Casey Wagner

Crypto education and media platform Bankless is going crypto native with its move off of Substack and onto its new website: Bankless 2.0.&nbsp;



“We love Substack, but it was time to get more control over our future and double down on Web3,” Bankless founder Ryan Sean Adams said. “We&#8217;re planning to really push the boundaries on what Web3 media can do when it&#8217;s enabled by a clear mission and a motivated community.”&nbsp;



Bankless 2.0, launched Friday, comes with a host of new Web3 features for citizens, including podcast collectibles and a POAP mint in the application, a tool Adams said creators do not fully exploit.&nbsp;



POAP “allows fans to collect on-chain memories for key events, like an album release, a concert or a big product launch,” Adams said, adding “We used to manually email NFT claim links to our fans, but now they can claim Bankless POAPs in one click. We think superfan digital collectibles will be table stakes for creators ranging from Lex Friedman to Taylor Swift in a few years.&#8221;



Members can also now pay for subscriptions using crypto, thanks to Bankless’ partnership with Coinbase Commerce, the exchange’s payments platform for merchants.&nbsp;



Bankless 2.0 has other Web3 features launching in the coming weeks, including citizen profiles with on-chain engagement and collectibles and an option to sign in with Ethereum for a more secure, crypto-native approach.



The new site launch comes shortly after news that Adams and Bankless co-owner David Hoffman are launching a $35 million crypto venture fund, the company confirmed with Blockworks. The fund will be a separate entity from the media company.



It’s not the team&#8217;s first foray into Web3, as the Bankless’ co-founders separately launched a DAO — complete with its own governance token, BANK — in May 2021, and part of the initial supply of BANK was airdropped to premium Substack newsletter subscribers.



The DAO has a <a href="https://openorgs.info/organization/bankless">treasury</a> containing <a href="https://debank.com/profile/0xf26d1bb347a59f6c283c53156519cc1b1abaca51">cryptoassets</a> worth about $1.4 million, mostly in BANK and ETH. 



BANK itself reached a market cap of $15.6 million in April 2022, but that has fallen to about $4.6 million as of Friday at 12:00 Noon ET.



Disclosure: Bankless is a co-host of Blockworks’ Permissionless conference, a separate business line from editorial.



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Bankless Enhances Web3 Push With New 2.0 Launch

Sebastian Sinclair

Bankless, known best for its flagship podcast, is branching out beyond media.&nbsp;



The self-branded digital assets education outlet said Friday it is acquiring a tool designed to hook users up with software that automatically scans for unclaimed <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/ethpow-token-surges-and-plummets-before-its-launch" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">airdrops</a> of digital assets.&nbsp;



Earnifi, picked up by the outlet for an undisclosed sum, will sit within a newly created vertical, dubbed Bankless Labs, which aims to bolster DeFi tools for its customers.&nbsp;



Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but it involves exclusively <a href="https://opencorporates.com/companies/us_wa/604553008" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Bankless, LLC</a> — the company started by Ryan Sean Adams and David Hoffman — and not the <a href="https://medium.com/bankless-dao/announcing-bankless-dao-133220f5efd8" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Bankless DAO</a>, Bankless&#8217; chief operations officer Rachel Cusack told Blockworks via email.



The purchase is part of Bankless’ ambitions to scale its educational programs next year, the outlet said in a <a href="https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/df715592-2209-4bcd-be8e-ef9426c00dfe" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">statement</a>. Its podcast has surpassed 30 million downloads, reinforced by a daily newsletter that now has more than 250,000 subscribers. 



Seeking to leverage that growth, Bankless is hoping to scale into fresh markets with its Earnifi purchase. The startup said it has reclaimed a cumulative $150 million of lost assets.



Earnifi scans wallet data on chains compatible with the Ethereum virtual machine (EVM), such as Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain (BNB), to locate unclaimed airdropped tokens or NFTs. Users are notified via email of outstanding assets.



Co-founder Ryan Sean Adams said his company decided to acquire Earnifi after conducting a prolonged due diligence, including a number of conversations with its founder, Dawson Botsfor — following his fellow Bankless co-founder, David Hoffman, stumbling across the tool on Twitter early this year.



“EarniFi let him quickly check all of his Ethereum addresses, for all of the opportunities he had missed,&#8221; Adams said in a statement. 



Added Adams: &#8220;A few minutes later, he was finding airdrops on wallets he didn’t even know he had.”



As part of the deal, Botsford is set to join Bankless as its first chief technology officer, where he will lead the Bankless Labs vertical.



Bankless, via its DAO, in true crypto fashion, issued a governance token, BANK, in May 2021. native governance BANK tokens to premium subscribers, with part of the token supply initial airdropped to premium newsletter subscribers. 



The BANK token is a smart contract that runs on the Ethereum blockchain intended to be distributed directly from Bankless’ treasury. Holders can unlock certain perks, per its crowdsourced draft <a href="https://forum.bankless.community/t/banklessdao-white-paper/3130" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">whitepaper</a>. 



As of publication, BANK was up about 13% in the last 24 hours, as denominated in bitcoin, to $0.0088 — propelled by an upswing on the news. 



Disclosure: Bankless is a co-host of Blockworks&#8217; Permissionless conference, a separate business line from editorial.



This story was updated on Dec. 2 at 2:03 pm ET with additional details.



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