Bankless - SotN #3 GROWING (The Flippening is Back, India Banning China, DEXs going parabolic)
Episode Date: July 2, 2020STATE OF THE NATION #3 - Tuesday, June 23, 2020 The State of the Bankless Nation is....GROWING! The Bankless boys discuss why. Watch the video here. Covered: The Flippening is back (will ETH flip BTC...?) India Bannking China (and why it's good for Ethereum & Bitcoin) DEXes going parabolic (bigger than Binance?) ----- GO BANKLESS WITH THESE SPONSOR TOOLS: 💸 RAMP - FIAT ONRAMP FOR DEFI (ONRAMP $100k FREE WHEN YOU MENTION BANKLESS) https://ramp.network/ 💳 MONOLITH - GET THE HOLY GRAIL OF BANKLESS VISA CARDS https://monolith.xyz/ 🌈AAVE - LEND & BORROW YOUR CRYPTO W/O A BANK https://aave.com/ 📈MULTIS - BANK YOUR BUSINESS W/O A BANK! (1 MO TRIAL - JUMP QUEUE WITH "BANKLESS") https://multis.co/ ----- Action items: Look at the Flippening Metrics Read: An Inside Look at China’s Digital Currency Check out DEX metrics dashboard ----- Don't stop at the show! Subscribe to the Bankless newsletter program http://bankless.substack.com/ Visit the official Bankless website for resources http://banklesshq.com/ Follow Bankless on Twitter https://twitter.com/BanklessHQ Follow Ryan on Twitter https://twitter.com/ryansadams Follow David on Twitter https://twitter.com/TrustlessState Follow DeFi Dad on Twitter https://twitter.com/DeFi_Dad ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time we may add links in this channel to products we use. We may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. We'll always disclose when this is the case.
Transcript
Discussion (0)
All right, welcome to another edition, the third edition of State of the Nation. I've got
myself, Ryan, Sean Adams, and we've got David Hoffman. And we're here to talk about the state
of the bankless nation today. David, how are you doing? I'm doing really good, Ryan. Lots of things
are moving around in the bankless nation. And I'm really excited to peel back the layers and get
into it with you. Well, I can't wait to ask you my starting question. But before we do, for those of
you who are new to State of the Nation, we do this every Tuesday. So every Tuesday, sometime,
mid-morning or afternoon, depending on your time zone, we will release this on YouTube.
So make sure you subscribe. We'll also release a podcast version of this on our podcast stream
on Wednesdays, but you get it on YouTube a date earlier if you're subscribed and tuning in.
This is where we talk about big picture stuff and we relate the events in the news to what
is happening in the bankless nation. And the first question, I always ask David,
on these is what I'm about to ask him. David, what is the state of the nation right now, sir?
The state of the nation is growing. So we had this bullish period and then we had this
churning period. Those were the last two states of the nation. And now things are settling and things
are really developing. And so we're seeing a lot of these applications come into maturity.
The churning state of the nation last week was all about learning how these defy apps and
and users of these defy apps would come to grow accustomed to this new paradigm that we are in with
the defy tokens, as well as the surge of automated market makers. And now that we have absorbed
these new things, we are now maturing with them and they are developing and growing. And we are all
doing that alongside the bankless nation. I like that word growing. It also implies sort of that we've
move from maybe a period of infancy to adolescence. And are we, are we in puberty right now, David? Because,
you know, not everything is going smoothly. We are growing, but there's sort of an awkward phase in some,
in some ways, too. Yeah, the puberty was the real word that we wanted to say, but kind of, kind of an awkward word.
