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Why Are Crypto Fees Going Up?
Recorded: July 1, 2025 Duration: 1:03:54Space Recording
Short Summary
In a lively discussion on Xtalks, industry experts explored the rising gas fees in the crypto space, the upcoming Token Generation Event for Soulbound, and the implications of increased adoption on transaction costs. Key insights included the distinction between transaction fees and actual revenue, as well as strategies for navigating the evolving landscape of DeFi and yield farming.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you're at in this crypto world.
My name is Cody and I will be your host for today's episode of Xtalks.
We've definitely got a great topic lined up for you guys today on why crypto fees are
going up or are they? So I've assembled a great panel of experts in the industry across the board
to help us answer these questions. So give me just a few minutes. I need to get a few invites sent
so that people can get up on stage. So bear with me here for just a second and we will
kick this thing off. In the
meantime, if you haven't done so already, definitely give this space a share. We would
definitely appreciate it. I know our panelists would and it will help us beat the algorithm of
X and get it out to the masses. Likewise, definitely give our panelists a follow. They
definitely deserve it for taking time out of their busy schedule.
So bear with me here for just a second.
I'll get these stragglers up and we'll kick this thing off. Thank you. All right. Those invites have been sent out. Open loot. I see you hanging out down there.
If you want to jump out and come back in, I don't know if you're seeing the request or not,
but definitely drop back out and come back in so that we can get you back up on stage.
So without further ado, let's kick this thing off.
Joining me is an OG host in the space, Marcello.
How are you, my friend?
Doing amazing.
Happy to be here.
Thanks for having us.
I will go ahead with my introduction.
My name is Marcello or Marcello. Head of Spaces here at Soulbound. We are a Web3 streaming platform. We're doing things a little differently from the traditional platforms. We're really looking out for the little creators and as well as looking to also reward their communities and their fans. So we're doing a lot of fun stuff.
as well as looking to also reward their communities and their fans.
So we're doing a lot of fun stuff.
We've also got prediction markets.
We've also got AI agents coming, and we're also deep empowered.
So we're doing a lot of cool stuff, and we do have our TGE coming up very soon.
So stay tuned.
But super happy to be here.
Thanks for having us, Cody, another amazing host.
Long time no talk to, right?
We were just on another space just a few minutes ago together as well so uh let's keep it rolling joel how are you my friend another major major legend in the
space who lives off of crypto yeah it told me that for the first time.
I didn't know that.
Oh, thanks everyone for having me.
And thanks Cody, of course, for hosting all the spaces.
Just all of them.
But particularly this one.
My name is Joel and I run business development and marketing for Dash,
which is up here to help boost the space,
which is a crypto focused on being the very best money and payment system
in the world with instant transactions, very high security, low fees, high scalability,
privacy, which is becoming increasingly important, and really good usability with usernames,
contact lists, encrypted metadata built right into the wallets, etc. And you can actually use it to
substitute for your money, your fiat money in most of the world.
I think around 2.8 billion people can pay their utility bills,
et cetera, with Dash today.
So we're expecting a lot of fun people
joining the Living on Crypto movement in the coming years.
Love it, love it.
Well, you've definitely inspired me over the time that we've known each other over the last couple of years. So I've definitely headed there myself. So yeah, next up we have OpenLoot is a Web3 gaming platform. I think that crypto has definitely evolved over the few years.
We've seen a couple different instances of gaming taking off.
And I think that down the line, there's definitely going to be a lot of financialization of games.
Awesome. Well, thanks for being here. Okay, So yeah, let's get this thing kicked off. Again,
if you're just tuning in, my name is Cody. I'm your host for this week's episode of Xtalks.
And if you haven't done so, definitely get this space to share so that we can get it out to the
masses. We would appreciate it. If you happen to have any questions during the episode for any of the panelists, feel free to tag them or feel free
to just drop your question if it's a general question on the topic in the comments below.
We'd love to hear them. With that being said, you know, today, I can't remember,
I'm trying to remember when I set up this topic, you know, I was working with a,
I was, I think I was, I can't remember exactly what I was doing, but I know that I was on a
protocol that I had used quite a bit over the years. And I'd noticed that when I went to go exchange
or purchase a particular token or service that the price had kind of gone up a little bit. And so
as a result of that, it got me thinking. So I started doing some research and I was like,
hmm, you know, there's quite a few projects that look like they're upping their fees, especially, you know, obviously you can't up the gas fees a little bit.
But some of these projects that do charge like buy, sell tax kind of stuff are seems like they're starting to charge a little bit more.
So curious if you guys are experiencing the same thing and if it is a trend that is starting to happen because we are in a kind of a weird cycle right now in the market.
So curious if you guys are experiencing the same thing.
I don't know if it's a way for them to do hidden costs to basically keep afloat or or if it's just them being ultra greedy, I
don't know.
That's what we're going to discuss in today's episode.
So let's kind of probe around those fees and profits and what's kind of making this happen.
So my first question to you guys is, what are you guys seeing out there?
Are you guys seeing fees getting jacked up or what?
Joel, go for it.
The answer is kind of yes, but this is the tip of the iceberg so far.
It's going to get so much worse is not what I want to say,
but it's going to get so much more.
