111. Creating Wealth With Ethereum, ETH vs SOL, ETH Bull Case & Top Layer 2's with Anthony Sassano

I've invested all of my spare fiat into the market because I'm fully allocated. I haven't got any stocks changed my super to be all in on eth.

Literally 100% of it is allocated. Property of a store of value is not defined by the main years, it is defined by the bear markets. But I do think that staked ETH will beat everything over time from a risk adjusted basis. But BTC and ETH are the only things that I would consider to be something that I would hold for decades. Right? And ETH to me superior welcome back.

To another episode of the Ben and Bergs Podcast. I'm Ben, your favorite high school dropout and founder of Collective Shift, alongside me as Bergs, your favorite MBA and CEO of Collective Shift, Australia's leading crypto portfolio insights company, providing professional analysis and portfolio strategies for crypto investors. Like you, we are a unique blend of the established and the self made and we're here to break down crypto business and personal growth. But we're not here just to talk crap. We're giving you the insights you need to make better investments, build successful businesses and level up your life. And today we're super excited because we've got two guests on.

Wasn't planned to do that, but we've got two amazing guests on one. Very thrilled to have on Anthony Sasano, an investor, advisor, educator and legend amongst the Ethereum community. Known to many on Twitter or X as Sasol Eth, Anthony is a passionate educator within the crypto space and as the founder of the Daily gwei, a daily YouTube channel and newsletter, he became an essential source of anyone looking to keep up an understanding of the intricate world of Ethereum. Anthony's insights have become have shaped discussions, educated newcomers and provided clarity in an often complicated space. And I personally love his daily bullish tweets. I keep buying more Ethereum because of him. So buckle up as we dive into the depths of Ethereum's ecosystem and unpack the complexities with the educator himself, Anthony Sasano. Mate, thanks for joining us.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Amazing man. I'm really looking forward to it. And we brought on our head of research, Matt Williamson today to help us steer this conversation. As Matt is also an ultra ball himself, so we thought to bring him on to facilitate this ultimate Eth podcast. Matt oversees our research team to produce quality content related to crypto assets. He worked in the crypto space since 2017. We've worked together for man, nearly seven years now and I've been absolute pleasure working alongside you. I'VE learned a lot and as a writer, reporter and independent researcher, Matt has got a bachelor's degree from Monash in double majoring in accounting and economics. And when he's not deep down the rabbit hole, enjoys hiking and running as well as spending time with friends and family. So, Matt, thanks for joining us as.

Well and pleasure to be here and looking forward to getting into eth.

Yeah, man, we, we, we needed, we needed a blockbuster to meet the blockbuster to really guide the conversation. So, Anthony, I want to start off, man, you mentioned just briefly before the podcast is, you know, you are in Ethereum for way more than just money. Like, you know, you've dedicated your life to this. Ethereum, you know, is a lot of things to def, you know, different people. I'd love to hear from you. What is it about Ethereum that you has made you want to dedicate your life to it?

So I think like, if I was to detail exactly why, it would take me like the whole podcast and more basically to detail exactly why. But I think that, you know, since I first got into Ethereum in 2017 and over time it has kind of evolved to an extent about why I'm actually in Ethereum and what kind of kept me in Ethereum as well. Because I think that there's the initial kind of reason you get into it. And I think for most people that's obviously making money, right? The initial reason you get into crypto is because you hear people make money and you're like, I want to make money too, basically, which is totally fine. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that. But then if you want to go a step further, you start researching the different technologies. It's like, okay, what have I actually bought here? Like, I bought Eth. Okay, what is Ethereum? What does it do? Because surprisingly, a lot of people will just buy these things having no idea what these platforms actually are, right? Because they're just buying because their friend told them to buy or something. Another. And then it's kind of like a funnel where at the bottom of the funnel you have the people who are actually doing a lot of research and knowing what they, what they're buying. But like, that's a very small percentage of, of the overall kind of market. There's. I think that's true for really any kind of investing really. You know, people will buy Apple stock, for example. They may know Apple the company, but they may not know Apple's financials and like what products are coming out, blah, blah, this, that and the other, right? They just like, oh, they got the iPhone, I'm going to buy Apple, you know, my friend's got an iPhone. So there's nothing wrong with that. But for me, you know, when I first got into Ethereum in 2017, I had already actually been in crypto in 2013 when I got into Bitcoin. And back then it was definitely 100% for the money. Like I was listening to some kind of Bitcoin is back then. Talk about, you know, libertarian, free self sovereign money, you know, money not controlled by government. Governments and stuff. And I was 21 years old at the time, so I had a bit of an anti government kind of, you know, stint in me during that. So that was as far as I got with it. But then when the market turned in 2014, I was, you know, I just left. I basically sold what I had and was like, you know, this is boring. Because Ethereum didn't exist back then. Ethereum had just kind of published its white paper in late 2013 and then did the ICO in mid 2014. But by that point I was so disillusioned by crypto I was like, ah, this Ethereum thing, who cares? Because there was actually other things at the time too. There was like Litecoin and Peer Coin, Name Coin, which all these other projects that weren't really anything serious. So I basically wrote off. Ethereum is not serious at that point. And to be fair, if you were around back then, you would understand why because there was so many projects just with white papers and like Ethereum was like the one out of probably thousands that actually went somewhere, right? So then when I got back into it in 2017, I was like, okay, my friend, my friend actually told me, he's like, oh, have you seen this Ethereum and this E thing, you know, it's going up basically for the same reason. But then I looked into it, I'm like, okay, well what's different between Ethereum and Bitcoin? Like if I'm going to get back into crypto, like I need a reason. Because I was so disillusioned by it the previous cycle. I looked into it, I'm like, okay, well Ethereum can do so much more than what Bitcoin can do. That's the obvious thing that you can see first. You can build applications on it immediately that click with me because I have a technology background so you know, I'm all about tech, definitely tech first, money second when it comes to these sorts of stuff. But then over the years, like just to give the, I guess tldr, it Shifted from what you could build on Ethereum and Ethereum as technology to Ethereum as a social movement and Ethereum as a force for social good in the world through technology. So you're basically enabling people to coordinate, enabling people to, to get access to things that they may not have had access to, like financial applications and services and things like that. And you're just using the technology as a means to get to that end. So I would say today I'm in Ethereum for that, the social side and the tech, as I said, really just a means to that end. And that's why when people say, you know, Ethereum doesn't have the best tech, it's like, I don't care about that. Right? I care about what the tech is actually enabling and for who it is enabling it for and the values that is embedded into that. Because Ethereum as an ecosystem values decentralization value, values credible neutrality, permissionlessness, values everyone being able to verify the chain for themselves, which is technical, but not, not that difficult to do. And I think that is a bedrock of the crypto ecosystem, which, which other ecosystems don't value. And they don't really care about that. They're like, you know, it's all about speed, it's all about how many transactions you can do and this, that and the other. I'm like, it's never been about that. Because if it was about that, Bitcoin and ETH wouldn't be combined. $900 billion of the total 1.35 trillion market cap. Right. So they are the vast majority and they both have arguably the worst technology out of everything in crypto. Right. So it's never been about the tech, it's been about the social movement of. And that's what crypto is to me. A social movement.

Yeah, that's super important. That's something that took me a while to appreciate the combination of the different reasons why a given protocol or blockchain would succeed or has a better chance to succeed. And then just sort of on. On that. We saw a lot of, you know, Ethereum copycats or Ethereum killers back in 2018, 19 come out and saw the success of Ethereum and thought, we can do this as well. Ethereum was struggling back in the day with a lot of transactions, processing them for cheaply all at once. Still does, arguably, but, you know, even a couple years ago. But yeah. And then, you know, just on that, Anthony, we see a lot of people try to preach the tech, the technological component of a given Alt 1 or alternative layer, one blockchain they're often referred to as maybe. Is there just one in particular metric? Maybe you've probably got a long list of metrics, but what would just point out one metric that you would just encourage your listeners and viewers to sort of, you know, really wrap your head around it or sort of, you know, understand, you know, where maybe they're trying to misdirect you in. If you're talking about a certain, you know, alternative blockchain where they're sort of promoting themselves. Is there just explain that.

