Bankless - 4 - Ether: The Triple Point Asset

Episode Date: March 23, 2020

Episode: #4 March 23th, 2020 There are three asset "superclasses" - Store of Value - Capital Asset - Commodity Asset Join Ryan and David as they explore the boundaries between asset types, and discover where Ether lies in relation to these three classes.  Additionally, Ryan and David compare and contrast the economic and financial institutions that make up the world we know, and how they relate to these three classifications.  Links mentioned in podcast: (Article) Ether: A New Model for Money (Video) Ether: A New Model for Money ----- Tools from our sponsors to go bankless: Rocket Dollar - tax shelter your crypto ($50 w/ "BANKLESS") Monolith - holy grail of bankless Visa cards Aave - money lego for lending & borrowing Ethereal Summit - the most bankless crypto conference yet ----- Episode Actions: Subscribe to this podcast Subscribe to Bankless newsletter program Read the links above mentioned in podcast ----- Subscribe to podcast on iTunes | Spotify | YouTube | RSS Feed Leave a review on iTunes Share the episode with someone you know! ----- Don't stop at the podcast! Subscribe to the Bankless newsletter program Visit official Bankless website for resources Follow Bankless on Twitter | YouTube Follow Ryan on Twitter Follow David on Twitter

Welcome to bankless, where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance. This is how to get started, how to get better, how to front-run the opportunity. I'm Ryan Sean Adams. I'm here with David Hoffman, and we're here to help you become more bankless. Hey, David, we're in Corona era now. How are things on your end? Yeah, man, it seems like we're at a huge turning point in where this world is about to go. In times of crisis, in times of volatility, the future becomes obscured and we're all kind of flying by the seat of our pants. You know, it's taken it one day at a time. Crypto markets have hit a resurgence lately while the equity markets have stayed flat.

People are still worried that the coronavirus has just begun. A lot of things are changing. So we're going to talk a little bit about that and then we're going to get right into the meat of the episode. How about how about like friends and family? how are they reacting to this? Are you finding everyone's on the same page as you that we've got to buckle up and get through this? I have been sounding the alarm in my social media feeds and with my family. So I'm the one that's taking it the most strict.

My mom and my dad, the two boomers, are just finally hunkered down for the first time, thankfully, like three days ago. So I'm happy I finally convinced them. Well, absolutely. So we could talk about Corona a little bit more, but we should talk about, what the focus of this episode actually is, which is ETH as a triple point asset. So ether as a triple point asset. Why is that so interesting? Why is that so exciting? This triple point asset, which is a term that I created, which is a terrible meme, but somehow people still use it. It relates to the outside world. There are three main asset types in the world. One is a commodity asset. One is a store of value

asset and the last is a capital asset. And these are like the three most significant types of assets that you find in the world outside of crypto. And so they correlate to real world things, like the bond market, the equities market, and also cash. And so the cool thing about this topic, the cool thing about how these three assets are found all at once inside of Ethereum, inside of ether, produces new characteristics. The fact that they're all happening so closely to together, it makes things really interesting. And we're going to get into that. All right. Before we dive in, let's talk about our sponsors today. I've got some fantastic sponsors. First up is Rocket Dollar. This is for our U.S. listeners primarily. If you have an IRA

or a 401k, the problem is it's stuck in jail. In brokerage jail. You can't access crypto easily. When you can access, they charge you 4X the price on brokerage exchanges. That is a complete rip-off. I call it the retail rip-off. What you need to do is break your retirement account out of jail. I've done this with some of my accounts, my retirement accounts. I plan to do it with some more soon. It's a pain to do it yourself. So Rocket Dollar takes care of the pain. They help you break your retirement account out of brokerage jail. They handle the paperwork. You can go to Rocket Dollar.com. You use the code bankless. You get $50 off and you can start buying crypto in a tax-free retirement account today.

In this episode, Ryan and I are going to talk a ton about different DFI protocols, also different ways that Ether operates inside of them, and also the different forms that Ether comes in. If you need a place to view all of these things at once, go to Xeron.io. Xeron is the comprehensive portfolio viewer for the Defy ecosystem. If you need a summary of all of your activity, you need to go to Xeron. They can integrate multiples of wallets and they have many different DFI protocols all in the same spot. So if you want to buy, sell, trade, trade on Uniswap, lend on compound, put assets inside of Uniswap,

you can do all of these things all at once inside of Xeron. It is the one-stop shop for all of your D-Fi activity. So if you want a summary of where your position is as the one-stop-stop-shop, you'll be in the one-stop-stop-shop-shop for all of your position is as this coronavirus has moved markets up and down, Xeron is the place for you. Every significant defy app that exists is available inside of Xeron, and I only expect them to include more as more come about. There's really no need to go to anywhere else. You don't need to go to compound.compan.companse to go to compound. You don't need to go to uniswap.combe. You don't need to go to the Maker CDP page to get your vault under management. You can just go to

Zeron.io and access everything in one spot. Switching back to Corona for just a second, then we'll get into the meet of the episode, which is Ether as a triple point asset. You know, a few things that I think I'm expecting to see wrote a post about this yesterday on bankless, like kind of the COVID-19 prep plan. If you're in kind of crypto or if you're in bankless, I expect these four things to happen. first, I think things are going to get worse for a little bit. That's because Western nations primarily have underestimated the virus.

We've been slow to social distance ourselves. This morning, I noticed California has just gone on full lockdown. It's like 50 million people. The cases will increase probably exponentially. I think that deaths will increase as well, unfortunately. And things will get worse for a while in the markets as we're all trying to sort that out. And in the process, the second thing that's probably going to happen is that central banks are going to print a whole lot of money. We've already started to see this with fiscal stimulus plans, but then also the Fed going directly to QE, announcing that they are injecting, I think close to a trillion dollars into the economy or into just issuance of money last week.