But yeah, really, when we pull back the layers, we are talking about going through banklessness,
the bankless nation is going through puberty, right? Like, we're seeing a lot of good strides and we're
seeing a lot of voice cracks and hiccups and kind of kind of our feet are really big and we're not
used to it stuff like that yeah the smell of ax body spray you know that kind of thing all right so
let's talk about three things today uh we want to talk about the flippinging we want to talk about
india banning ticot and really what they're doing is banning china and how that relates to to crypto
and we're to talk about the insane growth that's your word for the state of the nation of dexes
today and relate that into concepts let's first start talking about
the flippinging. David, when I say the word flippinging, what comes to mind for you? What are we talking
about there? I think the most simple answer is the market cap of Ethereum flips the market cap of
Bitcoin, but there are a bunch of other metrics that we could go into and each one represents
its own flipping. But the real point, the real point of contention is the flippinging between
the market cap of Bitcoin and Ethereum in my mind. Okay, so that was a meme that was like popular in
2017. Bickoiners hated it. Ethereum's loved it. I remember in 2017, Ether, the market cap of
Ether got within striking distance of the market cap of Bitcoin for the first time. It was like,
it was like 70%-ish of the market cap of Bitcoin. And then Bitcoin took off and Ethereum really,
ether really never recovered. And the meme of the flippinging died pretty much or faded out,
if you will. Even there was a website called Flippening Watch, which I remember from back in that time,
it's no longer maintained. So that tells you that the meme has died. It's not updated. It's not even
online. It's no longer maintained. But there is a new flippinging, there's a new flippinging
dashboard that just came to my attention. I guess somebody built this and sent it out. I think that
the meme might be resurrected. It's probably a bit early right now, but in the next billable cycle,
I anticipate Ethereum bulls to be resurrecting this meme.
Is there anything to it?
What I've got on my screen is actually the dashboard that I was talking about
with some flippening metrics in addition to market cap.
Do you think it's possible that we will see a flippening of market cap?
And what about these other metrics?
Yeah, I absolutely think it's possible.
And I think the more and more Bitcoin that comes to Ethereum
just makes it more and more likely.
And there are, so there are eight metrics.
metrics here. We have like market cap, transaction count, trading volume, node count, active addresses, transaction volume, transaction fees, Google search interest.
Like I said at the beginning of this, the real metric is market cap, right? All of these other metrics, including things like Google search interests, which aren't even something that's like a metric on chain. They're just meant to illustrate perhaps mind share or and then the transaction volume is supposed to illustrate like currency trading volume.
but really what we're going for is like market cap, right?
That is the real flippinging metric.
All of these other metrics.
Sorry?
That's looking pretty weak, wouldn't you say?
It's looking pretty weak.
Like 15%.
So right now.
It's the worst one.
It's the worst one.
Right.
So right now, Ethereum is kind of like Ether's the dark horse here
because there was a time where it's 70% of Bitcoin's market cap.
And now it's on the flippinging metrics website.
It's only 15% of market cap.
And all these other metrics, right?
especially things like active addresses and transaction volumes and transaction fees are supportive of
the thesis that one day Ethereum will flip in Bitcoin.
And so at least things are supposed to support the concept that like that 15% market
cap that ether is of Bitcoin is really low.
Right.
Yeah, exactly.
And I think a lot of these metrics are about usage of the network, right?
So on transaction count, which is interesting is Ethereum today gets more transactions
on a daily basis than Bitcoin.
So that's already flippened.
The other thing that's already flippant is the total transaction fees.
We talked about that in the last day of the nation,
but that's been true actually for the past three weeks
that Ether, Ethereum block space is more valuable right now than Bitcoin block space.
So it's bringing in more transaction fees on a daily basis.
That's been true for the last three weeks.
This might be the longest running period that that has actually been true.
ever. So like those are two flippinging metrics that have that have you hit the checkbox.
There are a couple of other interesting ones. Active addresses is an interesting one. That's been on the
rise. I think in the Ethereum network, it's the highest it's been since something like, you know,
2018. We do have to asterisk that one because Plus token is spinning up a bunch of just trash
addresses trying to obfuscate their ETH that they took in their Ponzi's
So like they are inflating that number a little bit.
But regardless, it's been moving up and up and up for the last two years.
Yep, yep.
And that's at 56%.