Yeah, I mean, there's a lot to this, I think, but I'll try to keep it concise. I think on your first point about all these competitors coming online, I mean intuitively, if you come into crypto and you're not very versed on crypto, you look at Ethereum and you're like, oh, wow, you know, it's like a $5, $10 to do a transaction. So intuitively you think yourself, wow, that's ridiculous, right? That's, that', that's completely ridiculous. Why am I spending that much when I can go through this other chain and it's basically free, right? Which is totally fair. Like, I don't blame people for intuitively thinking that because they will look at these products as the same thing. They'll basically be like, well, if I'm doing it on Ethereum, it's the same as me doing it on this other chain when that is completely wrong. Like it's, it's completely different. Like the way I look at blockchains is that they sell one product and it's, it's block space. So they sell the, they basically sell a block and different blockchains have different block times and things like that. But then that product that they're selling is very different to another blockchain and it's the same as any product. Like an iPhone is different to a, to a, to some kind of Android device, right? Maybe a low powered Android device compared to an iPhone, you wouldn't really do that comparison because the iPhone is fast as more features, it's obviously more expensive, but it's just all about the product that's being sold here. So intuitively, as I said, like, I get it and I get why the competitors have come online and they've actually always hit on that point. They're like, Ethereum is cheap. Sorry, Ethereum is expensive, Slow. Where? Cheap, fast. But if you look at the history of this, it goes way back before 2018 and 2019. It goes back to when Bitcoin was having its issues with, with fees and scalability. And that goes back as far as even 2013, 2014. And back then people were saying the same things like, we've got to fork Bitcoin and we're going to make it faster and cheaper, which they did. But the problem is, is like all those forks are irrelevant now. I mean, I think the most relevant one maybe is litecoin, but in terms of market cap, it's worth like a very small percentage of what Bitcoin is worth and no one really resonated with that. So when you look at the history of, of what people have actually continued to use and what products people have continued to buy, essentially it's, it's always gravitated towards the, the Bitcoin and Ethereums of the world, like the blockchain with the most demand for their block space is Bitcoin and Ethereum still, and Ethereum's layer 2 ecosystem on top of that as well, which makes peace cheaper, which we'll probably get into. But on your second thing about metrics to look at, this is the hardest thing in crypto by far, by far, because there are various metrics. All of them, except one, I believe, can be gamed and very easily game. They're very cheaply gamed. So the typical metrics that these other chains will come up with is transactions per second. Like, oh, we can do X amount of transactions per second and. But Ethereum can only do X amount here, right? Or they'll say we have this many active addresses, Ethereum only has this many active addresses or, or, you know, and they'll equate addresses with users, which is completely wrong because addresses, especially on the cheaper chains, like you can just spin up a bot, right? You can represent hundreds of thousands, if not millions of, of addresses as one user. So again, really, really bad. And then people will say, well, this protocol has this much money in it. It's like, okay, but it has that much money in it. But like, how much is that money inflated by? Like, is it just like a random token that's been pumped recently and now the value is just really highly inflated? So as I said, like the vast majority of metrics, pretty much all of them except one, are horrible. And the one that I'm talking about, and this is where it gets a bit controversial, depending who I'm talking to, is fair revenue. Because when it comes to fear of a new, and I'm talking about the fear of a new, of the actual chain itself, that is extremely hard, if not impossible to fake because there is a cost with that on Ethereum right now it's like between 5 to 10 million dollars a day of fear of a new. 70 to 80% of that is burned as part of the Ethereum burn mechanism, which means that the people that process the transactions, the validators, they don't get that that is actually burned forever. So if you wanted to fake that, you would have to spend five to $10 million a day, right, to fake that. And you would have to do that for a very long period of time to make it convincing. Now Ethereum has had this many much fairer of a new for years now. So that's why I say it's basically impossible to game because unless you're like extremely rich and you have a purpose to game it, I don't know what your purpose would be. But if you that that would, that that's what would happen. Whereas on these cheaper chains that have basically free transactions, if that's the case, then it's very easy for whoever wants to maybe pump the token, fake these metrics and then point to these metrics saying, oh, look at all the usage this chain has, right? Because they've got this much, this much addresses or this much tps, blah blah. So that's why I think that fear of a new is really one of the only metrics we can actually look at from an objective standpoint and get a good idea of things. And I guess the last thing I'll say is on the TPS thing because the TPS transactions per second is the number one thing people love to point to. There is a difference between theoretical TPs and real TPs. Theoretical TPs is what someone tells you that the chain can do. So if someone says, oh, our chain can do 10,000 transactions per second, but it's actually doing 10 transactions per second, like how can you believe that it can do 10,000? It's never done 10,000. It's never even gotten close to that. But they're saying that it can. Okay, well come back to me when it actually does that and for a long period of time then we'll talk, right? Because I can say that I can beat the world record on 100 meter sprint. I can say it, right? Maybe some crazy person will believe me until I actually do it, it's just the story I'm telling, right? So again, that's why I think that TPS is one of the worst metrics because it's very easy to claim something. But then if you can't actually achieve that, the claim means nothing in my Opinion, Absolutely.

And everything you just said, it comes back to like people guess. Markets decide where people put this technology out there. They're like, it's going to do a million transactions per second per second. You look at it, there's like 20 going through there. Obviously isn't the demand side there? And I like what you said about selecting metrics as well. Where, you know, we look time and time again, we see people going back to BTC and ethics. You know, you have a split, you have a new technology, but they'll go back to the ones they use and they vote with their money, like paying for those transactions. It's such an important thing to look at. Like, what is the market actually using? And I was fascinated by something you said earlier. You were in Bitcoin in 2013. That is crazy. I like talking to early bitcoiners because they're all a bit crazy.

Not saying you are, but I was at the time. I think definitely you need to see.

Something to, in order to actually buy this. And I just have to ask you, what was it like back then? What did you see in bitcoin? What piqued your interest to actually buy it? And then how did you even store your bitcoin back then? And what was the ecosystem like?

Yeah, yeah. So it was a very different world back then, as you can imagine. As I said, Ethereum didn't exist. Pretty much like 99% of the ecosystem as it exists today did not exist at all. It was very bitcoin centric. There were offshoots, but they were looked at as very interesting experiments that would be at some point integrated with bitcoin. Right. If the technology was actually useful, bitcoin would adopt it, which didn't materialize at all really. But yeah, I mean, no one took them kind of seriously. And there were things that people like to like to trade and make money on and things like that. Like the same as we see now, that that always remains the same. I think when it comes to the cycle of markets, that's been the same for as long as markets have existed. That hasn't changed. But back then, as I said, like with bitcoin, I was really. Because I was, I was quite young, as I said, I was about 21 years old. I was like kind of just out of union. I was like anti government a bit there. So I had that stint in me. And then because I bought bitcoin at like, I think back then it was 50 or 100. And then in 2013 it went to like a thousand dollars and it was making money. And back then I had basically no money. So I was like, oh my God, I'm making so much money. I had all these starry eyed dreams and things like that. But then I, I really just resonated with the, the rhetoric of like having money outside of government and like why the fiat system is broken, why governments manipulate money. And to be fair, I still resonate with a lot of those points, but not to the extremes that like the extreme libertarian people do where they say, you know, government shouldn't exist at all. You know, the whole thing's a giant scam. We should only use Bitcoin because bitcoin fixes everything. I don't resonate with that at all. And also at some point I was like, well like, Bitcoin's cool, I can buy btc, I can store it. You mentioned where did I store it? I store it on what's called the Bitcoin core wallet, which is a full node slash wallet, which is very clunky. It's still available today in pretty much the same capacity it was back then. It's pretty much the same, but it was very clunky still. And then funny enough, the same exchange that I was using back then, I still exist today. And I still use it today. CoinJar, Australians may be pretty familiar with CoinJar. I use them back then, like for pretty much all of my fiat purchases and sells and I still use them today. And then, yeah, I mean I wouldn't store any coins on exchanges. That's not something I ever did. I always stored them locally. But yeah, it was super clunky. You had to sync a bitcoin full node for Bitcoin core to actually show you your true balance because if it wasn't synced, it wouldn't know your balance and then you wouldn't be able to actually make any transactions. Yeah, it was clunky, right? But that's how you do things if you want to be fully self sovereign as well. Like if you're making transactions for example in ethereum today using MetaMask, you're actually not using your own kind of node, you're using a third party node and you could potentially be censored. So back then I guess we were doing things in a clunky way. But in the true spirit of crypto, you can, as I said, you can still do it today, but vast majority of users won't.

So yeah, because the people I've talked to that have bought Bitcoin relatively early, they'd be using Exchange or be Like Mount Gox or something like that ended up losing all their bitcoin. That's the exact reason you store your own crypto, though.

Yeah, exactly. I, I didn't. I think I remember trying to sign up to, to Mount Gox. I never got through or anything like that. You had to do weird KYC because they were based in Japan and then getting money over to it from Australia was like impossible. And yeah, I remember there was a big narrative back then was hilarious because you look at the narratives back then, it's the same as today where everyone was going on about litecoin being listed on Mount Gox and that was going to lead to like this biblical litecoin pump. But just the narrative of that actually did lead to a light point. Right. But then obviously Mount Gox collapsed and it all fell apart. But. But there are other exchanges back then as well that aren't around today. Like btce, for example. They and the FBI ended up shutting them down for laundering money for Russia, I think it was. Most of these exchanges were super dodgy, obviously. And then there was Cripsy, which I believed it was like the main altcoin exchange. And I believe that ended up being a money laundering operation too. Poloniex, which still exists today, but like Justin sun owns it now. Right. And was very dodgy back then. It still is pretty dodgy. But yeah, it's kind of funny how like there are certain cockroaches in this ecosystem that have survived. Like Ripple, for example, was around back then. It's still around today. Like, don't know what it does, but it's still there. Right? It's still top five or top ten, which is crazy to me. But in terms of like, what existed back then and today. Yeah, I mean, bitcoin is really the only relevant thing that's kind of survived and then everything else. Yeah, it's just. Just crazy different now.

And in terms of your journey, so it was when you're around 21, so what was your journey? Did you make enough money in, in bitcoin before you kind of got to eth. Or did you start working and have a career? And how did you get to kind of where you are today?

Yeah, yeah. So I lost 90% of the money I put in in 2013, 14. And to be fair, that wasn't much money because I did not have much money at the time. I was, I think I actually was still in uni at that point and I was working part time with my dad and I was spending all my money on just stuff know, obviously 21 years old, going out a lot, spending money on petrol, take away food and all the other manner of stuff. Yeah, alcohol, video games, you know, all that. All that stuff. And yeah, I was just in a very different mindset back then. But I think that I look at that period of time, that experience as a very pivotal moment in shaping how I approached crypto when I got back into it in 2017, because 2017, I got back into it and that was obviously another bull market. It was exactly the same as 2013, where everything went absolutely crazy. Ethereum basically repeated what. What Bitcoin did, essentially. Like, I mean, ETH went even harder. It went from like $10 to $1,400 in a year. Just crazy, crazy gains, right? And. But then in 2018, we had the exact same crash that we had in 2014, where everything just got absolutely destroyed. ETH went down 94%. Right. But the reason I stuck around this time in 2018 was because in 2014, I know I kind of learned what not sticking around meant. It meant that I missed out on so much, right? Because I missed out on the Ethico. Like, I honestly think that if I was in the mindset that I was in in 2014, I would have bought the Ethico and I would have held it for a very long time. I wouldn't have sold just for like a 3x or whatever. I would have held it because I truly would have believed in it because I bought my. I mean, I think I bought my first eat at like $10, but it wasn't much. And then I progressively bought more. And funny enough, I actually wasn't in profit based on all of my eighth buys until 2021, right? 2021, because I had DCA'd in during the bear market and bought some at like 200 and then it went to 100 and then I bought a bit more there. But I was like a true believer in it, right? And back then, being a true believer was. Was pretty crazy, especially because, like, as you said, like, there were all these competitors popping up. People thought Ethereum was dead. It came, you know, I had a massive crash, all these sorts of things. But as I said, like, I credit that learning experience from that first cycle in 2013, 2014, to actually allowing me to. To kind of stick around and do what I did.

