他为何卖掉 CryptoPunk，转投 ZCash.. - David Hoffman

Boom. David Hoffman, part two. Trustless Dave back on the stream. How are you, my friend?

Good. How are you, my man?

I'm awesome, dude. I apologize for my voice. It was struggling, but we got the tea out. How have you been, man? It's been a while.

Good. It kind of feels like there are at least some tokens that are alive, which is exciting. It feels like now, but it didn't feel like this 2 weeks ago. Something happened between 2 weeks ago and now.

What I can't figure out is whether this is a notable crypto vibe shift and times are changing, or if we're just being dragged up as little as possible by the rest of the market, particularly the stock market, which keeps re-rating higher and higher.

Bitcoin's definitely being dragged up because the correlation to QQQ is at an all-time high. We just know that for a fact. To some degree, yeah, Bitcoin is kind of getting cucked by the S&P and QQQ, but then there are some idiosyncratic tokens that are pumping. I don't know. I feel like some people are saying this is what it would be like in the calm before a storm.

I will say that, at the very least, I agree with you on a couple of select alts. There have been a couple of spots that we're going to talk about: Zcash, obviously, and VVV. We're going to talk about some of these coins that are getting flows. They do appear to be notable, and at the very least, it's a breath of fresh air. Like, okay, someone in crypto is getting—

Rewarded.

You guys had Michael Saylor on recently. Congrats. Really sick episode. I actually wasn't going to start with this, but I am curious: especially as a current or former—somewhere between—ETH maxi, where are you on the STRC-MSTR drama as it currently stands?

The way we think at Bankless is that we think in content threads. One thread that we want to pull on every now and then, just to check in on it, is Michael Saylor walking the tightrope between whether Strategy is a Ponzi or whether he's just doing a good, sophisticated arbitrage between time-frame investors. Which side he's on is going to be determined by how much risk he takes.

Yes.

That's the theme. And then STRC is a good product so long as he can manage risk.

Are you a holder of STRC?

Yeah, a very marginal amount, just because I think I have about $500 of it.

Okay.

Very, very small.

A non-zero amount is the way to describe that. But I can see myself owning more. I really liked the thesis that he presented: Bitcoin is the collateral for this new banking product where you are paid the interest rates and yields that you ought to be paid, but that your banks aren't paying you. As a new neobank with a different denominator that is paying people yield in a fundamentally more true way, I like it. He just has to manage the risk.

I think when he says, “I will sell Bitcoin to fund the dividends,” that's an example of him committing to appropriately risk-manage. So, yeah, I'm a fan.

There's also an argument to be had that Bitcoin, for the first time in I don't know how long, moves up—or at least stays flat—on what I would consider bad news. That's something we haven't seen in a while.

You're talking about the Iran war and—

The Iran war, but also Saylor talking about selling Bitcoin. At least in my bubble, maybe my—there's a lot of dry—

Saylor selling Bitcoin is bearish. I think it's bullish. I think more net Bitcoin will be bought by Saylor the more he can imbue STRC with more confidence.

How was he to interview? What vibe did you get from him when he was—

Hard. He's one of these guys that you just can't interrupt. I talked to our buddy Alex Thorn from Galaxy because he interviewed Saylor. He went to his home and gave us some advice. He's like, “Dude, he's just going to steamroll you as an interviewer. You're going to get a total of four or five questions in.”

Towards the end, I had to get more on the edge of my seat and get more aggressive and, frankly, rude about injecting what I wanted to say so he would wrap it up. I wanted to play the “wrap it up” music at the Golden Globes or whatever they do. I think we got a total of five or six questions, and that was it.

Over what? An hour? An hour and a half?

It was like an hour and 40 minutes, dude. It's really long.

Wow. Congrats on the interview. I mostly just saw clips. We watched some clips on the stream. There were some good ones. But, yeah, TBD how this situation plays out.

What I'm most excited about right now are a few of these alts outperforming. In particular, Zcash is one of my favorites. It was one of my best trades at 25. I've actually found myself back in it in 20 this year, a couple of weeks ago, and it's turned into kind of a monster. You sent me a cool DM, by the way. Thank you.

Yeah.

You found yourself in the Zcash discussion with a CryptoPunk sale followed by a Zcash article. What was that? Did you sell a punk to buy Zcash? Give me the rundown.

Those are two things that had been happening separately that just decided to converge at the same time. CryptoPunks are a proxy for ETH. ETH momentum and ETH motion are elsewhere right now.

