Bankless - SoTN #6 - EXPONENTIAL, Special Guest: LUCAS CAMPBELL (DEFI TOKENS, ETH PUMPING GOOD, TOKENS VS ETH)

Episode Date: July 22, 2020

STATE OF THE NATION #6 - Tuesday, July 21, 2020 The State of the Bankless Nation is....EXPONENTIAL! The bankless boys discuss why. Plus a special guest...Lucas Campbell a Bankless Analyst! Watch the��video here. ----- GO BANKLESS WITH THESE SPONSOR TOOLS: 💸 ARGENT - BEST ETHEREUM WALLET FOR GOING BANKLESS (we love it) - open one today! 🌈 AAVE - LEND & BORROW YOUR CRYPTO W/O A BANK - earn some interest! 💳 DEVERSIFI - DECENTRALIZED EXCHANGE FOR PRO TRADERS - use this exchange!   💸 AMPLFORTH - MONETARY EXPERIMENT FOR BASE MONEY - learn about this experiment! ----- Covered: TOPIC #1: DEFI TOKENS - w/ Lucas Campbell TOPIC #2: ETH PUMPING GOOD TOPIC #3: TOKENS VS ETH BONUS TOPIC: AmpleForth discussion We show: Bankless Q2 Token Report by Lucas Campbell  TokenTerminal for P/E Ratios Dune Analytics chart of DeFi users Messari Chart - Ethereum vs. Bitcoin settlement numbers Meet the Nation playlist --- Episode Actions: Read Q2 Bankless Token Report Join us for AMA with Rune Christensen on July 23, 12pm EST (Bankless Membership required!) Watch Meet the Nation on YouTube Also...subscribe to Bankless YouTube to watch State of the Nation every Tuesday! ----- 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.

Welcome, everyone, Bankless Nation. This is State of the Nation, episode six. David and I do these every single Tuesday. We broadcast them live on YouTube. Well, not live, actually. We're getting in. One day. One day. Yeah, it's the same day turnaround on YouTube. And then we post it also on Wednesdays to the podcast feed. We are here to talk about what is happening in the Bankless Nation. That means what's happening in crypto, what's happening in DFI. We related to the big picture things. We show you some visuals. We drop some insights and action items. Sometimes we even bring in a special guest. And today, we have a special guest that we will surprise you with in just a few minutes. David, how are you doing today, sir? I'm doing absolutely fantastic. Got down off of a mountain this weekend and came back to a totally

different DeFi. It moves so fast. It moves so fast. So you like was that like two days and you missed you missed like two years in defy? Yeah, it was it was 36 hours and now I'm just behind. You're going to have to find a new bankless buddy who can keep up faster than I can. All right. Well, I was checking things over the weekend. So I think I've got us covered but you know, there's a few things I don't understand as usual. It's becoming too much to keep up with. Before we I ask you the question, David, We should talk about two things that are going on this week. So the first is we actually have Roon Christensen, the founder of Maker, who's going to be in the bankless Discord at 12 p.m. July Thursday,

what's July 23rd? Thursday, July 3rd, 12 p.m. Eastern Time. So if you are a bankless nation member, make sure you make that. We get to ask Roon anything we want. We did this with Robert Leshner of Compound last week. Did this with Edomar from Argent. And it's just a fantastic way to learn a bit more about these protocols. So catch that.

Also, David, you are releasing a new bankless show. I hope to help you on that sometime, but you are taking the lead on that. Can you tell us about that and what you're going to be releasing next? Yeah, we now have the Meet the Nation series where new projects, kind of projects that need some more exposure, projects that people haven't heard about, are able to meet the nation. So we just released our first one with the Reflexer Labs project, which is producing the Rye Stable-ish coin.

And so if you want to know what Reflexer Labs and Rye is all about, you can go and listen to and watch the Meet the Nation, where I interviewed Stephen Yonescu, I believe, is how you pronounced his last name from the Reflexer Labs team. Their project is very comparable to MakerDAO, and we kind of pull back the layers and get into it, with Stephen on the Meet the Nation. And we're going to be rolling this out for every project that is new,

every up and coming project, any project that you have questions about. You can always ping me, ping Ryan, tell us that you want to get some project on to meet the nation and we will get that done. So this is like the way to learn about the next big things that are going on in DFI. So on state of the nation, we talk a lot about current events, current protocols, But Meet the Nation is a chance to, as we like to say, front run the opportunity and get a little bit ahead of what's happening next, what could happen next in Defi. I learned a ton from your interview on Rye that these things are almost like, they remove the volatility in a way that die doesn't. Super interesting.

And you're doing one today, right, David? I'm doing one today with the Ampleforth team because there's a lot of unanswered questions I have about Ampleforth, which we're going to get into. Oh, it's a good one. I have some unanswered questions, too. We should talk about that later in the show today. That's exactly what we're going to get into with Meet the Nation. Awesome. All right.

Well, let's definitely do that. So what do people need to do to catch Meet the Nation? Subscribe on YouTube, pretty much, right? Yeah, subscribe on YouTube. There's not going to be one Meet the Nation Day. We're going to record these as we deem necessary. If no new projects come out in a week, which probably hopefully never happens. But it seems in Defi, they always, something always happens.

And so whenever something good comes out, whenever there's a worthy team that we want to meet the nation, we'll meet the nation. But if there's not, there's not. And so the only really way to do that and pay attention is to, A, subscribe to the YouTube and B, follow the bankless HQ Twitter account because that's where we will be tweeting out the Meet the Nation episodes. You heard it. David, I've got a feeling you might be having to do one of these like every day pretty

soon because Defi is just coming fast and furious. Absolutely. Okay, so the question, the question of the state of the nation is always this. David, what is the state of the nation right now, sir? Yeah, we've already hinted at it pretty strongly thus far, but the state of the bankless nation is exponential. Things are absolutely crazy right now. Like I said, I went to the mountains this weekend and I came back and there's this brand new thing called Yiffie, this new token. What's YFI? Why FI? Yeah, is that it? Is that maybe I'm not. Yeah, that's it. It's it. It's the curve.

It's the curve token. Apparently, it's defy liquidity mining, but like on steroids. I don't understand how it works. I listen to Eric and Anthony on the, the eathub weekly recap, and I tried to understand how it works there, and I still didn't get it. And I'm, this, I live in this stuff, and I still don't get it. And so, like, if I don't get it, like, so many other people don't get it, DFI is moving so incredibly fast. Like gas prices are above a hundred gray right now. They were at 70 gray yesterday and 70 gray the day before.