I think we had this early adoption era of Bitcoin where everything was cheap and there
were Bitcoin transactions in the early days that were actually zero fee that would be
included in blocks.
And a lot of that is very bootstrappy.
The entire Bitcoin model, which sort of set the standard in the standard in the space was it's basically not
remotely sustainable at the beginning, but then as time goes on and the coins get distributed,
every halving, you get less and less inflation, which is, you know, basically holders paying
through dilution to subsidize the actual usage. You get more, you know, more and more of that.
And eventually you get people actually paying enough and more of that and eventually you get um people
actually paying enough fees to sustain the network that's kind of like the the way crypto is supposed
to work and everything you know every model sort of copied that and we had high fees in a few cases
of like mostly bitcoin and then ethereum And those were kind of like,
they weren't viewed as,
it was an artificial constriction
in terms of like the block size of Bitcoin
was artificially limited.
And then Ethereum, it's not 100% the same,
but similar in that the gas limit
wasn't necessarily increased as high as it could be.
But then also there were some scaling limitations
that you know the the basically the roadmap changed to be in favor of l2 scaling and therefore an
expensive l1 was not seen as a problem but basically so first we had everything was going
to be cheap and then we saw uh expensive things was like well high fees high fees are good. It's kind of a, it's a symptom of a lot
of demand, but also not a lot of supply. And then we sort of swung back to, you know, the Solana era,
as it were, where it's like, everything's cheap, everything's going to be infinitely scalable and
basically free and all that kind of stuff. And then the BSV world, if you remember during those times all the same stuff and i think um
that stuff is like i do think crypto will be affordable to use in the long run i also just
think it's going to be more expensive than these fraction of ascent fees for literally everything
um things are going to have to start charge costing more money because, again, they're subsidized by inflation currently. And that
kind of scheme, as it were, is sort of falling out of favor a little bit. So for example,
we're seeing cryptocurrencies with zero inflation whatsoever or very limited emission curves
started to become a lot more popular and like i remember when the
maya protocol fork of thor chain came out never had all the coin supplies created on day one
and then everything that paid the the validators and the liquidity pools everything has since come
from actual swap fees and thor chain which was the know, the progenitor or whatever to Maya, did have inflation, but then later got rid of it to mimic Maya's kind of thing and just live off of fees.
And so I think that that's the way things are going to go sooner rather than later.
And in order to be sustainable, they will need not only volume, like actual lots of users, none of this like, oh, we got a great blockchain, but we got like 12 people of users none of this like oh we got a great blockchain but we got
like 12 people on that kind of thing uh we're gonna need that and more actual like usage and
we've seen very rarely over a time period when certain projects did get relatively high fees
like i remember when um in 2017 litecoin got like one dollar transaction fees for a brief
period of time because people bitcoin was so much more expensive and people just jumped into litecoin
but litecoin's infrastructure couldn't handle that sudden surge of users and therefore we got to um
we got to a temporary spike in fees and then I remember when Monero was sustaining one to two
dollar fees for months, even a long period of time, because the data that was being transmitted
through the privacy function before bulletproofs reduced the transaction size by a lot were very,
very you know it was very big and so even though there was very few transactions it cost a lot
you know, it was very big. And so even though there was very few transactions, it cost a lot.
and you've seen these little bits popping up here and there but for the most part it's just then now
it's on tron which you know tron used to be the cheap you know way of sending tether in the in
the developing world and now not so cheap anymore because it wasn't properly structured and
engineered to scale you know know, much more than
Ethereum necessarily. And now it's kind of hitting those limits. So we're going to see a lot more of
that where I think you'll see temporary high fees if blockchains that weren't designed to scale
start to actually get users. But even the ones who are designed to scale will need some kind of
a cost to pay the bills. And we're going to start to see you know
a few cent transaction fees become relatively normal in crypto over the next five years i guess
that's my prediction now that makes that makes total sense uh before we move on let's let's uh
introduce pike g da. Go for it.
Welcome to the panel.
Hey, guys.
Sorry, I was just on a previous call which overran.
We are the Pype G. Dow, and this is Matzi,
aka MatziRamGuti.Wallet.
I'm the founder, the boss, the Don,
the jefe, commander, and captain of the Pype G. Dow project.
We're an impact finance ecosystem aiming to fund university design projects and make those university design project pipe dreams into realities.
So, yeah, Pagti, since you kind of came late, the question is, we're seeing a lot of the fees go up.
Is it due to gas fees?
Is it due to different protocols charging a buy, sell tax?
Whatever that might look like type of thing. So curious your thoughts on what you're seeing across Web3 as well.
I know you do a lot of investment stuff as well.
Just kind of curious your thoughts if you're seeing the same thing that most of us are
seeing with some of these projects increasing their fees?
Okay.
So what I would say to that is, I mean, someone might have mentioned before, but I'll reiterate,
is that I think because we have more monthly active wallets than we did last cycle, there
is more adoption, Therefore, there's more
throughput
on the networks.
And therefore, there
will be, you know, it's a scalability
issue. So therefore,
there will naturally be higher charges.
Because I think, especially
since, because ETH is now cheaper
perversely than it was before, right?
