Bankless - SotN#15 w/ Jordan Lyall - $MEME is Hot, Why EIP1559 Isn't Here, UNI: Buy, Sell, or Hold?

Episode Date: September 23, 2020

Episode: #31 September 21, 2020 ----- Tools from our sponsors to go bankless: 🌐 UNSTOPPABLE DOMAINS - GET A HUMAN READABLE CRYPTO DOMAIN 🌈 ZAPPER - ULTIMATE HUB FOR DEFI - ZAP INTO DEFI �� MONOLITH - GET THE HOLY GRAIL OF BANKLESS VISA CARDS 💸 AAVE - LEND AND BORROW DEFI ASSETS ---- State of the Nation - $MEME, NFTs, and EIP1559 $MEME is the main topic of conversation in this state of the nation. We bring on Jordan Lyall (@jordanlyall), the accidental founder of $MEME, to help us understand how MEME accidentally became a thing by memeing itself into existence.  1) $MEME IS HOT RN 2) WHY EIP1559 ISN'T HERE 3) IS UNI A BUY, HOLD, OR SELL? RESOURCES: 1) DON'T BUY MEME https://dontbuymeme.com/farms 2) EIP1559 AMA https://crypto-ama.herokuapp.com/messages_eip_1559.html 3) UNI TOKEN CLAIM DASHBOARD https://explore.duneanalytics.com/dashboard/uni-token-claims   Rate the Podcast 5 Stars ----- Subscribe to podcast on iTunes | Spotify | YouTube | RSS Feed Leave a review on iTunes Share the episode with someone you know! ----- Don't stop at the podcast! Subscribe to the Bankless newsletter program Watch Bankless shows and tutorials on YouTube Visit official Bankless website for resources Follow Bankless on Twitter Follow Ryan on Twitter Follow David on Twitter ----- Not financial or tax advice. This podcast is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions.  Do your own research.

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and it will even let you make investments into defy protocols right through their zabber.fi portal, making it really easy to compare and contrast different places as to where you can deploy your capital. Check them out at zabber.fi. All right. Welcome bankless nation. This is state of the nation number 15. We've got a special guest for you, Jordan Lyle, who is the creator, maybe the accidental creator of meme. which is our main topic that we're going to talk about today. If this is your first day of the nation, David and I do this every Tuesday.

And what we do is we talk about the things that are going on in DFI, in crypto, in the bankless nation that you should know about. And we relay those things, relate those things to some of the big picture topics that we talk about on the bankless podcast and in the newsletter. So this drops every Tuesday. It's live. We're doing it an hour early. But generally, it's going to be 2 p.m. Eastern if you want to catch it live. You can also catch the recorded version on bankless YouTube. And of course, we release these on our podcast stream on Wednesday, if you are more of the audio sort of person. Just some quick announcements before we get in.

We had an epic episode with Hugh from the Nexus Protocol that dropped on Monday. We also have an NFT episode that's coming out the following Monday. David, what did you think about that NFT episode? Our NFT is going to be the next big thing. my friend. You know what? That's kind of what it seems to be shaping up to be. NFTs seem to be really hot right now and I'll be honest, it kind of caught me by surprise. I was not on the ball with that one. Turns out there's a world of NFTs that I kind of haven't been paying attention to and that's kind of getting to what the state of the nation is, right? There seems to be a lot of excitement around

NFTs and so we have an NFT themed episode today and then we also have an NFT themed podcast coming out on your feed on Monday. Absolutely. Yeah. So NFTs are maybe the next up incoming thing in D5s. You've got to check that out. Also, we have an article coming out, much demanded article actually on taxes. With all of this farming revenue coming in the door, like how do you, the IRS is going to

want their cut. How do you manage those taxes? That's coming on the bankless newsletter as well. As lastly, an AMA this Thursday with Hugh Karp again, where you get to ask your questions of Hugh. but I'm going to start with a question I always start with at the beginning of the state of the nation episodes and that is this, David, what is the state of the nation this week? The state of the nation this week is meming, which has only a little bit to do with meme the asset,