This is a pivotal thing that Ben and I talk about, where it takes multiple market cycles to actually understand and manage your psychology and just so much pain when you were just talking there. So I started in 2017 bought so much, like 80 of it went to ICOs.

And then just, yeah, slowly averaging after that. But it takes a significant amount of time to actually learn how this market works and to project forward as well. To be forward thinking and say, you know, what is this thing actually going to do in five, 10 years and not sell out and you know, grind through the bear markets.

Yeah, exactly, yeah. And that's the thing, like I, I have this kind of thing where I say that the first cycle you get wrecked, the second cycle you get wrecked. But then, yeah, now you've got the conviction the third cycle is where you make money. Right.

Like I'm in my third cycle at the moment. So it's like first One wrecked on ICOs, second one did all right, but saw shining NFTs. Yeah, it's like into the next.

That's what I'm saying. You still get wrecked. Right. But then at that point you kind of like are in it. You're like, you have the conviction, you're like, you know, I know why I'm in it now. And then that's why the third cycle, by that point you're like, I need to take some profits.

This is the one.

Yeah, they've given me a third cycle one. So then that's what it was for me as well. Like, as I said, like I got wrecked in the first cycle, second cycle I bought, but then I wrote it all the way back down. I actually didn't take any profits in 2017 at all. I did throw some into ICOs, but not that much. I was mostly ETH. And then I just kept stacking during the bear market. And then in this cycle in 2020, 2021, I took a lot of profits from actually ended. I didn't end up selling any eth, funny enough. I took profits from other things that I had bought, like D5 stuff and, and, and other things around that. And then being so involved in the ecosystem, I had opportunities to do like angel investing and other stuff like that, which, which kind of helped me. But you know, if I didn't have that, I would have sold the Ethan made profit on it. But I didn't and I still haven't. I've never actually sold any eth. It's all majority of it is staked right now and it's probably going to be like that till I die. If I'm being honest, the most diamond of diamond hands. Oh, I am, yeah. Adamantium hands. And you know what if, if I, if I've got it till I die and then pass it on to my kids and make sure my kids are also like they, I'll, I'll come back to life if I can. If they sell my eth.

I was going to say, Anthony, what is your investing strategy coming into this cycle? Do you rotate into alts? That's where you make your money that you to live on and grow, stake your eth Bitcoin. How are you playing this next cycle?

Yeah, I mean at this point in my kind of investing journey, I am definitely what you would call a very conservative investor. The, the most kind of risk I'll take is on, on angel investments, which as I, you know, as people are aware, it's not available to everyone. Right. These are early stage deals, extremely risky, but there is a lot of upside if you pick the winner, so to speak. It's basically the same as VC investing where most will go to zero. You get that one, you know, 100x,000x banger and that'll make up for the rest of them. That's, that's kind of how you play it. So I would say that I don't actually recommend anyone to follow my investing strategy if they are relatively new to crypto, if they are still in the mindset of wealth accumulation rather than wealth preservation. Because it's just a very different mindset to be in. Like for example, if I was still in the mindset that I was last cycle where I was a degenerate and as we call them in crypto, I would be as you said, like rotating into these riskier kind of like smaller cap coins based on. I wouldn't be doing it based on just pure gambling mentality because I've never really been like that. It's more about doing it based on, okay, has this got like a good narrative that people could, could latch onto? Like, does this actually have some fundamental value that could back up that narrative? And there has been a few things this year that have played out like that, I think that have already gone up a lot. And people who played that, you know, played it well, if they sold, I mean they probably told it back down a lot of them. Right. Or trade in and out of it. One thing people do and actually one piece of advice that I tend to give everyone, not investment advice, but just general kind of advice when playing in markets is that chasing other coins because they're pumping and your coin isn't pumping, is the absolute fastest way to get yourself destroyed and to lose all of your money because it can actually last for months where your coin is sitting there doing nothing. Right. Like, for example, ETH can sit there and do nothing for months at a time, right? And btc, even we saw that recently, it sat there, did nothing for months, and then it kicks off and then when it goes, it goes. So what happens is BTC went from like, what, 26k to 35k in a matter of a few weeks, right? But the thing is, is that people who traded out of BTC because it was boring into these other things that were pumping, they were chasing that pump. Now they're out of their BTC position and they didn't get back in because they're thinking, oh, you know, this isn't a real pump, right? They're in disbelief and then they get sidelined and now they're down in BTC terms or in E terms because they want to chase something else. So I learned that the hard way, which I'm sure a lot of people did as well. But that's, that's the kind of one thing that I would avoid if I was, yeah. If I was doing the degen stuff now. But yeah, as you said, like, if, if you want to increase your reward, you have to increase your risk, which is going down that risk curve because, like, as bullish as I am on ETH, I mean, it's already a $250 billion market cap, right? If it goes to a trillion, that's a 4x from here. And I mean, I think it's definitely going to multiple trillions, don't get me wrong. But if you're in crypto and you have like a thousand dollars or a few thousand dollars, you're not going to be happy with a forex, right? You're here for like the hundred X that people have, have been telling you that it's possible, and it is very possible, but it is not possible with Ethel, BTC or even a lot of the large caps you have to chase like the sub, what, 100 million sub 50 million caps, which are incredibly risky because there's a reason why they're not worth much, right? There's a reason why they're not worth much to begin with. So. And that's what we call obviously finding alpha, right? Like finding alpha in the market, finding the gem in the crap. But at the same time, there's also a whole other side of the market which is all just like meme coins. That's just gambling. It really is. It's not investing. You're literally just taking a punt on a random coin and hoping that enough people do so to pump it. Because, like, I mean, Dogecoin is the original Meme coin, right? And it's still worth multiple billions. There are plenty of copycats like Shiba and stuff like that. There's also a recent one, Pepe, which went crazy. And then there are all the offshoots of that, but 99.9% of them are either going to go to zero within a couple of days, or they're just straight up scams, or you're going to lose all your money because they're rugs where essentially you approve the token contract and they just drain all your assets. So going down the risk curve in crypto especially is a very dangerous game and you can end up losing everything. Not just kind of from the investing side of things, but also getting kind of exploited from, as I said, like approving a contract, stuff like that.

Digital hygiene, people.

So.

So yeah, jump on the Collector Shift website and click on our security center. Look at what token approvals you have. Go to Revoke Cash or Etherscan IO, get rid of that shit or be really good with your allocation in different addresses. Know what you are approving because you will get wrecked and you will lose everything.

And for people who think that it's only happens to noobs, I'll tell a little bit of a recap here of how I recently lost. Was that 80,000 Australian dollars to one of these? Even though I obviously am acutely aware of how these things work, I wasn't paying attention. So I approved a something that I shouldn't have. It was so someone that I know on Twitter, I follow his account got hacked and it shared a phishing link. But it was. I mean, it must have been convincing to me to at the time because I fell for it. But I went and I signed token approval that basically approved the contract to spend all of my op tokens, which basically means that the contract could take all my OP tokens without me doing anything further. I didn't have to send them, I approved it. And then they took that straight away. It's a. It's obviously bot bots running. It's not humans, but they took it straight away. And Yeah, I lost 80,000 Australian dollars worth of op tokens just like that. And stupid me for one, having those tokens on a wallet that I use regularly, which is my SASO ETH wallet, I shouldn't have done that. And it's because that was my original airdrop I got. So that's why they were there and I was delegating them in governance and things like that. And two, I just literally Wasn't paying attention. I usually like triple check everything that I'm signing or approving, but I was, I was actually funny enough publishing my podcast, so I was editing that and then I was looking at these transactions like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm being a cowboy. Right.

This is exactly how it happens every time. You're either sleepy or you're a little bit sick or you haven't touched your hardware wallet.

Yeah, yeah.

Haven't touched your hardware wallet for a couple of months. You're not quite sure and they get you.

Yeah. Anytime. And, and really the only way I think to 100 avoid it because there's different technologies that you can use to help you avoid it. There's different wallets out there. I mean, not as stupid me was using MetaMask, which is probably still the worst wallet for, for this sorts of stuff, but there's other wallets out there that will actually warn you and like put up all these red flags and you have to actually manually tick that you understand what you're doing.

Yeah.

But like the number one piece of advice no matter what is just always be 100% attentive when interacting with things. Using a wallet that holds a substantial amount of funds. Right. Because you can have different wallets. You can have a wallet that has like a little bit of funds in it that uses play money and it's fine if you lose that, but then if you're, you're having your main wallet that has your life savings in it. Right. You really should not be interacting with that unless you're completely attentive to it. You know exactly what you're doing. Otherwise, yeah, you stand to get wrecked like I did.

Horrible.

Matt, man, I want to hand over to you. You've got a few questions. Do we want to dive a little bit more into Ethereum?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely, I think. Oh well, one thing, even going back a cycle, Anthony, again you talk about that reason for sticking around and it was similar to me in terms of after 2017 hype, you find your reasons to stick around and it's then a big self discovery period for the ecosystem. Even so for Ethereum, we saw Uniswap birthed in that period and even some early NFT platforms like Open well Punks.