Because actually you have the Layer 2 competitors, EVM compatible competitors, and some of the hard forks like Tron, which are cheaper than ETH and Layer 1X, for example.
So a lot of it is being laid off to the other networks. So whereas AVAX or whatever might have been cheaper last cycle,
it's more expensive this cycle because a lot of that stuff was on Ethereum last cycle.
Does that make sense? So I think things are going up because of the
basically
the ETH alternatives are doing their job.
Right?
The compute, the smart
contract compute, is
moving over to cheaper chains
and that will therefore make
the cheaper chains more expensive. And of
course, again, we have adoption
increasing.
I don't have the adoption stats to hand. I'm sure I can ask Grok about that. Do we have more
monthly active wallets? What were the monthly active wallets last cycle, four years ago,
compared to this cycle? And I'm sure we will see a substantial increase.
So, yeah, the more adoption there is, the more usage there is,
the more demand there is for block space, the higher the cost will become.
Yeah, I was just transferring $10 in ETH over because I needed some gas in another wallet of mine.
You know, one of those crypto investor issues that we all face.
We run out of gas sometime if we don't pay attention.
But yeah, I was kind of shocked because I transferred $10 and it didn't cost me $5 to transfer that much in ETH.
So I was really shocked.
But yeah, so I agree with you guys that the amount of wallets are going up, the more demand is going up, that kind of thing.
And I think it has to do with the infrastructure, right?
Like Ethereum is all based upon the consensus model that it is.
And so the price fluctuates really, really bad.
And I think that the layer twos are definitely coming out to try to solve that problem.
I'm curious, Marcello, on, you know, Soulbound and what you guys are cooking over there.
Do you guys charge a tax?
Do you guys charge like any other fee on top of gas fees to interact with your
guys' protocol?
Yeah, that's a great question.
I don't think so.
So we're on base.
We try to already keep things relatively pretty low when it comes to gas,
but we're trying to keep things as decentralized as possible even when it comes to tips unlike you know
the traditional streaming platforms you know twitch kick there usually is a cut
but we give a hundred percent to to our can to our to our creator so I'd have to
really have to double check. But from my understanding,
no, I don't think there are any other fees, at least when it comes to gas or trying to
do certain transactions. Yeah, we really want to try to take care of the, you know, the
creator and stuff. And I think that time and time again, we've seen a lot of streaming
platforms extract from their, you know know from their creator economy so we're
trying to do that a little differently and yeah i guess to just chime in on the on the question
here um love the points i think you know just to add to everything i think especially when it comes
to ethereum um sure things might have might be a little different from uh a couple years ago when
things were really crazy but definitely noticed a
bit of a surge in gas as well I think a lot of that could also be you know I
think also the rise of L2 activity so we're seeing a lot of L2's being built
on on on Ethereum you know I just mentioned base I know Arbitrum is doing
a really good job too so just the likelihood of a lot of the output
that's being done on top of that infrastructure
will have its own impact as well,
which I think might be why we've noticed
a difference in gas as well.
But yeah, those are some thoughts on my end.
And I think that, yeah, curious how all of this unfolds, right?
But yeah, definitely noticed something in the recent bit.
Yeah, no, that makes total sense.
Pike G, you got your hand up.
Yeah, and just one last point.
Of course, Bitcoin is over $100,000 pretty consistently, right?
Right. So that's what underpins all of this.
So that's what underpins all of this.
If Bitcoin is all time high territory, especially from the last cycle or especially since all time high last year, everything is going to go up.
Yeah. And so these things that happen in a vacuum, if Bitcoin is pumping or Bitcoin is high, especially Bitcoin dominance is high with it.
Bitcoin is high, especially Bitcoin dominance is high with it when and especially when there's
higher highs and lower highs, then yeah, everyone, the fees are going to go up anyway, because
crypto is priced in sats, not in dollars.
So here's a follow up question to that. You know, when you think of, like, swaps, you think of lending, you think of yield farming, you know, they all require some sort of tax or, you know, fee to withdraw that's on top of the normal gas fee in order to sustain rewards and things like that.
in order to sustain rewards and things like that.
As we kind of look at a lot of people that have staked in yield farms because they're waiting for things,
like right now is definitely hodl time for a lot of people, right?
So once that starts coming out and these fees are starting to go a little bit higher, any recommendations from you guys on how an individual crypto investor might be able to save money a little bit from either these gas fees or these kind of high rate taxes. I went into a pool, just to kind
of give you an example, I won't name the platform, but I'm constantly checking out different yield
farming, lending protocols, and even swapping because of the L1X cross chain swap that we have, I'm always kind of comparing them to other swaps out there.
And occasionally you'll see us post the breakdown
of how our swap compares to other people
in terms of cost and speed.
I was trying one the other day and they charged,
they were charging a 5% flat fee uh on the amount that i
was swapping so it was i was kind of blown away obviously i didn't go through through with it i i
was curious to see how fast they were but i wasn't willing to pay five five percent of what i was
transferring and i was only doing like 50 bucks anyways but
curious your guys's thoughts on on some ticks tricks and tips for those that are listening that
might be able to save themselves a few bucks joe go for it yeah no worries i saw pipe g's uh hand up and i was like oh maybe that's it um
i would make a few bucks well first of all, you do have to actually do market research these days.