So central banks will need to print their way out of this crisis. That seems to be the approach that they're taking. But the weird thing about it, and this is the third thing, is that in the meanwhile, it seems like people are going to still want dollars. The first stage of a crisis like this is usually a liquidity crisis. That's what we're seeing. We're seeing everyone fly to the most money asset there is, the most liquid asset there is. dollars are the money that you panic into. It's partially because a lot of debt is denominated in dollars across the world.

Oil, in particular, that is generally USD dominated. So when people have debt denominated in dollars and they're panicking, and the world's crumbling around them, they want to make sure they can pay their debt. So euros aren't as good for that. Yen isn't as good for that. Other currencies aren't as good for that, so they buy dollars. We're seeing things like the Australian dollar, you know, suffer and diminish 15% relative to the U.S. dollars. So I think we'll see that flight to liquidity continue as people want dollars.

But then on the back of this, and here's kind of the bet and the expectation that we are making, and that is crypto will rise. That's the fourth thing to expect. In this world where central bank systems are printing money nonstop, when I just noticed this morning, Venezuela has actually closed their banking system. They're saying it's to stop the spread of the virus. There's probably deeper reasons that they are closing their banking system, but 30 million Venezuelans no longer have access to banks. This is what crypto and the bankless revolution was made for. We're not fully ready now. We've got ways to go on scaling on economic bandwidth.

with, but by the end of this decade, I expect crypto will rise. Crypto will fill the void that central banks are leaving and traditional finance is leaving. And the internet for the people, by the people, as you like to say, David, will have its day this decade. So those are a few things to expect. You can read more about it in the bankless article that we published last week. Interesting times, to say the least, are they not? Absolutely. Anytime the Federal Reserve prints money is just rocket fuel for crypto. Maybe short-term prices aren't, don't reflect that. Maybe they do. We don't really know. But we haven't really seen money printing since 2008, where Bitcoin was invented in the first place. And so this second wave

of money printing, of quantitative easing, of bolstering the economy, of humans controlling what the future of the economy should look like. That's just rocket fuel onto the narrative of crypto. So, you know, the idea is that we're about to see a bunch of new entrance into the crypto markets because of this same narrative. Like the Fed printing money doesn't isn't just a narrative for crypto people. That's a narrative for the world economy at large. And so the crypto is here to serve that need of being a asset that cannot be printed. I totally think so too. I mean, this decade belongs to crypto.

2020s belong to crypto. And, you know, this is the crisis to kind of kick that off. All right, well, let's dig into it. This is a super important subject, Ether as a triple point asset. So when we talk about triple point, David, and the three asset types, maybe we should take a minute to go over the three types of assets. And this doesn't just apply to crypto, right? This is any asset. What are the three types of assets? Yeah, so the three types of assets are a capital asset, a commodity asset, and a store of value asset. And where we get the term triple point is from the term that you get when you combine a substance and the right pressure and temperature so that all three phases of matter are happening at the same time.

So you can go look this up on YouTube, type in triple point of water on YouTube, and you can see water being ice, liquid, and gas all at the same time. It's just because of the right parameters that this intersection of these three phases emerges. It's actually a pretty cool experiment. And so the triple point asset is an idea that the ether can be all of these three asset types at once. And so again, a capital asset, a commodity asset, store value asset. Now, a capital asset is an asset that produces capital. It's something that produces dividends.

It produces cash for you. So like if you are renting out your apartment or your house, you get rental payments, and that's cash. If you have your money in a T bill, in a bond, it produces cash for you. over time. Companies, stocks, these are capital assets. The main purpose of a company is to generate revenue and generate cash flow, and that is supposed to be returned to the owners of the company in cash in some way or another. The next asset, commodities. I call these one-time use assets. These are generally things that are valuable, because when you use them, you can take something into something better. So like wheat is a is a asset you can only use it once but you can turn wheat

into bread and people need to eat bread or you can take oil and you can put it in your car and you can move yourself from one place to another and that's good for you. And so yeah, one time use assets. The big analogy that we're going to get into later is energy. Energy is the biggest commodity asset there is. It allows us to take things and produce better things with it. We all need the energy to do that. And then the last one is store of value. That's stuff like gold, that stuff like cash, like the dollar, things that are inherently scarce. They don't do very much. They're not meant to be useful necessarily, but they are meant to be scarce and be exchangeable for other things at a moment's notice. So interestingly, a house can also be a store of value. People use their house to rent out for

cash, but people also use real estate to hold their value across time. Art has been used as a store of value. The reason why art pieces go from millions and millions of dollars is because they are partly art, but they are also partly a way for people to store their wealth across time. So these most pretty much all assets in the world fall into one or multiple of these categories. Yeah, I used to collect Magic the Gathering cards, you know, hoping that they were a store of value for me. Didn't quite work out that way. Would that be called a speculative store of value? I think it would. I mean, collectibles certainly fit under a store of value.