which is a topic that we're going to get into, but the memes have been strong lately. I think with this effort is perhaps spearheaded by Blue Kirby, who has been doing a fantastic job meming into existence so many memes such as few and weesh which i don't yet understand but i'm trying to uh it makes me feel a little bit like a boomer but the memes are flowing the memes are flowing this whole episode is going to make me feel like a little bit of a boomer because i haven't fully been been keeping up on meme the actual asset and jordan's going to get us up to speed on that but like is it just me david or have you noticed an uptick in ethereum's and defieres ability to come up with memes. Like last cycle, the last few couple years even, it's been all Bitcoiners. Like if you,

if you want the great crypto memes, they came out of maximalist territory and Bitcoiner territory. But now, I don't know if it's just me, but it feels like the meme game has shifted. And the Ethereum and the defires are like picking it up. Yeah. And really well. Maybe they're ahead of the Bitcoiners. Oh yeah. Right now. Like big lead. You think so? There's a there's a lot of memes that like I only understand because like I can go to a friend and ask them like, all right, what does this meme mean? And then I explain to me and then I understand it. And then I'm a part of it, right? Like as soon as you understand a meme, you're a part of the meme, right? And so and the way that I think memes work, that first off, they're highly correlated to asset appreciation, right? And so that like a token number goes

up, then the meme culture begins, right? Like that, these things are linked together. And when DeFi Fun Times happen and there's a bunch of assets all going up in price, you have like a decentralized production facility of memes coming out of every single corner of defy, every single corner of Ethereum. So like the meme factory has like started to churn out some real quality memes. It's super impressive. Well, aptly named State of the Nation then David. So why don't we get to our first topic? And this is one of three topics. So we're going to talk about memes, the asset today and get caught up to speed on what that is. We're also going to talk about EIP 1559 and like is it just me or did we enter a bear market is the bear not fully dead?

We'll talk about that. And then thirdly, we're going to talk again about the uni airdrop, which I think is warrants a another conversation this week as well. But first, let's talk about memes. Let's talk about NFTs. We're bringing on Jordan Lyle, who is the accidental creator of the meme asset. Jordan, welcome to Bank of of the nation, or state of the nation. How are you doing, sir? You got me all flustered with this meme. There you go. It's flustering for sure. I'm doing well. How are you guys? We are doing fantastic. You know, so David and I got a confession to make. So we try to keep up with everything in Defi. And like we do a decent job, right? But there's a lot to keep up with. And meme is one of the

things that we haven't yet fully kept up on. And so we're kind of relying on you to explain this thing to us, explain what this thing does and what it is and how you've got involved. And maybe, Jordan, we could start with kind of the Genesis tweet, right? So I'm going to actually share this and maybe you can explain how this whole thing started with this Genesis tweet. So I'm sharing right now a tweet that you made. When was this? Okay, August 14th. So a little over a month ago. And this was meant to be a joke tweet. You said introducing the Dgenerator, spin up a new defy project in as little as five minutes, and then you show this like mockup UI. Like some kind of a yield farm wizard user interface where you kind of select your governance.

You select all the money Legos and then, you know, out pumps a, I guess a new yield farm. Is that right? You got it, man. Yeah, that's it. So what happened with this, with this tweet? And then what happened afterwards? Well, how much time do we have? So, yeah, just like quick intro, I'm a product guy building on DFI, right?

I've been full-time Ethereum for like three plus years now. I'm at consensus at the moment. Prior to that, I was at Total, the Dex Aggregator as chief product officer. So I've been living and breathing Ethereum and DFI since it's been a thing, building products in this space. Pulse, thanks to you guys, in fact, my finger on the pulse of what's going on. And this seems like so long ago, but it was five weeks ago. This was not that long ago in any normal person's calendar, right? But this was just as Yam happened, right?