And I have found that, so for example, ThorChain and the My Protocol for cross-chain swaps have integrated something called streaming swaps, which basically breaks up a swap into a whole bunch of different pieces.
And therefore, you have better price execution than a centralized exchange and i would at the
kind of exchange swapping experience is it's very developing it's very like new still and so i would
keep up with the the most current attack on that especially be very careful about quotes because
i've seen a lot of quotes that are kind of not super
honest, right? They say, oh, it's so cheap. And then you do the swap and it's not cheap,
for example. As a general, like you do have to shop around a lot because the information about
what you can do with what and what costs what is just not super widespread whatsoever.
costs what is just not super widespread whatsoever. Now I have to say, moving forward,
there will be, in my opinion, there's a lot of stuff that is sort of shoehorned into a smart
contract that might not need to be. And computation tends to be, from my understanding,
more expensive than just like basic transactions or read-write
data kind of things. And so a lot of times if you do something via smart contract, it can,
you know, at scale become more expensive than doing it just natively. So for example,
one of my friends is a developer for Railgun which is a zero knowledge privacy protocol that
via smart contract on ethereum and all the other evm chains and he basically said that
while it is cool to be able to just have any programmatic chain just deploy the railgun
contract on it then anyone interacting with the contract can get like basically like Zcash level privacy for it. It does cost more money to do it that way than having it embedded
in the chain natively. Like literally that's the way that the chain works. It's optimized for that.
So if you wanted super private payments and you were doing that a lot, it was just like
send token from A to B super privately you'd probably want to
look at something that's sort of purpose built for that outside of a smart contract in order to do
that the most efficiently with the least actual cost uh but if you just want something extensible
that you just can apply to anything if you want then the the doing it through a smart contract
might make more sense so generally just like falling in those inefficiency sort of gaps.
The other thing I would say to avoid a trap is there's this weird L2 trap
where the slow and expensive chains have second layer solutions
that promise this is the way you save on fees by using these.
First of all, some of these can get annoyingly expensive to use
depending on what you're doing.
But also, just the interactions required with the L1
for certain things can be super expensive,
like way more expensive than just using the L1 for that action.
And so a lot of times
you don't actually save very much money and like one of the i should just at some point as i use it
more screenshot my phoenix wallet which is a bitcoin lightning wallet and just look at all
the fees of everything the fees are probably at this point kind of higher than on chain to be
honest to use lightning of the like the typical
just regular payment like when i bought something from shake shack with this or sorry steak and shake
um it was like 13 cents just for like a lightning payment which is not that much less than like a
real um like a regular on-chain bitcoin transaction but then actually loading the wallet and opening
channel getting more liquidity and stuff was several dollars worth and so on the whole all my activity using that wallet over the last few
months would have been cheaper if i just as they say raw dogged it i just went straight l1 to
whatever i wanted to do the whole way through it would have been cheaper than actually using the L2. So basically the TLDR and all that stuff is shop around,
avoid the L2 trap,
which has something to do with shopping around as well.
And don't overuse smart contracts to get,
if there's a simpler way of getting what you want done.
Makes sense. Anybody else have anything they want to add
our space is seriously rugging right now sorry guys damn sorry
can you guys hear me okay Sorry, guys. Damn, sorry.
Can you guys hear me okay?
Yeah, I can hear you fine.
Can you still hear me decently?
Yeah, I can hear you.
I can hear you.
Good, good.
Yeah, so yeah, I mean, those are definitely great, great points. And I think that, you know, a lot of times I think that people just avoid doing their
own research a lot of times just because of the convenience factor, right?
They're willing to pay a few extra bucks just to get it done quickly because they just don't
want to waste the time going and researching it.
But I think in the long run, you know, spending 15 to 30 minutes to research something, a protocol or a service such as a swap to determine if, you know, like how many smart contracts are in it are definitely worthwhile.
Because in the long run, yeah, for a quick one, one off is definitely kind of probably worth it.
But in the long run, if you're doing it quite a
bit yeah you definitely want to do your research so that's uh that's definitely some great feedback
uh let's welcome maverick to the panel how are you hey hey sorry for running so late but uh
happy to be here just had a meeting overrun but uh always good to be here. Quick intro, Maverick is a layer one designed
to integrate real world assets with DeFi. And in light of that, we've signed a $3 billion
tokenization deal with Multibank out here in Dubai to tokenize and sell properties from
the Mag Group. And we've got some other cool things lined up but basically everything we built are uh on-chain secondary markets and lending and borrowing so that's the elevator
pitch but happy to be here with you guys again sorry for being late love it thanks for being here
um if i remember correctly maverick uh you guys you and i want to say it was Shido, got into a little bit of a heated debate over gas fees on the blockchain.
Was that you guys? I can't remember. I want to say it was.
Was it about gas fees or I think it was about signing transactions?
Was it about gas fees or I think it was about signing transactions?
I can't remember.
But anyways, along those notes, you know, with today's topic being, you know, are we seeing crypto fees going up?
Curious to, you know, we've talked about how adoption has kind of driven up the price of, you know, some of the fees, especially around Ethereum and things
like that. Curious your take on what you guys are seeing. I know you guys have some projects that
are building on you guys. I mean, typically, you know, from gas fees for you guys, if I remember
correct, you guys are pretty low on your fees as gas fees as well.