Came out in 2017 as well.

Right.

I minted one from the contract in 2017. It's a rare claim to fame on that.

Yeah, okay, Very nice, very nice. You know, those things started to brew. You know, even, you know, there were scaling efforts back with, you know, omg, amazing go.

Yeah.

Yeah, all those. And even, you know, the Uni pig demo, all that sort of stuff where you're like, okay, there's some, you know, foundations here, building. We saw the Defi movement, you know, 2020 and all that. But then it's like, okay, we get into this, you know, really, you know, period of downward prices and, you know, retail interest disappearing and whatnot. And then what. What would you say are those, you know, similar. If there is a similar sort of, you know, groundswell of, you know, excitement around a given vertical or domain that hasn't really existed or flourished yet? Is there anything you're. You've sort of seen in the past 12 months?

I think there's one thing that has taken off a lot in the past 12 months that I'm not completely sold on yet. I think that there's many experiments being run, and I think that the winning solution is going to be as simple as possible. And what I'm talking about is something called social fi or social finance or decentralized social media. Right? This has definitely been a main theme this year. You have protocols like Farcaster, there's Lens Protocol, there's a few others out there. I'm forgetting the names right now. And they have different ways of doing things. But the whole idea is that while we have these centralized kind of social media platforms like Twitter, which is now X because Elon Musk took over and has done all these changes to it, right? And you can't actually change anything about it yourself. You can't take your social network with you, your social graph with you. You're basically just locked into this platform. So. And it's not crypto native either. It can't directly integrate with cryptos, things like that. So the idea is like, what if we create something from the ground up that is decentralized? But that's not the main point. The main point is that you basically can interact directly with crypto because it's built on crypto Rails. And this is like, Farcaster is probably my favorite in this arena right now, because the reason it's my favorite is because it's not trying to, as I said, like, be just like a decentralized social network. What it's trying to do is decentralize the parts that need to be decentralized, which are the social graph. So essentially what that means is that there's the Farcaster protocol, but then there are interfaces that are built on top of Farcaster, and then you can choose your own interface. You're not locked into one. So there's One called Warpcast, there's one called, I think, hey. And there's a few others out there. And you can choose which one you want to use. And by doing that, you get to choose things like which algorithm you subscribe to to show you content. Right? You know what content you want to see, and it's completely in your control based on interfaces. Like what, you know, what interfaces you like using, do you like something more simple or more complex. There were early iterations of this. One of them, the most popular one called Steam. But I think where Steam failed was that they tried to monetize everything where essentially posting you got rewarded for in money, you know, in some kind of money. And the money that you got was actually paid out of the inflation of the Steam token. So it wasn't actually anyone paying you, it was just like inflation. And then, of course, what do you think happened? Bots ended up ruling the thing, right? Bots and whales. And I actually saw it in real time how much money some of these bots were making. It was crazy. But what ends up, what ends up happening is the incentives basically become, well, I'm going to post content just to make money now. And it becomes like. And that's actually what I think, like a lot of Twitter pivoted to recently.

Yeah, noticeably change.

Right. Like, everyone doesn't matter if it's factual or not. And then I found it insane. I think they changed it now. But even if you got Community noted on your tweet saying that your tweet was actually not correct, you would still get paid out for that. So basically the incentives became, well, posting fake news is now monetizable, right? You know, in a real direct way.

Yeah.

And the same, the same happened for these early social, decentralized social media networks where they paid you for posting. I don't think that's going to work. I think what's going to work is, as I said, something like Farcaster, where they decentralize the social graph and then the protocol itself can be decentralized, but it doesn't have to be right. And then people can just enjoy being able to. To basically not feel locked into an ecosystem and basically be able to change interfaces, stuff like that. But yeah, that's one thing that I've seen kind of be a main point of focus. But I guess other than that, I think the funny thing is, because the ecosystem is pretty big now, anything new gets quickly latched onto by people right, where they're like. Like, for example, I still believe there's a lot of stuff left to do with Layer Twos. But Layer Twos are considered stagnant or considered old news to people in the ecosystem, which is insane to me. And they're like, oh, layer twos. I've heard of those a million times. Right. It's just crazy.

And people don't understand how long it takes to build something, let alone with decentralized teams on the Internet. You have to approve things, vote for things, and then that is just mental.

Gaming's for another great one. Yeah, it's always been heard about, but the sheer amount of time and resources it takes to build those, let alone on Blockchain, bro, you still don't have.

Like GTA 6, mate.

I'm still building. A good game is already an incredibly difficult task and now you're just trying to put blockchain stuff on it without. We don't even know what makes sense and what doesn't. Yeah, I mean, I will give credit to a few projects out there. Like, obviously Immutable is a homegrown project that's. That's putting in the hard work to not only do gaming, but also do scaling, because they got their own Layer two ecosystem. But I think what most people don't understand is that, like, you have to make a good game first. Right. You can't just like start with the blockchain stuff and then tack the game on later. No, because now you're just building like blockchain stuff and it begins to look more like a defi protocol with just like gaming stuff built on top. Right. Rather than a game with crypto stuff. And I think that's what a lot of NFT projects ended up doing as well, where they ended up just looking like tokens with pictures. Essentially. They're just like the same thing as the ERC20 token that everyone else trades with just pretty pictures on them. Now there was nothing else to them, which is fine. But I think where it becomes a problem is that people start believing that it's more than that and they start coming up with all these stories, especially in a bull market, right? Like all the stories of NFTs in 2021 over the world, you're going to be the most valuable thing ever. Like, everyone's going to be into it and then we've seen what happened, right?

Yeah, yeah, definitely.

Crazy times. Like everyone was just on Discord. It seemed like no one was working, everyone was just barreling into next.

I was not into work. When you're making free money, doing nothing, right, for like three months and then you get absolutely destroyed.

And it was like the ICO days was this.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, it was.

It was exactly, you know, sparked up. Twitter, fire up. Your favorite influencer was talking about something your best mate says, are you into this? And all of a sudden you just bought a bunch of, you know, you're.

Not working because, like, I'm rich, like, stick it to twice.

And there was that wealth effect that happens, right, where essentially before NFTS took off, eth, BTC and a bunch of other things went up a lot. So you had all these people, especially in eth, right, that had bought eth at like 1 to $200. And now they're mega rich because eats at like 3k. They're like, oh, I want to do that again, right? I want to ride that again. And they went into NFTS because it was so easy to do, right? And that's why you saw that. So the wealth effect in crypto, I think, is much more pronounced than it is outside of crypto because it happens so quickly where people can go from literally having nothing to having millions in six months a year, right? You can go from like 2020, for example. The beginning of 2020 was still like the bear market. Like we had just done 2019, where it was still another brutal year. ETH was like $130 at the beginning of 2020. And then by the end of 2020, I think ETH was like 7, $800. And then after that, a couple months after that it was 2000, 3000, right? So because it happens so quickly, people come into so much wealth, it doesn't feel real, right? It doesn't feel like you're going to lose it either. So you start being a total DJ and you start just buying everything and thinking, oh, enough, you know, everything's going to go up forever. It's a super cycle.

And I think that's another thing that I typically warn people about with crypto bull markets, is that every single bull market is the same thing where everyone says that there's not going to be another bear market. Like, of course there is, because unless everyone decides not to sell, right, prices can't go up forever. Like, that's just not how markets work. Yeah, it's just crazy to me. But, and I think people are once again still convincing themselves of this right now because of the ETF stuff. With, with BTC getting an ETF and probably Eat not far behind. They're saying, oh, with an ETF, money is always going to be flowing in because ETFs are part of retirement. Accounts. And like, okay, that's true to some extent. But remember that the majority of BTC buyers are not doing it through the ETF this cycle at least. And also it's not just BTC in the market, it's everything else. And BTC typically does not go up that much. Right. Compared to other things. And then when you have all these other things going up and you have so much paper wealth, it gets to a point where it's like, okay, everyone wants to start taking profits and then there's not the demand in now, especially in the long tail of things. So it doesn't mean just because BTC may fare well, which it typically does, it fares better than other things in the bear market, doesn't mean your favorite thing is not going to absolutely crater by 90 plus percent. It absolutely will. Because your favorite thing is like most likely a one cycle thing where by the time the next cycle rolls around, no one cares about it anymore. And there's plenty of those. It's just a graveyard. It really is a graveyard of token.

Market cap Historical page.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I love this point of view. And we've had this conversation at Collective Shift as well. What would an ETF do? And a lot of people think it will be stabilizing, there'll be infinite demand, it's not going to go down. But that just. That narrative doesn't fit with human psychology and everything we've seen in every other market that's ever existed since the beginning.

Of time, it may have a stabilizing effect in the long run, which actually probably will. But what I think people don't realize is that markets are forward looking as well. So the reason why BTC went from 26k to 35k was because the market realized that it had not priced in the ETF yet. Because if people remember there was a fake news that that kind of ended up being taken as true news that the spot BTC ETFs were approved.

Yeah.

And that said BTC in literally like 10 minutes from 26k to 30k. And what that showed the market was that one, people are underpricing the ETF, it's not priced in yet and the market is ineffic and two, the money's there to pump something. Right. Yeah. So of course we went back down to 27K. But then a couple weeks later or a few weeks later we're at 35k. So the market's being forward looking means that by the time the ETF actually rolls around. Right. Or by the time kind of the, the hype cycle kind of finishes here. We go much higher than we otherwise would have because of that. Because the narrative kind of pushes you higher. But in terms of a stabilizing effect I think it can. But again, it's not going to stabilize your favorite shitcoin. It's going to stabilize BTC and probably eat to an extent because ETH is going to get a spot ETF as well, I believe like not too long after. But everything else. Right. Is not going to have the same effect on. Because the ETFs are not buying your shit coins, they're buying BTC and ETH. Right. So that wealth effect in my opinion is not going to trickle down either. Because if you think about who's actually buying an etf, they're doing it in their retirement accounts with money that they can't access. Right? To pull out to buy the shitcoins with. Because they can only buy other things that they're allowed to in their retirement account. Right. They can't buy, they can't send it to, you know, an exchange and start buying these other kind of things in a tax advantaged way. They can do it if they've got like a self managed retirement account, things like that. But the whole point of ETFs is that it's better from a tax advantage perspective and obviously liquidity perspective and all those sorts of things like that. So yeah, I think people really need to keep that in mind that just because BTC and ETH may get stabilized by an etf, it means nothing for your shitcoins. It may mean that the hype drives them up in the bull market, but in the bear market they're still going down the same as they always have, guaranteed.