That's absolutely insane. I have friends of friends who are asking me about defy. I have friends. Wait, really? Yeah, uh-huh. Yeah, dude. Like, you're getting texts? Wait, are they saying the words defy?

Are they asking for like, like, um, ripple tips and stuff like that? No, instead of ripple, it's link. Okay. It's defy and link. It's defy and link. But they say defy because I got a link text. Yeah, you got a lit text. Yeah, I got one, I got one defy text.

Yeah. What did you say about one? You're going to make the link brain chat. Or maybe you're not. Maybe you're going to be bullish. I don't know. Yeah. So like, okay, this is a little bit of a tangent, but like I'm of, I'm ready to be convinced

that like things like Link, things like synthetics, they're all, like Link is over a billion dollar market cap, but synthetics is below a billion. But then there's like light coin and Bitcoin cash. and Cardano and Eos, they're still in like the top 10, top 15 billion dollars market cap, like Link is totally worthy of displacing them. Like Link could go to, could go and take off Eos. Wait, are you saying it's a better shit coin than the other shit coins? Perhaps. Perhaps. Perhaps. Perhaps. Yeah. And like so could all the other like,

Kyber deserves to be up there. Synthetics deserves to be up there, at least in comparison to Lycoyne. Like, Lycoy doesn't deserve to be up there. And so while I say the state of the nation is exponential, like we could be in the very beginning of that exponential curve. All right. So open mind. You've got an open mind on that. We're going to talk about that too. I think that's our first topic with our guest actually to talk about what's going on with defy tokens and some of the exponential growth that we've seen.

But before we do, David, we've got to talk about our sponsors. The first is Ave. Oh, pardon me. That's me. AVEA is a borrowing and lending protocol on Ethereum. One of the many tokens that are absolutely moaning, and I hope to one day have it displace all the other shit coins out there, like light coin and all the other ones in the top ten that I just mentioned.

Avey is a borrowing lending protocol that is a little bit different, got a little bit of extra tools and tricks up its sleeve. The one that I really enjoy is the stable interest rates, loans. That's a really important money, Lego, in order to bring crypto to the mainstream and replicate some of the financial services that we find in the real world, but on Ethereum. Stable interest rates are incredibly important to be able to plan out and predict your financial future, and you can access stable interest rates via AVE. For developers and the creative types, you can get real crazy with their flash loans protocol,

where you can borrow up large and large, large amounts of collateral for no collateral, no deposit. so long as you pay it back in the same transaction. So you can do some pretty crazy stuff with that. Check them out at AVE.com. Awesome. And also speaking of AVE, I want to tell you about Argent. So Argent is the best defy wallet for DFI, hands down, especially if you're using mobile.

David was talking about AVE. You can access AVE. It's currently free. I think they've extended it. So if you're doing anything with AVE in Argent, there's no gas prices. And that actually needs a lot these days. You can also access compound, pool together, Kyber, token sets.

This is really a, almost like a, if you're in the U.S., you know Venmo, this is like a Venmo experience for Defi. It's super secure, easy to use. There's no seed phrases involved. You can have guardian and social recovery. So you can bring in some of your friends into recovering your wallet in the event that you lose your mobile. They've got over 20 million in locked assets. I bet that's going to climb. as well. It is the most bankless wallet with good UX out there. So check them out at

argent.xy-z. That's a r-g-e-t-t-xy-z. We will include a link in the show notes. Okay, David, we're talking about shit coins. I don't, you know, I struggle with that term because I think it's a, I think it's abused, you know, like, um, particularly around, like among maximalists. Um, but there are some coins out. there that clearly unless they are viably competing as a money, they are not worth nearly the market caps that the market sees them as worth ascribes to them today. Our first topic, we want to talk about this Q2 token report. So the second quarter token report that Lucas Campbell put out on bankless. Lucas is a talented researcher. He researches, you know, all of these kind of token

economics and he put up this fantastic report. We've actually, we're bringing him on the show. Lucas, are you, uh, are you there? I am. How are you guys doing? Well, good, man. How are you doing, Lucas? Just dandy on this, uh, fine Tuesday morning. Awesome. Well, you killed it with this report, dude. It's like really good. When I read it, I was like, you know what? We're starting to get to the level where we've got like Wall Street level analysis and metrics supporting some of these token assets. So kudos to you. I think it was super well received. Well done on it.

I'm actually going to share aspects of it, Lucas, on the screen. So we can talk over a couple of the findings. But maybe you could start with, like we've talked a lot on bankless about defy tokens being a new asset subclass in crypto. They are crypto capital assets. Can you talk a little bit about what a crypto capital asset is? and how it's different from other assets in crypto? Yeah, so crypto capital assets are kind of this new emerging asset class within, you know, crypto assets, right?

And I think the notable difference here is that these protocols or these assets are, you know, have tangible value flowing through them. So you're able to take, you know, traditional valuation methods like PE ratios and DCF models and you're able to model how these tokens stack up to their peers, an attempt to find, you know, like a fair valuation. So that's probably a notable difference. Like when you're talking about like other shit coins like like coin and whatnot, there's marginal fees on the network.

So it's really tough to value those tokens based on their cash flows. So that's kind of really the key differentiation between a majority of crypto assets and then the crypto capital asset is that there's, is this tangible amount of cash flows flowing through the protocol. And this is kind of what we talked about with Ben Hunt, right? Where there's a very strong transition in crypto right now. While I still believe a lot of these valuations are kind of just based on traditional crypto valuations where it's mostly just supply and demand and narrative and story,

there is now ways to measure these things in very grounded and fundamental valuation. And I think that's partly why the defy narrative is so strong right now is because we can actually see cash flow. We can actually see real value in ways that we cannot see with like like coin or Bitcoin Cash or Cardana or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. You know, like Ben was talking about basically getting back to sort of fundamentals

and the tie between true fundamentals investors who still see a world even in stocks that is, you know, based on cash flows as a fundamental. And this asset class is starting to become that in crypto. So it's cool that like traditional investors who are used to models to value stocks can now value some of these defy tokens that way. That said, it's been absolutely explosive like the growth. I want to maybe flip forward to this to talk about token performance in Q2, right? So Q2, April through June, of course.

I've got a chart up that was included in your report, Lucas, that shows token performance. And we've got BNT, that's Bankor, right? We've got Lend. We've got Wren. These grew, like the first two, they grew by over 500%. They did a 5X just in one quarter. Wren grew 2X, synthetics, almost 2X. I mean, it's done a lot more this quarter, but like, that's some pretty explosive growth.