Do you guys have a flat fee or what's your structure over there?
No, there's a fee market, but it's not flat fees.
But I think it's something to keep in mind is that almost every blockchain now has low fees except for Ethereum
because they've abdicated any sense of responsibility for scaling their blockchain
and just offloaded that to L2 to
centralized L2s. So, you know, if you look at almost every other blockchain, I mean, Tron's
fees have gone up, but you got to also stake the Tron and, you know, lock it up to get energy. That
always confused me. I've been using Tron since forever. And that always is, you know, energy and
bandwidth is such a pain, but everyone, like every other blockchain, I know, energy and bandwidth is such a pain.
But everyone, like every other blockchain, I mean, first of all, you have to differentiate between,
you also have to differentiate between layer ones and layer twos,
but all the other layer ones for the most part are also super low.
It's just that Ethereum doesn't scale and it happens to have a lot of demand due to
first user advantage. Then they kind of like offloaded that to, you know, L2s. And then those
L2s gobbled up a bunch of their actual work Ethereum should have been doing. And then ETH's
gas fees have gone down because everybody's offloaded to the 7,452 L2s that are out there.
So it's, I wouldn't say that gas fees are high.
I'd say that there's just a small door and a bit and like a ton of water that wants to go through it.
And unfortunately, ETH hasn't really, like, what was the last upgrade that meaningfully made a difference to ETH?
It was several years ago.
So, you know, that's kind of, I don't mean to like, you know, just talking to my chief of staff about this,
not to rag on the industry, I should really, you know, create a podcast for this.
But we've, for the most part, there is a lack of demand for block space across most blockchains.
So what we really need to ensure
is a filling that block space with actual usage, and then making sure that that block spaces,
you know, comes down in fees, but fees will trend towards zero. And something else,
just one last thing to add in there to spark debate between everybody, transaction fees do
not equal revenue. And a lot of the DeFi platforms continuously are like, oh, but look at Solana,
it's making like the data platforms. Look at Solana, look at this blockchain, they're doing
this amount of revenue. Like that's not going to the foundation or the for-profit teams. Mistin
Labs doesn't earn the gas fees for blockchains. The validators do. They might happen to run a lot
of the validators, but revenue does not equal gas fees and gas fees will trend towards zero. It's paid towards validators or burned. And that's something that the industry needs to wrap its head around.
That's what it was over. Transaction fees are not revenue. That's what it was on. Yeah. Pipe T, you had your hand up.
Yeah.
Pike T, you had your hand up.
Yeah, so sorry I kept rugging there,
but I believe the question was how token users mitigate fees.
Is that right?
Correct.
Yeah, okay.
So I think maybe just looking at things holistically, right,
you sometimes have to on-ramp with fiat
because the whole transaction includes loading your money
from wherever it is, number one.
So a lot of the time people use exchanges to bridge from one chain to another
before they then do the on-chain stuff.
Whereas you can use something like L1xSwap.
Yes, I'm shilling a bit,
I'm part of the L1x team as well,
as being a part of my project,
because we have a joint venture.
But actually, we tend to use L1xSwap ourselves
when we're kind of doing stablecoin stuff,
because we have like six different...
So we're deployed on six different chains
and we're also taking payments from our presale
on six or seven different chains as well.
Yeah.
So having less steps to just get your stuff
from one chain to another
has actually saved us quite a bit of money and time.
And just using L1X swap to jump from one chain to another
has actually made life a lot easier for us.
So that's one thing.
So there is ThorSwap,
but I think ThorSwap works a bit differently in terms of how it operates and that kind of stuff.
But having a cross-chain DEX, for example, to gas trackers and that kind of stuff to actually see when that chain is heavily in use in your time zone.
So I think the cheapest time in the UK is between 7 and 9 a.m., particularly on Ethereum.
Right?
So that's also a key thing when you do the transaction.
Yeah.
It's extremely important because you can save on that.
Could you,
could you imagine it's like the future of money?
It's like,
Hey,
I want to buy a shawarma or a burger,
but you know,
gas fees are going to be lower in two hours.
So I'm just going to sit here and,
and be hungry until I can afford to pay the transaction fee.
Yeah. But why would you be buying takeaways with an asset that appreciates in value?
You'd rather use dirty fiat for that, right?
Well, I mean, it doesn't matter.
Even if you're using USDT for that, you still have to pay gas fees and even higher than just sending the native token.
But if you want to talk about appreciating, why would you pay with an appreciating token,
then you definitely would want to pay with ETH.
Price action the last two years.
Yeah, yeah, I get that.
I'm talking merely from a yield farming perspective, right?
Or DeFi protocol perspective as opposed to kind of just buying, you know, everyday consumable goods.
Because I think that context is different.
So, I mean, this is just stuff I know from my experience in terms of mitigating gas fees if you want to do that, right?
As well.
So, these are some of the things.