This is just as the curve token was deployed by OX Chad, right, on Twitter. This was just as BASED was coming out. What we started to see was like a lot of these guys were using, you know, the synthetics token for staking. They were using this, or sorry, not the token, the governance contract. The synthetics contract for this, the compound contract for that, they were just kind of mashing together contracts, right? Making some changes. And they always told you, you know, like inconsequential changes to this code that justifies not getting an audit.

And, you know, my background at consensus, one of the projects that I was pretty proud about that I led was the defy score. And it was all about like ratings agency on a blockchain. what does that look like? It's awesome, by the way. Thanks for that. And so I'm always coming at it with like, as a user, I love this stuff, right? I'm right in there with you guys in the pools. I'm a D-Gen by night, but by day, I, you know, I've been thinking about like,

how do we bring some credibility? A new user is just going to look at the highest APR and they're going to jump in. How do we start to become a better, just a better, more accessible? banking or bankless infrastructure. So it's kind of ironic, right? So I was kind of poking fun at the Yolo nature of test and prod, of pre-mine, of get some Rando to deploy the contracts perfectly for your entire your entire protocol on main net first try. So it honestly, it occurred to me that this would be a fun project to build and we can probably build it. But of course, as like the lean startup MVP approach.

I'm like, well, let's see if anybody would resonate with anyone. And then it just became like, oh, I can squeeze in all these in jokes. So there's like lots of little Easter eggs in here. Just having a ton of fun with it, I just so happened to pick the pineapple emoji in this in this screenshot. It was pure like, well, the yam was taken some of these other, like what's what's cool? What's still food? But what's a little bit more fun?

That's the source of the pineapple. And that was it. I posted it. I thought a couple people, couple friends in the space would like it. I thought Anthony Sasanah would retweet me. I thought we did some likes and then we'd be done. But that did not happen.

It actually got a ton of interest, as you can see by that. Yeah. Okay. So shortly after, this is on the 15th. I think you post or reply to your own tweet that this is, what have I done? So what did you do? What happened, Jordan? So you'll see there's a missing, so you see there's a hidden tweet in there that I took down in between. If you scroll up kind of in between there, maybe it's not showing. But anyway, so what it, what had quickly happened was I said, well,

I don't have a SoundCloud. How do I use this attention on Twitter? how do I use this momentum and do it for something good? So I created a Notion page. I bought a website, domain name, created a notion page, sent users to that, sent users to the Telegram for there. And I started a telegram group. I thought it would just be a handful of us, like that, you know, those of us that had the same sense of humor that loved Defi and we can do something fun in there.

Maybe it's build the product for real or maybe it's just share some laughs. But that's kind of how things took off is this telegram group that was creating. I don't want to fast forward too much, but I do want to give our listeners and watchers a, I guess a perspective on what happened. And, you know, the way in crypto, we look at things a lot is price, right? So this is an actual, the actual meme token that was created on the back of this joke, as you said. So 30 minutes after creating the telegram group, not me, someone else had the bright idea of creating an ERC20 token just for the loals. Just for the laughs. So somebody on the 15th, after you tweeted, what have I done? They created the ERC20 token, called it meme, right? And the price then was kind of funny. You know, $11, $180K, right? You know, good market cap for a joke. Now, here we are, and something has happened in between because here we are five weeks later, as you say, the market cap is no longer 11.

and 186k. It's now $1,400 and close to $13 million. Just FYI, that's volume, Ryan. Oh, my God. Sorry. All right. No, this is price. Yeah, that's about 30. I was saying, okay, cap is 30 million. Ah, thank you for correcting me. So I was quoting volume instead of cap, market cap. So we went from, let's see, we went from, about 300k when it was launched to 31K. Thanks, that's better guys. 31 million, yeah.

31 million, excuse me. Which is partly why the state of the nation is meaming. Right, so what happened, Jordan? How did this happen? It was this magical moment where off the silly tweet, a telegram group was created, a small group of people formed, just for laughs, as you had mentioned.

One thing led to another. The meme came first. Hey, we should have fun with this. Let's create an ERC 20 token. Let's fairly distribute it to everyone that's this early participant in this community. Fair, even distribution. No whales. Everyone has the equal share.