Is this growth deserved, Lucas? What do you think? Yeah, that's a good question. Had you asked me what the state of the nation is, I would have said mooning. These tokens just have been going off. Like, most of them have increased by like triple digit percentage gains. So it's just been, you know, wild. If you told me, asked me if you were deserved, that's a little bit more nuanced.

because if you look at the fundamentals, like, earnings have gone down by a substantial amount. This is largely due to Maker having the zero percent stability fee, which drastically kind of reduced earnings in the DFI sector. Oh, so let's talk about that. So I've got the earnings chart open. So if you're on the podcast, I mean, check out the video. The video is where you could see this, visualize this stuff, or check out the report. You'll see this graph.

This is why we do the video. Yeah. Go to the video. Go to the video. So we've got Q1 here, right? So look at the Q1 bar chart here. These are earnings, right? So to be clear, these are all of the cash flows that these DFI tokens have actually generated.

So real cash flows. We talked about this in our Chris Brinsey, Bernansey podcast. This is super cool. So Q1, the DeFi protocols did 5.5 million in cash flows in one quarter, right? So that's annualized. It's about 20 million, right? Q2, it's down, this is what you're saying, Lucas, it's down to about 4 million. What's interesting about this is the bars, like the tokens that make up that amount,

have completely changed from Q1, right? So like synthetics just almost evaporated. Maker, as you were saying, almost evaporated. They're tiny. Now and other protocols it looks like. Yeah, there's no significant leader. Those are all pretty equal. Yeah, so we see a drop, right, as you're saying.

But we also see far greater diversity in Q2. Is that kind of what you're seeing too? Yeah, so we saw like a lot of notable new entrants, a lot of protocol upgrades in Q2. For one, we saw Uniswap V2 launch in May. We also saw the launch of Balancer. Wren launched on Main Met. Genosis launched their decks. Loopring was launching their layer two decks.

So we just saw like a lot of. new entrance into the D5 space, which, you know, in turn just made it a lot more diverse. But yeah, lots of new players in the space now. And you said, Maker is out because, because why? Because their stability fees, that's the interest they charge on their loans dropped to zero. And the reason it dropped is to try to stabilize die. Is that right?

Exactly. Exactly. Why did synthetics drop? So synthetics was kind of disproportionately reporting their earnings. due to some front running issues back in Q1 and early Q2. But I believe they've fixed it for the most part. So now they're kind of reporting more accurate earnings, which is just a lot lower naturally.

Not all of these have tokens. I'm noticing here. Right, Lucas. So Uniswap V2 does not have a token that can capture that value. D-Y-D-X also does not have a token to capture that value, but the rest do. Is that another distinction you'd make? Yeah, definitely.

Okay, so very cool. So we've got real earnings. We've got massive price appreciation. And you and bankless, and I feel like token terminal and maybe a few others have pioneered this additional look at relative valuations of tokens. That's super important. And that almost creates like a,

a price to earnings ratio, right? So if you're analyzing stocks, maybe you talk about what a price to earnings ratio is in the stock world and then how that relates to price to earnings in these defy tokens. Yeah. So a PE ratio is just like one of the, you know, basic metrics for valuing an asset. So really what it means at the core is that investors are willing to pay X dollars for every one generated by the company today. So what that means, let's say Apple has a P-E ratio of 80. So investors are saying that they're willing to pay $80 for every dollar earned by Apple today.

And really what that measures is a future growth potential that the market believes that that asset has. So we can take that same framework and apply it to defy tokens given that we had these cash flows. So yeah. So generally with P.E.s and stocks, you might see stocks that there's high expectations of future growth like tech stocks. Those would have a higher P.E. ratio, right? It's not necessarily that they're overvalued. It's that the market expects them to grow faster, grow their

into that valuation. Yeah, versus like a general electric or something, right? Which is like, I don't know, They're not 10xing anytime soon. They're not 10xing. There may be like an 8 to a 15 PE ratio, depending on whereas like a Netflix, that's going to be like 100 or something like that. Wait, what's, how about a Tesla? Yeah, that's the real one.

Tesla's valued at 280 billion or so, and they don't even make any money. So that just like one of the nuances. And then like Zoom, which is just video technology, that we're actually on right now has a PE ratio of like 1,200 or something like that, insane. Right? So like when you're looking at these defy tokens and when you're looking at, you know, the addressable market, these are like open financial software accessible by anyone in the world.

And then when you compare that to like Zoom who's posting higher PE ratios than most of these defy tokens and it's video conferencing technology that's been around for 20 years, you just kind of see that there's massive growth potential ahead in like this. despite the fact that we're in the hundreds for a lot of these defy tokens, it's actually not that bad, relatively speaking. Yeah, so like what is a Netflix, for instance? Yes, in Netflix, let's look it up. I mean, I would guess somewhere in the, in the current market, like 100 range or something like that.

Yeah, it's about 84 right now. Okay, so that's 84 PE. And we've got, in this chart, we've got a bankor at 92. That's the lowest one, right? That's the lowest one. The other thing that's interesting about this, I think Lucas, is both protocols and companies can kind of dial up their earnings and dialed down. So Amazon went through a large phase.

They're still in it to some level where Bezos was just like, I'm going to recycle all of our profit. We're going to make $0 because I'm going to recycle all of our profits into making our prices the most competitive. and I'm going to do that to gobble up market share and get network effect and then basically own the world, right? So for many years, Amazon had like zero profit or negative profit, but more recently they've started to dial that up. And at any time, like, they could just dial that up and then insanely profitable companies. So PE can be a little deceiving on that level too,

right? Right. Yeah. I mean, it's super interesting to think about that. Like, that can't really happen to the same level. I mean, I guess it could happen through like governance, right? Like if you wanted to reinvest those earnings or the cash flows, like governance could, I guess, elect to do that. But it's definitely a much more like nuanced situation than something like Amazon or basis is just like, hey, we're going to reinvest all of our money. And we're going to post negative earnings.

I just want to appreciate the fact that we're actually having this conversation where like, and so, Lucas, like, hats off of generating like a graph with PE ratios of all the defy protocols and now allowing us to make comparisons to the stock market right and like being able to compare things to the stock market which is like our foundation for valuating stuff is insanely just a awesome and i'm the b i'm finally glad we're here we're here now like we can we can have these conversations the fact that we're we're having this conversation i think is just insanely bullish yeah i mean big shout out to token terminal they're really the ones you know behind this and the ones pioneering the PE ratio and aggregating all this data.