So you mentioned art. Some people collect old cars, you know, old money. It could be a store of value. A lot of things. Collectibles have kind of that emergent quality where they start as a collectible and then can become a store of value. You know what? This these three asset types, the capital, the commodity, and the store of value that you're talking about. Funny thing is, I considered myself kind of an investor and, you know, somebody in finance for a while, but I, like, just learned that the world could be divided into these three asset types in the past couple of years. Like, that was a newer taxonomy to me when exploring crypto. And the reason I stumbled upon it, I think Chris Berninski actually pointed it

out in a paper, and he found it from another paper. Robert Greer. Yeah, Robert Greer. The man. 1999. There he is. 99. He figured this out that the world's assets could be fit in these three different buckets. But it's super important because it has to do with valuation. And in 2017, we talked about this on the last episode, the economic bandwidth episode,

but we had an ICO mania where there was tokens everywhere. And people didn't seem to know how to value these various tokens, these various crypto assets. And this framework that the capital, the commodity, and the store of value really helped cement how to value crypto assets to me as well, because you can value them in these three different buckets. So the capital assets that you were talking about, like rental income and stocks, those are super easy to value. You just value them based on profits, the net present value of future cash flows. That's how stocks are valued. They're based on how much you pay for the earnings per year.

That's where price to earnings ratios come from. You can get even simpler than that. How much does it cost and how much money is it going to give you over time? Exactly. That's exactly right. Super simple capital assets. Most of the assets that we kind of know in trade are in our brokerage accounts, these are all capital assets.

Commodity assets are a bit different, though. These are valued based on supply and demand. And what you were saying, you're talking about oil and energy as a primary commodity, you know, it's really based on what you can produce on the other side of that commodity. So if I can produce, you know, some sort of asset based on oil, then oil is going to be valuable to me to a certain extent. And if everybody else is buying oil as well, that increases the demand for oil. and since there is only a scarce supply of above ground and below ground oil, that increases the value of oil.

So it's really just supply and demand dynamics, right? Store of value assets, those are really unique and really different. So most of us think a lot about, you know, capital sometimes we think about commodity assets. But store of value assets, they don't generate any income at all, at least pure store of value assets. They're just used as money. So dollars are a great example of a store of value asset. You're not earning anything on your dollar. You're not getting any interest or income unless it's in a savings account. As a dollar, it's just meant to store value for tomorrow or for next week or for when you want to pay your rent at some point in the future. Store of value assets are just used as money.

And the thing that I think is important to realize is that these assets can be more than just one at the same time. I think you mentioned that earlier with houses and with real estate, David, that real estate can be a capital asset, but it can also be used as a store of value asset. You know what we should do? We should go through some of the common assets and talk about how they can be, where they fit. So let's take stocks. What are stocks? Are they capital? Are they store of value? Are they commodity? Are they all three? Yeah. So people will give you different opinions as to what a stock, what the role of a stock is, a share of a company is in someone's portfolio. The genesis of a company is always about cash flow, right? Like you always start a company thinking about how you were going to get more revenue, how you want to sell things and make more money.

but at some point it turns from just a capital asset into also a store of value asset and some austrians would argue some austrian economists would argue that the reason why stocks on the stock market are treated as store of values is because the store of value the dollar is actually not that great of a store of value and so because the dollar is targeted to lose two percent of its value every single year people take their their store of value dollars and buy stocks on the stock market in order to maintain their wealth across time. So it's a capital asset because it produces revenue, but people also use it as a store of value at the same time because it theoretically in bull markets holds its value better than the dollar does. It's interesting that you said theoretically, David, because

part of this is somewhat of a generational thing. So stocks have done really, really well since the mid-1950s. You know, the era the baby boomers grew up in, you know, Gen X, millennials. Stocks have done well for most of our lifetimes. But the era before that, if you talk to some of the folks that grew up during the Great Depression, stocks crashed in 1929 and they didn't recover to all-time highs for 25 years. For their generation, stocks were not a good store of value. asset. So a lot of times we kind of retrofit the model of what a store of value asset is based on even

generational preference and generational experience. It might not be the case that stocks remain a good store of value moving forward for the next 20 years, the next 30 years, the next 50 years. But part of it is a generational preference, which I think is super interesting. But let's take another. Let's take gold, for example. What is that? Capital commodity store of value. So gold is largely a store of value asset. The majority of the world's gold is held in central banks somewhere. And like you said on a previous episode, all of the supply of gold of the world can fit inside of like an Olympic swimming pool. So there's not that much gold. But sometimes gold is used in electronics. It's a really good

conductor of electricity, which makes it a good thing to carry data across distances and wire. It's also extremely durable, which is actually kind of one of the reasons why gold became money in the first place, because it doesn't tarnish, it doesn't decay. It's very inert. It's very dependable. And so people use it, you know, in dentistry, in industry. But because other things can do that as well, gold has primarily been a store of value. Maybe it would be useful to contrast that with silver, right? because silver has some of those same commodity-like properties,

but it's less of a store of value now, right? Right, yes. And so silver is what was once a store of value, and perhaps it still is. But comparing silver as a store of value to gold as a store of value just is two completely different stories. If the price of gold doubles, there really can't be a much, a larger increase in the production of new gold.

However, if silver, the price of silver doubles, then a lot more silver is going to be mined and pulled out of the ground. And so that inflates the total supply of silver, and that makes it a poor store of value in comparison to gold. And so that's why silver is much more used in industry to do different things in lieu of gold. Absolutely. And at different time periods, it would have been different. At different time periods, silver would have been a stronger store of value. So it seems like the store of value point on the triple point asset side of things,

is the thing that we decide we want to become money collectively as a social collective, as a society, as a civilization. That's the thing we all select and settle on as the money. And to me, it's not too much more complicated than that, although it is quite a path and quite a journey for a commodity asset to become a store of value. Can take decades. Maybe we should talk about crypto. So how do the various crypto assets fit inside of those three different asset classes?