The investment case for Bitcoin is that Michael Saylor is going to buy a ton of it. The investment case for ETH is that Tom Lee is going to buy a ton of it. That's cool. It's kind of growing up, I guess, in a sense. It's the institutionalization of both of them.

But the investment case for Zcash has so much substance. I can't write an article about the investment case for ETH because Tom Lee is buying it. Who cares? That's a tweet, not an article.

The investment case for Zcash is robust and thorough. We're all on Crypto Twitter and we're all investors, but I'm first and foremost a content producer. I love telling stories. The Zcash story is a really good story, and I'm compelled by the story. There's just story-investor resonance in Zcash. A bunch of other people and I feel compelled by it, too. That's what really compelled me to write the article.

Was it a big deal for you to sell the punk? You took a loss on it for sure, right?

Yeah. I bought it in 2021 for 69 ETH and then sold it for 62 ETH, but ETH was at a much higher price when I bought it. So, yeah, it was a dollar-denominated loss and a marginal ETH-denominated loss.

You were thinking of the punk as strictly a proxy—basically leveraged ETH beta?

Yeah. I always kind of said that Punks are exposure to how cool Ethereum is. If Ethereum is cool, then Punks will have an ETH-denominated premium. If Ethereum is less cool, then Punks will lose that premium.

That's a fun take. Have you given up on ETH being cool?

I don't see ETH not being cool in the short term. Not now. A lot of my frustrations come from the ETH leadership.

Something I tweeted before I wrote that article was, “The cool thing about Zooko is that he's bullish on Zcash and wants it to go up in price, and he's explicit about that.” To me, that was refreshing.

I saw it. I actually saved that for the stream doc. I don't know if it made it. I liked that tweet of yours: “Dev cares about price.” What is your thinking on that? I guess it's a complete 180 from Vitalik and the Ethereum Foundation caring about price.

Yeah, that's basically it. I don't want to talk negatively about Vitalik or the Ethereum Foundation, but they have diverging goals.

I think Vitalik really wants Ethereum to be a check on the powers that be, especially the future unknown powers that be that we can't really imagine. In my opinion, what I'm here to do, and what many others in Ethereum are here to do, is for Ethereum not to be a check on power, but to be the power itself.

As an investment case, it's much more salient when Ethereum is the institution rather than being a check on institutions. Ethereum is consistently being positioned as a check on institutions, which doesn't really have a strong investment case.

You know, that's actually a fun take. I've never really thought about it this way, but indirectly, I obviously do. Hyperliquid, with Jeff, obviously cares about the price above all else. They take all of their revenue and basically TWAP the token back. Pump hasn't done well, but Alon obviously cares about the Pump.fun price. There seems to be a theme there.

Yeah, these are all different people, cultures, and vibes. But having some sort of notion that it's not even about—I don't want Vitalik to turn Ethereum into an ETH-TWAPing protocol, even though it kind of does do that with the burn. It's just a notion that growth is good, and that Ethereum is an economic system where, if it grows, that's good for Ethereum.

Ethereum has certain goals: cypherpunk values, decentralization, and all these things.

Those goals are better achieved with a higher ETH price, which doesn't really seem to be inside of ETH leadership culture. It's only in the community, and the community is only so powerful.

It's a good take. You're like 2017 crypto, right? Maybe pre?

That's right. That's right. That's right. Yeah.

What was it? Why was it—

It was funny when Zcash first started pumping. At 25, it was so hated because everyone was like, “What the fuck is Zcash? What the fuck are we doing?” Why was Zcash so cucked by the OG crowd?

Yeah, I remember in the early Ethereum days, there was a big conversation about block rewards, dev block rewards.

Uh-huh.

And there was a big fight in Ethereum. Kevin Owocki was on one side of this fight, where he wanted to say, “Hey, we could fund Ethereum public goods, fund public goods, fund the dev teams by taking 10% of the block rewards, and then we can just fund them.” And then me, Ryan, my co-host, and a bunch of other people were like, “No, no, no, no. ETH is money. It needs to be politically neutral. Don't do that.”

And Zcash embodied a bunch of things that Ethereum disagreed with, like proof of work—

Mhm.

—a block reward dev fund. It looked like a sandbox for cryptographers to tinker with their cryptography much more than it was a money or anything like that.

But as it's gone on, that was the age back then, and then the 5 years of irrelevancy is actually turning into an asset for it, because now everyone's stoked about Zcash because it's PvE. One of the reasons why it's PvE is because no one believed in it until now.

I—thanks for the lore. I was kind of fired up to see you buy it, by the way, because I was like, “All right.”

