Bankless - How ETH Wins | Ryan & David

Episode Date: May 15, 2025

Ryan and David reunite on Bankless Takes with a big question: What must Ethereum do to win? Ryan champions a memetic and cultural shift, calling for ETH maximalism and nationalism to reignite belief in ETH as a monetary asset. David brings a product-driven roadmap, urging Ethereum to strengthen its L1 as the economic hub of the internet. Together, they explore a vision for a unified Ethereum that can scale, coordinate, and ultimately win. This isn’t just a talk—it’s a strategy session for Ethereum’s future. ------ 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24 https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🪙FRAX | SELF SUFFICIENT DeFi https://bankless.cc/Frax 🦄UNISWAP | SWAP ON UNICHAIN https://bankless.cc/unichain 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle 🌐SELF | PROVE YOUR SELF https://bankless.cc/Self 🟠HEMI | BTC & ETH, ONE NETWORK https://bankless.cc/hemi ------ TIMESTAMPS & RESOURCES 0:00 Intro 3:21 Job’s Not Finished 10:11 A Call for Maximalism 13:10 Blue-Money Gospel https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1915874994514452763 25:23 Restoring ETH’s Product-Money Feedback Loop https://www.bankless.com/read/restoring-eths-product-money-feedback-loop 46:58 Towards a United Chains of Ethereum https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1917298612540739931 https://x.com/Spire_Labs/status/1915430799618564394 https://l2beat.com/scaling/summary 1:05:43 ETH—Commodity Money Backed by an Economy https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1918065179725570536 1:08:59 Rethinking Our Messaging 1:14:49 Can Ethereum Still Win? 1:19:22 Closing & Disclaimers ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠

Bankless Nation, welcome to a bankless takes, David. We haven't done one of these in a while. And we've got to... In four months? No. Welcome back. Thank you. Thank you.

While I was away, I was thinking a lot about Ethereum. And this episode, I think... How are you? Well, I was thinking about other things first. And then toward the end, I started thinking about Ethereum again. I don't think you'll ever not be thinking about Ethereum. It seems that way. I mean, it's embedded pretty deep at this point.

And I had a few thoughts, some things to say as we're coming back. I think that's the subject of today's episode, really what Ethereum needs to do. And I've got some takes. And I feel like you and I have different lenses on some of the problem slash solutions for Ethereum. I think my lens, if I were to like throw something out there, my lens is more memetic. So like my focus and aperture is like, hey, what memes and what social layer changes around those memes does the Ethereum community need to adopt moving forward? your take, if I understand your article, is a bit more product lens focused. So you're like a bit more roadmap and the things to prioritize if Ethereum is to reorient

and start thinking about a product-led roadmap versus whatever it has been doing previously. So I think we're bringing two different lenses into this conversation. Yeah, maybe to... So you took your three months hiatus. if you've come back two weeks ago, three weeks ago. And I think during that time, you and I have not, like, we had one month check-ins. But yeah, we went like one month at a time without checking in. It was real cold turkey.

Real cold turkey. And so for the first time ever since, like, starting bankless and even before bankless, you and I have had the opportunity to, like, think about Ethereum without bouncing ideas off of each other. Yeah, we haven't synced the nodes recently. Yeah. So I think this episode is kind of like a node sync between us about our current takes of Ethereum. but I also kind of appreciate the time of like what does it look like for like David and Ryan respectively to like come to their own conclusions about Ethereum while they aren't always like sharing such a strong brain space that we've always shared.

Right. And like I think our attention focuses have diverged. I don't think we have divergent opinions, but we have just simply focus on different things. and I think that has become apparent as you come back and you have three articles that you've written. I have one article that is going live on the newsletter tomorrow from the day of recording. And so, yeah, we get to kind of like put these two things together and see what mesh is and what doesn't mesh.

Yeah, I think that's what's cool. And so maybe that's going to be the structure of today's episode. Basically, what's really interesting is just last week, this is kind of current events. Heath was up 44% in like a 72 hour period of time. Honestly, incredible. This is like the largest. gained since like 2021 since like it jumped from 200 to like you know something a lot higher in that

era so interesting that no one really knows why that's what's funny to me right i say caught a lot of people off sides of course the peoples were like oh we told you so like i was among them i'm like yeah yeah there was nothing ever wrong in the first place well see that last piece is kind of the the danger spot i think because it's very much for me you know i was sharing that that cobi a big sports guy was sharing that Kobe Bryant meme to use like job not finished honestly I had no idea that that was gonna be it's like a meme right it's like somebody asked him during playoffs or something I don't know basketball fans keep

that's right but like hey like he had a really good game like aren't you excited about your game or whatever he's like so like why would I be excited jobs not finish and I feel like that is true for Ethereum right now we got 44% last week let's not rest on our laurels we are still at 0.024

for ETHBTC Jobs not finished right we have just barely gotten started Okay. So this, in our opinions, I think, of mine and then also yours, is what Ethereum needs to do to, like, finish the job. And I think that's the context for today's episode. Maybe we could also define what we think a finished job looks like, too. So, like, what are the outcomes that we're going for? Yeah. I guess, I mean, by way of preambles, a few things I'd say. It's like maybe the first thing. For me, I mean, we've talked about my first love, I think your first love. I mean, like, I had Bitcoin before this, but it was really Ethereum that kind of like sent me down the crypto rabbit hole. And it's because of this holistic idea of programmable internet money, this

defy economy, all emanating from a programmable smart contract platform. So I think what's the goal? What's the end state? For me, this comes from a position of love, like very much, I want ETH to win. Like, emphatically, like I truly do because I want that complete vision for a bankless money system to win. And Bitcoin has pieces of it, right? But if you look at, it doesn't have the programmability part. If you look at all of the activity that's happening, is happening off-chain in like, you know, Michael Saylor accounts

and with, you know, custody Bitcoin tokens, IOUs, essentially. It's not the full vision of defy that we're promised. And then you have alternative layer ones that make some big centralization sacrifices because I don't think they're going for the state, the nation-state resistant sovereign money thing. And so from my perspective, what do I want for a, like what Ethereum needs to do. What Ethereum needs to do to win, essentially, is where I'm coming from.

Yeah. I think the way that I would articulate this is that if Ethereum does all of the things that I think that it needs to do and if it has the successful outcomes that we want it to have, ETH will be downstream of that a sitting shoulder to shoulder with Bitcoin as the second money to emerge out of crypto. And so I don't consider like the flippinging to be like the KPI, the metric, the goal of success here. Because I don't think like to me that that kind of includes like the demise of Bitcoin partly inside of like the success of Ethereum. And I don't think that needs to be the case.

What I think looks like success is that the Ethereum product stack, in my article we're going to talk about like this like Maslow's hierarchy of product development. And like ETH is money. and ETH is like a non-sovereign store of value that's sitting shoulder to shoulder with Bitcoin is downstream of a very coherent, very successful product stack. And so to me, successful, a job well done, a finished job is that there are two crypto monies out there valued by the market. And that's Bitcoin and Ethereum. And like there's kind of like, there's nothing else.

We have the digital gold and then we have this digital economy money. and those are the two valid contenders for internet money. That's what success looks like to me. Strong Ethereum network, strong Ether, the asset, both of those things. I think we're in full agreement on that. Well, it's a lot of preamble. Maybe we should get to it. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible.

