatever you want and traditional world world laws do not apply to you. But that's just absolutely not the case. That's not what's happening in the courts right now. Like they're being prosecuted as like traditional fraudulent schemes. Like just because it's crypto doesn't mean it's just not, can't be deemed as like corporate or breach of fiduciary duty or like just totally false claims as like what you're going to be doing or building for people. So there in a positive way, there are legal avenues for people that have been subject to like pure scams. There are like. Many legal viable civil or criminal routes for people to take to get back money. But it's kind of in contrast with a lot of things in crypto are kind of like play at your own risk, right? But that doesn't necessarily Make you safe from eventually having to exactly put you in jail.
Lawrence:Yeah This is where it gets like really tricky with legal issues, right? Like You know, on one hand, the U. S. it's got its good parts, too. And the good parts is that people, if you commit fraud here on a large scale. You're probably going to get caught eventually, and they're going to make you pay for it somehow. You know, so that, but on the other hand, they want to also monitor everything. And, you know, so it's like, you got to pick your battles. You know, if I was a developer wanting to build a privacy solution, I would not build it in the United States. I would try to build it in a different country with less. Rigid institutions like you know, Argentina, for example, go build it in Argentina. They, they need all the money they can get right now. So they'll take your business. You know, so it's like, it's tricky.
Dan:Yeah. Yeah. Or Dubai.
Lawrence:Yeah. Or Dubai, Dubai. Yes. Dubai is one needs all the business it can get. So there'll probably be a little more leeway there with like what kind of businesses you run as long as you. Pay, whatever taxes you need to pay, et cetera, that'll just kind of leave you alone. But, you know, the United States being the world deserve currency and everything, people expect certain things, you know, and that part of that is knowing where all the money's going and who owns what and that's, it's just kind of the,
Dan:the environment that we're in. Education industry, like, everyone's kind of willy nilly just throwing corporations out in different jurisdictions, but I think there needs to be, like, a really good. Clearer picture for where people can set up businesses, set up tokens, not custodial or custodial wallets. There's like so many things out there in NFT projects. Like where's the best place to go? Like, where are you? Yeah. Where are you domiciling this? Essentially like the foundation component, the corporate component that.
Lawrence:Yeah, I think, I think it, we're going to get there. It's just going to take a long, long time. I mean, Coinbase is doing a lot of work around this. Like Brian's always in DC lobbying for a better crypto regulation. So like we'll get there, but it's, it's, it's going to take a long time. It's we're just, we're just super highly regulated when it comes to finance. And almost like draconian, I mean, we, it is draconian, it, we're, yeah, that the, the, the word is, it's basically a no is the default. So
Dan:we see some changes here in November will be like a really critical for crypto us. It does seem like it's very dicey idea to do that.
Lawrence:Yeah.
Dan:There's a lot of protocols that are still headquartered in the US
Lawrence:Right
Dan:time. Have to be in court jurisdictions.
Lawrence:Yeah. Like Unis swap, right?
Dan:Yeah. Unis swaps based in Brooklyn and yeah, they, they're dealing with an SEC lawsuit, I believe as well.
Lawrence:Yep. I'm not surprised. I mean, New York, New York City is arguably the most highly regulated place to start a financial business in the world, so. I mean, I, I think probably like the only comparable places might be like Amsterdam, you know, or some crazy, so like, you know, kudos to them for taking that risk, but they're going to have to do a lot of work to stay there. I think,
Dan:yeah, definitely going to need to follow that one close to the Uniswap consensus and Yeah. You know, swapping consensus coin base. Those are going to be the critical to follow. Let's see how those things shape out. And I think Ethereum being a security is going to be on the docket for the consensus case. So they're going to try to get a ruling there. Not sure how long that will take, but very going to be very critical. How these things get deemed.
Lawrence:Yup. I really think ultimately though, that there's so much money to be made from ETFs, et cetera. Like we've already seen, I think the Bitcoin ETF was like a big move. You know, we crossed the Rubicon there because now they're going to want to do more. They're going to want to do a theorem ETF. So they're going to want to do Solana ETFs. They're going to want to do an ETF for everything. And. That's going to force the SEC's hand. Ultimately, they're going to, they're going to have to go with what the apparatus wants, you know, what, what BlackRock, et cetera, wants and what they want is ETFs. So I think ultimately there will find a way to make this work for everyone. It's just going to take time.
Dan:That's interesting. Yeah, we'll, we'll see. I know Michael Saylor, he could be, I mean, definitely heavily in BTC Maxi territory, I guess, his recent conference maybe, or I don't know if this is the same conference where he announced like they're building the DIDs on Bitcoin. He seemed to be very positive. Confident that like Ethereum, Solana, like all these other chains, essentially that are large, that are not Bitcoin are going to be labeled as securities and like institutions are not going to want them. So he seems to be going, we're believing very heavily that it's like, yeah, Bitcoin is going to be. Like the ultimate solution for programmability and everything else. So don't know if he's right at all on that or not, but it's, I don't think he's a dumb guy. I don't think he's just like a stupid idiot. There's, he has a lot of questionable practices and motives, but it's just. You know, I do think it's a real possibility that we get some crazy ruling that like, I mean, yeah, like a security or
Lawrence:something. That's, that's a good point. Yeah. I mean, he could be right, but you also have to consider like his Bitcoin bags are pretty big at this point too. So he, you know, he's, he's got a vested interest in making sure that Bitcoin is the number one thing that everyone buys. So
Dan:yeah, I just don't get the whole, like, why can't other cryptos exist as well? Like, you would think that if you're pro Bitcoin, you're kind of pro, like, crypto in general, where you'd hope that, like, Bitcoin, I feel like, has its lane. It's like a very clear lane of just the store value things. There's very minimal risk of these crazy protocol related fluctuations. And I think Bitcoin has a strong lane
Lawrence:there.
Dan:As a digital gold, and I don't think it necessarily needs to be competing constantly with Ethereum. And I would think Saylor would know that because he's just like everything else. So just,
Lawrence:yeah, I, yeah. It's yeah, I just think his his company is riding pretty hard on Bitcoin right now. So he's got a, that's got to be, it's got to go up for him to, yeah, definitely interest. Yeah. A little bit, a little bit. So, you know, in general financial advice, you always got to understand, like people are talking in their bags. And you just have to make sure that you're just, you get all opinions. I mean, I got big, I own Bitcoin too. I think it's a great asset, but I also own a lot of other assets that I own for very good reasons that are different than Bitcoin. And I think everything has a right to exist in its own way. Bitcoin can't be the one solution for everything. Absolutely.
Dan:Cool. Yeah. That just about does it for today's docket. Sweet. Yeah, a lot of stuff going on. Well, we're going to try to get on a more consistent cadence. We're going to have some interesting guests on very soon. And yeah, we have a backlog of content that we got to work through, but pretty excited about getting all that stuff out there very soon.
Lawrence:Yup. Awesome. All right. Thanks for joining us, everyone. We appreciate you being with us for this discussion and have fun out there.
Dan:Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for tuning in. Yeah. We'll chat soon. Peace out.