I haven't bought it quite yet. I took a little bit of dust and just 10x-longed at the very top, just as kind of a hedge, but my actual capital I've yet to deploy.

So what's your thought process on how and when to do that? How do you think about these trades?

Dude, I'm not a trader. I'll just start TWAPing in tonight whenever I get my money in person from Coinbase.

Oh, yeah. What happened with that, by the way?

Yeah, you send money out of Coinbase, and then they're like, “Okay, we're going to hold this for 72 hours and just verify.”

It's bankless, man.

You've never had that happen to you?

No, because the coins are the worst. Yeah, it's brutal.

I went into Kane's DMs and said, “Dude, I would use Infinex so much more if they had an on-ramp.”

Yeah, facts. Coinbase is terrible. We're sort of forced into using it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Regardless, buy it, don't buy it. Seeing you write the article kind of fired me up because one of the bull cases I like for crypto is that even if no new inflows—no meaningful inflows—came into crypto, there could be this mass re-rating of the top 100.

Most of the—if you ever look at CoinMarketCap, CoinGecko, whatever, the top 100 is brutal. What is in that list? It's horrifying what's in that list.

Yeah, it's always been that way. It's always been that way.

It's horrifying what's in that list. And there's enough money in that list where you could just flow bad coins to good coins and make some very meaningful pumps.

Seeing someone like you post the Zcash thesis, I'm like, “Okay.” There are some of these not-super-trader, short-time-frame thinkers in crypto. It basically taps and scratches the itch of a new level of capital, I think, in crypto, which is very interesting about the Zcash thesis.

What got you fired up enough to write and publish an article about it? I don't see you doing that about that many tokens.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I write articles when I see an opportunity in the content market. I was looking around for who wrote the Zcash thesis, and it was fragmented. Mert had some good tweets, and Sam had some good tweets. No one really had it all in one place.

My attempt was, “Okay, let me collect all of these very good theses and put them into one big article, where if somebody wants to get downloaded on Zcash quickly, they can just read this one article.” That was the goal of it.

I frequently do stuff like this, where I see it as a service to other people who are trying to get a grasp on things. That was really the motivation.

To your point about old coins, or just coins getting re-rated, we're in the middle of scheduling. Mert is all the way over in Japan, and so the schedule's a little difficult, but it's Mert and Tushar coming on the show to talk about Zcash.

I don't know if there's anything more PvE-emblematic than Mert from Solana and Tushar from Multicoin coming on Bankless to talk about Zcash. It's the ultimate middle ground for all things in history to just be ignored.

As an illustrative example, I've never seen—I really get motivated when a bunch of the crypto community all agrees about the same thing. It's like, “Oh, yeah, no, we are actually, as a community, as a cult, whatever, all here.” It's heartwarming when we have an opportunity to do that together.

I think everyone sees that this is just crypto Twitter hot money sloshing around, and this is all we can do because we're all broken, so we can only pump it this high. But everyone's kind of positioning for, “Actually, no, we're going to hand this off to Bitwise and Grayscale, and they're going to sell it to boomers' retirement portfolios.” We're all in this trade together. I think that's fun, and I want to be a part of that.

I'm excited to listen to that. Also, quick callout: Drowning Kitty, I think, is hacked. He just tweeted a CA.

It's only at, like—

Kitty?

Yeah, the chat is telling me he just tweeted a CA. It's a Solana coin. I don't know, it's at like 2 million. It looks like a farm. It's done so much volume and the market cap is so low, it looks like a farm. Just calling it out to the chat.

What was your take on Mert and a lot of these giga-Solana bulls going so hard for another token?

A very smart choice by Mert. I really want to know how—and what motivated—Mert to find Solana, or find Zcash, so cheap and so ahead of the curve, because it wasn't on my radar, obviously.

It makes sense. I don't know where Solana is. I think Solana has experienced, in the same way that ETH is getting priced against Bitcoin, Solana is getting priced against ETH and Bitcoin, respectively.

Protocol wars seemed kind of over to me. Solana's price is what it is. ETH's price versus Bitcoin is what it is. These things are kind of where they've landed.

From a social media strategy, Mert hopping onto—not to say he's hopped off the Solana train, but he's definitely hopped onto the Zcash train—is, as a trade, a cult of personality. He wants to grow his cult of personality. He's hopping on the Zcash train when it's an opportunity to do so. It's a good move.

Someone that's been here in the 2017 crowd, what do you think of the Monero versus Zcash debate? Did you consider a Monero article as well?