Yeah, I was going to ask you Anthony, with, with most cycles we've seen in the past, bitcoin dominance tends to creep up and leads the market. And I think that just creates that excitement for retailers.

Yeah, definitely.

And as we know, retail investors think that bitcoin Ethereum is boring. So they go and find their favorite coin. Do you think? And historically what we've seen is the peak of each bull market has been approximately 12 to 18 months post Bitcoin halving the picto top every single time. So that would mean that we were about 18 from time of recording. 18 to 23 months away from that in historic period of time ahead, which is a long way to go if history was to rhyme. Do you or how do you expect this next cycle to play out? Do you think it'll be the Same in previous cycles where you know, bitcoin's gonna lead the Harvey will occur. Say Bitcoin's at 50, 60K. Retail investor like, oh shit, this thing's not dead. Come back in, pile into shitcoins and we just do this whole thing again. Or do you think it's different where we don't get that massive retail interest obviously in the world right now? I think just like discretionary spending is down, very different, you know, money supply isn't at the same level as previous inflation. How do you see that playing out in this cycle?

So I think the cycle, we call it the four year cycle in crypto, right, has pretty much played out exactly the same this time, but it's actually accelerated. Which I wouldn't say it worries me, but it kind of gives me, gives me pause because during this year, especially even at the start of the year, I had the same thesis. I'm like, you know what this year is going to be like 2019, we're basically in a crab sideways market. We have a bit of a pump because it's like we just came off a brutal bear market and people are itching to, you know, get back into the market, but it's too early because there's this concept of time based kind of capitulation which basically means you need enough time to pass people to forget the pain and then start buying again. So really it was just like the money that was already in crypto, it wasn't new money coming in at the beginning of 2023. But now that we have the ETF stuff that's changed the calculus where as I said, like the market has brought forward the cycle because I didn't expect BTC to go and maintain above 30k till probably next year, but it's brought it forward by about three months now. So if that's the case, you could reasonably expect the cycle to be at least three to six months shorter than it otherwise would have been. Because if the hype gets too ahead of itself too quickly, it's going to burn itself out. And I actually think that we may have seen a kind of glimpse of that in the 2021 cycle because we had the first peak in May 2021, which I still consider to be the real peak, because if you actually look at what drove us up to November 2021, the second peak, it was degen leverage. And, and it wasn't just the retail investors, it was the big money that all blew up. It was the FTX and sbf. It was three hours capital. It was dcg, it was the terror stuff. Right? So if you look at it like that and you see that really the second top was just buoyed by fraud essentially and fake money, then you can count May 2021 as the real top. Right. Which means the last cycle was actually a faster cycle than usual as well. Right? Because if you actually look at every Metric except price, May 2021 is where all of them peaked, including retail interest in crypto. So I think what ended up happening was that we saw the NFT bull market obviously in the second half of 2021 and the, the alt layer ones as well. But again that was driven by the crypto money, the crypto native money that was still in, not the retail, not new retail money coming in and, and all the fraud. So if that's the case, that means that we could potentially see the peak of this cycle be maybe just the second half of next year instead of in 2025. So that's why I say it doesn't worry me, so to speak, because to be honest, I'm playing. That's how I'm actually just going to play it myself to be honest, that I'm going to assume it's going to be an earlier cycle this time. But at the same time I feel like it depends on what you're in because typically these things will kind of like rotate even as the market's coming off the tops. Like even if BTC and ETH top other things may pump for like another six months or something like that and give you like chance to exit those. But it's very hard to tell obviously this is why investing is so hard. And I stick to just the principle of like dollar cost averaging in, dollar cost averaging out. You know, sell when stuff's crazy, buy when stuff's quiet sort of thing. But yeah, the cycles are definitely changing and I think, I think a big reason is because people love to say we're so early with crypto BTC and Ethan early. If you look at them as mark in terms of market cap, right. BTC is about to be fully integrated into the TRADFI system via this etf. It's not early like BTC will be a trillion dollars if you know, if it goes back into its all time high in market cap. Right. So it's definitely not early anymore. But if you look at the long tail of stuff, sure it can be early, right? But then you're just doing pretty much the same thing VCS do. You're just basically investing in early stage projects, hoping to make A large multiple. I think ETH is, is this. I'm not, not to say that I'm obviously bullish on these things, but if you're looking at the kind of like returns you're going to get and, and, and kind of like previous cycles, Ethan, BTC have, have matured so much at this point especially. And with the ETF stuff that's like the final step in my mind for BTC reaching mainstream adoption. In terms of, of price, price action in terms of like using the products themselves, we're nowhere near that like people using on chain products on Ethereum or Layer Twos. We are absolutely no idea. I would say that we're actually probably at 2013 or earlier levels of adoption there still. Right. But if you're looking at price. Yeah, no, I don't think so. And that's why the cycles I think are going to get shorter brought forward for BTC and E especially and then also it'll stabilize over time and we're probably not going to get those violent cycles for BTC and ETH maybe for that smaller things because they're just smaller. But for BTC and eth I don't think we're going to see those violent cycles. I would, I would ideally like to see just BTC and E doing exactly what the stock market does, right. Where, where all the, the, not the individual stocks like the indexes for example, like the, the S P500 just slowly going up and then from time to time with the broader economy it sells off. Right. And then goes up. Because you mentioned the macro stuff and this is one final point that I actually wanted to hit on. I still don't think that until we get probably the ETF and until it bakes for a while that crypto cares about the macro stuff at all. It's too small, right? It's too small. It's too irrelevant to the world financial system. Yes, there's, there's kind of like obviously a lot of turmoil here and there, but it's not as bad as all the doomers would have you believe as well. You know, inflation came down. It's funny because inflation peaked in June last year. That's when ETH bottomed. Right. And since then everyone's been saying ah, you know, we're going to crash again, we're going to go down again. The only time we crashed near that was FTX collapsing and FTX collapsing couldn't even get ETH to a new low and BTC went slightly lower. Right. But since then it's been basically up Even though the entire year everyone's been saying imminent recession, the world's going to fall apart, everything's going to zero. But don't get me wrong, there are people suffering, right? And the middle class is being eroded. But when you look at the market and who's actually buying, like rich people keep their money in assets, right? They buy assets. So if the middle class is eroding and you have like just poor and rich and over time that doesn't really affect assets because the rich are buying all the assets, right? So yes, it sucks for, for, for the middle class, it sucks for the, for the poorer people. But if you're looking at it with just an objective investor hat on, that's why the market's still going up. Because the rich people who have the money, they're still going to beat assets. Yeah, exactly. They still got money and they're still affected by the inflation of, of obviously the dollar and then when rates go down and stuff like that as well. So they obviously want to hold hard assets. That's why people hold btc, that's why people hold eth. And then if they want to do kind of like riskier things, I go down the risk curve with these smaller projects, they do that as well. And, and that's why you see in the broader markets as well, like people do that. And also in the broader markets, like outside of crypto, the retirement accounts count for a lot, especially in the us that's just a constant funnel of money going into stocks, like non stop, like, like constant. That's not going to stop because that's the retirement plan for everyone. Right? Same in Australia with the superannuation scheme and things like that. So if you look at it like that and then you add BTC to that with the ETF and then even if the people only allocate 1% of the of it to BTC, you know, the, all that money is like tens of trillions of dollars going into it and then 1% of that is still a substantial sum. So that's, that's kind of how I view it broadly. But whether it's good, bad or other, I don't think it matters. Because when you're investing you can't look at things as good or bad. You have to look at things as objectively as possible. Because we start looking things as good or bad and you start doing like moral investing, you can do it. But if your aim is to make money, that's not the best way to make money. And that's just the truth, right? Not that I kind of, I guess condone it or are happy about it but I think people need to, need to come to terms with that if they want to be a good investor.

Yeah, for sure. That's. There's so much great content there. But now we will work. We have to, we have to touch on Layer two. Let's do it.

I'll be waiting for this moment.

Yeah, we have to. You said. Yeah. If there is a big rush, you know, of users like. I think I'm really keen personally to see layer two is be stress tested again. I think it's just something that would almost just expedite attention and resources into making them even more effective and whatnot. But for the average crypto investor who's checking in on the markets every couple of weeks or something, they see a new Layer two launching everybody every month really. I think scroll just went live recently. There's that one with Nil now. It's got the equals, it's got an equal sign in the name like it's just getting ridiculous.

But you've got to get in early. Get those airdrops, mate.

Yeah, I know like this whole year has basically been that really like. Yeah, it's been some legitimate usage of course, you know. Yeah. OP Mainnet or the OP stack chain space was probably one of the highlights of the year I guess just generally. Yeah. Where do you see just layer to adoption at and is it probably more or less where you would have predicted it would be and, and maybe a breakdown for. Yeah, it actually is. And why it's necessary for Ethereum?