How about Bitcoin? Yeah, Bitcoin as an asset that cannot be minted or printed when the price goes up is one of the big bull cases for why Bitcoin is such a good store of value. If the Bitcoin price goes 100x, there still isn't more Bitcoin that is being minted. There's still just 21 million. And that's a feature that Bitcoin has even above gold. And so Bitcoin is held as the premier store of value simply because of this rule. This is why Bitcoiners love it so much. This is why there is an absolute restriction on changing the monetary supply of Bitcoin.

That is its big role. But different people have different opinions as to whether Bitcoin is just a store of value or also something else. Ryan, what's your opinion? So my opinion is that Bitcoin is a store of value absolutely, but it's also a commodity. And I think a lot of people miss this. So the reason it's a commodity is because it's used to pay for block space on the Bitcoin network. So in that way, it acts as a commodity. The way you transmit one Bitcoin from a Bitcoin address to another is by paying transaction fees. And those fees are denominated in Bitcoin. So essentially, there is this supply, demand scarcity, if you want to do stuff on the Bitcoin network directly, you want to send transactions around, you need Bitcoin. And Bitcoin almost acts as a commodity to pay for those transactions in that way. Because just like other commodities, a transaction on the Bitcoin

network is potentially an ingredient into another good. There was a time, for instance, when, and still is where USDT was kind of pegged, or was kind of based on the Bitcoin network, and USDT through a protocol called Omni, actually had to pay fees in Bitcoin. So it used Bitcoin as a commodity in that way. So I think it straddles both of those sides, both commodity and store value, though others have different opinions. But what about some of these DeFi protocols, David, like a maker? Yeah, MKR, Maker is really interesting. It's one of the my first fascinations in crypto and so talking about it as an asset class is really interesting to me so mkr is the asset that appreciates in value the more dye there is out there and dies a stable coin peg to the

dollar and these dyes come into existence when somebody puts in a another asset not mkr but an asset like ether into a kind of a vault an account and they are able to mint dye based off of their collateral in that account. Now, that dye that they have minted is a loan. It's a loan from the Maker Protocol. And there is a fee for having an outstanding loan. And that fee goes to burning MKR. Now, this is like a business.

This is like an internet bank. This is like an internet protocol bank where it allows you to mint money based off of your assets and then repay it at a higher price later or a larger amount of money later. And that's the business of MKR. It's a revenue-generating business. It generates fees.

So that makes MKR a capital asset. However, I would also call MKR a store of value because there isn't much upside in dye. Dye is meant to be stable. In fact, there's supposed to be zero upside in Dye. It's designed to be flat. It's designed to not have upside potential. and just to be a thing that other things referenced for stability, for price,

which means that upside potential gets pushed into MKR. And so if you, to the degree that you do not want to store your value in die because there's no upside potential, there is upside potential in MKR. And so the MKR system is always burning MKR from the fees generated by the protocol. And so in theory, in good days, and if this whole business works out, at the start, there is one million MKR, and then the fees start burning, burning, burning MKR. And so it's designed to be a deflationary asset.

So the bull case for MKR is that there's one million MKR, you buy a handful of them, and then in 50 years there's only half a million MKR. And the total percentage of the supply that you own has doubled. This is like Bitcoin if the $21 million was actually getting smaller over time. And so you were incentivized to buy and hold it early and wait for your share of the network to increase. Totally. And in what you're saying, it seems to me like MKR is almost in some ways like a stock. So it does throw off revenue. Now, unlike a stock, which distributes those profits and that revenue to shareholders, it actually uses its profits to burn MKR. And that makes MKR,

deflationary asset. And in some ways, like a stock is, it's a store of value. But it's not quite like a money store of value, if you will. Something like die, for instance, or USDA, that would be more like the dollar, a pure store of value that you're going to store your money in from week to week. You might not want to store money in something like USDA or die for decades for the reasons we talked about. The dollar is constantly being inflated and losing value over time, but certainly a good short-term store of value. There are other assets, too. One that I think is interesting in crypto or one category are these other assets that are kind of base chain assets. So the Ethereum killers fall into this category. Also assets like atoms from Cosmos. So Cosmos is,

a blockchain network. It has a base asset called atoms. These atoms act as a capital asset in the same way that that kind of maker does in that if you have these assets, it entitles you to a right of future cash flows, future transaction fees of the network. But it's a bad store of value asset because it's constantly being inflated over time and it's not being used as a money today in the same way that Bitcoin is or Ether is. And I think that is the flaw with a lot of these Ethereum killers. We talked about this a little bit in the economic bandwidth episode, that they're focused on getting trustless, or some of them anyway, are focused on getting high trustless transactions per second, but they're not focused on getting a value accrual

mechanism, particularly a monetary value accrual mechanism on their base asset. They're not focused on making their base asset become a money. And unless they do that, they won't have the economic bandwidth to grow an entire open financial system on top of. Okay, so we talked about it. We talked about a lot of the assets in the traditional finance. We talked about some assets in crypto, but we left one out. What about ether? So ether's the triple point asset. How is it a triple point asset, David? Yeah, this is why I get so excited about ether. This is what gives me chills. So ether, to my knowledge, is the first asset to ever encompass all three asset types all at once. So it's a store of value asset. There is a restricted supply of them. No one can print any more or

less. The supply of them is determined by the protocol. The increase of ether price does not meaningfully change the issuance of ether. Is a use as a store of value. And people take their ether and they put them inside of defy applications and they deposit them into open finance because of the value that they have as collateral. And that's why you see ether as collateral across Ethereum. It is the store of value of Ethereum. It is the thing that backs die. It is the collateral inside of uniswap trading pairs. It is the collateral inside of compound. Collateral, collateral, collateral. That is the M0. It is the store of value for Ethereum. It also is a a capital asset, or it will be in proof of stake Ethereum. You will be able to stake your