I'll write any article that has good enough substance to it. As far as I understand it, the debate is which token is going to go up in price more.

Monero, when it gets delisted from exchanges, is a criminal coin and institutions can't touch it. The Zcash thesis, as I understand it, is that the crypto community pumps this thing up, everyone gets around it, and then Bitwise and other asset managers sell it to boomers. That can't happen with Monero.

In the same way that Monero represents a check on power because it is true privacy—I mean, maybe it's weaker privacy; I'm sure there are some cryptography people who would like to argue the merits of privacy—but I'll give Monero its purity points. It's true privacy, completely cypherpunk.

It's a check on power rather than being powerful itself, kind of in the same way as my frustrations with Ethereum. Zcash's upside is that it's a handshake with the powers that be. So is there a debate? No. They're in the same category, and one is doing more than the other.

It's crazy that people always make the argument, “My drug dealers never accepted Zcash.” Monero being so private and difficult to transact with has made it impossible to buy.

Yeah.

I think it's serious, because I like Monero. I also like the vibe. I like the word and the way it sounds. The people who shill it—it just sounds right.

It's so difficult to trade that I think it actually keeps a lot of people away from it, because they don't know what to make of it. Someone put up a pair on HyperDex at one point. I don't know exactly how that's played out, but it's gotten so difficult to trade that I think it actually keeps a lot of people away from it because they don't know what to make of it.

Right. Right. Yeah, it’s been interesting to see the Zcash conversation be centered around money: Zcash is encrypted Bitcoin, is private money. Money needs liquidity. It’s great that Monero is literally better at privacy, but you need the money-ness.

You need the money-ness. It’s a good take.

On a completely separate note, just while I have you here, what do you make of DeFi—Ethereum DeFi, but DeFi in particular? You are one half of Bankless.

Right.

And it’s an unbelievable spot to be pro-DeFi. Do you have some level of existential dread about the state of DeFi right now?

I don’t feel like I have existential dread, but I understand the argument for why somebody would have existential dread. There needs to be—I think some platforms are well positioned. Morpho is literally positioned to answer exactly why and how Aave got hacked.

At the end of the day, it’s bad enough, even outside of the Aave hack. With AI and all the other hacks, the vibe and security are bad enough. Everyone is saying this. Kane Warwick said this on his podcast: “I don’t feel secure holding my assets on DeFi.”

Again, we’re talking about money. It’s finance and money. DeFi needs to be completely rebuilt. Do you know what Odysseus from Failing Labs is?

No, what is that? Maybe—what is that?

It’s a crypto security protocol that is now getting extra attention because he built his security platform to account for stuff like this. He wrote this article saying that DeFi needs to be rebuilt from an aeronautics-industry perspective.

On an airplane, or a spaceship, or a rocket, so many things are redundant because the components are expected to fail.

Uh-huh.

DeFi is not wired like that. With the Kelp DAO, LayerZero, and Aave setup—

Yes.

—one thing failed and it all kind of fell.

Yes.

Aave needed to have assumed that Kelp DAO was going to fail at some point in time and needed to have been constructed as such. LayerZero needed to have assumed that one of its components was going to break and needed to be constructed as such.

DeFi needs a complete rewrite of how it is built. Ethereum also needs a complete rewrite, because everything needs to be rewritten in a post-Mitosis era. Everything also needs to be rewritten to be formally verified.

There’s a ton of work to be done. The DeFi concept and idea are still out there, but now we need to rebuild everything, and it’ll be better. It’s just going to take a while and be very hard to get there.

I had Robert Leshner on the other week. You guys should do another Leshner episode. It was fire, and his take was that Mitosis is really scary for DeFi, but it can also just as easily compromise existing infrastructure as build a better foundation for future infrastructure that doesn’t exist yet.

I think that’s optimistic, because I find myself—I was in a discussion with this guy Darren on Twitter, who I think is really smart. We were going back and forth, and I understand that we could see concentrated flows in five coins. Maybe TVV, Ton, it, Zcash, couple couple alts do do very well.

But he was asking about DeFi, and I’m kind of a giga-bear on DeFi right now. He said, “Well, that’s going to make it very difficult to see flows go into other coins if DeFi ceases to exist.”

I’m not of the view that it’s going to cease to exist, but it would be nice if that LayerZero situation could have been a local bottom.

Yeah. Yeah, I don’t know. The assets that are moving right now don’t have any dependencies. I’m not an expert on Hyperliquid’s architecture, but Hyperliquid is just its own thing. They control that thing end to end.