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discover ways to interact, participate in the leaderboard program, and be part of the community that's uniting Bitcoin and Ethereum. So when Ryan and Sean Adams comes back from his three-month high as he immediately starts powering out a bunch of articles on Twitter. One is called the Blue Money Gospel the second towards a united chains of Ethereum and three ETH commodity money backed by an economy. And so Ryan just comes in with a force. And really, I think you're sharing your thoughts. You're dumping your thoughts on Twitter. How do you want to proceed through these things? Is there an order of operations here? Where should we start? Yeah, I want to start with like three calls that I'm making. Really, the first is a call for

maximalism. I'm just going to let that word just linger in the air because I think a lot of people in the Ethereum community hearing the M word are immediately. triggered and that is intentional. I want you to be triggered. This is a call for eth maximalism. So I'll talk about that. It's also a call for nationalism, both ether nationalism and Ethereum nationalism. And finally, it's a call for a change of the narrative. All right. So there's really three calls to action. And one thing I'll say before getting into my takes here is one, this is very much for the Ethereum community. Like, it's for us. Okay. So this is not the episode to go send your tradfye friends to explain like what is either the asset necessarily.

This what the work that I am trying to do and I think you were trying to do in your article is internal. It's basically what we would call layer zero, you know, the social layer that underlines all of these social technologies that are blocked. It's that kind of work. We're setting the house straight. Yes. And of course, these are our opinions. This is bankless take. So it's just like we're not the only people in the Ethereum community.

But we've been here for a while. we've seen a few things, and our takes are based on that. So these are musings meant for the Ethereum communities, not outsiders. And this is like, this is not technical work. This is layer zero memetic core dev work, if you will. So, you know, that by way of preamble. So maybe I'll just start with the first article I released, which I called the Blue Money Gospel. And this is really the call for maximalism, David. Now, when I say the M word, maximalism, okay, what does that trigger in just the context? Or what do you think that triggers in the average sort of Ethereum community member? Yeah, I think there's a negative connotation of like toxicity and close-mindedness and being mean on Twitter.

Like these are, I think the first like. Like laser-eyed like asshole kind of thing? Yeah, emotional reactions that I think people have to the word. Yeah. Is that your reaction or do you see also a positive side of that? Yeah, I definitely see the positive side of it. It takes a little bit more cognitive work to see the positive side of that, but if I were to articulate the positive side of that, it is being like unrelenting, having an unrelenting focus and support of like a particular asset and like espousing the positives of an asset as like as it deserves to carve out this niche in the market.

Okay. So here, here's my case for why Blue Money Gospel and why Ether the asset maximalism, not necessarily Ethereum, the network maximalism. And it begins like this. In order to win, Ethereum has to embrace the Blue Money Gospel. And that means, ETH is good. ETH to $10 trillion is good for the world. Without ETH, the asset, there is no defy. Without ETH the asset, there are no cyberpunk values.

Ethereum will never be a strong Ethereum without a strong ether. And so here's the problem, David. I am laying that out and putting that out in like very bold ways. I feel like the Ethereum community has been very weak in talking and presenting and evangelizing the value of this programmable censorship resistant monetary system, this money that lies at the heart of everything that we've created in this network. And that is ether the asset. Okay?

We spend all our time on Ethereum the network, talking about bringing other people's assets on chain and, you know, like stable coins and real world assets and layer twos, all of these things. And that's great, but that's only one half of making this economic system successful. The other half is ether the asset, and we spend almost no time evangelizing and talking about the value of ether the asset. And I would go further, David. I feel like embedded somewhere in Ethereum culture is this hesitancy. Resistance. Yeah, the resistance towards like the money or the value of the currency. It's almost like a wealth aversion type thing. Like, okay, number go up, like bags go up. That's dirty stuff. Like, we're better than that. Right. Right.

And what I'm saying is we're not better than that. We're not better than that. And actually, that is a good outcome in itself is because when ether, the asset goes up, defy goes up. In fact, the strong case of that is it's the only way we can possibly create defy and not be overrun by somebody else's assets, some form of tokenized Bitcoin on Ethereum and our layer two's, some sort of stable coin. We don't have actual sovereignty over our network unless we have a strong multi-trillion dollar, tens of trillion dollar, ether the asset. And we should not be ashamed about that. Okay. In fact, we should be like Bitcoiners. So here's something that Bitcoin got right. Orange coin, number go up, 21 million. It's not supply for them. It's scripture.

Okay. They've turned it into a religion. Like, we've been in crypto long enough to actually see this, right? People used to laugh about this stuff. And now they're talking about Bitcoin on the treasury of the United States of America in a permanent way. Like, they did the hard thing, and they did it on the social layer. They did it through evangelism. How many network upgrades have you seen from Bitcoin over the years? Like...

Two. They don't talk about their network. Right. Okay? They all sing one hymn, and that is Bitcoin is a store of value. It's the money. Bitcoin is good. Bitcoin fixes this. And what did they do?

They turned it into a $2 trillion decentralized store of value asset, right? Like, how magic is that? And they did it through the propagation of, like, what I call a gospel, a religion. If you're not comfortable with that, it's a social consensus, right? It's incredibly powerful. And I think what Ethereum forgot is even if you build the best settlement engine on Earth and you build the best network, if you don't have a strong ether the asset, you will not achieve the goal of being a censorship resistant, you know, monetary system, store of value, like all of the defy things that we've been talking about for the world. It's like there's a switch. We celebrate when Coinbase adds a layer two. A base coming to Ethereum. Yay. Like, cool. Celebrate that. I'm super. excited too. But you know what would be even better? It's like when Coinbase adds, 250,000 ether to its balance sheet, it has like 140,000 now? 1090? 160? Something like that. We don't celebrate

that enough in the Ethereum community. And so that's the kind of reorientation I'm talking about. Yeah. There's been a, this has been a feature of the core Ethereum community and like DNA for a very long time. There are Ethereum, like, core devs who have always been about, you know, Ethereum the network. And ETH is just like a means to an end to produce the network. Whereas, like, you know, Bitcoiners actually, Bitcoin as a culture thinks that everything about the Bitcoin system that is not the 21 million unit hard cap is actually a burden, not something to like celebrate. And Ethereum is actually some parts of Ethereum culture is the other way around. Whereas like the asset itself is a burden for what we are trying to do, which is to produce like World War III resistant block space

for like whatever downstream products that that creates, which I think what you're saying is like there's a huge missing piece to the puzzle there. And when you snap that piece in, everything locks up. The incentives work. And I would say that like, like, I think the message that I would like for, that we would want to have this part of the Ethereum culture here is that, yes, building Ethereum the project, Ethereum, the network is extremely noble. And emphasizing Ether the money and growing Ether the money is a 10x multiplier on all of the effort that goes into building the network. It's just as noble for ETH to hit $10 trillion as to have an incredible decentralized network.

Both of those things are noble causes. We can take Ethereum's decentralization. It's credible neutrality. It's multi-client network. the extremely hard labor hours that's like many, many people have just poured into building an incredible network. And we can 100x the reach of that network by simultaneously investing into the value of the currency, which itself has properties of that network imbued in it. Yes. And so there's financial properties of the asset itself that has all of the same

properties that we have been working so hard to create in the network that now the asset has, and we should not shy away from the nature of it being a financial asset. We should actually lean into that. A hundred percent. You know, there was a tweet thread, Donkrad, who's an EF researcher for those that don't know, he put out a question on Twitter and just said, hey, what Ethereum apps require nation state level security resistance? That means the immune from nation state attack. What apps practically on Ethereum today do that? You know, people are throwing out different apps, you know, and different ideas like, well, is it like something like Zora? Is it, you know, something like staple coins, right?