But what's interesting are some of these low ones,
like Google search interest is only 10% of Bitcoin's Google search interest.
So Bitcoin just has massive mind share compared to ether.
Like even when people ask you about like crypto, you know,
when people ask me, they ask like, oh, are you into Bitcoin?
mind. Like, you know, they don't even say crypto. They, they very rarely say ether or Ethereum.
And it just has captured more mindshare. And I think that reflects the search,
Google search interest too, right? Yeah. Yeah. And I've always been skeptical about Google search
interests with Ethereum, right? Because Ethereum is not just one thing, right? So like,
are they counting MakerDAO? Are they counting Auger? Are they counting like any,
all of these Ethereum apps? Like, because I think those also count as like Ethereum, Google search
interest. And I'm guessing that this is just comparing raw Bitcoin to raw Ethereum, which only paints
so much of a picture. Yeah, it really does. Even when you look at the transaction volume figure,
so transaction volume, that means the amount of value that has been sent is actually comparing
transaction volume of Bitcoin to transaction volume of eth. But it doesn't, it's not comparing
ether plus all of the ERC 20 tokens on top of Ethereum versus Bitcoin. If you look to just,
just that metric. If you added tether and everything else, this says right here that Ethereum
would be way above Bitcoin in terms of the transaction volume because of all of the ETH and all of
the ERC20s and the cumulative value exceeds the value of the Bitcoin right now. So that's
interesting. Yeah. So in some ways we are comparing like two different networks. One is a is a mono
asset network, which is Bitcoin. The other is a polyasset network. So it's not exactly comparing
apples to apples, but you know, as I like to say, both are fruits, so you can't compare a little bit.
Yeah, so you know what's also interesting is actually the guy behind this was the guy behind the
Bitcoin rainbow price chart as well. So this is somebody who's very into Bitcoin, and, you know,
he just recently came out with the Ethereum flippinging index. So I don't know if that's
indicative of a mind share flippinging too, but it does seem like there is a shift from
maximism to more interest in the Ethereum space. We touched on that a little bit last time too.
Yeah, absolutely. And Ethereum, the ETH price chart does follow some sort of like logarithmic
curve. It doesn't look like Bitcoin's logarithmic growth chart because if Ether skyrocketed
into its market cap way faster than Bitcoin did at its Genesis. But I'd like to see what happens when
you do the rainbow price chart for ether too.
Yeah, I know.
I know far off.
Yeah, I hope somebody comes up with that and I'm actually surprised we haven't seen that
because this is a, I mean, this is just a beautiful chart, right?
This Bitcoin price chart, right?
Like so, I mean, this, what this is showing is that Bitcoin historically,
if it's following the rainbow curve is in the undervalued territory historically,
it would be a tremendous buy as of today.
It's almost basically a fire sale, but it's certainly a buy according to this chart.
Which is not financial advice.
No, none of this is financial advice, guys.
Absolutely.
All right.
So let's talk about something else too.
So something in piqued my interest, David, was that it seemed like India was, you know,
banned a whole list of apps recently, particularly Chinese apps.
This is a list of all of them.
So TikTok is the number one.
I'm sure like a bunch of folks probably use that and have heard of that.
Also things like, let's see, WeChat, which is a Chinese messenger app.
What do you think that's all about?
Why is India doing this?
Well, I think the first thing that this illustrates to me is like how a lot of these very just, you know,
normal apps are actually tools of the state and specifically tools of China, right?
So like TikTok is, I think the biggest one that the biggest culprit of this is like, yeah, it's a cool app and it does.
It's a social media app and allows people to have fun on it.
But like it's actually the way that China uses it is a way to see, see what's up, see what's going on.
You guys, peer into your data, get data on you.
And India is having none of it, right?
India is like, no, uh-uh.
You don't get to get data about our people better, better than we are for sure.