Venice is an AI tech platform. It’s got an equity-like token on Base, but the token doesn’t have any dependencies. Zcash is money. It has zero dependencies. That’s kind of its whole deal.

All the tokens that are running right now don’t have the daisy-chained risk-contagion exposure that all the DeFi tokens do.

Yeah, which is nice. Can I ask you a side question?

Sure.

How’s the Bankless operation right now? How is it running, and how big are you guys? Especially now, I know how much work goes into this. It’s really impressive that you guys are still operating the way that you are.

There’s the broader Bankless umbrella, which has a couple of smaller media arms under it. We have TDR, the DeFi Report, which is kind of our research arm. You know how Delphi Research has Galaxy Research? We have Michael Nadeau. He and Ryan do the DeFi Report, and they do two episodes a week—some for Bankless premium subscribers, and some for the public.

That’s our premium research content. We have Limitless, which is Aave’s and Josh’s.

Crushing, by the way.

Yeah, crushing.

Really crushing.

Yeah, they’re killing it. That’s our AI media arm. Then we have Bankless, which is crypto, obviously, and our newsletter team.

Everyone is kind of creator-first, and then we have all the operations people to support all of that: a COO, a graphic designer, a website guy. That’s everyone.

The thing that has really changed in the last two weeks is that Ryan and I have our Claudes ready to go. When I bring on a guest, I use a slash command—slash guest prep. I give it the guest’s name, who they’re from, and a little bit of context, and then it collects everything they’ve ever produced.

It gives me a Grok prompt to get their 20 most viral tweets, excluding all replies and all that kind of stuff, to get a snapshot of what they’ve said on Twitter. I’ll use Obsidian to snip relevant things from the internet and feed that data in, and then it rolls an agenda for me.

That helps with guest preparation and guest selection. We really want to explore outside of crypto. We always have, but we also don’t know who’s out there. I’ll tell Claude about a concept for a podcast I want to produce—here’s the subject matter; give me the top five people to comment on these things—and they’re usually names I’m not familiar with.

Then I go to YouTube and check how well they can talk and whether they have anything interesting to say. Then I invite them on the show.

You had Rory on, which was awesome.

Rory was such a friendly guy.

He’s so good. That guy rocks. Just my generic question: what do you think is the best business decision you guys ever made at Bankless?

Honestly, talking about ETH was the best business decision. We penetrated a community and told the story that everyone kind of felt, but no one had really articulated. That’s where we rose.

In sponsorship land, we have two philosophies on sponsors. You can lock in a long-term sponsor for a year, like Polymarket and Phantom, and lock them in at a stable price. We love those sponsors, and they pay for the foundation.

Then you have short-term sponsors that refresh and turn over a little bit faster. Because they’re shorter, you can charge them a higher rate, and that’s where you get the profit.

When we came up with this sponsorship philosophy after the FTX crash, all the marketing budgets dried up to zero. We needed to pay attention to this, so we made a more intimate deal with Kraken for 2023, along with a few others.

Having foundation sponsors and churning higher-level sponsors has been a model that’s worked out for us.

That was a super-based answer. He’s talking about ETH. David, you rock, man. I really appreciate you coming on. It’s fun to hear you talk about Zcash. I was fired up to see you write the article.

I didn’t care that you sold the Punk—I didn’t have a directional take on selling it—but it was provocative to see you sell the Punk.

I’d just had this Punk forever. There’s a lot of capital locked up in that, and it’s not really doing much.

Yeah.

I like content, so it’s provocative. That fired me up, and I appreciate you coming on. Give us, on the way out, some crypto optimism, if you have any to share. What do you think the next 6 months or year looks like?

There’s an inevitable conclusion to crypto, especially with the rise of AI and how fast things can move. The only form factor of capital markets that can keep up with the rate of innovation is crypto.

I think internet capital markets has a thesis, and everyone kind of has their own interpretation of what that is.

It will make a comeback. If AI is going to completely invert what labor looks like and everyone becomes an entrepreneur, the capital markets will have to be on the internet because if we have 10 million entrepreneurs, none of them are going public. They’re all going to go do stuff on the internet. And that’s where we live.

I could love it. David Hoffman, Bankless. Everyone knows where to find you. I’m looking forward to the Merch episode. When is it?

We’re trying to pin Merch down to record, but hopefully it’ll come out next Monday if we can.

Pin him down. I’m looking forward to it, man. You’re awesome, brother. I appreciate it. Thanks for the time. Love part 2. Maybe part 3 when ETH hits an all-time high. I don’t know. We’ll see.

Maybe next year.

Have a good one. Peace.