eth inside of the protocol, provide your services to the network of validating transactions, and you will receive ether as payments for that service. That's kind of like the dollar inside the bond market, right, inside a treasury bill. You put your asset inside of the protocol, and over time, you are receiving dividends for that service, for that staking. And so ether is also a capital asset. It returns you more ether across time. And lastly, it's also a commodity. And this was like the first meme of ether when Ethereum was getting really off the ground. Ether is gas. Ether is gas for Ethereum, which is true. It is. It is one part of Ether's role for Ethereum. If you need to pay the fee to get your transaction included into the Ethereum blockchain,

you need to pay for that and you pay for that with Ether. So Ether is like the oil. It's the energy of the Ethereum ecosystem. When you pay ether to a miner, you are making his computer heat up and consume electricity to include your transaction in the blockchain. So you are paying your ether for electricity for the inclusion of your transaction into the blockchain.

So it's also a commodity, it's also energy at the same time. And it's doing these things all at once. In one single transaction, ether can represent all three of these asset types, which is why Ethereum is so cool, which is why Ether is so powerful. And so in one fellow swoop, Ether has checked all the boxes for all three asset types, which I can't find any other asset that does this. And that's why I get so excited.

It is pretty interesting for sure. I mean, so it checks all the boxes, right? It's a store value like gold. It's a commodity like oil. It's a capital asset like a stock, or at least it will be, when staking goes live. this year. There doesn't seem to be much like it in the legacy world. Maybe the closest comparison we could make to what this Ethereum thing actually is and what Ether the asset actually is is the comparison of a nation state. Ethereum is like a digital nation state. We could maybe

compare it to another protocol. We talked in episode one about the Constitution and the Democratic Republic Protocol as a governance structure, as a protocol structure. Ethereum is kind of like the U.S. in terms of being a protocol. It is a digital economic nation state instead of a physical Democratic Republic economic nation state. And so we can start to sort of compare things between the U.S. and the Ethereum. system. Maybe we should do that. So let's talk about how the U.S., you know, analogies from the U.S. as an economic system to analogies as Ethereum as an economic system. Where do you want to start? Yeah. So let's start with the bond market. And I kind of illustrate these things as the

three pillars that really hold up an economy. And so the bond market or in an Ethereum terms, proof of stake, staking your ether, are kind of the same pillar. Now, when I say ether is a triple point asset, imagine just those three pillars of Ethereum are just a lot closer together. In the legacy world, these three pillars are far apart and not very, they don't support similar structures, where in Ethereum, it all kind of supports the same structure. But in the legacy world, these three pillars are much more distinct and much more separate from each other. So let's start with the bond market, one of the first pillar. Yeah, the bond market is incredibly interesting. And when we're talking about the bond market, maybe we should start talking about the government bond market, the sovereign

debt bond market. So in the U.S., that is the T-bill. Those are treasuries. That's sort of the government bond market. The U.S. allows you to take their base money, dollars, and put those in a T-bill, in a government bond. That is equivalent to staking ETH. So ETH is the base money of Ethereum. And when you stake it, when you bond it, that's another word for staking, you're essentially putting it in a T bill. Now, the U.S. government, what it does with its bonds, essentially you're loaning the U.S. government dollars, denominated in its currency, of course, dollars. It's providing you interest. So it's giving you some additional dollars for providing that debt. And then it uses that debt, ideally, to pursue its interests, to secure its economy, military, diplomacy,

to spend all sorts of, to spend it on all sorts of things that Democratic republics, you know, spend their money on. In ETH, that staked Ethereum also goes towards securing the network. It provides economic security. We talked a bit about that in episode two and episode three on economic bandwidth. So it's similar in that way. The U.S. and Ethereum are also similar in that they have this base money, of course. We talked about how that base money can be bonded.

In the U.S., that base money is U.S. dollars. In Ethereum, it is ether. Both of these things have been somewhat called into existence by the protocol. Both of these systems also have a tax system set up. They have an IRS. So in the U.S., there are. there are two forms of taxes. There's the IRS where you kind of pay income tax essentially on money that you earn. But then there's also state taxes, of course. Other nation states

around the world have kind of more federal use taxes, consumption taxes, where you're charged every time you make a purchase. Ethereum doesn't really have an income tax, but it does have this consumption tax. So every time you, do something on the Ethereum network, you move ether from one place to another, or you lock some eth into a defy protocol like Maker, you're using the network, you're consuming a portion of it, and you pay a tax. That tax is called a transaction fee. It's also called gas. So in the same way, you have taxes in the Ethereum system. You pay for your usage of the network, just like in the U.S. economic system. You pay for your consumption of the system. You pay for your consumption of the

goods. So you've got these kind of three things that start to resemble almost a digital nation state. I really love the comparison between like the IRS charging taxes versus Ethereum charging taxes because the IRS or just taxes in general is supposed to be a tax on your usage of the economy to pay for shared goods. But it's kind of a subjective, there's no perfect way to collect the right amount of taxes per person. And that's why nation states have basically always been in debate as to how to manage taxes. Ethereum really solves this problem by saying, well, there's a market rate for getting included into the blockchain and you have to pay that. And it's really, there no one is taxed more or less than what they should be taxed because you're only ever

taxed if you include a transaction into the blockchain. If you never make a transaction, you never pay any taxes to Ethereum. If you make a ton of transactions to the Ethereum blockchain, you pay a ton of taxes. It's really a pay per use mechanism. And it really just takes all the subjectivity out of who should pay what. And so it just says if you use the Ethereum blockchain, you pay this amount of taxes and it's equal for everyone. And so it really takes a lot of debate and political decision making out of the protocol and just commits everything to code. For sure. Yeah, we've used that term, the term a lot credibly neutral to talk about monetary policy. We did an episode two. But what you're talking about, you know, credible neutrality, that's also true for Ethereum's

