A16z’s Chris Dixon pushes for bipartisan legislation at Permissionless III

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Happy day two of Permissionless!

Catch Katherine’s colorful writeup of day one below. And those not in Salt Lake City can soon find recordings of panels, firesides and other discussions here, once they’ve been uploaded over the next week or so.

The kids are alright 

There are three words I need you to keep in mind: axes, wizards and climbing.

All three of which are present at Permissionless III this year. If you’re around Salt Lake City, you can test your axe-throwing skills and then immediately try to climb a wall. Then, after a restful break, you can find yourself watching a wizard go off about bitcoin. 

Crypto really is magic sometimes. 

Anyway, there truly is excitement in the air as folks sit in on sessions focused on a variety of topics, from investing in private markets to a fireside chat with BlackRock’s Samara Cohen (we’ll get to that in a bit). 

But despite the fun oddities, people seem pretty pumped to descend on Salt Lake City. 

Though — while many attendees noted that the overall vibes were good — Lumida Wealth CEO Ram Ahluwalia remarked that he felt the vibes were “malaise.” 

For Ahluwalia, one question lingered above his head like a rainy cloud: Will the latecomers — who bought in as prices rose — HODL or dip once we carve out a new all-time high?

Blockworks Chief Operating Officer Sid Viswanath noted he’d received a lot of positive feedback, with some even remarking that they prefer the quality of the event, which is smaller than last year. 

As for the panels themselves, there was a lot of positive chatter amongst attendees as they flitted in between talks.

A16z crypto’s Chris Dixon was one of the first to speak on the main stage.

Dixon pushed for bipartisan legislation, noting that there’s a current “chill” on crypto due to the overall environment. 

The regulatory environment — a very popular topic for crypto — was mentioned heavily throughout many of the panels, especially the ones that took place on the main stage. 

But there’s an undertone of bullishness rippling through the attendees and the speakers at this year’s event. Or perhaps it’s just a lot of optimism. Either way, I’m not just writing that as a Blockworks staffer. 

BlackRock’s Samara Cohen gave some insight into IBIT’s investors and the appetite that the world’s largest asset manager has seen since launching its bitcoin ETF in January of this year. 

Cohen said that roughly 75% of buyers of IBIT were first-time iShare buyers, showing that the majority of the investors were crypto natives. 

Looking at 13F filings, she noted roughly 85% of the investors were direct buyers. 

“What we have actually seen is an appetite” for bitcoin ETFs, Cohen said. 

After her talk, one attendee commented that Cohen was “badass.”

Other talks had some more…well, eccentric…vibes.

For example, a wizard — Taproots Wizard co-founder Eric Wall — sat next to Galaxy’s Alex Thorn as the two discussed bitcoin with Bankless co-founder David Hoffman. 

And, mind you, that’s the same Hoffman who’ll enter the ring on Friday to take on Kain Warwick in a Karate Combat match.

So, yeah, Permissionless might look a little different from last year but it still embodies that tenacious yet positive spirit that we all know and love.

— Katherine Ross

The Works

• Stripe has enabled USDC payments for US businesses on Ethereum, Solana and Polygon, The Block reports. The payments giant stopped supporting bitcoin payments in 2018.
• Trump-linked DeFi project World Liberty Financial wants to work with Aave.
• BTC fell below $60,300 for the first time in a week overnight. It has since rebounded to $61,000, down 1.7% in the past day. ETH is still working on holding $2,400.
• A historic first: the FBI created its own cryptocurrency to bust dodgy “market makers” for wash trading and market manipulation.
• Total SOL staked in Solana DeFi is at its highest point since July 2022: 46.25 million SOL ($6.4 billion). By US dollar value, Solana’s TVL is still slightly under where it was in March.

The Riff

Q: What doesn’t Joe Rogan get about crypto?

If you’re after a temp check on mass mainstream adoption, check this recent exchange between Rogan and jungle keeper Paul Rosolie about crypto, the rat race and giving back once you make a certain amount of cash.

Even someone who finally makes their first $5 million, for example, might not be willing to give back to their community: inflation might devalue that net worth, or the hedge fund they piled the cash into might go under.

“Or, you’re an idiot and you invest in NFTs or bitcoin,” Rogan said. “Like you get nutty, you think it’s free money — no. It’s some kind of crazy thing, that’s still going on, where you got fake money, some weird, created money, and you just spent a lot of real money to buy some of this weird fucking imaginary money.”

Rosolie, a conservationist who lives in and helps protect parts of the Amazon, added that he’d almost “got got” by “the NFT people,” who’d suggested that he sell NFTs to help raise money for the rainforest. 

Rogan had similar experiences but could never commit. He didn’t get how NFTs work — similar to Warren Buffett’s advice about not investing in anything that you don’t understand.

“Jamie [Rogan’s producer] has tried to explain it to me like six or seven times and I was like, ok, but you have it [the NFT] on your phone, right? So I can take a screenshot and I have it on my phone too.”

“No, but you don’t own it.”

“Ok. What does that mean?”

Jamie then tries for the eighth time. He does a decent job: you can replicate the NFT by taking a screenshot, but that doesn’t give the same experience as actually owning it — just like how owning the Mona Lisa would offer a different feeling than just looking at it in the Louvre.

“You don’t just own it on your phone, is the thought… the phone is the access point to where you do own it. That’s like saying your bank account [exists] only on your phone,” Jamie said.

Rogan and Rosolie then drift to unpacking how difficult it must have been for ancient humans to craft arrowheads and arrow shafts — little pieces of history that have real value, unlike Bored Apes.

At least Beeple’s NFTs get a pass, per Rogan. “When he has a gallery and you go there and there’s this giant digital art. Those kinds of NFTs make sense. This thing [a Bored Ape] is like a shit cartoon.”

The deeper you are in crypto, the louder the echo chamber, which can make it quite hard to gauge what parts of crypto have bled through to the normies.

Turns out, digital art NFTs might be just about the only thing that has, going by the state of this yapping heard millions of times this week.

— David Canellis

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