Of course, but when we look at spending crypto at all right
i mean it's why would you buy a a new macbook pro with crypto if you've got to pay egregious gas
fees why would you buy a coke you know we're supposed to be here to be the future of money
but we ended up charging people more, not only the businesses,
but consumers more than Visa. And so, I mean, I agree with you on all the parts. I just think it's
absolutely insane that people need to be like, well, I'm going to move my assets at like 5am
because I live in some time zone and it's cheaper in the other time zone,
et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. Okay. I get that. But what I'm trying to say to you is,
but people do this in TradFi anyway, right? Because fees, as I'm sure you know, take up to
25% of the value of your portfolio over its lifetime. So people do try to mitigate fees
when they're buying financial products and services, right?
Which is different to buying a burger, right?
Or whatever.
Yeah, but no one's like, I'm going to send money on a Monday instead of Tuesday because the fees are lower.
Like, I agree with you that they try to avoid fees, but it's not because like, hey, well, it's past 5 p.m. in New York.
I could send it cheaply now.
Yeah, yeah.
No, no.
You know, I totally get that. uh and again the future of money is crypto
money right is crypt so there's a whole thing of i'm sorry i'm kind of going a bit of a tangent
here right but i mean this guy i follow janice verify because i don't know if you know him
he's an economist and he's he's you know he's he's into crypto and stuff but he says that crypto is not
money right is not cryptocurrency is an is a misnomer because currency can only be issued by
a central bank right only the fed can issue currency it's a digital asset yes but it is not
money it is not currency right it's a can be… He sounds like someone who wouldn't accept Italian champagne.
Maybe, maybe not.
But no, but it's just sort of the person who decides…
The body that decides what money is, is a central bank because they're the issuers.
So anything which is trying to say that it's money is not money because…
So I'm just giving an example, right.
To sort of say, sometimes we shoot ourselves in the foot by trying to say crypto is money.
It's a, it's an asset, but, but is it money?
This is a kind of difference.
You know what I mean?
So I tend to agree with you because in order to be money, you need, I mean, either the
acceptance of a nation state economy, and that can either come by usage or that can come by like gold.
Gold was accepted as money
because people valued gold and it got accepted
and then eventually coined, right?
It used to be barter,
then you got gold, it got coined.
And then that's social acceptance.
They didn't have,
they eventually created their own forms of central banks
in terms of minting coin.
Gold. Yeah. Yeah.
Right. But gold got that by social acceptance.
And so there's no reason to believe that a cryptocurrency couldn't do that.
I think it's far-fetched.
I tend to agree with you that like it is not fiat money, but also our idea and concept of money evolves over time.
Fiat money is only what?
It's a couple decades old, really.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So, yeah, I agree with you on that.
But I think, yeah, I think more digital,
if we just think of crypto digital assets for now, as opposed to money,
I think we can maybe not get ourselves tied up in knots about,
oh, is it money? Is it not money?
It's an asset, but is it currency?
Maybe, maybe not.
It's fun getting into those weeds,
but for the sake of crypto fees going up,
you know, Twitter space,
I will agree to agree
the currency for me
I'm rugging big.
Are you okay?
All right, cool, cool.
Like I would say, I mean, in prison, you know, cigarettes are definitely a type form of currency.
So I think that, you know, it is, there is opportunity, like you guys talked about, you know, wherever you're at. I mean, it could be, I just look at my own family. We love, love, love sweets. And so we use candy all the time to barter and trade with all the kids and trying to teach them about the value of
and trying to teach him about the value of earning and holding something.
But it makes great for Poker Night, that's for sure.
I know Joel is probably sitting on his hands and biting his tongue
based upon the conversation.
Dying to say something.
I'm with you.
He's probably dying to get out there
dash is the future of u.s government money yeah um let me stay on topic first and then we'll get
into that stuff about the gas fees that is an interesting topic about like are you going to
pay this much in gas fees to buy a burger no so then that kind
of goes back to the whole smart contract thing of like sometimes gas fees for complex things are
more expensive and therefore save money by doing simple things it could just be that different
purpose-built chains are for different things like you can get a really low so for example one example i like to
give a lot is nano which is a crypto that has no fees at all no fees no anything and some of the
way they achieve that is by just being super lightweight like no data associated with transactions
at all just super lightweight and so sending money a to money B is just efficient.
So you don't need fees for that necessarily.
So we will, depending on the design of the blockchain you're using,
you could do that.
As far as like gas fee seasonality,
mostly I think that that's a result of
the markets at peak capacity levels. It's not that like if the blockchain is
half empty i don't think you're going to have have to wait for a monday for gas fees or anything
it's never going to happen because the price is just the market price for whenever you have it
because there's no scarcity but when you do have a blockchain at capacity, which again, a lot of blockchains have been at capacity for artificial reasons, they just chose not to pursue on-chain scaling, for example.
And then some, of course, hadn't properly engineered to be able to handle that kind of volume.
You will see that kind of thing.
The ones that do have fee markets, at least, which I think fee markets are very healthy
for kind of mitigating a lot of these things.
The only times you'd really kind of,
I think you'd see just very rare instances
of those kinds of like fee surges
where you have to kind of mitigate that.
Now you do see that in the actual like fiat world as well, where I forget, was it Wendy's?
One of these fast food joints was experimenting with surge prices for burgers, where they charge more during a certain time or charge less during a certain time.
We've had like weeknight and happy hour specials all the time at restaurants for a long time.
