2024 Was Full of Fascinating Crypto News. Here Are Its Top Moments - Ep. 757
Episode publishedPodcast: UnchainedUnchained
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Hey, all. Happy New Year. Before we begin, I just wanna note that I'm not on camera because you may recall that I fell and hit my head, and so finished off the year with a black eye and very nasty looking marks on my forehead. And I'm actually recording this the same day that I recorded this one episode, so I don't look any different from that day, which is another day when I refused to memorialize my beaten up face. Now onto the year end review episode. I'm your host, Laura Shin, and this is the December 31, 2024 episode of Unchained. Polkadot is the original and leading layer 0 blockchain wi
has been a historic week for, for Bitcoin. I think any way you look at this week, it has to be a huge success. If you look at it from the perspective of investors, between last week and this week, they've been able to reduce the fees they pay for accessing crypto in a fund structure by 80 to 90%. That's a massive win. If you look at it from people who haven't yet invested, it's now gotten so much easier for mainstream Americans to access Bitcoin in a wrapper that they're familiar with. And if you look at it from Bitcoin's perspective, from my point of view, this is a necessary milestone on the
Then in March, Ethereum underwent a major upgrade called Denkoon, which was specifically designed to cut fees on layer twos, and the results were immediate. Fees dropped dramatically and usage skyrocketed. Jesse Pollock, the creator of Base, which became one of the most successful layer twos this year, shared his insights on how this upgrade reshaped the ecosystem.
So we, didn't really know what to expect going in. We we'd been pretty conservative, you know, saying that we we expected, you know, 2 to 5 x reductions in fees, but we didn't wanna give an exact number. Since we we went live, we've seen a fair amount of variation. We saw some times where we've seen 1,000 x reductions in fees or 500 to a 1,000 x reductions in fees, subset transactions. We've also seen actually more demand start to pick up on base. So the average amount of transactions per second right now, you know, I just looked at it, is about 5 x where we were before 4th because more people
By March, spot Bitcoin ETFs had already exceeded analyst expectations, achieving milestones in just a few months that took gold ETFs years. Eric Balchunas of Bloomberg Intelligence explained how this incredible momentum showed the impact of crypto ETFs.
What makes this unique is that it happened right off the bat. You know, the only possible precedent is gold. But gold ETFs took them 3 years, basically, to get where we're at where we are now with the Bitcoin ETFs in 7 weeks. Something like it's something like that. It's ballpark 3 to 7 weeks. And that is wild. And even if you extract take out GBTC's outflows, that number is accurate, by the way. If you if you add in GBTC, you get to 53,000,000,000 in assets. That I think gold probably took 5, 6 years to get there. So in in fact, the Bitcoin ETFs are already, I think, like, 55%, as much as gol
Also in March, I interviewed Kyle Davies, cofounder of the now infamous 3 Arrows Capital. The interview turned out to be one of the most talked about of the year. Despite the hedge fund's catastrophic $3,000,000,000 collapse, Kyle offered no apologies. Instead referring to himself as the Lloyd Blankfein of crypto and offering up some explanations for 3EC's collapse that had some people's jaws dropping. At the beginning of the show, I referenced how there's largely negative sentiment against you from the crypto community and what, you know, I feel like I've seen a lot is thi
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