So big shout out to them. I'm going to pull this up, by the way. This is token terminal, guys, if you haven't seen it. So it will show you basic, more than just defy protocols, but a lot of crypto assets and their PE ratios and their earnings over time. They even put Ethereum, Ether, and Bitcoin in this list. Bitcoin has a super high P.E. ratio, 1,100. So this is what, dude, this is why,

if ether is just stupidly undervalued. It's so undervalued. It's stupid. Look, even if ether is just a capital asset and you don't buy the ethos money, economic bandwidth, everything we freaking talk about on bankless, it's P.E. ratio is 108. It's got a Netflix level PE ratio. Yeah. And it's a global financial infrastructure.

A global financial system. Like, whatever. The market will figure that out. I'm just, I'm angry at this point because ETH is so stupidly undervaluate. The Tesos is valued at 41,000 PE ratio. Jesus. Yeah. Well, so back to what we were talking about in the intro, David, right?

So do you think, like, good valuation of this stuff, Lucas and David, are going to, like, wash all of the, let's pick on light coin because that's been a theme today. Like wash all of the light coin and XRP garbage down the toilet and some of these. assets will start to shine? Are we like starting to see are we going to see a paradigm shift now that we've incorporated these valuation mechanisms? Lucas, go for it. I think I would hope so over time, right? Like we're still super early to this game. Like compound is like the only DFI unicorn in existence today. It's valued at 1.5 billion. The rest of the D5 protocols are valued at less than half a billion. So there's there's a long road ahead. And I would assume that over time the market, would kind of realize that a lot of these assets are relatively undervalued and compared to like

the top 10 where there's billion dollar market caps and minimal earnings or revenues on the network. Yeah. So I think that we are, it's possible that we are in a massive repricing event where all these defy protocols with real cash flows are just going to come into fashion and to investors who are looking for something real to invest in. And also like, why today in 2020 would you have a thesis on light coin or Cardano or XRP or, you know, Bitcoin SV? And I say why? Sure. It's be I think it's because and this triggers me that it's because um they're operating under this like backward facing narrative of there's Bitcoin and altcoins right. They're not operating under a narrative where there's three types of crypto assets, the asset superclasses, as we call them with Berninski, right?

So you've got crypto capital assets that are earnings and cash flow. You've got commodities, which are based on supply and demand. And then you've got store of value coins, right? They're acting like Bitcoin SV and like coin. They're priced as if they're all store value coins competing for money. Right. Right. So it feels like that's why. It's like the alt-coin narrative. It's like this maximalist narrative that's not staying, keeping up with what's actually happening in the space. Yeah, I totally agree. And like I said, I think this is why I'm kind of cautiously optimistic about things that are already really highly priced in the defy world, things like hyper, things like synthetics, things like Maker and Compound, Avey, these things have gone on absolute massive runs, but they're still below a billion dollars. and like Bitcoin SV is three and a half billion dollars.

Cardano is $3 billion. Lightcoin is $2.8 billion. There's no reason why all the Defi protocols can't be up there with them. If those are priced like that, the defy protocols can also be priced like that too. And I think this next cycle that we all believe that we're about to go through, we're going to see all of these, you know, theoretical store values that aren't real store values like Bitcoin SV,

like coin, fall out of fashion because obviously they should. or maybe I'm just biased and then the DFI protocols can step in because of the actual P.E. ratios and the actual fundamentals that we get to measure? Or is that just too bullish? I mean, I think you're right on the mark there.

We shall see, though, I think the famous saying is the market will stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. So we can only hope that these D5 protocols will realize the valuations that we have, you know, especially relative to some of the stuff that's in the top 10 and valued over a billion dollars.

We're getting there. It will probably take a while for that to happen, but we can only hope that it will. Narratives still dominate, right, David? We should talk about Ampleforth, by the way. Narratives still dominate. Yeah, narrative still dominate. Yeah, that is true.

There's some other stuff in this report, guys, you've got to check out. Lucas does a breakdown by sector, sort of like Dexes just absolutely crushed it, both in Q1, but also in Q2. do. Whereas lending sector was way down as far as earnings go. Compound kind of bolstered it up through yield farming.

And then another sector to take a look at is derivatives. And that's basically synthetics right now. Although we've got some interesting new entrance like MC Dex, McDex, entering the ring. And I'm sure we'll see others. I think we'll see a lot of others. Lucas, anything else? that you want to highlight from this report that we should be thinking about?

What's kind of the bottom line here for us? That's a good question. If I said anything that we're probably just getting started, this is a multi-year, multi-ideally trillion dollar bull run that we're going through or that we think that we might be going through. And there's a long road ahead here. And equally as important,

there's a lot of new tokens that have yet to launch. In the deck sector, we have curve in the lending sector, BZRX's launch. AVE has an upgrade set for the next few weeks. We're seeing OMA protocol in the derivative sector. So there's a lot of assets coming into fruition and that are going to launch in the next few months here. So just keep an eye up for them. Sounds like what you're saying is there's plenty of room for growth. I did write an article called the trillion dollar case for each.

So there's plenty of growth ahead. a world famous article at this point in time. And we've got right now, I love this chart, this is defy users over time. Richard Chen put this together. We're at about 260,000 defy users. That is the population of a mid-sized U.S. city. So lots of growth ahead. Growing way faster than a mid-sized U.S. city, that's for sure.

Yeah. The Bankless Nation is the size of the city of Richmond, Virginia, basically. So there's a lot of, there's a lot of grip ahead. All right, awesome. Lucas, thanks. It's been a pleasure, man. Awesome. Thank you guys for having me.

Cheers. Appreciate. Take care. All right. So Bankless Nation, go check out that report. It's fantastic. David, we should talk about our sponsors again before we get into the next few topics. Do you want to start?