I mean,
where is legal? There's some states like Massachusetts where happy hour is banned,
but that's a different story. It's only sat hour over there. But the point is you will always have some sort of a surge pricing type of mechanism like that, but it's kind of a minor thing.
Typically, you go out and get, let's just say, a beer somewhere. It will cost kind of the
exact same almost all the time, just a few exceptions. So I think that that's kind of
the waiting for gas fees, you wait for the optimal time to time gas fees thing.
It's a way bigger thing now than it will be in the future. But just to briefly touch on the crypto's money kind of thing.
Well, as everyone should know, I've been not owning fiat and just using crypto's money for that last 10 years.
And there's a few other people like me.
What people don't necessarily understand is that money is a technology.
It was invented by humans to serve a purpose, to serve trade. And obviously you can't
invent gold or silver or whatever. It's, you know, material from the ground, but it was
purposed into coins and things like that to be a better technology for these things. And so,
it's just like saying like X isn't news. It's news. It's not a newspaper. Well, it's true.
isn't news. It's news. It's not a newspaper. Well, it's true. Yeah, it's kind of not what,
it's not really a newspaper, but do I report journalistic stuff on X and get paid for it?
Yes, I do. And so is it kind of the placeholder for that? I guess, but it's a slightly different
thing. Money has existed for generations, for millennia even, before any kind of a central
bank or issuer kind of thing like that. However, in recent times when we've had fiat currency,
we have had central bank issued currency. And that's kind of what most people tend to use,
what tends to be a little bit more dominant. It is interesting though, where you do have parts of the world, especially in Latin America, where another central bank currency, namely the dollar,
is the money that people use. And it's not by virtue of it being a central bank currency,
because it has nothing to do with their governments. Their governments have not
mandated it or endorsed it. It's just that it's a utilitarian tool for trade and they use it and
it's their money. In some places it's kind of co-official like El Salvador, for example,
but in many places it isn't. Tether, you know, is the semi-official currency of a lot of the
world like that. And so it does get a little like, does get a little different, you know,
when you start to dive into all that stuff. But
the last little thing I'll say on that is I think that the concept of money as a static concept,
I don't think it's static at all. Money is just a language for communicating value that we use
to communicate with each other. That's what trade is. We're communicating value to each other.
That's what trade is. We're communicating value to each other. And as the language and the ability
to communicate increases, the language of money will morph. Like right now, we have kind of like
one-ish or before crypto, we had one money. Everyone just did this. And then if you've
really valued something, like you really wanted a charitable act to happen, no one bought units of charity. It just didn't happen. So people like in my former job, I was a nonprofit fundraiser. I had to come in as a middleman to sort of bridge that gap between people really value charitable work but won't pay for it for some reason. So I find a way to get them to pay for it through some other processes anyway. But in the future, I think that there will be like a charity coin or
something that people will actually be able to reward to express that they have value for this.
And someone who's rich in these charity points, for example, will be able to redeem those for
real goods and services with some limitations, maybe. There will be lots of
different ways that people express money or trade or things. And I don't think that we, like, I think
we can argue till we're blue in the face about the way things have been in the past, but the future
is like a black box. We actually don't know what things will look like even 10 years from now. And
I'll pretty stand by that. I mean, just watch. Things will be very different from almost all of our predictions 10, 20 years from
now. Yeah. You know, I look at it as, you know, what Maverick said about, you know, as adoption
starts coming up, eventually those gas fees will get so close to zero, practically nothing
as adoption starts coming in more and more. And I look at it that way. But then I also look at
like a debit card. I look at a credit card. I mean, it's just ones and zeros being transferred
back and forth anyways, right?
Like when I travel outside of the country and I try to use a dollar, you know, the US dollar to pay for something, they just look at me like, I don't accept your dollar type of thing,
even though their currency might be backed by it. But on the flip side of that too,
is this like when I swipe my debit card or my credit card,
they gladly take my ones and zeros.
And so in reality, I mean, there's really no difference.
I mean, if you look at the first wire transfers back done in the late 60s,
those were all kind of done through blockchain technology anyways.
kind of done through blockchain technology anyways.
And so, you know, in reality, that's kind of how I view cryptocurrency in that sense.
Maverick, got your hand up.
Yeah.
So, you know, when you swipe your credit card, you know, let's say I'm assuming you're U.S.
based from the sound of it you go to europe and you
buy like fish and chips in london right uh no offense to any brits who don't consider themselves
european there but what ends up happening is is that the credit card companies will process your
transaction for you in dollars take your dollars swap them into pounds and then give the merchant
pounds so the merchant is never actually accepting your ones and zeros.
There's an intermediary who is swapping between those assets.
It kind of works like a router on a DEX where, yeah, you could use wrapped Bitcoin to go buy an NFT,
but OpenSea or the seller is not actually accepting wrapped Bitcoin in that case.
They might be accepting USDT, and in the back end, it'll swap your wrapped Bitcoin into USD case, they might be accepting USDT. And then the backend,
it'll swap your wrapped Bitcoin into USDT
or ETH or whatever it is.
So it's just something to keep in mind
that when you like pay,
even when you can buy cars in Dubai with crypto,
the car dealership doesn't actually accept your Dogecoin.