It's like my answer, Ether. Ether. Ether itself is a use case. It's an app, okay? The trading and the borrowing and lending of Ether on Ethereum, small set of smart contracts, with a censorship-resistant global store of value, that is the app. the number one most important app that requires credibly neutral censorship resistance. It's money. And so the question, though, for the Ethereum community is often like, okay, cool, Ryan, you're saying this, David, you're saying this. You say this is all noble.

How do we do it? Here's the part. I'm just like, it's not rocket science. We talk more about ether the asset. We play the ground game. Like, what did Bitcoiners do? We just like all witness this in real time. It's not magic. they worked hard to meme this thing into existence. For me, it's not a marketing problem with like the perfect freight. It's an evangelism problem. It's a belief problem. It's a faith problem. Until we convince TradFi that ETH is good, Bluecoin is good, all the institutions will keep

saying, okay, you got a cool protocol. Ethereum the network is great. What do I buy, though? And they'll go buy something else. So I think this is kind of a bottom up community. type of approach and requires a reorientation, and it requires some bit of maximalism to hold ETH, tell everyone you know to hold ETH, shame L2s and Treasuries and Wales and Dows that don't hold ETH, celebrate people who hold Eth, give them the carrot, stake, restake, auto stake,

meme Eth as digital gold with yield, write, tweet, podcast, shippost, elect leaders who do the same, proselytize one-eath equals one-eath until it's kindergarten math. All right, that's You can call it irrational, but that's what a store of value is. What do you think gold is? It's irrational confidence. What do you think Bitcoin is? It's pure irrational confidence. And I think Ethereum is so kind of smart and so ivory tower that it doesn't respect the meme layer narrative of how you actually create a store of value.

I think there's some people who might say, okay, this sounds kind of toxic, Ryan, like you're losing me. You use the word shame, and I think a lot of people are going to be like, you want me to shame people? I don't like doing that. Okay. Do you want to win? Do we want to win? You're going to, a lot of people are not going to get on that boat.

A lot of the Ethereum community is not going to get on that boat. We don't need all of them. We need a contingent of Eith bulls that are just so hyped up on ETH that they veer on laser eyes. Okay? They don't have to go all the way Bitcoin toxicity. It doesn't require that. Ethereum has more. Theorem has an economy.

I'll talk about that later. But we need some faith in ethie asset. And we need to reorient what we talk about in the Ethereum community towards the asset. So the thing here is belief beats the spreadsheets. Right now, ether of the asset is stuck in this like, Sam from FRAX came on the podcast a couple episodes ago. And he talked about ether the asset being costing this discounted cash flow. hell. It's valued based on sort of the revenue that it produces. That is such bullshit, dude. Like, this is a global censorship resistant store of value like Bitcoin except it's programmable.

Okay? And you're going to value this thing on discounted cash flows. First of all, the cash that it throws off is denominating ether of the asset. You can't even do that. Why are you converting it to like USDC or dollars at the point of cash flow? None of that makes sense. The whole economy is recursive. All right. L1s, layer one tokens, are monetary assets first. The burn, the cash flow, that's just a way you've reduced supply. That's just a monetary, you know, feature. One thing I want to be clear, though, in this call to, you know, ETH maximalism is I'm talking about ether, the asset itself. I'm not talking about Ethereum the network. So my call to action is we're maximalist about Eith, the money, and that means we evangelize, we believe ourselves,

we push it out there, but we're very pragmatic when it comes to Ethereum the tech, right? And that gets into your roadmap, right? Should it be a product-centered? Of course it should be a product-centered roadmap. Should we bully L2s into joining the Ethereum United Chains of Ethereum? No, we shouldn't. We should have like financial reasons for them to do so. It should be in their best interest. We can't accomplish all of this like Ethereum Roadmap tech work through blind to maximalism.

Okay? So I don't want to be like Bitcoiners when it comes to Ethereum the network and technology. We should be extremely pragmatic when it comes to the network and dogmatic with respect to ether the asset. Maybe I throw out some hyperbole here that you're like not comfortable with, but I'm doing that to like push us and stretch the Overton window so that this community starts talking about its asset again. There are some things about this Ryan, which I actually feel pretty divergent from, where you said being pragmatic about Ethereum the network and Maximus about ether the asset. I actually have become more.

into the idea of being more maximalist about the Ethereum layer one and downstream of that just more pragmatic about the nature of ether the asset. Now, I'm also understanding the case of being maximalist about ether the asset, and so I think we have to kind of unpack this.

Maybe if we could turn to my article, we can open up this idea of this like Maslow's hierarchy of blockchain development. And so I have this triangle, this pyramid, in this article that illustrates Ethereum, the layer one at the very bottom, and then Ether the asset at the top of the pyramid. And then there's like a tech stack between these two things.

So at the foundation of everything is the Ethereum Layer 1, followed by devs and applications on the application layer, followed by Users, followed by Layer 2s, followed by Ether, the asset. And this article is trying to emphasize a reoriented. Some people are calling this a pivot, a strategic pivot. I'm calling this a strategic pivot in Ethereum. Other people are calling it a re-priority. whatever, it's all kind of semantics.

But previously, I think we, as a network, as a community, as a roadmap, made the wrong order of operations when building out the Ethereum network. And so we put, first we went the Ethereum layer one. Yes. And then we went layer twos. And then we went devs, apps, and users on top of that. And then there was like finally ether, like maybe at the top, but ultimately kind of discarded. And my mind was like, that is the wrong order of operations.

And in order to like realign the chakras of the Ethereum social, like, techno, tech stack, you need to put the layer one first. And you need to put more things on the layer one and scale out the layer one. And so this realignment of the Ethereum roadmap is what I'm calling like a product-centric roadmap, rather than a roll-up-centric roadmap, entering a product. product-centric roadmap. And so there are a bunch of like things, call to actions. I'll pause here, but there are a bunch of like calls to action.

Let me make sure I understand, like set this up for you. So you wrote this article called Restoring ETH's Product Money Feedback Loop, right? And the pyramid that you talked about with Ethereum Layer 1 at the bottom. So as Ethereum Layer 1 at the bottom, and then above that has devs and apps, and then above that has users. And then only above that does it have Layer 2s. And then on top is Ether the asset, right? Yeah.

So this is, what you're saying is, I think you're saying that this is the state you would like Ethereum to be. Yes. But what you're saying, I think, is we started with Ethereum Layer 1 and then we went straight to Layer 2s. And now all of the devs and apps and users are supposed to sit on top of our Layer 2s. And that's the wrong, like, layers of the cake. Right. And so you're basically, I think what you're driving towards is we need devs and apps and users back on the Ethereum Layer 1. And like too much emphasis on the layer two at this point in the roadmap.