Yeah, absolutely. So our next sponsor, your camera's off. Our next sponsor is Ampleforth. We've talked a little bit about Ampleforth so far in this episode. Ampleforth is a base money experiment, and I really want to emphasize the experiment side of things. It is a very interesting token with this crazy mechanic called a rebasing mechanism where it targets a dollar, but it targets a dollar slowly. And if the price is above a dollar, you will find that there will be more supply added to the total Ampleforce supply to bring that. price down and then vice versa if it's below a dollar. And so it's some pretty crazy stuff happens around the rebasing. But the point of Amplforth is that is a non-dilutive M-zero money experiment. And so it's like Bitcoin in the sense that it is non-dilutive. So when you purchase a share of the all outstanding Amplforth tokens, you are guaranteed to have that same share no matter what the supply is. So it's a it's a supply elation.

currency while it's also a price inelastic currency. So pretty interesting experiment. Check them out at ampleforth.org. Lots of cool little, there's a dashboard there so you can check out the state of the experiment and what's going on. Also, guys, if you are exchanging crypto, want to tell you about our other sponsor, Diversify. So gas fees are too high. It's very expensive to use defy exchanges on the base layer, but not with diversified, because Diversify is built as a professional grade, non-custodial DFI exchange that operates in a layer two. So it settles on the Ethereum chain, but all of the orders and transactions occur on a layer two that they've developed some incredible tech here. It really makes you wonder why use a centralized exchange at all,

when you can get a better experience on diversify without giving up custody of your assets. So we're talking 9K transactions per second, instant execution and super low fees. They also have the NEC token, which is used for governance. And it will soon provide discounts to diversify traders. So that's something to check out as well. They were doing liquidity mining before it was cool way back in 2000. 18 and their exchanges is fantastic. So check them out. Go to Diversify.com. We will include a link in the show notes. All right, David, what do you want to talk about next, man? I think we're talking about the

morality of price go up. Morality of pumping. What? What? Morality of pumping. Didn't we just say, like, people shouldn't pump shit coins? Like, what's going on? What do you say? Yeah, there's nuance here, right? And so, and Bitcoiners figure this out very, very early. Because, there's an intrinsic relationship between the health and protective barrier of a blockchain crypto system and the price of its native asset, right? And I wrote about this in my most recent article, the protocol syncing global public goods, where I illustrated Ethereum is this platform for offering protection to applications, right? So uniswap, maker, it needs to have self-sovereignty in order to be the things that they are, right? Like a uniswap or maker

that is under state purview is not a maker or uniswap at all, right? So Ethereum offers protection to these applications, right? It says you are allowed to be self-sovereign. You don't have to, you know, look to the nation state to operate and have rules and regulations. You can use Ethereum for your rules and regulations. And Ethereum itself is also self-sovere. Ethereum gets itself sovereignty from the price of ether, right? And so Ethereum protects applications, but ether protects Ethereum, right? And so when comes to pumping eth, quote unquote, pumping ETH, there is some amount of like service that you are providing all applications on Ethereum by trying to make sure that Ethereum is as safe and strong as

possible. And that strength, the strength of the walls that protect Ethereum is reflected in the ether market cap. David, are you saying it's our patriotic duty as Ethereum's to pump the price of ETH? Is that really what you're saying? I'm not not saying that. That's what I'm Okay. Wait, so like, I've gotten into debates on this. And to be clear, like, so I think what you're talking about when you use the term pump, like you're using the term pump to be a little bit provocative. It's a little facetious, yeah. It's a little facetious. What you're actually talking about is valuing the token economics and value accrual mechanisms of ether the asset highly and prioritizing ether the asset, not just Ethereum. the network because the price of ether, the asset, is what gives security to the entirety of the Ethereum network. So you're saying, all good Ethereum patriots should want ETH price to go up, right? And you're not talking about like speculative pump so you could go dump on somebody. Right. Right. Like I know you. You're holding this, you're holding this shit for like 20 years,

aren't you? Until I die. Gray beard, right? You're in a stake. You're going to like that. That's your vision. so you're not short-term pumping. You're talking about long-term value accrual mechanisms. Did I get that right? Is that what you're doing? Yeah, absolutely. Also, do you want to stop sharing your screen?

Yeah. And so, like, and I think there's an important nuance here where, like, I think there's a relationship between the centralization of an asset or of a project and, like, how immoral pumping is, right? And so, like, and again, Bitcoiners figured this out where if you replace, like, the Bitcoin army with the XRP army or insert XR army here. Like they're almost indistinguishable. The difference though is that Bitcoin is fully decentralized.

So there's no central orchestrator of the pump in the same way that like there definitely is for the XRP army. Right. And so like Bitcoiners if Bitcoiners are quote unquote pumping Bitcoin just as hard as XRP people are pumping XRP. But the difference is it actually serves a purpose with Bitcoin, right? it serves a means to an end because Bitcoin actually needs to go up in order to survive. Whereas like if you are if you're a centralized team and you have a large amount of the supply of

a token pumping that is nefarious pumping that is malicious because there probably there's too many people that are just going to be enticed to dump right. And the part about Bitcoin and like ether is also very sufficiently decentralized when these things go up in price. there isn't large bag holders, at least not in comparison to how there are for centralized assets like XRP, there aren't large centralized bagholders that are going to dump on people. When it pumps, when ether pumps, when Bitcoin pumps, it pumps for all of us, right? Not just for a select few. And that's, so the decentralization of a project relates to how moral it is to pump something.

And I think ether and Bitcoin are sufficiently decentralized where like it's not just pumping. It's like protecting the network. Okay. So, but from a community perspective, the Bitcoin. community right now, they are very, very comfortable with price go up. In fact, that's their main thing. That's the whole thing. The ether community, the Ethereum community, is historically less comfortable with that, right? So I think there are many among us who are, you know, saying things like, hey, the entire security of this thing, there's an economic report that came up

last week for ETH2 staking, which basically said, this thing works if ETHU-Staking, which basically said, this thing works if Heath Price is high. It doesn't work if it's not, right? The entire security of the network, basically. There are some that are comfortable with that. But there's also, I think, a taboo, I want to say, against talking about Eith Price in the, historically in the Ethereum community. We had Vitalik on the podcast, and he talked a little bit about potentially talking too much about Price being a moral hazard. and it being an impediment to the progress of Bitcoin. So the criticism of Bitcoin is they've become so obsessed about price go up

that they're willing to sell their soul to crypto banks and to not scale the network and not extend the vision because all they care about is price go up. They're not building a network for the world, right? I'm not saying I share that view. I'm just saying that's a potential criticism that they've lost sight of the goal. What do you think? Do you like, what do you think about this dynamic? Do you somewhat agree with it too? Or like are you more Bitcoiner in that way? Yeah, it's a good question. And it is relevant to say that like Ethereum does have its centralized components, right? Like Ethereum 2 is a is a centrally coordinated endeavor. Like there's many different client teams. And so that kind of decentralized is the effort. But like we can we have a list of people who are working on ETH too. Right. So that itself is inherently centralizing. We also have the EF. Right. So I'm caught in between like a lot of these client teams that are building out

ETH2 and a lot of the efforts for building out ETH1.X depend on ETH price because that's what's funding these things. At the same time, if ether price goes too high too fast, there might be like, you know, there might be some jostling. There might be some like positioning. There's a lot more value to capture and any centralized entity like the EF, like the people that are handing out money to client teams. there's now like a political component as like who's going to get that money.