Everyone got the air drop that was in this early group. Part of the genesis was adding liquidity to UNISW for EF slash meme. and then of course in full meme he sent the LP tokens to Vitalik's public address essentially burning those tokens right so they can never rugpole because they'll

always be liquidity um and why is that burning the tokens because Vitalik's never going to go get them you could if he wanted to that's a meme though like you could you can look it up a lot of people have done this with their token but

yeah it's it's a meme because it's instead of sending it to like the burner address, the zero X zero zero zero zero. They made a meme out of it to send it to Vitalix address. Okay. I wasn't even aware that was going on. It's just one meme in a long stream of memes here. Yeah. It's memes on memes. It's memes on memes. It's memes all the way down. All the way down. Okay, but Jordan, you, you guys literally checked all of the boxes like of what sort of the memeous thing you could create for this kind of a token, you know, was, right, including this. So if you go to, yeah, I don't, was this the URL that you registered, don't buy meme? Was that part of the joke or is that a different one?

Not originally. I bought the DeGenerator.com, but quickly turned it into, you know, once we had, once we, you know, day, day two, I settled on don't buy meme.com. All right. So don't buy meme.com. Kind of like a reverse psychology thing, I guess, that is going on. Or just another meme. Or just another meme. Who knows? But what instructs you to do is don't buy it, don't farm it, don't join the

telegram, don't have anything to do with it. Although they are buttons. Yeah, they are buttons that allow you to do things. They tell you not to do. This is compliance. This is how the SEC won't get after us. Okay, yeah, because it's basically the Andre from Wifi play, right? Meme has zero value, right?

That's it. Everyone was freaking out. Of course, this was before we had a product. This was before we had a website. At the time, it was, hey, we're the doge for defy, right? Like, this is just a meme coin. And people were fomowing hard, and it was spreading around Twitter. It was spreading around all these P&D groups. And I have a reputation or at least, you know, one that I'd like to maintain. And I work for consensus. I got to make sure that we're good there. So I was kind of distancing myself at the time like dudes like let's let's ease off this was just a joke this was satire you guys know this right um so that the meme became early on don't buy meme hashtag don't buy me that's

it's been it's been the meme all along and when we got listed by poloniacs yesterday the meme was don't um don't list meme like please please stop don't list us oh my god so so centralized exchange listed meme at this point, Polonius. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so I have to ask, is there any... We're like a tech-level meme now. Yeah, it's in memeception over and over and over again. So I have to ask, like, is there any sort of fundamental value proposition to this, or is it just a meme?

Okay, so what's the fundamental value proposition to meme? So early on, it was just a meme, but it's long since been just a meme. And in itself, that's a mean, right? So, yeah, early days, pump and dump territory. What do I do? What do we do? Do I distance myself? Do I get more involved?

It got going into that territory. A lot of people had dumped because of this early FOMO, you know, early days we were able to, the token price is starting to get up there in price. A lot of people dumped. In fact, I'm not going to call them out. out here, but if you search for Twitter, there are a handful of people that have, that have, publicly confirmed. Anthony Sassano.

There you go. He dumped. And he regrets it. He was on form two, which is another meme, but he was on, he was on the airdrop that received the early, yeah, 355.55.5 meme. He dumped it pretty early on for a couple of Eve. And why would you, why wouldn't you, right? This, you know, a few grand for a funny joke. Why not? But after all the dumpers had dumped and moved on, and I'm trying not to take it personally, my name attached to this thing, but we can move on.

After all the dumpers had dumped, it was like, okay, what do we do? A few of us were like, dude, this is lightning in a bottle. Like, this is magical. This is like, this doesn't come around very often that like we have something, like we have the meme first, and then we have the brand or the community. and then the brand and now it's like well now what do we do you know I'm a product guy so it was like okay if we are the doche for defy we would be composable right like we would be a Lego brick of course so what does that mean and then a bunch of ideas floating to the

top you know being discussed in this early group this was 2 a.m. my time I'm having a blast everyone and this is all meanwhile people are throwing memes they're meaning each other their need of me. A bunch of like, again, memeception, memes on me. Like, it was just an insane ride. I wish we had filmed this thing. Meme fractals. If it'd become, like, this was, it was just an amazing 12 hours.