transaction system. It's tax system essentially, which is, which is, I think, a really important quality that nation states don't tend to have. You know, they kind of bend, bend the tax rules in the interests of lobbyists and whomever is in power and whomever asks the hardest and, you know, makes, maybe donates the greatest amount to their political campaigns. You also use this term a little bit earlier, David, when you were talking about ether as a triple point asset, you called it M0. Maybe we should take some time to define what you mean by, what we mean by M0. I'll just jump into that. So in the traditional financial system, there are different types of money. There's M0, which is the base money of the system. That is the money

issued by central banks, so it's the money on their balance sheets. Central banks also issue physical cash, so it's that money too. So all of the base money on the central bank balance sheet in the form of digital dollars, to take a Fed example, and in the form of physical dollars, that is what the traditional banking system calls M0. That's the base money in the system. M1 is M0, so all of the base money, plus all of the dollars that are kept in bank checking accounts. So it combines this bank, this central bank base money, the M0, plus all of the commercial banking money in checking deposits.

So it's still highly liquid, it's still sort of money, but it's not base settlement money. Then we get to M2, which is everything from M1, which includes M0, plus, some additional things, all the money in savings accounts, so a little bit less liquid. Savings accounts tend to be a bit more locked up or in CDOs or in money market funds. So M0, M1, M2, all of those things combined are, that's kind of a taxonomy that the traditional system uses to talk about money. Important to realize that the base money, that is equivalent in the crypto space to things like Bitcoin or things like Ether.

Bitcoin and Ether are really the M-Zero in crypto. Those assets are the base settlement assets. So when you issue more M-0 in the traditional system, Central Bank is doing that right now through quantitative easing and through all of the things we're about to see, probably they will be issuing trillions. They're actually printing money, so they're actually increasing their M-0.

base money. When Ethereum or Bitcoin are producing block rewards to reward miners for providing security, while they are increasing their M0. In the open finance world, you can also think about M1 and M2. An M1 might be ETH if it's locked in a protocol like compound. So it has a little bit more risk. There's some protocol risk that's involved with putting ETH in compound. So, it's not quite the base settlement, ETH as M0 might be, it's M1. Or Dye is a good example, probably, of an M1. It ultimately has to settle to ETH.

If Dye has a global settlement, it basically becomes a redemption coupon for some ETH. So it settles in ether, but it is in this other layer. It is in the M1 layer. We could talk about M2 as a layer as well. But it's important to note, I think, that this traditional scheme of the base money and these other monies that have additional risk but still provide liquidity, that's kind of the monetary fuel for these systems. But the base money itself, that is probably the most important money of all because everything settles back to the base money.

and the issuance of the base money is something to pay close attention to. As we've talked about often, the issuance in a central bank money system is arbitrary. In 2008, for example, the Fed printed 40% in one year, right? Bitcoin and Ether, they print 3.5% for Bitcoin. It's dropping down to you 1% range, 1.5%. Ether prints 4.5%. But you could see exactly how much these systems are printing. With the Fiat money system, it's really up to the central bankers, and they're under political pressure to print more and more depending on the circumstances and what's happening. A lot of comparisons,

a lot of similarities between a nation state and the Ethereum system and the crypto system. So the M1, M0, how does that fit into our triple point asset idea? What pillar is that relevant to? It's all relevant to that Stora value pillar. So again, the store of value pillar, you could also call that the money pillar. And these Ms all fit under that pillar. They're just different types of money under that pillar. And really, the base money, that's the money that actually exists.

Everything on top of it is essentially a credit of some form or another, a coupon, some sort of redemption for that base money. And that's true in the traditional system. It's also true in these crypto systems as well. So that's the perfect time to start talking about monolith. Monolith is a defy card. It is a card that you get that you can hold in your wallet, that you can spend anywhere visa is accepted. So basically the whole world. And when you spend your money, you are spending your die.

You are spending the M1 of the Ethereum ecosystem. And so Monolith offers you a credit card, a visa card that you can take anywhere, and so you can access the M1 of Ethereum wherever you go. You get your card, you load it with dye, you put it in your wallet, and then you have a little bit of Ethereum in your pocket. So what Monolith allows you to do is it allows you to transfer some of the world's economic activity whenever you go out, you buy your coffee, your pizza, your whatever. When you do that, you are putting some of the world's economic activity on Ethereum.

Using Ethereum's M1, using dye, using applications like they're supposed to be in the background to support your financial life. So go to monolith.comyz. Check out their defy card. They have a ton of cool features. They have a ton of cool features coming soon, such as Metatransactions, E&S, Wallet Connect, that will allow you to further use your monolith account, your monolith card, in a bunch of different spots very easily. It's going to be a great way for people to get onboarded onto the future of Ethereum. You can take it out. It looks great. It's a sexy card. You can show your family and say, hey, there's crypto on here. Really cool innovations happening over at Monolith. So again, go to monolith. xyz and check them out

we have the best sponsors David on bank lists want to tell you about AVE it is one of the most interesting D5 protocols out there it is a lending and borrowing protocol on Ethereum so it allows you to take your ether that triple

point asset and do more with it it allows you to create dye out of it you can create die out of it and then you can lend it to AVEA it will magically transform your dye into something called a die, which is die except earning interest. It's a little bit like a savings account in the traditional world. You can also borrow from it. So you could take some of the

M0 ETH that you have and you can put it in the protocol and create a fixed rate loan on top of that rather than selling your precious ETH. Developers, you have to check out their flash loan protocol. They've just integrated that into a D-Fi saver. So with D-Fi saver, you can use the AVEA protocol and actually swap out some of your maker loans collateral on the fly. Incredibly powerful stuff. Go take out a loan if you're interested or go use the lending protocol from AVE at AVE.com. That's A-A-A-A-V-E.com. All right, David. So we talked about a lot of the pillars in the nation state, Ethereum versus the United States.