And so like having a little bit of money is like a nice balance because there's not a lot of, there's not much at stake. But at the same time, it would be nice if you have had more money to pay for more salaries for more client teams. But then there's also the political risk of like who's going to who's how do we decide where that money goes. So it's all a balance. So I understand that like for one person that is trying to pump Eath, there's another person saying like, hey, maybe we're not ready for that yet, like, maybe later, maybe when there's no one to like stop you. But, but right now, I think there's a delicate balance between

like trying to pump Ethan and trying to have like a smooth equitable network. Yeah. And the thing about Ethereum's tokenomics, it's scarcity economics, is that its price appreciation, its scarcity is actually linked to network usage. in, I think, what could be a very, like a very nice virtuous cycle, right? So if your blocks are providing value to the world, that means your transactions on the Ethereum network, people will pay more for them, right? And you're creating more blocks as well, so you're going to have shards, so you're going to have more capacity, but people will pay more for them. And a portion of those fees goes into burning the actual ether token itself. So usage of the network feeds back to

scarcity of the ETH asset, that seems to me, and I've heard people argue this, to be a very non-pumpy thing to do, right? It seems like, it's like, wow, this is an economic network that is actually increasing the utility of its blocks, the value of its blocks and the real world usage of its blocks to scarcity of its asset and pumping the price that way. I mean, to me, that's like a, like, when you view it like that, and by the way, we're talking about EIP 1559, it's coming to what could be coming at ETH one. But when you view it like that, I mean, that's a very low pump thing to do. Compare that to like XRP Army or like, you know, link brains. Yeah. Like the pumpiness is a solution for having no fundamentals, right? Like that's what that is.

And so the more we bake in fundamentals, the less we have to have this conversation, right? And so we integrate EIP-1559. And now there's nothing left to like for people like you and me to rally around. Like, hey, let's pump ETH. Let's find a new way to pump ETH. Like, no, like it was one-five-nine. Now that's live. And then there's also staking live.

And now the only way to pump ETH more is by supporting DFI protocols that add more economic activity to Ethereum, which the only way that that's going to happen is by, providing a real world use case, a real world utility to people that want to use that DFI protocol. So like we get to shut up and move on. Be like we don't have to talk about EIP-1559 anymore. We don't have to talk about ETH price. We can just talk about like how these D-Fi protocols are helping change the world because in the background, Ethereum gets the protection it needs because of the fundamentals of EIP-1559. And this just fits right into the conversation we were having with Lucas

earlier where like, and this is just the whole narrative of I think, 2020 is like there are now real ways to evaluate and value these things. And like that's and that's what pumping is for if you don't have that. And so like pumping is for trying to replace some sort of real world valuations, real world meaning. If we have real world metrics and valuations and cash flows, etc., which is what EIP 1559, then we don't have to have this nebulous, let's pump ETH conversation. we can just talk about like this is how much is worth. Yeah, absolutely. I agree.

I think that what we're probably agreeing on and saying is, eath price go up is fundamentally good. We need that in order to secure the open financial network of the world. Low ETH price is bad net from a utility to the world perspective. The world is a worst place with low ETH price. It is. So if you are supporting kind of the entire movement of bankless and defy, this is what I can ever get around.

It's like if you're supporting that movement, we need a trustless store of value. We need trustless economic bandwidth. We need a non-sovereign source of money at the M-Zero, at the base layer, or this whole thing doesn't work. A government can just push the button and like deactivate the entire thing. That's the same as the traditional system. That's why everyone's getting skisole. Jared about USDC and DFI.

Right. Exactly. So anyway, there is some morality to price go up, certainly. Maybe not to short-term pumping because you're going to dump on someone based on some knowledge you have. Certainly not that, but long-term value accrual, the morality of that. It checks out for me, man. So let's keep doing it. All right.

What else do you want to talk about, David? I think we should talk about the relationship between tokens and ETH, Ryan. Oh, okay. Yeah, take us. Well, so one interesting thing that happened last week, which is not surprising at all to me, is that the asset value on Ethereum, the asset value of tokens on Ethereum, that is.

Aggregate, yeah, the aggregate. Aggregate, your C-20s, actually passed the value of ETH, right? So I've got a graph somewhere I could show, but it's something like, something like, I don't know, 25, 25 billion each was the number at the time, something like that. And so what does that mean from your perspective, David, so now we have ERC 20 tokens that are worth more than the value of ETH. So Camilla put this out, this tweet out.

By the way, Camilla's book back there, Infant Machine, pick it up. Read it. read it as great. I just finished it. It's history of Ethereum. She said that this disproves, or it could disprove the fat protocol thesis. It's a challenge to the fat protocol thesis because tokens are capturing more value than apps. What's your take on this? Yeah, and this just fits in so well to the previous conversation where like, I bet this wouldn't have happened if EIP-155, 5-9 and staking was a thing. However, I will continue to be of the opinion that, like, the more valuations of

tokens that are on Ethereum, and, like, I don't even think that the FAP protocol thesis means that the native asset of a chain, ether, actually has to be greater than the aggregate of total tokens on Ethereum. It just means that, like, the more value of tokens on Ethereum, the more ether price is going to be. And the frustrating thing I think about Ether, you know, people like you and me that have Ether, we want the valuation of Defi to be like one-to-one tracking with the valuation of Ether, but it just doesn't do that, right?

I think Ether is a huge lagging indicator for Defi, right? And so while the current volume or current aggregate market cap of all tokens on Ethereum is surpassing the Ether price, like that narrative just gets flipped the moment Ether goes from like $230 to like $300 or more, right? When's that happening, David? Tomorrow, so. But it is happening? Well, okay, I mean, it could, right?