Yeah, yeah. I mean I think it's about where I would expect it to be at this time because of the fact that as I said like there still isn't that much new money in the market and AKA not new users and I think that a lot of the usage as you mentioned there's airdrop farming people just hoping to get a token or something. But I think that there's also a lot of the people that may have been on other layer ones because they were cheaper. They come to the layer two because Layer twos have more liquidity, they're easier to use, they're directly integrated with Ethereum. Things like. And then people. Yeah. Just migrating from Ethereum Layer one as well because it's, it's expensive there. But I do want to before I dive into other things, frame, frame this a bit differently for people because I think that when it comes to scaling chains and scaling crypto I think that people assume that there's all this Latent demand that's going to come as soon as we scale, which isn't the case because we've had a lot of space, a lot of block space available on, on, on other chains for years now, right? And they've been able to do heaps of heaps of transactions and do them really cheaply, but they're all very, very, very small compared to Ethereum and Ethereum's layer twos now. And there's a reason for that. And the reason because I believe fundamentally the most valuable use case of blockchains by far is the economic use case. Everything else is completely secondary. Gaming, social stuff like all the other stuff. It's cool, it could add a lot of value. But if we're talking about what actually brings demand or what people pay for on chain, because you can do a lot of this other stuff off chain while still using a blockchain, which we could potentially get into. But it gets a bit more complex there. But in terms of what people would actually pay for, it's economic because for example, let's just say you want to trade something on uni swap and you want to buy some, some random token you came across. But on Ethereum layer one the fee to do that is $10. Okay? Well if you expect that token to do a 10x right, and you're putting a hundred dollars in, you're fine paying $10 for that transaction, right? Because it is a positive expected value, right? Whereas if you're doing a transaction and you've only got $50 and it's costing you $50 to do it, well, you're getting nothing out of it, right? There's no point doing that unless you again expect the token to go up and then you're just taking a loss for, for more expected value. But it all depends on the individual. But at the same time the people who are actually doing regular transactions on the chain, not the ones just buying a token once a week or something like that, other bots, and these bots are what we call MEV bots where essentially they do things like arbitrage, they keep the prices in ch. They, there is negative MEV where they kind of like attack liquidity pools and, and take advantage of non suspecting users, stuff like that. And for them the calculus is can I spend $10 to make a dollar, right? Like if you, you know, all it is is inching out a profit. Doesn't matter if they've spent $10 if they're still in profit, right? So for them the fees are kind of not not, not that big of a deal. Then you have the third set of players, which are the whales, the ones who are not sensitive to fees at all. Right? And the way wealth, wealth distribution works is typically the wealth is concentrated at the top, right? Like crypto wasn't invented to fix wealth concentration like that is a much harder issue to fix. But if you look at where wealth is concentrated, it usually follows a prudent distribution where most of the wealth is concentrated in the top, right. But it's also not wealth of individuals, it's wealth of companies and entities. So for Ethereum Layer one, you may have a company that's happy to pay heaps of fees because they're managing other people's assets, right? Or they're an exchange. For example, they're happy to pay the on chain fees and maybe take a hit on them and maybe not pass it on to users because they're making money other way. They're making money from the fees that the users are paying on the chain. But it's not their money obviously, it's the, it's the, the user's money. Right? So that's why I said I wanted to kind of like maybe reframe the discussion around the fact that we've had all this blog space for ages. The demand has not come. So why is that the case? And the case is because if you look at who's actually fee sensitive, it is the everyday users who are not doing hundreds or thousands of transactions a day, right? They're not doing that at all. They're doing, maybe they're doing a few transactions that are pay for things. If we're talking about like a payments network, right? Or maybe they're sending money overseas once a month, right? So if you're talking about that, even those users are not that fee sensitive. Yeah, because if you're sending thousands of dollars a month overseas, yeah, you'll pay. It's not even that much. It's only ten dollars. You pay five dollar transaction, but you'll pay that. Of course it's cheaper than the other alternatives, right? It's cheaper than Western Union, it's cheaper than the alternatives. That's. But all that is not to say that scale isn't important. That's obviously why Ethereum is scaling by a layer twos. But I think people need to maybe come to terms with the fact that maybe that the demand that they think is actually there if we scale is not, is not actually there. And really the fact that the matter is, is that the people who the demand is there for are happy to pay the fee. Sorry, the. The people who bring that demand are happy to pay the fees anyway.

Yeah.

So regardless of if there's more scale or not, they're going to pay to use the chain. Right. And I think we have enough evidence of that, enough proof of that at this point to make a really strong, strong case of that there. Because typically, what people will say when they say we need all this scale within millions of tps, they'll come up with use cases that make up sense, right?

Yeah.

So, for example, there's a very popular use case in the Solana community called Deep In. Right. Which is basically decentralized infrastructure. So there was a. There was a project that kicked this all off called Helium, which essentially what they did was they created this little hardware box that they sold to people. You would plug it in, and then you would be paid out in the helium token, and then the boxes would form a mesh network to create like a mesh cell phone carrier. Right. Cool. That sounds cool. Right? Okay. Yeah, it sounds cool, but okay, who's paying for it? So if you don't have paying users, and if people are actually paying to use the service, who's paying for is the people buying the token, because the token is being used to subsidize the cost by paying it out to the people running the nodes. So essentially you have proof of work again, Right. Where people are just like mining the token, essentially. So really, unless you've got paying users to make up for for that, which is very difficult to get, because in crypto, I think if. If one thing's difficult to get, it's paying users, and it's like, really? Then, then that, then that doesn't work. People will say, oh, we need the millions of tps to make that, that work. It's like. Yeah, but the thing is, is that if you look at it from an economies of scale perspective when it comes to hardware, there's a reason why hardware centralizes. Because economies of scale kick in. It is much, much, much, much cheaper for someone to run a data center and a data warehouse. Right. And to centralize everything, which we've seen play out in Bitcoin mining, by the way, where there's very few big mining entities because one, they can weather the storm of. Of drawdowns, two, they can lower costs through economies of scale. Right. And three, it's just much simpler from an overhead perspective, generally, like personnel and stuff like that. So even that use case doesn't make any sense to me. But of course, people tout it as A use case because they need to justify their touting of oh, this will do millions of tps. Right. So and that's why I think that that defi has predominantly stayed on Ethereum and Layer twos, even though that The Ethereum layer 1 is the least scalable kind of solution for that is because the money is not going to move for cheap fees. That's not what they're there for. Right. The money is there. I mean Ethereum offers them a lot for in return for those fees. Right? Offers them the most decentralized chain, offers them extreme security, 100% uptime. By the way, Ethereum has never gone down and also offers them the assurances that Ethereum is going to be around in decades to come. It's not just going to go away, it's not just going to become irrelevant. It's going to be kept being built. If anything was to go wrong with it, it would get fixed very, very quickly. So there's always other things that hang off of that. So that's how I think about scaling generally.

I love that reframing. Yeah, it was really good.

I've had this conversation so many times outside of blockchains with engineers and software engineers wanting to build things. A lot of the time it's a solution without a problem. They're over engineering things and you're spot on with block space. Like if people actually wanted the thing you're building Ethereum before every block would be full. Gas fees would be through the fucking roof. Because people want that thing and we're just not seeing it. And if you build it on L2, sure you might get a few more users, but the demand is not there already for you to actually go there.

Yeah. And then I get the thesis that like the demand will come in time but as I said, the problem becomes as like. Like you're assuming all this demand for things that I don't think are going to be on chain to begin with. Like I really think that a lot of this stuff will actually end up happening off chain. And this is actually what layer twos do. Layer Twos especially zk all they do is that they just do things off chain. There's this concept of a ZK CO processor which basically what it does and this is the magic of zero knowledge proofs it does the transactions off chain doesn't it pays a cost for them, but it's the cost of running the what's called a ZK Prova on it can be on a centralized database doesn't have to be on chain where it's more expensive and then they just post the proof on chain, which is much cheaper than doing the actual transactions on chain. So you're basically compressing the cost, right? And that gives you the same security guarantee that you would have on chain through the magic of zk. So like, when you look at it holistically like that, not only is my belief the demand for millions of transactions per second not there and not ever going to be there, we also have ways to do it where even if it is there, right, in that kind of capacity, you can compress it down so that on chain it doesn't require millions of transactions per second of capacity to actually enable that. But, and that's my bull case for layer twos and the, what we call the modular scaling roadmap in Ethereum, because there's the monolithic approach, which is the chains like Solana, for example, are taking that approach, whereas Ethereum is, is the modular approach where you have layer one. It's not, it's not very scalable, but it's extremely secure, extremely reliable. And then the layer twos that sit on top, they can take advantage of this really fancy technology in order to scale Ethereum. And it's just an extension of Ethereum, basically. But also on top of that, Ethereum layer one can in the future, maybe five to 10 years out, take advantage of that technology as well in something that we call enshrinement. So if we were to enshrine something at the layer one, it would mean making it part of the Layer one protocol, because maybe it was part of a layer two, now I've put it as part of the layer one, and now you can take advantage of it at layer one as well. So the vast majority of improvements in this ecosystem will not come from hardware, it will come from software. And that and ZK will be basically the main thing that does it.

Yeah, that's what everyone seems to keep saying. Just the amount of resources going to ZK and some of the early efforts of.

Zcash and stuff like their techniques and all of that are in the last bear market, really have expedited all of that, which is great. And again, it's that idea. Something will come or new apps will be unlocked, which may very well happen. But it's interesting because you get the likes of Decentraland and I'm just thinking of those projects that were really salty in a way when Defi Summer took off, because remember how that took up the chain.