And so it's basically India claiming self-sovereignty.
over China, right? So China is a nation state. It's got very defined borders and it does it. It's not
colonial, right? It's not like reaching out to the rest of the world and trying to claim it like
Britain was in the 16, 17, 1800s. But it's doing that through technology, right? Like 90% of the
world's chips are made in China, which is really scary to me. And like a lot of these apps that
everyone around the world used is developed in China. And China is spreading its influence through
these applications. So what India is doing when they're banning these apps, just saying like, no,
China, like get out. Like you're, you are banned from, from our app stores of sorts. You, you don't get
our data. It's interesting that you use the word colonialism because some people have called us
basically digital colonialism, which is, is kind of expanding the, the empire and breaking the
self-sovereignty of nation through, through technology, digital technology. What's interesting
to me, too, is these can, let's be fair, these consumer apps, they're all opt-in, right? China,
is not forcing any like anyone from india or the u.s for that matter at gunpoint to use tic talk we're
choosing to use these things like there's 900 million users on on ticot today and to my knowledge all of those
users made a choice to jump into ticot is that because we just don't care about privacy like we should
we don't care enough about data surveillance um do you think that tide is going to to shift at any point
or is just is this basically tragedy of the commons problem yeah you know
China is definitely doing that with, that is their strategy, right?
Let's make something useful for people so that they forget about like the whole privacy side of things.
And we're seeing Apple start to develop their hardware in ways that are definitely pro-privacy, pro-consumer.
So in the new iOS software, Apple has a little flashing icon whenever your camera or microphone is being used,
either by an active app or in the background.
And it's very much like an anti-China move, either with intent or not.
But with regards to like what China means for the rest of the world, like China is the most anti-bankless nation that we can think of, right?
Like it is the opposite of the bankless nation.
Like it's the digital nations and that would that I've been describing as Bitcoin and Ethereum, like the antithesis isn't the nation state is the authoritarian nation state.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
The bankless nation and the USA nation or Germany or France, those can co mingle.
and coalesce and work together,
the bankless nation cannot work with the China, the China nation.
That is, it's oil and water.
There's nothing more antithetical to the China nation state
and the bankless digital nation.
And to be clear,
I think you're talking about the,
the Communist Party in China,
so the CCP rather than the people of China.
And it also could be the case that in, you know,
Western, like Democratic, formerly Republic,
strong protocols for individual sovereignty and liberty,
that those could collapse,
into more authoritarian regimes too, which is why we have to keep our guard up.
Every generation, I feel like, has to keep their guard up against the encroachment of tyranny.
That's really what the bankless movement is about.
It's about a bill of rights, essentially, that money should be separated from the state
as we transition into this digital era, that the state should not get full control of our
monetary systems so that despots and tyrants don't control us, essentially.
I do think that this news with India's sort of banning, what they're doing is they're banning
China, really. It's more than banning these particular apps. They're banning China. But in a way,
that's really good news for credibly neutral crypto blockchain network systems, right? Like
Ethereum, like Bitcoin to some degree. There's been talk often about what happens if China
creates a blockchain. They're working. They have a blockchain initiative right now. Or what about the
Chinese digital currency, right?
You know, won't that just stop out all of these public networks like Bitcoin and Ethereum?
And I think the answer to that is no, absolutely not.
Because like, so if you just work out the game theory, if India is not willing to use
China's TikTok application, there's no chance in hell.
They're going to use China's blockchain.
There's no chance in hell they're going to use China's digital cryptocurrency, right?
Think about the surveillance ramifications of that.
And so what this means is if the nation states are going to use crypto and going to use blockchains,
they're going to all settle on the one, the systems, the small number of systems that none of them control and none of them can co-opt.
You have to kind of use the most credibly neutral system.
That's just how the game theory works out.
So I think that's super bullish for Ethereum.
and like people aren't realizing that because of nation state politics, essentially, you know,
a national blockchain program cannot work at least outside of the bounds of one particular nation state.
No, that's totally right.
And at the start of that, you said, you talked about how like Bitcoin and Ethereum, these digital nations are checks on the nation state.
And there is this theory, this attitude that the nation state, no matter what, even pick your favorite best nation state.