I don't know if you'd say it was a mistake, but it's a detour and we need to like cut back to reprioritize the layer one. The mistake that we made was that we built out this layer one and then we skipped all the way to layer twos and there were like two or three steps that we should have taken before we started building out layer two's. Primarily, we should have expanded the layer one as much as reasonably possible

to keep everyone on the Ethereum economic hub. And so you want to be maximalist about Ether the money. I want to be maximalist about Ethereum, the economic hub of the Internet, which it was from 2015 to about 2022, where all the users, all the devs, All the applications were on the Ethereum layer one. And remember in that there was like a meta in 2021

where we were all realizing like, oh, the EVM is at the center of everything. Sure. And that positions Ethereum, the layer one is this economic hub of the Internet. The Ethereum needs to be restored as the economic hub of the Internet. And there was this positive feedback loop of value being created between the users on the Ethereum layer one would attract, like, first devs and Ethereum's, developer ecosystem would come build apps on the Ethereum layer one, which would attract users, which would attract even more devs and apps, which would attract gas fees and protocol revenue,

which all of this feed back into each other. Then it started to like elevate ether as this unit of account for buying NFTs in 2021. And all of a sudden, there's this positive feedback loop where people realize that this, this feedback loop was so strong that it resulted in like the excesses of this feedback loop turning into the value of. ether the asset. That was how ether the asset became elevated to become like sitting shoulder to shoulder with Bitcoin as a money out of the crypto industry. Right. And then we

injected layer twos into this feedback loop. And we said get off main net. And we said get off main net. And like the feedback loop got severed. Like the we we put a wall in between the speaker and the microphone. The signal died because Ethereum layer twos could not extend Ethereum network effects because now every single layer two has its own network effect.

Base wants to attract things to base. Optimism wants to attract things to optimism. Arbituram wants to attract things to optimism. The network effects were not reintegrated back into the layer one. And so what we should have done before investing so heavily into the Ethereum layer one

was research and build based and native rollups, which are the same ruleups, but they are more tightly integrated into the Ethereum layer one, and they do share the feedback loop of the Ethereum layer one. They share the network effects.

And then we also needed to invest more heavily into interop standards to allow for just more heavy integration of the extensions of Ethereum, the layer twos, the roll-ups, and everything, so that the network effects are the same. The feedback loops are the same. But we didn't do that.

We skipped straight into the layer twos and then also told everyone to get all off of Mainnet. And so we just did this wrong order of operations and this feedback loop that supports a very strong product foundation never was able to actually continue into showing up as price of ETH. Yeah, I want to add something to this that I think you're also implying here. When you talk about the Ethereum Layer 1 was formerly the undisputed economic hub. There was like nothing else, right?

It was obviously this would. You mean economic hub for basically asset issuance, all of the assets would be issued on top of Ethereum. The deepest liquidity would be on the Ethereum layer one. The nice thing about this type of thing is all of the most use smart contract protocols and defy protocols would be on the layer one. And the nice thing is when you're on the layer one, the default kind of becomes ether the asset.

When we think about like a money-ness story and like why are issuance and economic activity in the layer one better for Ether? as money, it's because the default on Ethereum Layer 1 is always Ether. It's not USDC. It's not some stable coin. It's not some roll-ups token or some other asset, wrapped Bitcoin. It's Ether. And so if Uniswap was doing a trading pair, the base trading pair would be Ether. Of course, other assets is a pluralistic economy. Other assets would come in. But it was always Ether First. It was always Ether first for, you know, Maker, collateral loans or for Ave. and like when you shift defy activity off of the layer one,

I think you're also losing the moniness of ether the asset. And so these two things are interrelated. Yeah. Yeah. And the way that I see this connecting to your article is the mistake, if you will, right, that I think that you are doing is you are copying the Bitcoin path of skipping towards talking about ether the asset, the asset of the network.

And I don't think the Ethereum system is, set up to support that. That is the Bitcoin system. So if you are a person who's predisposed to just talking about the asset of the layer one, you are likely a bitcoiner and you are likely not in the Ethereum community. If you're an Ethereum community, we have to understand the difference of the genetic makeup of both the code base of our network and the genetic makeup of our community. And that involves the parts of this Maso's hierarchy that sets up support for being maximumness about the asset. So if you want to be true, strong, and effective, ether, the asset maximalists, we need to have this foundation of a product support that supports ether. And so that

looks like a very strong layer one. That looks like an incredibly strong developer base, which Ethereum has. It looks like growing user base. And it looks like a tightly integrated, not dispersed layer two economy from introp standards and base and native rollups. And when these things become strong, then all of a sudden the Ethereum community has this foundation to stand on to go to Wall Street and beat its chest about the ether of the asset. I don't think you can skip straight there. You have to be maximalist about the Ethereum Layer 1 as an economic hub, and you need to have Tamash align the Ethereum product stack so that people like you and me can go beat our chess on this podcast about how great Etherty is. And if we just skip straight

there, then I think the market will reject it. So I guess what I would say is, like, I probably agree with you more than I disagree with you. My take is just that we can have wars in two theaters at the same time. So we can fight, you know, Hitler in the East, and, you know, we can war in the Pacific at the same time. There can be two fronts of this. And in fact, I think Ethereum needs kind of two fronts. We can chew gum and walk. We can meme ethyasa and talk about its values and virtues as a programmable money

and get all the analysts in Wall Street to stop thinking of this as a cash flow asset and to view it as it truly is, which is the internet native currency of a massive decentralized on-chain economy. We could work on that. And by the way, that doesn't require dev cycles. That just requires a community of believers

who can actually propagate this message while also pivoting and working on the Ethereum Layer 1 roadmap and making this even more true. Right? So like getting defy back on the layer one. And I think this is like recursive, you're reflexive loop feedback cycle. So when more people believe that ether is the money and eth number goes up, right,

we get compounding returns to defy on the layer one. People start to believe, oh, this is actually like a store of value asset, right? So like I'm not just saying that we can do both things at the same time. I'm saying like we actually need to do both things at the same time. and this is actually Ethereum superpower. So that's the one ad I would make. I think you're right. I also think I'm right.

I think we should do both at the same time. And I understand if sometimes people have a difficulty like balancing two ideas in their head at the same time. I totally think we can. I mean, it's like not that hard, right? Like we already have a model of commodity monies and we can bootstrap on that model. And now we can see what DFI is doing on the layer one.

And so I wholeheartedly support what you're, like, what you're saying on kind of the product side. Let me ask you, what do you think the, if you kind of laid out the problem, right, where Ethereum has been and why DFi is kind of like, not migrated, but the growth really hasn't occurred on Ethereum growth has stopped in 2021. Okay.

So what's the prescription? What do we do about it? How do we get back on track? Right. Number one, we scale the layer one to as far as it can go while preserving the things that make the Ethereum layer one special. So that's censorship resistance. That is decentralization.

I guess decentralization is a means to censorship resistance. Centrissive resistance really is the primary property here. So we scale the layer one to where we have seen like Donkrad, Ansgar, Justin Drake talk about it, which is like a 100x throughput in two years. So we 100x the size of the Ethereum layer one. And maybe the community responsibility here is to, like start talking and promoting. Like you want people to talk about ETH.

I want people to start talking about the layer one, not layer two's. Don't go to layer twos. Like defy on layer one basically. Defy on layer one. Tokens on layer one. Tokenized assets on layer one. Applications on layer one.

And so like you opened up this article, you know, Ethereum is our first love. Ethereum, the layer one is where we got started and where I want to be. and the project that I want to invest my time in. And I would like it if layer two's became base and native roll-ups because what does that mean?

That means they are trying to be as deeply integrated as possible with the Ethereum layer one. Once you are based in native, you actually, the lines between what a layer one is and what the layer two is are materially blurred. You are so close to the layer one that you might as well also be Ethereum.

Yeah. But the layer two is like today... They're not quite that right now. They are two, they have too high a degree of freedom. There's no, there's no, the network effects that do not recycle back into the layer one. They are actually more competitive

than what a positive sum grow the pie mentality. That's not their fault, by the way. That was the roadmap design. That was the role of roadmap design. And the posting DA was the thing that they were supposed to do and they're doing that for the most part. That's exactly right.