There's an intermediary who takes like a one
percent fee and then they'll swap it into the durham the local currency here and they will
give the car dealership durhams so it's something to consider when you think about like you know
when we were talking with pipe on like what is currency or value the local economy will accept
their own money you might be able to pay with a foreign currency.
But the same way that like, if you go to Latin America, their, their, their, their, their fiat money might be backed by the US dollar, but they don't accept dollars locally because that's not what transaction.
Think of them as like almost independent blockchains, right?
You go into Mexico, the cash register is just not built to take dollars.
It's built to take dollars. It's built to
take pesos. But if you're using a credit card, you now have that digital intermediary so that
you can pay with your dollars. It's almost like a bridge. You can pay with your dollars and the
merchant receives pesos. Although I'm sure there are places in Mexico that'll accept US cash, but
U.S. cash. But, you know, I'm talking about just like foreign currency country to foreign currency
you know, I'm talking about just like foreign currency country to foreign currency country.
country. Yeah, exactly. There's a lot of similarity. So I'm glad you picked up with
what I was trying to lay down. Joel, go for it. You just like, I would say like an 80, 90% agree
on that. And the 10% difference might be, I did grow up on the U.s mexico border and paid in the u.s with pesos a few times cash
and uh in mexico with dollars cash as well um also but those are like outlier like every time
you get overlap and things you get outlier things of like yeah i'll accept it at a work at a at a
worse rate and i'll go through the trouble to make some extra cash. Yes, but hold on. You wait for the next...
I've paid for beer in Singapore and USD. They just gave me a shitty rate.
Yes, but again, that is sometimes an outlier. Some people in these other countries will actually
give a premium to, for example, the foreign currency, if that's what they'd rather have,
because the inflation rate is different. But for for example with the living on crypto thing for very many years um it's always a mix right
and there's nothing that's like oh it's all this way it's all that way but i have been paid in
crypto not just crypto like but in crypto denominated amounts like this much bitcoin
or this much dash or this much whatever,
then it fluctuates the next week and I still get the same amount and I keep it. I don't convert it.
And the opposite is also true where there's a lot of goods and services that have been priced in crypto units. When I go buy my coffee at the local place, the owner, I know them,
they keep the crypto. They want the crypto. They don't take it
so they can turn it into dollars the next day. There's a lot of cases of that as well. And again,
it's not a universal, of course, but it's network effects are very persistent, of course. So
whatever everyone uses, everyone's going to trend in that direction. But all you need is just a
little extra growth in these alternative financial sectors
before just any random anything can become kind of more of a currency and then you do end up um
sorry just completely lost that last train of thought there but um you do crypto native
ecosystems is where you find it a lot so for example example, when like OpenSea came out, things were priced in ETH terms.
And when you use a blockchain, you purchase digital goods, then digital goods, a lot of times,
again, they can have like price Oracle kind of things to adjust these days. But a lot of things
is like you're buying block space, you're paying for a transaction or something like that.
You're paying and priced in the native token of whatever it is and as that be right now those are kind of like
play things almost they're not like people don't really take that's not a serious part of the
economy today but i think that they will be in the future and then we will start to see things
paid in a certain other commodity.
The whole idea of what is and isn't money, as I've said before, I think is going to be thrown on its head in ways that we don't necessarily anticipate, even me.
Oh, for sure.
PipeT, you got your hand up.
hand up. Yeah, yes. Yeah, all very interesting points, you know, in terms of, you know, what
Yeah, yes.
gets accepted, you know, it's almost always behavioral and then the regulators and the
governments catch up later. Yeah, there are obviously forward thinking jurisdictions like
the UAE, for example, that kind of are ahead of the curve.
But just kind of going back to the topic, I think
buying or investing
in instruments or assets or whatever
that are basketed is also a way to cut fees.
Right? So if there were more that are basketed is also a way to cut fees, right?
So if there were more...
Is that me rugging or is he rugging? I thought I was rugging too.
Yeah, no, that's him.
I'm sorry, Pipe.
Yeah, sorry, man.
You're going to have to finish that thought another time.
We are definitely up at the top of the hour.
I want to thank our panelists for joining in today's conversation.
Maverick, I think I'm going to set up a debate on transaction fees does not equal revenue. So special invite for you. Kind
of keep a lookout for that. I'm going to try to get as many L1s as I can on the space.
Absolutely love it. Absolutely love it. Please do.
Okay. Joel and Maverick, I'll definitely give you guys an invite and PipeG, I'll give you guys an invite as well. But let's try to drive some L1s and some other L2s potentially over on that space. So I'll let you guys know when that's going to happen.
if you guys are a crypto project,
please tune in tomorrow.
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If you are a project and would like to shill,
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Happy to get you guys up on stage for that.
Likewise, thanks to our panelists again.
We appreciate them taking time out of their busy schedules.
Give them a follow.
They definitely deserve it.
They are definitely some projects that are cooking up some good stuff.
And thanks to all of you guys for tuning in as well.
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Definitely appreciate the love and support each and every week.
And until next time, keep working to unite all the crypto and we will catch you guys
tomorrow 8 a.m eastern standard time for the 10 minute pit show have a good one everybody bye-bye
see y'all later Thank you.