And it's, the theory is that it might just be moving towards authoritarianism organically.
That might just be in the incentive of a nation state, including the United States.
Like it might just move more and more authoritarian over time.
And so like the and a system like a Chinese central bank digital currency or any central
bank digital currency is an authoritarian type of digital currency, right?
And the whole incentive of a nation state is to be extractive, right?
The reason why India is banning this is because it's saying, no, China, you cannot extract out of our citizens, right?
Out of our citizenry.
And so any sort of any sort of digital currency that's operated by a central government is going to just increase the government's ability to be extractive of the people that use it, which is why it's really important to be using a credibly neutral system because those systems are minimally extractive, right?
They hold the point of the system is that there's no one at the center doing any extracting.
Yeah.
And I, you know, that brings to mind.
I was reading a statement this morning on the Chinese digital currency and electronic
payments.
So this is the Chinese digital currency.
It's essentially that's being rolled out now.
So it's been six years in development.
It's now starting to be rolled out.
And there was a statement in it.
This is a good in-depth.
We'll include this article in the show notes.
If the government, that's the Chinese government, decides to deactivate a wallet or reverse a transaction, they can do so with one simple click.
Like, how dystopian is that?
One click and we can eliminate you, citizen, from the world economic system.
You have a problem with our politics, our policies, our leadership.
A bureaucrat can click a button and eliminate you from the global.
economic system. That is terrifying to me. Especially when we like include the fact that in the long-term
future, these digital systems are supposed to also be our identity systems, not just our money systems.
That that centralized power of just removal is even worse, right? Like not only is your,
economic and financial status gone. Like you are gone. You do not exist. And we saw what happened
when like a centralized regime like in the USSR, they would just delete people.
They would just, you're gone, goodbye.
You never existed.
And now we're doing this in a point and click type fashion.
Well, you can even program algorithms to delete people, right?
So, I mean, you could set up a whole nation state apparatus where, you know, robots are
deleting people who travel in, you know, to certain provinces or in certain ways.
And they automatically delete the citizen or freeze their accounts.
or steal some of their money, take out a fine.
It's very scary to me.
And the thing about it is,
this is the, you know,
we're talking about China and the Chinese digital currency.
But I think that the U.S. and Europe and Western nations
will move in the same direction of becoming, like,
of incorporating digital currencies into their nation state protocol,
essentially.
They kind of have to, one, to compete with China.
right but but but but two um it's just more convenient i mean the entire society is moving into the
digital realm i mean once the last time you paid with with uh cash money with benjamins or anything
right my wallet doesn't even have a spot for cash it's a hard only wallet yeah so is mine
because cash is like cumbersome it's uh it's like older generations uh use cash but i um cash is also
very important because it is a way to opt out. Like cash preserves individual privacy and anonymity
more than any anything else, any other form of currency. Essentially, it's also a bearer asset. So
when I give you cash, you know, the transaction is totally finalized. So if we eliminate you can't,
well, you could burn it, I guess, but like no one does that. So India once upon a time did delete cash.
They just said like, all right, these denomination of bills are are no longer accepted. You have
two weeks to turn them into something else.
And so like there is that weakness there, but until then.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
And that's fair.
And this is the reason why criminals use cash, right?
Because it's untraceable.
With that activity, there's also tremendous downside, but there's also a bunch of freedom.
And I worry that as we transition into this digital currency world, like we lose all of that,
both in China, in authoritarian regimes, but also in Western countries like the U.S.
In the U.S. it might look like Facebook and Libra plus the Fed.
And essentially, like the Fed and the state government uses our technology companies as an apparatus to do the same thing, to deactivate a wallet, to reverse a transaction, to take money from its citizen rate.
It seems inevitable to your point earlier that nation state governments will move in this direction.
And to me, crypto is the only alternative.
It's the only way to opt out.
So once cash is eliminated, we will only have two forms of money.
We'll have fiat from nation states and we'll have crypto.