And so we scale the layer 100x. We turned the layer one into a ZKVM that's an insurance. grind roll-up on the layer one. We build out interrupt standards. We build out base and native roll-ups. And then we double down on users on the layer one, applications on the layer one. And then we take this product to Wall Street and look, look, we have the best of both worlds. We have a scaled layer one and we have a fully extensible layer one with base of native roll-ups. And so the economic hub of the layer one, what that looks like is the network affects,

the positive feedback loop starts to bleed back into each other and we can get this whole engine going again where the users comes because the devs comes because the layer twos are now integrated, not dispersed in this positive feedback loop crescendos into elevating ether the asset to sit as the second crypto money to roll out of crypto. Do you like that to Mosh Line

like recently on Twitter? He was like Ethereum is for everyone and everything. And it's kind of an inversion of the future of Ethereum is Coinbase to the future of Coinbase is Ethereum. Ethereum. Actually, it's like, I think you have a line in here where you're talking about treating L2s as customers, not the destiny, right? Yes.

Along with customers that are direct users on the L1, that's another co-equal customer, right? And also, devs, the entrepreneurs who are actually building on Ethereum, all of those are customers. I think that's what you're saying. And if it's a, I guess if it's a product-centric roadmap, right, who are we developing this product for, would you say? Yeah. I mean, the world, I would say for everyone. I think that's exactly right. I think in that line that you talked about, which is like previously the Ethereum roadmap made Layer 2's like the centerpiece of Ethereum scaling. How will Ethereum scale? It will scale with layer twos. And that creates an incredible problem. Because of since layer twos are permissionless, does that mean every layer 2 is part of this like centerpiece of Ethereum scaling? Because that means, like, base is in charge of the future of Ethereum. That means the next marginal layer two. You know,

movement, the layer two that has been in the limelight for a very bad reason, that was the centerpiece of Ethereum's like main focus on scaling. No, like Ethereum needs to be in charge of its scaling destinies, not extending this out to like networks with opposing incentives. and so, like, this product that we are building needs to be, like, Ethereum, and who we are building this for is the internet users who want to have any sort of relationship with, you know, finance.

If I were to bottom line, what your article is saying is just like, right now, Ethereum is sort of staying stagnant. Maybe it's not getting smaller, but it's kind of staying the same size, the layer one. Well, the layer two's are getting bigger and bigger and bigger, right? Yeah. And you're calling for layer two is to get bigger, but the layer one to also get bigger

and to get much bigger, right? Like this is kind of the diagram that you're showing right now. It's kind of a small Ethereum in the center and these layer twos just get kind of bigger and bigger. You're calling for like a bigger Ethereum layer one is the economic hub. And like these layer twos can also grow,

but Ethereum as a layer one has to be a center for defy liquidity and users and economic value transaction and asset issuance and all of the things that require that censorship-resistant decentralization. Now, I would even go so far to say the way that I have this diagram drawn is all these layer two circles. They have a line between the layer two circle and then the center Ethereum layer one circle, and that line can like represent the bridge. A base and native roll-up actually does not have a

bridge. It is more tightly integrated with the layer one itself. And so it's actually not a separate circle. And so the Ethereum layer one can actually start to integrate and gobble up the layer twos and have it be a part of this like seamless design, which has always been the vision of this tightly integrated layer one that is both vertically, vertically and horizontally scalable. And so like, I know like that I'm going to say, I'm going to say the words that Ethereum people don't like, like this integrated roadmap, we used to call it monolithic, but like Kyle, Somani and Multicoin and all this lot of people started to use this integrated word, we need to integrate the layer twos.

We need to put the layer twos into the layer ones. And it needs to be this one seamless product tech stack that doesn't have these layers that can have if they wanted to because it's a permissible network. But we need to create more strength and more surface area for integrate, more tightly integrated layer twos into the Ethereum layer one. I've got an idea, I think, for like my next piece on the United chains of Ethereum that sort of presents an analogy that I think fits very well with your article. Do you want to talk about that next?

Yeah, let's go there. All right. Well, before we do, let's, yeah, let's stop and thank the sponsors who made this episode possible. Uniswap is your gateway to a more efficient defy experience. With Uniswap swapping and bridging across 13 chains, is simple, fast, and cost-effective, helping you move value wherever, whenever. Thanks to deep liquidity on the Uniswap protocol, you'll enjoy minimal price impact on every trade, and now Uniswop V4 takes it even further.

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like on cello or off chain audited by zK security the self app is live on iOS and play store visit self dot xy z and follow self protocol on x david i think your your prescription of a strong economic hub strong layer one was exactly what i was getting at in the second article i wrote after i got back and my second call my first call was a call for ether the asset maximalism my second call to action is like similar to yours it's like a call to nationalism and I sort of, like, a lot of the things that you said also resonate with me. And I was thinking about this analogy. You know, I've been somewhat obsessed about this, right? It's like comparing, you know, Bologi's network state ideas never gotten out of my mind. I think that's ultimately what we're creating. We're creating kind of these new substrates for human coordination and economic activity, almost like a nation state, except it's an internet native network. Okay. And so Ethereum is like a network state. But the problem is, we're two federations. were not coordinated enough. And that was a problem that the early United States of America actually faced. Okay. So they had won the war. This is post the Revolutionary War in the 1700s. And they had

set up this loose articles of confederation for all of the 13 colonies to kind of be loosely and not aligned in a security pact, right? And obviously they had some degree of security pact. They just fought off the British. And that was somewhat successful. But now they still had a coordination problem after they won the war, which is these are still 13 separate states, almost like 13 separate nations. Oh, 13 separate chains. I included in the top of this article, which is called toward a united chains of Ethereum, a quote from George Washington. And he said this. He wrote to one of his key advisors, James McKenry at the time. This is August 1785. Again, this is post-revolutionary war, but instill the articles of Confederation era. Pre-constitution, he said this. We are one nation today.

and 13 tomorrow, who will treat with us on such terms? This is this letter. What he was talking about is basically had this problem. Congress had no power to regulate trade or foreign commerce. So every time they would try to strike up a deal with the British or the French, they refused to sign trade deals because all of the separate states were negotiating separately. And so he was so frustrated by this because there was not a strong central government. He said without...

There was not a strong interop standard? There was not a strong interop standard. There was like not a strong, like layer one effectively. There was not a strong federal. All the power was in the hands of the chains in the states. And he said, without stronger federal authority, America, quote, looked ridiculous in the eyes of the nations of the earth. In a word, we are one nation today and 13 tomorrow.

No one's going to deal with us on these terms, right? We're too dis-coordinated. And this is actually like a problem. with a lot of federal, federalistic models, which have power distributed among individual states. I mean, there's great advantages of that. But if you don't glue the coordination, right, then you always have problems. I mean, you could even look to the European Union today, right?

It's kind of you've got an economic alignment, but is it starting to fracture? How long will it hold? There's not, maybe there's not enough coordination glue to hold that thing together over the long run. I mean, the UK and Brexit is a recent example of a chain basically saying, hey, we're going our own way, where, like, this coordination system is really not working. And so you have to balance powers and you have to stay economically aligned if you want a federalist model to actually work. And so effectively, my take on Ethereum is that it is in between its articles of Confederation era and the Constitution. Of course, for the U.S., the way out was drafting the Constitution, and that was a protocol upgrade to more closely align the states, the 13 colonies, into one unified United States of America instead of 13 different entities with varying economic power. Ethereum has not struck its balance.