Let's take the last one. What's the third one? The last pillar is the whole rest of the economy. So the U.S. economic system is nothing without all the jobs, businesses, companies that people go to on their day-to-day basis. So when you get in your car and you drive to work, you are using energy in your car, you park it in the You take the elevator up and that consumes electricity. You power on your computer. You are sending messages on your phone to everyone, from everyone. Everyone is passing things along and it's all taking energy to do this. And so it's really the energy of the system. That is really what allows the

U.S. economy to really come into fruition. Everything runs on top of energy. And that's like the last pillar of the Ethereum ecosystem is the energy. The energy of the Ethereum system is of course ether, right? It's ether when it gets converted into gas to pay for transaction fees, but it's also something more. It's also the block space of the Ethereum economy. It's the capacity of the movement of goods in one unit time. And that capacity is how much energy Etherium has at its disposal. And so think of the block space of Ethereum as the highway that people drive to work on, if there was only one highway. The plans to expand Ethereum in ETH2.0, that's like taking that highway and creating 64 more lanes, right? Absolutely. Yeah, it's allowing us to be more energy efficient as an economy.

The more highway, the more lanes that we can produce, the more the same amount of energy can allow us to go further. And so, you know, any sort of activity in the world takes energy, and it's the same is true on Ethereum. If you want to do anything, you need to pay ether to pay for the block space. Now, that's why there has been so much emphasis on scale when it comes to Ethereum. How much more lanes of highway can we produce? How many more lines of lanes of highway can we get into the protocol? And how efficiently can we make those cars on that highway? How can we do the same activities using less energy, using less gas? And so it's really a function of how, how efficient the whole system is because the more efficient the system is the more

economic activity we can fit inside the protocol more cars in the highway baby and so if Ethereum is trying to be the world's economic system it's gonna need a few more lanes it's gonna need more efficient cars and that's what the growth of Ethereum and the usage of ether as energy is all about okay so we've got a digital nation state versus a traditional state nation state What if you want upside on this digital nation state? So if I want upside, if I want to invest in the American economy, I kind of know what I have to do, right? It's a basket of a few things.

Mostly, it's a basket of the SMP 500, stocks, U.S. stocks, maybe some corporate bonds sprinkled in there. 80% of my portfolio is going to be that. 20% of my portfolio might be things like U.S. dollars or treasuries, but I don't want to keep very much in U.S. dollars because anything I keep in U.S. dollars is just going to get inflated away. How does that work in the Ethereum economy? So what if I want upside on the Ethereum digital nation state? What do I do? And this goes back to when I said that the pillars of Ethereum are a lot closer together than their real world correlates. The three pillars of Ethereum are stitched together better. And this is why if you want exposure to the growth of the U.S. economy,

You buy, you don't buy dollars, you buy equities, you buy probably the S&P ETF. But if you want exposure to the growth of Ethereum, the equivalent SMPETF is basically ether. It's mostly ether. If you want exposure to generalized health and growth of Ethereum, you buy ether. Yeah, absolutely. So a basket, if you're going to invest in the Ethereum economy, right, it makes sense to have the base layer money. It doesn't make sense to have the base layer of money in the U.S. economy, or at least very much of it, but it does make sense to have the base layer money in the

Ethereum economy because it's a different type of money. It's issued by algorithm, not by central bankers, so it's decreasing to 1% issuance per year. The eth, actually, that is consumed as energy, we haven't talked about this much, but the eth that is used in transaction fees, a portion of that will actually be burnt. We could talk about that more on another episode. And all of the protocols, all of the economic activity built on top, if they're going to be trustless, they have to use ETH as economic bandwidth. So I think a better portfolio, if you're investing in the Ethereum Digital Nation State, is going to be more heavily weighted towards ETH. And then later, staked Eith. Ethereum is going to have its initial bond offering.

That's going to be staked Eath. Those are the treasuries of Ethereum. makes sense to have a decent portion of your assets in those two classes as upside. Maybe the rest you put in DeFi protocols or something. To me, that is a better portfolio to gain exposure to this digital nation state. You know what? One last thing. I think we should clarify a bit more.

I think you hinted at it. But we've been talking about Ethereum and Ether in particular as a triple point asset. It's being a store of value. we made that case, we talked about that, a capital asset when it staked, but then also a commodity. I do want to say this explicitly because ether itself is actually not the commodity, right? So there's some subtlety here that now that we've gone through the entire triple point asset case, we could talk about the subtlety because I think listeners will understand it more. Ether is not the commodity.

It is the money that's used and enforced by the protocol to pay for the commodity. The commodity itself, as you said in this podcast, the commodity itself is block space. So that is the scarce resource commodities, the amount of transactions you can fit in an Ethereum block that is pushed out every six seconds or so. Yeah, totally. That block space that comes every six seconds in East 2 and every 12 seconds today, that is the product of Ethereum. That is what Ethereum constantly produces and sells to the world. So, you know, that is Ethereum's one responsibility. That's where all the security of Ethereum goes to protecting.

All of the security goes to protecting the value of the block space. And the whole entire point of Ethereum is to produce good block space, block space that people want, block space that is in demand. And it's like pumping oil out of the ground in a way. Because, you know, one new block is produced every 12. to six seconds. And that block space is, there's no more, no more, no less. And, you know, new block space is produced. So there's always more. But for that one particular block, you can't make any more space in that block. And ether is the asset. Ether is the money that buys that space.