And those are the only two options, really.
Yep, that's it.
Yeah.
And it is good that like the digital nation currencies exist because they,
their mere existence, the ability to opt out of an anti-cash authoritarian society
is itself a check on that.
So like even that people that aren't participating in these digital nations,
they still get the benefit of them because you can't go full authoritarian if something like
Bitcoin or Ethereum exists because then you're just going to hasten the arrival of these
technologies.
Totally.
So even if these systems occupy 10%, 15%, 20% market share of the world monetary system,
that's enough of a check and balance to resist this kind of stuff.
All right.
So, man, dark topic.
But our word of the day, the state of the nation is growth.
we talk about growth because defy exchanges, these are called decentralized exchanges, so people
shorten that, they call them Dexas. They are going absolutely parabolic. Like they're going crazy.
What's happening here, Dave? Well, so we found this very early primitive and it turns out we can
jigger it around to really fit our needs in a bunch of different ways. And what I'm talking about,
of course is the automated market maker model.
And the reason why the AUM, AUM model is so strong
is because it is instead of being a peer-to-peer exchange,
it is a peer-to-contract.
And so peer-to-contract is so much more scalable
than peer-to-peer because you don't need to operate an order book.
You don't need any infrastructure.
You just need a single contract on Ethereum
and that can scale out to the whole entire world, right?
And so many, many, many people can all trade with each other by going through this intermediary
contract that coordinates everyone.
But you don't need to have like an order book.
You don't need to have a matching engine.
You don't need to have a server, which a lot of these other decks tend to do.
And so the AUM automated market maker, AMM, excuse me, automated market maker model has just
absolutely exploded.
Yeah, it's crazy to see.
This is a tweet from Hayden, who was the,
the original creator of the Uniswap protocol,
whom we've had,
we've talked about on the bankless podcast previously.
He said,
and this is kind of happening behind the scenes,
everyone's talking about liquidity farming,
but Uniswap's June volume
was greater than all of its 2019 volume combined.
So one month,
in one month, June,
we're not even halfway through 2020.
It beat Uniswap volume,
beat all of 2019.
We're not even done with June.
We're not even done with June.
This is actually a tweet from the June 25th.
So, like, where are we going next is the question.
I've got a chart here.
God, this thing's in the way.
There we go.
I've got a chart here on dex metrics.
And you were talking about, like, so one form of a dex is an automated market maker
that you talked about, right, which is what Uniswap is.
But there are other order book types of dexes.
But what's interesting here, when you look at the, first of all, that volume is crazy.
$450 million over a seven-day volume.
But when you look at the breakdown,
41% of that is uniswap.
And 12% of that is curve.
So between another AMM.
Yes.
So Curve and Uniswap are the two AMMs.
And then it got 8% of balance or two, right?
So that is 60% percent.
60 plus percent.
So a healthy majority, almost two-thirds majority
of all of the decentralized exchange traffic
is from automated market makers.
I think that's pretty interesting
because that is a new use case
that only defi enables.
It's kind of the first completely innovative product market fit
I think that I've seen.
It's something that doesn't exist in traditional finance
at all, to my knowledge, right?
Like if you think about Maker,
there's loans and collateral,
that sort of thing exists in traditional finance,
but these automated market makers, money robots, as we like to call them, are pretty unique
to Defi, and they are just growing like crazy and they're dominating everything else out there.
And importantly, the protocol sync thesis predicts this, right? So automated market makers
are like the most dense type of decks that is available, right? So super high utility,
lots of people want to use it. And also when it comes to its scalability and its trustlessness
and its permissionlessness, it has it all.
It has the full marks, right?
Which means that any automated market maker system,
because an automated market system, excuse me,
an AMM is just a application that accepts any token.
So like anyone can use them as it sees fit.
And so it really is a, an AMM exchange,
it just reflects the demand of the world around it.
It doesn't really have any impact upon,
it doesn't do anything else other than reflect.
the needs and desires of the Ethereum ecosystem, right?