Like, to your point, right? It is operating. The way I see basically all of the chains of Ethereum, it's almost like a security alliance, David. Okay, so it's almost like some member nations, member chains, inside of NATO. Do you know, like the NATO alliance, it's a security alliance? Mainly the United States kind of enforces it. They're the big military power, but the other nation states kind of come in. They get this security shelter effectively, right, from their adversaries.

But they can, like, leave at any time. They can totally leave. They operate on a separate currency, okay? They are not. I was wondering if you're going to bring that up. Yeah, so all 13 colonies had 13 different currencies. Right. Imagine how chaotic that was.

There was no coherence. There was in each one of those things was less valuable than if they had just put them all together and had 13 of them. And that's where we are today. That's where we are today. Effectively, the chains are all in an Ethereum security alliance. They're in some form of NATO. But you know the united chains of Ethereum that we were promised? We're actually not there yet.

We haven't done the work to actually unite all the chains. it's exactly what you were saying, right? And so if you swap out colonies for roll-ups, you got base. So I'm not picking on any specific roll-up, but base can literally swap out Ethereum's data availability layer at any time. Any layer two can just leave. They can all just leave. They can.

Now they don't because of why, right? Like because the brand, they do want the security. There's enough of an epicenter. Yeah. But it's not as cohesive as coordinated. It's not an Ethereum, a United States, chains of Ethereum yet. Chains like Polygon, when you cross over to Polygon, does that feel like Ethereum?

It feels like a foreign country, man. You got to cross a bridge. They're all new chains. New currency. You got borders on the thing. Starknet, to use another example, collects his taxes and ether, I guess, right, transaction fees, but also STRK, the Stark, is the Starknet token. Okay?

Do any of the states in the United States of America? Like, is there a, you know, Washington coin that you can pay taxes in if you're in the state of Washington or a New York coin? No, it's all the dollar. It's all unified, all right? So our problem is really ironically, it's kind of a coordination problem with the chains as they are today. We're not a union of chains. We're a loose security alliance. And so what I'm calling for is for Ethereum nationalism. All right? We need to fuse this, these separate colonies, these separate chains. And I know like we're all vision aligned, or many of them are, but we need to fuse this into an actual united chains of theorem so it feels like one network state one one nation e plurbus unum okay so nationalism for

eth what does that mean we do have a set of shared values do you know how ology when he talks about the nation state he says there's two words there there's the word nation and that like the word nation is kind of derived from basically tribes it's values shared values that we all have right it's the thing that makes you feel patriotic and proud it's the thing that causes you to like maybe want to die for your country and for your belief system and, you know, those that live there. It's like this kind of a medic, deep in the soul sort of thing. And that's one part of a nation. The other part is the state itself. What's the state? Well, that's the bureaucracy. It's the laws. It's the protocol, if you will. Okay. Network state, nation state. Ethereum needs some nation type energy,

some national energy. And I think a focal point for that energy, I come back to ether the asset. We can express our patriotism in ether the asset. We can express our patriotism in ether the asset. Bitcoiners have this, this, well, they have strong nationalism. There's, there's a thing called Bitcoin nationalism. And it's basically like stack sats, that binds us all. You know, that's what you do. That's the ritual. What's our ritual? It's buying ether and holding ether. Okay. If we want sense, if we want to express our values like censorship resistant, what do we do? Buy hold and stake or eth. If we want public goods, we want the EF to continue funding research. We want this community to economically thrive.

What do we do? We buy hold and stake. Same thing. We make ethie indispensable asset that L2s also rely on. Okay? So I think we should socially move towards nationalistic L2s. And again, you could use the shame tactic. I prefer the carrot tactic, whatever possible.

But what would an economically aligned L2 actually look like? I think they should hold some of their treasury in ether. the asset. How much? 10%, 20%, they should have some, they should be invested in the Ethereum economy, right? They're part of the network of chains. So why not hold some of your reserves in ether of the asset, except transaction fees in eth, put ether as a centerpoint in wallets and dashboards, you can measure their success by how much ether importing into their network. They're preaching, they're actually helping us evangelize ether as a store of value to outside world. It's a buy those war bonds type of thing. Okay. And when they do that, when we see

chains like Arbitrum join the Strategic Ether Reserve and they say we have, you know, 100,000 ether in the strategic Ethereum that we're holding on our treasury, we should praise that. We should get really excited. Arbitrum has a crap ton of Eth in their treasury. Well done. Which is worthy of praise. Well done. Let's start here, right? Go find out Coinbase. We just mentioned them earlier. I mean, they're stacking some eth. They bought like, I don't know, 40,000 ether last quarter. Well done.

Well done. Okay. That's nationalism. And the center point can be ether of the asset. The other thing is I think you're exactly right. We need a stronger coordinating mechanism for our L2s. And my prescription is exactly the same as yours, which is you need a stronger L1. Okay.

A stronger L1 won't disincent chains to become L2s. They will want to join, like, chains want to join networks of chains that are strong, that have deep liquidity, that have power, that have the security to like... People want to ally with the winner. Yes. So be a winner. A strong L2 is good for all of the chains, and they won't respond by, like, defecting and be like, oh, you're growing too strong, L1.

They will get more chains. to join, right? It's like a positive sum mentality here. So a strong layer one is good. Also, it gives the layer one more negotiating power. Imagine the contrast, so weak layer one. You know, if the layer one starts to become, like layer two start to become the tail wagging the dog, at some point in time, they'll look around and they'll say, wait, why do I need you again? Like, why am I in the security alliance? I could just be doing something. They'll leave the network. So a strong layer one is foundational. I'm completely aligned with what you're talking about there.

And then I also think base native roll-ups, that's the economic alignment. So right now we have separate countries in a security alliance. That's today's roll-ups where they're posting DA. That's okay. That's a start. They're all in the same, like they're all in NATO, whatever. Based roll-ups are more like territories of an Ethereum Republic. Okay?

Native roll-ups for themselves. They're actually states. They're actually states. Why? They're sharing the economic upside of the Ethereum. through the asset. That's where MEV fees go. They're using ether as a currency. They're natively interoperable. They're much more like a united chains of Ethereum. So those two things, scale the L1, and then we've got to get L2s on a track where they are converting to based and native roll-ups,

and they won't do it for the sake of being good for altruism. Let's not depend on that. It has to be an active economic self-interest. We have to make it so appealing to them to join the United Chains of Ethereum that it's just like obvious that they want to become a based roll up. That I think is the way out. That's like how we get our Philadelphia Convention, Constitution. It could take some time for that to play out. It's going to take some time. It's going to take some time. It's not going to happen overnight. But I think that's the path to actually creating this vision. It's not the status quo of just like posting DA to Ethereum. As the Ethereum products starts to shift focus towards the power of its layer one, the capacity of its layer one, elevating the layer one,

as like the centerpiece, I actually think that there is going to be a shift towards like layer one maximalists. Yes. And I'm seeing myself be compelled by this vision. There's this tweet out there from Spire. I just sent in to you in Discord, but it's also in my article. Spire, and this is the team that's building a based roll-up infrastructure, yeah. And it's showing this like spectrum of layer twos that are or are not Ethereum.