And it's the only money that buys that space. Just as, just as the IRS only accepts US dollars for your taxes. Ethereum only accepts ETH for its block space. And that's how, through all of that economic activity that you're talking about, that's how it's bootstrapping itself into moneyness through demand in its own economy, demand for block space, demand for economic bandwidth. The cool thing about the Ethereum Protocol is that the Ethereum protocol is selling the block space, but it's actually really the validators of Ethereum in Ethereum 2.0. So if you are the person that is staking your ether in the bond market, you are the one that is receiving the fees from selling that block space. So the revenue,

from the bond market is partly the revenue from selling the fees because like I said, the pillars are closer together here. The pillar of ETH being staked to the protocol is really close to the pillar of selling block space as a commodity. And so the purchasers of the block space are paying the people that are staking their ether to protect that block space. So these pillars are right next to each other. Totally. Full episodes we need to do on staking, David, takes 32 ETH. to stake, I think a lot of folks that are listening will want to become stakers in eth2.0, get exposure to that initial bond offering. You know, and as we start to think about wrapping up here, we can also think about some of

the tokens that are issued on Ethereum and how those affect the value or not of ether. So something like USDC, for example, that is a stable coin issued by Coinbase. It's backed by Fiat. So traditional U.S. dollars in a traditional bank account. But when U.S.D. is deployed on Ethereum, it increases value to ETH through demand for gas, through gas that in the future is going to be burnt through every transaction. So that decreases issuance. And also, and I think this might be the most important catalyst for value accrual on ETH is it starts to onboard more people into Ethereum, into creating an Ethereum address. in having an Ethereum bank account, if you will.

And the people, once they're in the Ethereum bankless money system, they tend to do other bankless things. They tend to buy the bankless reserve asset, which is ether, that creates additional demand on ether. Dye is a little bit different. How about Dye? How does that increase the value of ether? Yeah, so Dye and USC are both stable coins.

They're both these tokens that are worth $1 on Ethereum. And when you send one of these stable coins to someone else, you pay a fee that goes to the stakers. And so that increases the value of ether to a small degree. Dye is different because Dye has a much more direct link to economic bandwidth. And so for every one die out there, there's at least one and a half dollars worth of ether inside of a maker vault somewhere. So not only is the economic activity of Dye buying commodity block space, but it's also pulling ether off of the secondary market and making it be deposited into MakerDAO.

So it's actually increasing the value capture of ether in two different ways. It's pulling ether off of the secondary market and depositing it into MakerDAO and it's also paying fees to those that are staking ether and making it more profitable to stake ether, which if it's more profitable to stake ether, then more ether will be pulled off the secondary market to stake more. So dye is really hitting this twice. It's really adding value to ether in two different ways. It's like some of these tokens have indirect value accrual mechanisms for ether, and some of them have very direct value accrual mechanisms for ether, wouldn't you say?

Absolutely, yeah. So all of the native finance on Ethereum, defy, open finance, things that use ether as collateral, they are doing two things. They are using ether as collateral, making it a really good. good M-0, but they're also hosting economic activity on Ethereum. They're creating demand for block space, and they are making the price of block space go up. The more competition there is for block space, the more people have to pay, which means more ether stakers are receiving more fees. And so it's the really good protocols are the ones that are holding a lot of ether

deposited into their contracts and doing a ton of economic activity at the same time. Those Those are the gold standard applications that we want on Ethereum if you are interested in the price of ether increasing. Absolutely. And I think, you know, maybe to close this out, the reason we're talking so much about ether is because it's been consistently underrated by folks. People often talk about the value of the Ethereum economy and all of the value of Ethereum, the network, and all of the developers who are building on it and all of the cool things. and all of the cool things that they can do. And that's all awesome and that's all true. But Ether itself as an asset, we should take some time to appreciate it

because it's really kind of a magical asset. It's really a bankless crypto-native asset that is going to fuel this entire open finance movement. And I hope today we helped guide you in understanding it as a triple point asset. So as capital, when it's staked, it produces capital. as a commodity when it's used to pay for gas and as a store of value when it's used as economic bandwidth, when it's used as collateral and money within the system. That's Ether, the triple point asset guys. Talk about risks in disclaimers. Nothing we've said here is financial advice. We are super excited about assets like Ether, as you know, but buying Ether is super

risky. Crypto is risky. DeFi is risky. We're headed out west. We're headed out west. We're This is the frontier. It's not for everybody. There's bandits along the way. So be careful out there, guys. What we want you to do as far as actions today, obviously subscribe to the podcast. If you haven't done that, you've got to do that. We're doing this every week, a new podcast release every Monday.

Keep leveling up every Monday. Also, start thinking about ether that you use as a triple point asset. So when you use it to pay for gas, what are you doing? Well, you're using it as a commodity. When you're using as collateral for a loan, it's a store of value. And then in the future, we'll do episodes on this. Staking will be part of the equation too. So putting ether in a bond in a treasury, that is staking it.

Start to think about how you're using eth in the context of a triple point asset. Also, you've got to go to bankless and read David's post, one of the best posts, I think, ever written in the Ethereum space, at least pertaining to the economics of ether. It's called Ether, a new model for money. Look up that post on Bankless. He also has a fantastic video. I think it's a 20-minute video that was recorded at an Ethereum event

where he goes through the entire case for Ether as a new model for money. You've got to check it out. Guys, we are super excited to have you on this journey. This has been Bankless. Thanks for joining us.