And so it just is a good tool for people to use.
And just because of its simplicity and its maximal utility as an application,
it's become really, really dense.
And so we're seeing uniswap and curve just gain and gain and gain density
in the form of, you know, monthly, weekly, daily volumes, right?
That is the metric of density for these AMM applications.
Yeah, absolutely.
It's been exciting to see it.
And, you know, everyone knows the rules of the game that they're playing with.
So each of these automated market makers have a specific curve.
And it's all transparent.
They can't cheat you.
So these are, I think, much more economically dense protocols than centralized exchanges.
We're actually starting to see that.
So I was blown away last week I saw this.
USDC, which is the stable coin, like the second largest stable coin.
And tether, which is the largest stable coin, the trading volume on curve,
exceeded Binance over the past 24 hours. This was on the 20th. It's crazy. Right? So Binance,
like mighty Binance, the largest exchange, centralized exchange out there with a vast majority of the
market share. They're being beaten by tiny curve. Like look at this. This is curve. All right. So this is
the decentralized protocol, defyat protocol curve. Back in February, this was their deposit.
February 10th, they had $8,000 in liquidity.
$8,000.
And you fast forward, this is around when the comp token launched.
Fast forward to now, they have $50 million in U.S. dollars deposits.
And Curve is specifically, they're really good at exchanging like-for-like things.
So stable coins, for instance.
So USDC and a tether would be a perfect exchange for them or like two forms of tokenized Bitcoin.
on Ethereum and they are beating centralized exchanges already and it's only been like four months.
Right. Right. The growth is absolutely insane. Like and finance, you can kind of compare
finance to Coinbase and using the protocol sync model, right? Because like Coinbase is a lot more
restricted and it requires KYC and finance doesn't and finance is more global, more scalable,
doesn't really care about what country you're from.
It takes any asset it can think of.
And so, like, using the protocol sync thesis,
finance is denser than Coinbase, perhaps.
And even Binance, like, the most dense, like, centralized exchange
that the centralized world can cook up is still losing to curve
in a four-month time period, in a five-month time period.
Like, absolutely blown out of the water, at least with stable coins.
But I think all the other assets are not far along.
Yeah, it's super exciting.
So, you know, growth is definitely the theme.
And like the last thing, maybe to mention on this whole trend of decentralized exchange growth is that it's back to what we've been talking about in the previous state of the nations in our podcast with Dan Ellitzer is these defy tokens are essentially going to be rocket fuel on top of this, all of us.
So these defy tokens, you're essentially, you know, what does Dan call it?
Time spacing?
like you're bringing profit from the future into the present with these things.
And you're using that to supercharge liquidity and make the future more inevitable, essentially.
So that's what comp is doing.
It's incentivizing liquidity.
It's pouring rocket fuel on all of these defy systems.
And now Curve is coming out with their own CRV token to further incent liquidity.
So that was Curve's growth that we just saw, just given the recent,
you know, BFI token launches of comp and other things. It hasn't even launched its own token yet.
It hasn't even poured its own rocket fuel on top of the rocket fuel that already exists.
So there are scant detail about CRV tokens right now, but Curve did release a PDF about it.
I believe earlier this week, or perhaps it was last week that shares some more details.
We'll include that in the show notes.
But that's something to look at these decentralized protocols.
particularly defy exchanges starting to incorporate their own tokens to further incent liquidity.
It's just going to be, I think, a pretty large explosion.
Yeah, and then the explosion that comes after that is using all of those tokens as collateral
and in things like MakerDAO and allowing to mint new dye based off of the value of all of these
capital asset tokens.
Because for the first time, I think MakerDAO has a nice wide variety of selection of good assets
to choose from, which they haven't really had before.
Like, BAT, not really the best token.
Like WBTC, fine, I'll take it.
But like now we have these real on,
it's most importantly, on chain.
Like WBTC is not on chain.