But then that's the thing, it prices out certain use cases yeah, like for example, gaming like the central band Gods Unchained. An early. Yeah, the ones that they got priced out because no one is paying $10 in fees to trade a card that's worth 10 cents. Yeah, right. But again God's Unchained is now on Immutable, which is a layer two. Right. So they just was like, well what? There's no point. You don't need to have everything on. On a 10 cent card. Does not need to be.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's only to be secured by a network that's being built to resist nation states. Yeah, yeah. I don'. Need that for my common Pokemon card that's worth 10 cents. So again that's. And that's a broader kind of discussion there. But the last thing on the ZK thing I'll say is that ZK as a zero knowledge as a concept has existed for decades. It just had no practical application until blockchains came along, which meant that there was no funding going towards it, which meant nothing got built there. It was a science project for people. It was a research thing. But now that it has a very, very practical application for blockchains, it's. It's come. It's been funded with billions, tens of billions of dollars. And it's real and it works. It's not theoretical.

It works.

We have their lives. Ek VMs alive. Right. CK Co processors are live. So when looking at like that and looking I actually think that that stuff's still early. You know I said before how a lot of this stuff isn't early when it comes to the markets, the tech side still very early and that will enable the new use cases. But as I said like I don't think that there is millions of TPS demand for like on chain gps. Right. I think that the demand may exist but as chain thing because on it's too expensive. Even if these chains that claim to be able to do millions of tps right on on chain, they haven't done it for starters. Right. So you can claim everything you want like I was saying at the beginning. And secondly it's going to be much more costly than it will to do it off chain. And if you're getting the same, if not better security guarantees but doing it off chain and better efficiency, then why wouldn't you just do it off chain? That's kind of my whole pieces of things.

Yeah, very, very interesting. And I suppose, well even from your vantage point, I know you mentioned angel investing earlier, like are you still doing, you know, some of that or you know throughout 2023 and stuff.

Yeah, I mean generally when, see generally with kind of like I guess venture, it will lag the public market in terms of where it turns.

Yeah.

So it lags by about 6 to 12 months. So won't hit its bear market for like 6 to 12 months after the public markets have. But I did much more in 2021 and 2022 than I did in 2023, for example. Yeah, yeah, it slowed down a lot. There weren't that many good deals. The valuations did come down, which was nice, some of the things that I looked at but at the same time like because I at this point I've invested all of my spare fiat to be honest, into the market. Like I just don't have the fresh capital available right now because I'm fully allocated, so to speak. So I actually like. And I think that's why venture lags is because people take their profits from the public markets and then reinvest them into the venture deals.

Yeah.

And that happens during the, the bear market typically. Yeah. But yeah, I mean I think it's like almost 80 venture deals I've done in the last three years. Yeah, a lot of them definitely. I would say the vast majority of them are all Ethereum based. Yeah, I've got pretty much. I've invested in all the layer twos as like the thing that I'm most convicted on except starkware I think is the only one I missed out on and then a few other things around that. And I'm also an advisor to Bankless VC which is Bankless VC arm there which. And then an LP in a fund called credibly neutral and credible neutral. I'm an LP because they're doing things outside of Ethereum so it's kind of like a hedge I guess even though I don't.

Yeah.

Like and I'm friends with the founders but it's kind of like a hedge of like if I'm completely wrong. Yeah, yeah, but and then the bankless basis. I've been close to the backless guys for ages obviously. But yeah, I mean generally as I said, like the VC market or the venture market right now is very quiet but it will heat back up again and also lags the bull market by six to 12 months. Yeah, right, yeah. And, and I typically find the best deals are in that six or 12 month period before and after. Kind of like the bull market because you've got like the lower valuations and the projects that are actually building because they care about building, not just doing it for opportunistic money grab.

Yeah.

But at the same time, venture, especially in crypto, I would say there's a 99 failure rate, to be honest, and success rate.

I was, yeah, I was meaning to ask about that. Just with the, you know, they talk about the early ability to liquidate. It's always been like the pro of doing that.

Exactly.

But you know, it's like, yeah, that's, that's one benefit, but then there's. But that's a whole bunch of other things.

Dump the token on retail.

Yeah, yeah, a lot of, a lot of that has kind of gone away because vesting's getting longer on projects. Like typically it's a four year vesting now, but I know that there are different ways around that. You know, funds especially can, can do different tricks and things like that, like with the high watermark and stuff. And also they can like short it on the market and then cover their short, you know.

Yeah.

The exchange still exists in a year's time and they get their tokens.

Even four years though, compared to private.

Oh yeah.

It's a shorter cycle.

Shorter. But it's gotten longer because. Because some. Yeah, like. And depends on the. Like. Honestly, I would actually distrust any deals that had quick vesting.

Yeah.

Because it would just. It would to me. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was cash grab to me. Yeah. But at the same time I think that the longer vesting is kind of funny thing because, because crypto prices are so volatile, what ends up happening is that you can still be vesting when your investment has gone 100x and then by the time you unlock your tokens it could be down 90 plus percent. Right. So there's a lot of that that happens. But that's venture, that's angel investing. That's what you sign up for. Because you know, there's vesting from day one. Like you know, you're not going to get your token straight away and then you can kind of plan around that. But I think that's also why people like investing in the bear market is because by the time the vestings come around, the market's hot again and you can liquidate if you want to. But yeah, I would have to say that most deals that are made go to zero, get written off or they just underwater for a lot of people. But then the ones that succeed, succeed big. I mean think about the early investors in I guess like Solana, for example. The ones that were buying, I think the earliest rounds are like one or two cents. And if they had those tokens when the Pro in 2021, when the price went over 200 bucks. That's. That's a crap ton of money. Right. But then the same was true for eth it just wasn't done in privately. Yeah. 30 cents.

Yeah.

You sold it not even. Not even in 2017. If you sold it in 2017, like a thousand dollars.

Yeah.

You made a huge multiple. And then again in 2021, if you held it till then, you made even more. Right. But that's. Those are the deals that make up for all the losses. But as I said, like, it's extremely rare to come across something like that, especially with the timing, you know? Timing.

Yeah.

Where being able to actually take the profits when it's at that price, because these things go down 90 easily within six months right. From their top. So that's kind of what it is. But for me, just on. On the last note, I'll make here, a lot of my angel investing, the vast majority of it, has really just been to support teams that I really wanted to support. At the end of the day, you know, I'm not too concerned with making money on them, to be honest. Like, I don't. I don't need to. It's more of a hobby for me, to be honest.

Yeah.

Yeah. It's not really something that I'm expecting to make a huge return on, but to be fair, like, some of the ones that have. That I've invested in have returned the entire fund, so to speak. Like, I returned more than I put in.

Sassle fun.

But at the same time, that was never the goal for me.

Yeah.

I was always, oh, hey, I want to support this team. You know, I want to. I want to give the money and I want to be close to the team and get their dates of what they're doing in the background, stuff like that, which is. Been really awesome, just especially because I cover a lot of this stuff in my daily show, and just being able to. It's not like insider knowledge or anything like that, but just being able to have, like, a connection to the team to get clarity on things. Yeah. Is very helpful for me.

Yeah.

But, yeah, other than that. Yeah. It's not. Not a thing. Because it's. It's. It's all my own capital, too. Right. It's not outside capital now. I don't have anyone to please. It's like, if I lose money, I lose money. Yeah. And that's it. But at the same time, like, if I lose all of the money I put into angel investing, I'll still be Fine. You know, typically, the way I think about, I put the money in, I'm like, okay, that's zero now. I don't even count it as part of my portfolio anymore. It's not even on. It's on its own separate spreadsheet. It's not in the main spreadsheet.

That's what I do with all of my crypto, like that spend.

That's actually the way to keep yourself sane. Even the public. Best thing that you do if you just write it all down to zero. Because typically people do the opposite, right? Where they're like, oh, just put 10 grand into this coin. If it goes 100x, I'll be a millionaire. Right.

You're accounting the future project.

Yeah, yeah. More likely scenarios that it maybe it does like a 2x and you sell and then you miss the 100x. Yeah.

Or does a 5x thing. You see how to do 100 and.

Goes right back in.

Yeah.

That gets a lot of people in the late stage of the bull market where everyone's like, everything's up only. Yeah. So what they'll do is they'll buy the everything because everything's pumping. And then they're like, yeah, okay, this is going to go 100x or whatever it is. And then it all just burns and crashes and overnight and they keep doubling down as it crashes because they're just like buying the dip.

Yeah, they're like, I'm buying the dip.

Yeah.

And that's the kind of cult mentality. But I, I actually think a lot of that mentality has been slowly going away as we tap into more of the available capital base. Because as I said, on the market side of things, we definitely aren't early. There's a lot of capital already in the crypto markets. But, yeah, as time goes on, as crypto becomes more mature, a lot of that will go away and it'll be concentrated within, like the pure kind of just like gamblers rather than like, you know, the investors. People will just admit, okay, I'm just gambling now. Like, this isn't investing anymore.

So earlier we were talking about angel investing, and previously you mentioned wealth preservation. And generally people make their money through wealth, through concentration.

Right.

You invest in one thing, your business, a certain coin, whatever it may be, you make significant amount of money. And I really want to know how you think about wealth preservation now, because making money is one problem, keeping it is another. And how do you think about asset allocations? Do you have a lot in crypto? Do you diversify into stocks and real Estate. How do you think about that now?

Yeah, so I haven't got any stocks actually right now. I actually changed my super to be all in on eth.

Self managed super. The following on e. Literally 100 of it is allocated which is staked. Which is staked. He staked it locally too. Not with a provider. I staking it on my own.

What sort of return are you getting.

For that on the 8th? I think it's around 4% solo staker in eth denominated obviously. Not in dollar denominated there. But yeah, I have no stocks right now. Not to say I won't in the future, but I have zero stocks right now. I have my house obviously and then a few other kind of of bits and bobs here. But the vast majority of my net worth X the house is in crypto. Like I would say 95 plus percent of it is, is crypto and of that, you know, most of it is in eth, but there are other things that I hold. And this is excluding angel investments of course, because it's, it's, it's hard to include those because the valuations that they get is not going to be the public valuation, you know, a lot of the time because there's different valuations here and there. But, so there's that. But in terms of like, like my long term plan for wealth preservation, the, the thing is I love staking my eth. I love doing it as a solo staker. I love feeling like I'm supporting the network. I love proposing blocks on the network because it just seems wild to me that I get to be the one proposing a block on a network that's made up of all these different individuals, that's decentralized, that's trillion dollars, you know, trillions of dollars. Wholesome business.