And I think that like are layer two's Ethereum, the answer is less, well, that's a spectrum. spectrum. If they are a layer two that does not consume Ethereum DA and only settles to Ethereum, that's a chain with a bridge. You know, that's a chain with a, you know, wormhole does that, right? There's no material, there's no strong connection there. So it's hard to call a layer two, a non-roll-up layer two, to be truly Ethereum. Now, a roll-up is if you settle on Ethereum and you also use DA, that's the kind of that security alliance that you were talking about. You know, there are property rights guarantees that the Ethereum layer one extends. It's a property rights guarantee.

Yeah. But it's not economic alignment, is it? It's not economic alignment. We are still splitting the network effects of the countries. Like the base or arbitrum or optimism flag is their flag, not the flag of Ethereum. They have their flag. And so it's separate. There are some, again, security guarantees, but these are still separate chains.

And then we get into base or native rollups, which share either sequencing or execution respectively. And then there's based and native roll-ups, which has a one-to-one continuation of Ethereum's settlement, Ethereum's DA, Ethereum sequencing, and Ethereum execution. And it starts to actually be really hard to argue that that is actually not Ethereum. And again, this is where the lines blur between layer ones and layer two. And so the way that I see current roll-ups as they are today, arbitram, optimism, base, world chain, you actually, in order to go from Ethereum layer one to these chains, you have to bring your passport. Yes. You have to show a proof and you have to wait in line

and you have to bridge over there. You go through border security. On base and native roll-ups, you do not have to do that. It is going from Oregon to California to Nevada. Interstate highway, baby. Interstate highways,

you just breeze right through and in base and native roll-ups. It's the same money in both states. It's the same money. There doesn't have to be a token. I mean, there doesn't really have to be a token, but like base and native roll-ups can be tokenless,

governance-less extensions of Ethereum that can stop fracturing the monetary power of ether the asset. I mean, every state has like, you know, state bonds, for instance, right? Yeah. But they're not the monetary unit of the state. They're not the store of value of the state, are they?

They're just like different financial tools to get kind of, I guess, upside in the state of California, I guess, if you want to buy some municipal bonds or something like that. Yeah. So I would like to open up the door. for this like layer one maximalist position where nationalists yeah we got to we got to bring them in here where like layer roll up player two is that do not share sequencing and execution with ethereum are

customers of ethereum but they are not the ethereum network they are not integrated into the theorem network they are good for ethereum we want them they are part of this security alliance with ethereum and i don't the Ethereum network is the integrated base and native roll-ups yeah and i i don't think there's kind of like a protocol change that can sort of enforce this, which is why it sort of has to be a kind of social layer thing. It's like if you look at L2B, L2B is it has stage zero through stage two. But as you progress through the stages, the Ethereum community collapse gives you collapse and you get more and more kind of legitimacy and credibility, right? And Vitalik might tweet about you. But stage zero to stage two, it's all about property rights for users.

And that's fantastic. I'm really excited about that. I'm really excited about that. all roll-ups on the journey to stage two, you're doing fantastic. That's great work, okay? But getting to stage two does not equal United Chains of Ethereum because it doesn't equal interoperability and economic alignment.

And if you want an actual United Chains of Ethereum and not just like a NATO security pact, you have to, we need other stages. We need economic stages. Your stage zero maybe right now if you're posting DA and your stage one if you become a based roll-up. That's the type of thing we need here.

And I think if we don't do that, David, we talked about the U.S. and they kind of crossed the chasm and they got their shit together and they created a constitution. They figured out of their protocol. If we don't do that, there's a lot of examples of networks that have kind of disintegrated due to like too much federation. I think a perfect example of this is Cosmos. Yeah. So Cosmos was like a promising crypto network.

It was an Ethereum challenger. And their whole thing was like no empires, all city states, basically. All really power. Every chain is really powerful. And so they had no central force to kind of hold the network of chains together. And I know the project's not done. I know there's still some cost of those people out there. But like, they maintained a weak center.

They didn't, Adam never became a monetary unit for their ecosystem. There was strong tech. There was good values, but it was too fragmented to actually have an impact in the world. At least at current state, maybe they can pivot. But they have to pivot so hard at this point. And it's so contrary to their value. And remember they, we used to have people like Sunny on the podcast used to call Ethereum an Empire. Yeah.

I mean, I've been calling Ethereum an Empire. And I'm like, yeah, that's a winning strategy. It is a winning strategy. But the thing is, we're not pulling off our empire. We're not pulling off our like America from the like 1800s. And so nationalism of ether, the asset, federalism of our chains, but with a strong central protocol that I think is the prescription. Yeah. You ready for the last take?

Sure. this one's really short. Last article I wrote is Ether commodity money backed by an economy. So first was about maximalism. The second was about L1, like nationalism, I guess, and the third is about narrative. And so this is kind of what I feel like we're doing is we're telling a weak story for Ether the asset. So this sort of goes with the Blue Money Gospel. ETH is not a cash flowing equity. What is ETH? It is a network state. It is a commodity money backed by an economy. Another, I guess, lesson from American history. If you wanted to long America post-war, so it was very clear that America was like the dominant superpower post-World War II. It's 1947. The war is over. Let's say you're bullish on the U.S. economy, okay?

You're bullish on the builders, the population, the trade routes, the empire itself, right? Pax Americana. You can kind of see this coming. How do you capture that upside if you're not going to pick any stocks? Okay. What you do is you actually, to bet on the U.S. at that point in time, you need a basket. You need stocks, U.S. stocks, S&P type stuff. You need bonds. You need the land, the property that's available in America. And you need that all priced in dollars because that's America's currency, basically, right? You can't just buy dollars. You can't just buy government bonds. You need all

of those things in some sort of weighted basket. If you put $1K, like $1,000 into that basket in 1947 and you wrote that thing up, it would be worth three to four million dollars today. The America Index for Pax Americana in 1947, okay? That's what I'm saying Ethereum is. You buy ether and you're automatically buying that asset because it's a currency that's not getting inflated. You're buying essentially the stocks, the bonds, the land, all priced in ETH. You're buying the indycy of the Ethereum property rights empire.

And if this subsumes the entire internet and becomes the property rights layer of the internet, you're basically buying a piece of the internet economy, the property rights layer of the Ethereum economy, right? So if you swap out United States for Ethereum, the protocol rules are the constitution, the fee burn, that's like taxes, the roll up bridges, this is like trade routes, validators are a defense system, smart contract ownership, that's property rights. You can see how all of this equates to something like a network state. So ether, not a DCF, it's an index, all right? It's a commodity money backed by an entire economy. And I think if you're going long-eath, right, you're bullish on that entire economy. So it's different than Bitcoin. Bitcoin is

kind of like digital gold, but there's not an economy, an on-chain economy blowing up around Bitcoin, at least not yet, right? Maybe in the future Bitcoin does its layer twos, we'll see. But Ethereum is miles ahead with respect to an on-chain economy. And so that's really what you're buying. And I think we need to take strides to improve that narrative and how we tell that story to like Wall Street, to the world, to the rest of crypto, and get off this, you know, cash flow type of valuation method. So that was my last take here. I have my last take that I think is a continuation of this and also some things we've also been talking about. And the idea here is like if we were trying to restore the Ethereum economy and also restore it to plug back into

ether. We also need to rethink about our messaging. And I think something that you will agree with me on is that the Ethereum community itself is a part of the Ethereum product that we are trying to sell to the world. It is an integrated part. So like what do Bitcoiners do? They are the marketers, the sales force of Bitcoin. All all blockchains have their community as like this army of supporters that message and show like what this what their network is all about. And so this is true for Ethereum too. And so we are trying to, we need to also think about as a community, how do we market this Ethereum product. And that is why I'm like one of my big call to action called arms is like promote the layer one, promote the economic hub of the internet to be Ethereum, the layer one