All of these, all of these comp governance tokens,
the curve token, the balancer token,
these are going to be great collateral for MakerDAO
and allow for a lot of new value
to be created inside of the Ethereum ecosystem.
Yeah, they're all crypto-native capital assets,
which is super exciting. Now, that's not to say some of them might be tremendously overvalued,
but at least we have a value accrual mechanism and we have a way to benchmark the value that
we have and that, you know, could be accrued by these tokens, which I think is pretty unique.
I sort of think of it as it's a bit like in, you know, let's say it was early, it was like
1999 early internet. And let's say every time you use the,
Google search engine instead of Alta Vista, Google would award you with Google shares.
That's essentially what these tokens are doing.
Now, it could be the case that instead of Google shares, you're getting like pets.com
shares or some other stupid.com, right, because we don't actually know what the winning
protocols are going to be, but they are capital assets that you're getting, almost like shares,
right?
There's the protocol shares that you're getting in exchange for using the protocols, which is
is pretty interesting.
And, you know, the original internet movement did not have that sort of feature.
It was Google was not giving out its shares for, you know, Googling something in their search engine.
Absolutely not.
And this is, I think, why I'm so bullish about this particular instantiation of governance tokens of sorts, right?
Because what a share of Google is is a governance token.
And I do hope that these governance tokens start paying dividends pretty quickly because we've seen
these tech companies in the stock market have these tokens, these governance tokens over these
massive tech companies.
But the only reason why they're valued is because of the greater full thesis, right?
There's no these tokens, these shares of companies don't actually give you anything.
They like no one's actually actually using them for governing.
They're just shares of a company that aren't paying any dividends.
And I think that's actually a huge problem.
in the legacy markets. And so I kind of hope these governance tokens on Ethereum start
paying dividends really quickly because the whole point of these tokens is that they are access
to cash flows. I know that wasn't really on our list of topics, but I thought I'd bring that up.
No, it's true. And they're being valued as if they're going to pay dividends in the future.
So if they're not, then they're way overvalued at this point. If they are just governance
tokens without any option on future cash flows, then I think the value,
behind all of these things completely breaks down.
Right. So it seems like the market is assuming and almost depending at these prices on these
tokens becoming full shares essentially that reward through dividends or burn mechanisms and
other things we've talked about.
I'm with Dan.
David, anything else, man?
I think that's all we, that might be all we have time for today.
I think we're out of time.
That was it.
The Banquish Nation is growing, is developing.
It's not all good.
There are, their balancer got hacked.
They lost a bunch of money.
Comp tokens got extracted out of the balancer system.
It's, it's, we're going through the fire.
We're going through the fire.
But there's a lot of growth, a lot of things happening right now.
So, defy is hitting puberty at the moment.
Yeah, nice.
This is the Wild West, everyone remember.
So risk and disclaimers, guys, this is none of this is financial advice.
Keep in mind, all of these protocols are risky.
Crypto, ETH, Bitcoin, all risky.
investments to have and to own. So be careful out there for sure. As far as action items, we will include
a link to the flippinging chart that I sent you in that we looked at in the show notes. Also,
things to watch will include a link to the information about the CRV token on curve. And you've got to
hit subscribe as well. That would be the third action item. So subscribe to YouTube. Subscribe to the
bankless podcast. Speaking of the bankless podcast, July is going to
be hot in terms of podcast. Yes, David, who's coming on the bankless podcast this month?
We're going to be interviewing Chris Berniske on Thursday, so that episode will be out next Monday.
And then after that, who do we have after that? We have Fatalic coming on, which is also just going
to be absolutely insane. We're going to talk a lot about the article that I'm about to release
maybe this week, maybe next week. So stay tuned for that one. And then Ryan, remind me who we have
after that. We have Ben Hunt from Epsilon Theory, who's one of my favorite writers about
everything that's going on in the capitalist world these days. And then also Eric Morky's
to kind of close up the month. So it's going to be awesome on the podcast. We are glad that you
are with us on the bankless journey. This has been State of the Nation, episode three. Thanks a lot.