But it was an idea kind of floated to the surface. And that was, hey, what's the, what's the memeous product that we could build, but actually provide some value and something that would be worth our time. right, like we wanted to build something. I didn't, we didn't come all this way to just, to just fizzle out. Okay, yield farming was huge at the time. This was right after yam. This was pre-pasta, pre-sushi.

Sounds weird to say, right? But this is pre-food-court. It's forever ago. Yeah, it was like, it was early days. And then the thought was, okay, yield farming. They haven't done NFT yield farming. Let's mash the two together. and let's see what happens. A lot of things you can go in that direction, right? Like a lot of

different directions we can go. Fortunately, the engineers that happen to be in this small group of people that didn't sell their air drop, they picked up and ran with it. And 10 days later, so 10 days after that tweet, we were live in production on Main Met doing pioneering NFT mining or NFT farming. And that's kind of... To be clear, you didn't have that idea, nor did you execute anything, right? I didn't have the original idea. It was a community thing. Being a product guy and, you know, I focused, I wanted to get involved and help and help

get this out the door. Right. But it was primarily a lift done by a couple of engineers that are pretty amazing that continue to push this thing forward. Okay. So, yeah, always, always a, you know, community, community thing. Jordan, I'm showing on my screen. So if you're not familiar with this, this is a, it's kind of like the eBay-ish for NFTs, non-fundurable tokens. If you're not familiar with what those are, but they're basically collectibles, crypto-based, crypto-registered collectibles. So most of these are registered on Ethereum. And here are some that were recently listed, I believe, by Meme Limited, as it's called. So we've got what, the, These are yours, right, Jordan?

We've got this Andre. These are not yours? No, they belong to meme, but yeah, they're not mine. Oh, okay. I know they're not yours. Sorry. They belong to meme, the Dow. And you guys have created these, like, different cards.

Is that the first product that you mentioned? And this is kind of, I guess, crypto subculture, right? So we've got an Andre rare card. We've got a, I saw some fatalic cards in here. I saw some Hayden Adams cards that are newly minted. as well that we can see. Let's see here. Meme, Grail Relic. Here's the Hayden legendary card. Okay, Hayden's card, he's the creator of Uniswap, for those that are not familiar. It's listed for over 944 Eath right now. Sure is. What are these selling for? Like,

are these really selling? So we skipped over a big piece, and that's the actual, like, farming pools. So if you go back to it, we're much more than just like, creating funny pictures and putting them on open seed, right? So it'll make you connect the wallet. But if you were to jump into the farming stuff, you'll see that there's- I have to click don't farm to farm, right? I can neither confirm nor deny. Okay, I'm going to click it. I'm just going to do it. Yola. All right, and I've got choose-a-farm, Genesis or LP Genesis. So pool one is Genesis. Pool two is LP Genesis. Pool three is artist series. So jump into one of these. It may make you connect

wallet. I don't know if you're connected here. I am going to go against my better judgment and connect to the Genesis NFTE collection. So the first batch included metallic, both rare, common and legendary, Sergei, and then CZ from Binance. That was, and then the relic, the meme grail. And that's it is. That's all it was, was different rarities, a set of three for each crypto celebrity, each crypto OG. And that's what it was. We worked with an artist, and we built these awesome graphics,

these trading cards essentially, right? And they had different rarities. But what you do, so the mechanics here is, if you click manage stake right there, assuming you had meme in your wallet, you'd approve it, and then you'd deposit, just like farming, just like locking up, just like staking, right?

you'd stake your meme token that you didn't buy, and you would start accruing. So you earn one pineapple point for every meme locked per day. Minimum is one, and the maximum is five. So we did not anticipate a token price of $1,500 or whatever it is. At the time we built this, the token price was $15. So the barrier to entry was pretty low. But the reason we kept a maximum of five meme on there is to just prevent the whales from coming in and minting everything. I wanted to give some love to the little guy.