and expand the capacity of the layer one to fit more people. And previously, Ethereum messaging has been like get off the layer one. The layer one is not for users. Ethereum's not for users. Layer two's are for users. We need to completely stop saying that. We need to never, ever say that again. We need to say like, no, everyone, builders, if you want to build something useful in crypto and get distribution, you go to the layer one. You want to like buy a tokenized asset, you go to the Ethereum layer one. We need to expand the capacity of the Ethereum layer one so that fees don't go up when too many people do this. And we need to make sure fees stay down as low as possible. And in my article, I have a bit of a mea culpa that I would like to share on the podcast here

because I think the Ethereum community has done this. I think we bankless, I did this and I'm going to stop doing this. And this is the Ethereum community needs to stop gerrymandering support around products or apps or use cases, which we find distasteful or immoral. Stop purity testing. We need to stop purity testing. Because right now, and it has been in this for a while, the Ethereum community feels like the hall monitors of crypto. And we are like the losers of crypto. It is like, yeah, we are the people who just like really care about the values at the cost of everything else.

And we are leading Ethereum down that path if we continue to gerrymander our support around like use cases that we find morally upstanding or or inappropriate on the layer one. One of these examples is like Lido. We all try to like ostracize and expunge Lido for like threatening to cross the 33% barrier. and I understand why that's important, and I get it. We also do the same things around meme coins. And speculation and trading. We don't, like, Ethereum community and traders don't go well together. And Ethereum, the community and speculation, we, like, resist speculation.

And so, like, where did all the speculators and traders go? Now they're on Solana. And now we don't have that liquidity anymore. We don't have that volume anymore. And now we're trying to, like, start the engine back on our own economy. and we need to be more open to speculation in traders. And there's a tweet that Alon from Pump.comFund tweeted out that I think is perfectly correct. And he says,

traders are easily the most important user group in crypto. I'll include speculators on this. Not creators, not devs. If traders don't see value, creators and devs don't eat and they go elsewhere. So if you're tokenizing anything, traders come first. And again, also speculators. Speculators, traders, they put the first dollar into a brand new application. They try things out first.

They are the bootloaders for an application layer. And like the idea of like the internet economy, the internet marketplace, requires traders and speculators to foster breeding grounds for good applications. And we need those applications to be on the Ethereum layer one. And we need speculators and traders to go on the layer one. So like we need to as a community stop like trying to say like the Ethereum layer one is for this or is not for that. Yeah, yeah. The Ethereum layer one is for absolutely everyone.

It is for users. It is for traders. It is for speculators. It is for DGens. It is for tokenized Wall Street. It is for everything. And we can't be like moralistic about our network, especially when like the biggest, one of the biggest values that the Ethereum ecosystem has is permissionlessness.

We can't be policing use cases on the permissionless network. That doesn't make any sense. And so we have to just stop doing that and say the Ethereum layer one is for absolutely everything. Yeah. And I think that a way that you, we could do some of these themes, we talked about sort of, you know, even using, using the word maximalism and nationalism and not purity testing, right? It's like, you don't have to be toxic in doing this, right? Like, you don't have to talk about all the other assets and all the other chains that are shit. And like, you can focus on the thing that makes Ethereum different and good and unique. Focus on the bright spots, right?

Like it doesn't have to be toxic, you know, punching down or punching up on everybody else. It can just be like exalting the things that, you know, we feel like are valuable for the community. So let me ask you this in closing, David, as we kind of wrap this up. Again, these are all our takes, like take them or leave them guys. So, I mean, like, I'm curious to hear how people will react to this actually in the Ethereum community. But my question to you is, at this point in time, we just define what winning actually means for Ethereum. And it's got to be some version of a multi-trillion dollar ether asset and a successful network where Ethereum, the later one, is kind of the central economic hub for property rights for basically everything that gets tokenized on the internet. Okay?

That's the win condition. Let me ask you this. Do you think Ethereum can still win? It is materially harder today than it was in 2021 or 2022. to. We have our work cut out for us because Bitcoin, its arc has continued. It has never stopped growing its branding as digital gold. And now it is treated as a special snowflake by the largest government in the world of the United States. There is a thing called a strategic Bitcoin Reserve. And that is something that Ethereum ought to aspire towards. Meanwhile, as Ether has lost

its moniness, it has fallen itself back into an inferior valuation bucket, which is the smart contract layer one, which is a very crowded marketplace, which I don't know if Ethereum has the chops to compete in that marketplace along the likes of much more centralized, faster moving competitors, which are willing to cut corners. So it's now in an environment that it is not suited to win in, and it needs to get out of that environment. Ethereum has the highest upside, I think the Ethereum roadmap, the roadmap that all blockchains are on, Bitcoin is on the same roadmap, like Bitcoin wants Slater 2s, Solana has network extensions, all of these things are kind of doing the same thing of building this grand unified vision for the blockchain. Ethereum has the largest upside of if it executes that, it executes that better than anyone else. And in a way that is inaccessible to Solana, inaccessible to Bitcoin.

The Ethereum, the grand unified vision of Ethereum is the largest tam that exists. And only Ethereum has the ability to actually produce that. Because the Solana version of like a roll-up-centric roadmap does not, it's constrained. And so is Bitcoin's. Ethereum has the possibility of the largest possible Tam. And we just need to get it there. And so can it get there? Absolutely.

So that's my take. It's hard. But it can get even close enough is fine too. We will get close to $5 trillion. maybe we get three trillion dollars. But yeah, all it has to do is try. And then we get trillions of dollars of ETH. I don't know. That's my take. What's your take? Yeah, I agree with that note of optimism. And particularly, I'll double click on. I think Ethereum has the most ambitious, the most ambitious vision of anything in crypto, which is not just to become a store of value,

but to become an entire on-chain economy. If Ethereum can pull off the reserve asset, store of value and also the united chains of Ethereum is like unstoppable. I have no idea how large that could grow, but I think the market cap of gold is just like not sufficient. Do you know, like if you have the entire internet economy built on top of this thing, what's the value of that? And so right now, I think the market is pricing Ethereum potentially. If you like believe that it can swing back towards some of these narratives that we've been talking about, is pricing it at a tremendous discount. You know, it's like what, it's 99% discounted to gold right now. It's like 87% discounted to Bitcoin. I mean, like the ratio is that lows we haven't seen since 2021. So the market's

fading it hard. And if you think that the market is kind of underplaying, it's indisputable that of the two assets in crypto, the second, that is most likely to become a store value asset is Ether. And just on that basis alone, why is not Ether trading at a trillion dollars? Just because it has a chance, okay? I think the market is saying, well, that chance is a lot lower than we used to think, right, compared to Bitcoin. If you want to counter trade that, it's a tremendous opportunity to buy Ether at these prices.

So, look, who knows what could happen? Bitcoin always had a very narrow chance of making it to the other side, right? What they had was faith and conviction and a bunch of believers who always thought it was inevitable, right? Ether still also has a small chance to make it the other side. But like, look at what it's doing. Look at how far it's come. So it's not something. It still has some incredible assets on its balance.

100%. That no other ecosystem has. 100%. So I wouldn't bet against it. And maybe there's an opportunity to get at a good price. So I guess we'll end with that. Bankless Nation. Thanks so much.

You guys know crypto is risky. You could lose what you put in. But we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on The Bankless Journey. Thanks a lot.