And so like the larger market cap on Ethereum is like there, just ether is just proximate to it. And at the very least, like that proximity is going to benefit it to some degree, right? I think EIP 1559 in staking closes that loop and makes that relationship. happen faster, but I do think that relationship is present no matter what. It's just a lagging indicator right now. You know, another thing, so part of the concern, there's been a concern for a while, I think, that, well, if ERC 20 tokens, if they exceed the price of ETH, the aggregate price of ETH too much, that means they're no longer secure, right? Like, the value of ETH is

not enough to secure the tokens on top. But on this, I've got to disagree because I don't think that most people are making the differentiation that we like to make when we talk about settlement guarantees, for instance. And this is so crucial for people to understand. So Masari put out this. Am I sharing my screen, David? Yes, you are. Okay. Masari put out this. This is Ethereum versus Bitcoin daily settlement value, okay? And Ethereum is now higher because it settles more on a daily basis of both ETH and ERC20 tokens in aggregate. So it's settling more than Bitcoin. But I actually disagree with this, okay, because what's counted in this number, in the Ethereum number, is all of the 10 billion or so ERC 20 bank issued stable coins. Right. Okay. It's super important

to remember that bank issued staple coins are not actually settling on Ethereum. They're not. They're settling in the traditional financial system. These are IOUs for money in a bank account somewhere. The IOUs do settle on Ethereum, but that's not the final settlement. That is not the final settlement layer. It's still the legal system. So it doesn't, so it's using the security of the legal system. Now, it's using the transport layer of defy and crypto, which is super useful, but it's not actually being settled on Ethereum, just the IOUs are being settled on Ethereum. This is different. Like Bitcoin is completely settled on the Bitcoin network when there's a transaction on Bitcoin. Ether is completely 100% settled on the Ethereum network when there's a transaction on Ethereum, right?

So I think people don't make this distinction. What's really important, what's more important, is that the trustless assets, like Ether, for instance, or like ERC20s that aren't issued by a bank somewhere and settled in meat space and legal space, it's really important that that value, those ERC20s, maintain some ratio with the value of ETH or else you could get into a situation where you know, you lose the security. the security of Ethereum is not enough to keep pace with all of these digital bearer assets. Does that make sense? I just feel like a lot of people maybe don't understand that subtlety, but I think they should. There's nuances that go even further than that, right? Like, I do agree with you. I do want this broken out into, in between like native Ethereum assets like MKR, you know, Khyber, Aube, all the things that are native to Ethereum. Yeah. And then also the non-native assets, largely USC and Tether. However,

there is some, these things do settle on Ethereum to some degree, right? So I think if Balancer was hacked or Uniswap was hacked or somebody got hacked and somebody stole a bunch of USDC, I think it's pretty reasonable to think that that hacker made off with that USDC. Do you think so? Yeah. So here's what I think would happen. I think Coinbase would just freeze the account. You think so?

Oh, yeah, dude. You know, like so, you know the Twitter hacks last week? they sent out a or they had a logged into coin base mobile and they basically said the bitcoin address that the Twitter hackers used has been you can't send anything to it yeah it's going to happen too fast though right so like say say somebody drains some account I don't want to pick on any particular defy protocol but somebody drains some defy protocols account of USC they immediately go to you to swap and sell for ether I think that's possible well so but what are they doing that's interesting right that's a good point yeah that's a good point yeah that's a good

they're swapping for ether right away because ether is the the cash you can get away with because it's the base settlement layer right you don't want USC yeah you want to ether you want die something with stronger settlement guarantees yeah having closing that turnaround time for hacked protocols with centralized assets uh i mean it's also at some point like the the circle or tether really actually care that much like they don't really lose money like they're may like and like they don't really have too much responsibility to... It's true. It's true. Yeah, it's true. That's going to happen and that's going to be interesting.

Oh, I think so. Like, let's say compound was hacked right now. And you knew who the hacker was, right? And they made off with a whole bunch of USDC. And Coinbase had time. What would they do? Bam, blacklist account, assets frozen, refund this tender. They'd almost be, as a company, it would almost be their fiduciary responsibility to do that. If you didn't do that, you'd get sued and leave. legal space, right?

Yeah, that would be a very interesting court case. If I lost my money and Coinbase had the ability to give it back to me but didn't, that feels definitely like a lawsuit. Sure. Yeah. For somebody. Yeah. Then we get into the whole Code is Law debate, like, was it a hack or was it an exploit or,

you know, did it actually use the code as intended? There's a lot of dirty, dirty hairiness there. I agree. I just think that if you're not settling on. on Ethereum, you know, fully, for instance, or on Bitcoin fully, that there's, it's not truly settled, right? Sure.

So there's all this room for ambiguity. And yeah, we're not, like, we're not considering that as much when people look at, you know, eat security. Anyway, I do think that fat protocol is right, personally, at least for like money protocols. You know, not necessarily for any protocols, like, and, but I think,

think directionally it was right. And I guess we'll see. I don't know what you think about that. I think the fat protocol thesis is here to stay until some ERC 20 token passes the market cap of ether. Like that's like a single ERC 20 token, not all of them, right? Like I think the fat protocol thesis is pretty flexible. Is that going to be ample for it, David?

No, it's not going to be ample for it. Although that would make me happy. actually no one no one no one all right so maybe maybe lastly just because just to tease kind of meet the nation right so I have some questions

about Ampleforth and full disclosure the sponsor of the show the reason we the reason oh shoot okay the reason we took them on as a sponsor is because is because

essentially we could talk about we can talk about them the way we wanted to talk about them, which is as a monetary experiment. And I do think it's a fascinating monetary experiment. But it doesn't have like the whole rebasing idea kind of throws me for a loop because the supply can change on a daily basis, right? Yeah. But this is just. Supply is volatile.

Yeah. Price is less volatile. But if you buy like whatever units, X units of Ampleforth, right? Let's say you bought your whale, you bought 1% of all Amplforth in existence. You always own 1% even though the units will actually change on you. Is that right? Yeah, the units will go up and down, but you will always have the same percentage of the market cap that you bought at the time you bought it.

Okay. So it's similar almost to like Bitcoin's $21 million. Right? So Bitcoin has like $21 million when it's fully, um, diluted and then, you know, so does ample forth. But I don't know that everyone understands that because people are hitting my Twitter, you know, DMs and such and saying things like, yeah, like, this is a coin that just expands, you know, it's completely different than Bitcoin or ether. It's a coin that just sort of expands based on demand of the coin and sort of, you know,

tethers itself to a dollar. I don't know that they fully understand. The supply dynamics going on. I'm also skeptical of how much people actually understand it. And it's one of the things like maybe I'm missing something, but I don't think I'm missing anything. I think it's a cycle. I think what's happening is a very interesting psychological trick based off of how we're not used to having stable price and volatile supply.