Yeah, you're a part of it. You're contributing.

I'm directly contributing. Right. With my little boxes that I have at home that I built myself, that I set up myself. It just feels empowering. Y. So, so for me, yeah, the, the vast majority of my net worth will probably always stay in eth staked eth and I'll just probably live off the staking gains to be honest, and, and maybe sell the, the rewards as, as time goes on. But I haven't decided exactly what I want to do there. But at the same time there's a lot of other things that I, that I own. Obviously the angel investments, but some other, I mean not a lot of other public market assets that I own, but there are some that I Do plan to to eventually sell and then probably put into something like stocks or something like that just to be even further diversified. But generally as you said like there's a concentration aspect to it. And to be honest, I prefer to be concentrated than to spread out because being too spread out just means you're keeping track of too many different things at once.

Yeah.

And it becomes like a headache because I benchmark my performance of everything that I own against E. So it's not just dollars. If I beat dollars, cool, whatever. But like I want to stack, eat. Like usually I'll sell something and put it into buy more ETH with it. If I'm not outperforming eth, it's just a write off of an investment to me. So that's how I kind of view it. And that's why I tend to outside of the angel investing stuff, I am extremely concentrated with the things that I that I buy. But everyone has their own strategy. I personally think that staked ETH is a good strategy because I believe ETH is a store of value and a money. I know that's maybe a controversial topic for certain people, but I believe it is. I believe it is on par with BTC in that respect. It's just behind because it hasn't existed for I guess like six years of BTC's life. So it's behind on like liquidity, profile, network effect, all that sort of stuff. But it BTC are the only things that I would consider to be something that I would hold for decades. Right. And eat to me superior not just because of staking, but because I just like obviously much more bullish on the Ethereum ecosystem as a whole and driving value to ETH than I am on on Bitcoin. But I think either or it's like you can't really go wrong in that respect from a preservation perspective. But I would say that even though I'm in sort of wealth preservation, I still have have sides of it where I am accumulating wealth. Like as I said, the other things that I own.

You still want to grow it, don't you?

Yeah, obviously you still want to grow. The preservation isn't about just staying in one spot. Right. It's still growing it over time. But I do think that state EAT will beat everything over time from a risk adjusted basis. Like if you're talking about beating inflation. Right. And for the lowest risk possible besides just putting money in a bank account and earning, you know, a yield on it. But you're doing that on dollars. Right. You're not doing that on, on eth. And I expect ETH to continue to go up, up probably forever over time against fiat. That's what I kind of expect. So like for example, I mean people use the example of gold as, as being that kind of example. That I just think that BTC and ether like much better gold if you want to look at it from that perspective. So that's how I generally kind of think about things. But you know, it's kind of funny when looking at it and, and looking at people's reaction to me saying, oh, it's, it's eth, it's staked, right? Especially my super fund, that stuff like that, like, isn't that risky? It's like I actually don't consider ETH to be that risky of an asset anymore. The other stuff is obviously. But Ethan btc I would consider to them to be much safer than most of the stock market at this point in time.

I love that as you were telling me, your whole thing normally have that woof, but there were like no alarm bells whatsoever. Just seemed.

Yeah.

Do you have the same feeling? Well, I'm not storing it all in NFTs.

I mean, you know, the funny thing about the NFTs though is that like there's an argument to be made that some of them are actually like, like BTC and ETH in that they could achieve a store of value status. So that's kind of the mean that people come up with. I'm not talking about bored apes or anything like that, but like something like a crypto punk where essentially it is like provably scarce. Right. It has a history as a story to it and it does nothing. There's no promises. You have a punk, right? There is a social narrative around it. There's a social, there's a shelling point around it. So maybe they just are worth, you know, a lot and grow slowly over time as more and more people want them, as a story becomes stronger and stronger. But the vast majority of NFTs no execution risk.

You don't get that.

Yeah, exactly. You get that with there's no roadmap.

Yeah, yeah.

It's the same with Bitcoin. I actually think the punks are the BTC of NFTs because there's no roadmap, there's no promises and no execution risk. There's just like, okay, here's a thing that you buy and if enough people think that it's a store of value or if it's something that's going to increase in value over time then it will, because it's just a social story.

This is an incredible thing with NFTs. So shelling point is, is kind of where people naturally attract to, right? And I firmly believe that punks are that like people go towards it, whereas other NFTs are like Veblen goods where people buy it just because it's going up and it's a status kind of thing. Like Bored Apes. Yeah, incredibly. I just wanted to highlight that because it's incredibly fascinating to me and you've like solidified something in my head about NFTs now.

I mean, I think that's the right way to think about them because I think a lot of people think about them. Oh my favorite NFT is going to be as big as punks or whatever. And I think that that became a main narrative because obviously Bored Apes became his biggest punks and like flipped it for a little bit. But the property of a store of value is not defined by the main years, it is defined by the bear markets, right. Is defined by what assets attract capital in a bear market, right. What do people take profit into? You know, what do people hold, what do people not want to sell? Like it's not just true of crypto, it's true of everything where you don't sell the assets that you, that you want to hold first, you sell the assets that you want to get rid of first and that you don't see long term value in. And that's it. Like it's the same with, with the real world, right? If you're in dire straits and you need money, you're not just going to sell your house, right? Your house is the thing that you want to keep the most. So you're going to sell everything else and then if you have to, you'll sell, you'll sell your house. So and you know, property is not the same everywhere, but I think that's a huge reason why property is definitely very valuable to people. You know, a home is obviously very valuable to people. But in crypto you just look at multiple cycles. What has actually attracted the capital and stayed there? It's BTC and eth. They're so much bigger than everything else. Yeah. Like BTC is three times bigger than ETH right now. And then after eth, I think the biggest thing is what bnb, which is like BNB is not even a crypto to me. It's like a stock, it's a stock in binance. Right. So we're looking at an actual crypto excluding xrp because XRP is. It's just an outlier.

Deduct the stables and all the rats.

Yeah, you deduct the stables, you deduct the stake to hit the ST8, the Rapid.

All that baby got like four left in the top hundred.

You get to like the next biggest one, which I, I think was Salana at like almost $20 billion cap and Cardano shortly. So 20 billion compared to BTC is almost 700 billion. Right. Like, there is a substantial difference there. And that is what you look at when you're looking at stores of value. Like what performs well not in a bull market, but in a bare market. That's what defines it because that's where the value flows.

Amazing, man. I think, I think we might wrap it there.

We, we.

We've gone in all lengths. Do you guys have anything else you want to burning questions?

No, I got mine and I'm very satisfied, man.

I'm going back to buy some more eggs, mate.

I'm selling everything.

Anthony, that's been absolutely amazing, man. Where can, where can people find your stuff? Do you want to just give a shout out to your Daily Way, your show? Where can people find your stuff?

Yeah, just on, on Twitter, you know, I'm sure you'll link my Twitter in the show notes and things like that. And then on there, there's just links to the Daily Way, which is. But as you mentioned, a daily podcast YouTube channel that I do, that's 30 minutes every weekday talking about Ethereum. Just a lot of the stuff that we just talked about on the podcast, but mostly Ethereum focused. But I do talk about other things like the macro environment sometimes and how that relates to crypto and barely about the markets, if I'm being honest. I try to avoid that because I like focusing on the fundamental stuff. But yeah, if we just did an Ethereum and you want to get into the weeds, that's. That's where it's at. I would, I would warn people that it's not noob friendly, to be honest. There's a lot of, lot of context that you probably need to have. I try to keep it kind of high level, but it's hard because I like to get into the weeds and that's my place to do it.

So for an hour, if you have to explain.

Exactly, exactly. So there is a lot of, kind of prerequisite knowledge, I think. But if you are at a point where you think that you can just like listen to it and take it in as time goes. Some people will do that, right? They'll listen to it. And they'll be like, I understood nothing that you were saying a year ago, but now I actually understand it. Like, oh, well, that's a pretty hardcore way to learn about Ethereum, but. But, you know, that's good. So, yeah, that's where I do all my stuff. And then on Twitter. I mean, I'm less active on Twitter these days because it's just not that great of a platform, to be honest, these days anymore. There's so much noise on there. I am on Farcaster as well. People can find me on there if they want to sign up to that. It's a pretty cool social network, to be honest. I think it's. It's very crypto native right now because it started off in a closed beta where it was just crypto people on there. But Yeah, I mean, YouTube and then there's a deli. Great discord channel that people can join as well if they want to just get involved with the community there.

Amazing, man. And we've got so many of our members that are coming up to their third cycle. Like, I reckon 60 of our members are coming to their third cycle. So I think a lot of already interesting your stuff and would be very keen to dive in. So, mate, thanks again so much. You've come in here just in your own time. It's good to see some other fellow Aussies too, in the space.

Good to do something in person for once. Yeah, they're doing these things behind a computer scene. Right?

So much better in person.

Yeah, exactly.

Yep.

Now, thanks so much, mate. And as always, guys, if you have any friends or family or other crypto people that you think would find valuable value in this episode, we'd love for you to share with a friend. It's how we grow the podcast. And yeah, please check out Anthony's stuff. He's an absolute legend. Matt Berg, thank you so much for joining us. It was crap. One of my favorites, this one.

This is amazing.

It was so good. So good I have to have you back on.

Yeah, yeah, definitely. Always happy to chat. All things Ethereum and crypto. Definitely.

Awesome, man.

Thanks, guys.

See the next episode.

Thanks, J.