Everybody in crypto is used to stable supply and volatile price. This is the inverse. But the fact that those things are interesting, inversed doesn't actually change much. Like, it's still pretty, if it still follows the same laws of supply and demand. And, like, and, you know, there's a case to be made where you can just mint it in normal ERC20 token,

have fixed supply, and it kind of fulfills the same M-0 experiment as Ampleforth, except it just doesn't have this rebasing mechanism to keep the supply volatile and the price relatively stable. And so it's really up to the amplification. Appleforth team to like figure out how to extract utility and value out of the rebasing mechanism because you don't get stability and your value from Amplforth because the market cap is just as volatile as any other cryptocurrency. It's just that it's taken the volatility from the price

and put it into the supply, but there's still volatility. It's still present. Yeah. So if I own one percent of Ampleforth, going back to my whale example, that could be worth $1,000 today and $20,000, thousand dollars tomorrow and ten dollars the next day yes and the ample for a token will still roughly be around a dollar right because it adjusts daily yeah so i think the way i understand it is the way you understand it so i would be super interested to hear in your meet the nation like more about that and you guys to dive into that like because maybe that's what it is and if that's what it is it's um it's still an interesting money experiment because no one's doing that as an er c20 today Yeah, absolutely. It's all about like how how does the rebasing mechanism actually like, how can we leverage that in ways that are useful that you couldn't just leverage with a minted ERC 20 token? Like what are the ways that users can actually use the rebasing mechanism to their advantage? And like I think we, I think it's pretty fair to claim that like we know that the market doesn't understand this because I've been watching the rebasing mechanism on uniswap and people when the price rebases and what this means is that.

new supply is added to everyone's wallets equally, right? So you can watch the supply in your wallet change, right, after the rebase, every 24 hours. And when this happens, people rush to Uniswap to buy the cheap coins, but that's a total psychological fallacy because they're still buying the same percentage of the market as they were right before the rebase. And so, like, we know the market doesn't understand this because they're falling, falling to the psychological trick, right? And so, like, I don't think Ampleforth is really going to stabilize in its market cap until the market understands this and stops succumbing to the psychological trick.

And you use the term psychological, you know, trick, right? But at some level, it goes back to like, isn't 21 million and the scarcity meme a psychological trick to? Totally. Totally. That's why this is such a fun experiment. A psychological trip to bootstrap money, basically. Right. So because money is inherently social. Right. In order to create money, you have to have a good meme. Do you not? 100%. 100%.

And this is why I'm happy with Ampleforth being a sponsor of bankless because the difference between a monetary experiment like Ampleforth working and not working is how well can they distribute their token? How well can they get awareness? Because money, if money is a meme, awareness is everything, right? understanding it is everything, right? And so, you know, while like I've personally gotten some flack about like saying that Ampleforth is legitimate from some people who are hyper-sceptical, I'm happy to do what I can to help them do what they need to do to spin out what could be

more than an experiment one day. Well, I think a lot of Ethereums are uncomfortable with the idea of money as a meme, to be honest. And they want even the value of ether to be bootstrapped not just because of a meme, but because of its raw utility. Back to our conversation about 15.5-9. We've been talking about this all episode, right? Like, it's great because we're getting the fundamentals. However, there's always going to be the meme layer. There's always going to be the meme layer. It can't not be. And I've always thought that the meme layer is where you drive the highest level of security. Right. So if you are a meme coin, You have to compete as a meme coin in order to be one of the highest value crypto assets in the world.

To me, the meme coin or the meme side of things, it's just another word for monetary premium, right? Exactly. And so Bitcoin is like almost completely 100% monetary premium because there's not much utility there, except for like, you know, the proof of work is its utility. the seizure resistance is the utility, but memes are based on fundamentals, right? So there's a relationship between the fundamentals and the meme. Well, so the meme creates the fundamentals, right? Because I would argue also...

No, I would say it's the other way around. Okay, well, so maybe they're both related, right? So I would argue right now anyway, Bitcoin is also useful because it's so liquid, right? So it means itself, it meaned itself into liquidity. Into reality, right, totally. Right. And because of that liquidity, it's... it's now actually useful because I can use it as a trading pair almost anywhere because I can

hold it and a reasonable amount of crypto banks or individuals will accept it as real value. So it's like a cycle where it creates its own value. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. You can't have one without the other. So maybe it's a chicken and egg thing where the order doesn't really matter, but you do need both, right?

You do need both. Absolutely. And so like the utility of Ampleforth is this rebasing stable-ish mechanism. and it's really up to the Ampleforth team to find ways to leverage that because like that's great that that's that utility but they have to derive value from that and that's really the innovation behind an ample fourth that needs to happen all right so I create an ERC 20 David it's got fixed supply and it's money damn it's it's it's base it's base money it's M0 right the bankless dollar um are you in can we mean this thing to money

is that is that how it works I guess the question is like If Ampleforth is doing this, right, what's to prevent? This is the old question in the Bitcoin community, with people who are you questioning the value of Bitcoin. What's to prevent everyone to do it, everyone to create their own money and kind of out-compete it or dilute its mean? Because I'm just competing with the bankless dollar or whatever. Yeah.

I mean, we saw that happen. That was what 2017 was, like, make your own money. And that's why Ethereum blew up in 2017 because it was a platform for making your own money, right? Obviously, it didn't work out too much, but many things did survive. I wouldn't say that very many monies survived, but I guess light coin counts, I guess. It's like $2.5 billion, so I guess that kind of counted.

But I guess also didn't come from 2017. I mean, it's partly one of the reasons why we are so optimistic about the future of defy is because anyone can spin up their own token and ascribe some amount of value to it, whether that token turns into global money is a different conversation. But I'm sure if we spun up bankless coin, bankless token, there's some ways that we could describe value to that, that would generate a market cap and then generate some meme layer on top of that as well. Like there are things that we would,

there's tools at our disposal that we could use. One question. As you do, the meet the nation is regulatory. So Ben Hunt says, don't come at the state with you're saying your thing is money because the state will dominate you. That's an interesting question to ask the team.

Big threat. That's why Satoshi was anonymous, right? Anyway, super interesting discussion, David. Yeah, I think we should wrap it up here. Absolutely. If there's one thing, I hope the bankless nation got out of the state of the nation, it is this. Do not buy a light coin.

Just kidding. I mean, Gorda. It's going to zero. No, I mean, don't bet against narratives, I guess. I mean, we have no comment about like coin. But what you should do as far as actions is check out the report by Lucas. It's absolutely fantastic.

Take a look at Token Terminal. We will include those things in the action list. And then also check out State of the Nation. New episode releases today. So it should be available by the time or close to the time that you watch this. David, anything else I'm missing on the action items? Nothing from me, except for stay tuned for the future Meet the Nations that are coming. One will be coming this week.

Awesome. All right. State of the Nation, Episode 6, the State of the Nation is exponential. Thanks a lot for joining us.