But essentially, that's what you do is you lock up your meme, you're earning pineapples, and then over time you come back, and then you can exchange those pineapples for NFTs. And it's only minted when you click mint. Like these things don't exist until you redeem them and mint them for the first. Wow. And then you can go and you can take that NFT, and then you could go sell it on somewhere like OpenC. Yeah, you can sell it on the aftermarket, and that's what those are there.

People have been selling these things. People have been holding these things, you know, why not hoddle? We've kind of hinted at, like, down the road, giving extra utility, potentially long-term. There's a trading card game. So there's a lot of different strategies in play here. But there is certainly a secondary market.

The largest so far was the legendary. and you're on the legendary would be another tab on there. If you go back to Genesis and then you click LP. Now, in this case, you're not locking up meme, but you're locking up LP tokens, which is uniswap, you know, you're essentially your tokenized share of liquidity on uniswap. With what? What's it paired with? It's Ethan meme?

Yep. And we got it. This was really just an experiment in like liquidity, right? Could we incentivize liquidity here? And at the moment, you know, at the time we launched, it went from maybe $40,000 USD in liquidity to $400,000 USD in liquidity. So we proved that that experiment works. But yeah, so these are the legendary cards where only 10 exist, 10 will ever exist. The cool thing about 1155 is that you can do a bunch of things like that where it's impossible for us to go burr.

Right? Like we can't add anymore. 1155s you're referring to an ERC. These are not ERC 721s, which is an NFT. These are 1155s, right, which have some other feature sets related to that. A little bit, you know, it's almost like a mix between an ERC 20 and ERC 721 where you can do some cool things. You can batch them together. You can create some additional rules.

But the one thing that's really interesting. Kirby. Got the blue curvy, of course. So some of these have been have been topping out. Right now the record buy is the rare Sergei from Chainlink at the top there. This one? Yeah, it sold. In one day, it sold for 7.7th.

The buyer turned it around and sold it for 77.7. Are you kidding me? In the same day. 20K USD. 30k I think something closer to 30 that is absolutely insane and why is that I mean there's there's a lot of value here there's only 10 that will ever exist at the time it was the only one minted right and it's it's kind of interesting to see like which I mean this is like this is like art right this is like collectibles art but it's it's a shared participation you know as well so like why does this have

value the same reason the Mona Lisa, I suppose, has value, right? Just like this shared social fabric and the shared history behind it. And the interesting thing I think, too, is you've got a lot of folks who are doing fairly well in crypto, right? So, like, art always requires a rich, you know, patronage to pay for the art. And you kind of have that in crypto and in defy. Like, there's a lot of money floating around and not a lot of newly, newly won money that people apparently are throwing at things like that. Is it, you know, does that take resonate with you, Jordan? What's your explanation for why this card sold for 30th? Yeah, what you were describing is, is like NFTs in general, right? And I know you just did a podcast and I don't think it's live yet, but

there's like that whole untapped thing, really, which is like BFI is just now waking up to NFTs in general and all the, and it's more, it's more than just CryptoKitties. It's more than what meets the eye. What we did, and we can dive into that, but what we did is, is build on top of that instead of just being, you know, we could have easily sold these cards and maybe someone would have bought it. But we created this economy where, I mean, it's a meme sink to David could probably explain this better than I, but you're, the total value locked of meme locked across all our pools is up to like 12 million USD. Like we're top top 20 or whatever it is in TVL if we were on the list.

People see value. They're locking up their meme to mint these things, whether it's because they want to hold on to these things because they do genuinely value like scarcity of these assets or they think there's some utility that may come down later. Or they have a ton of money and they want to tell their friends or they want to put it on display. or they want to sell it, like a lot of these defy folks that are coming in, they see the aftermarket or the secondary market sales. So there's a 70.

Andre Cronier went in and bought his own for 32 Eiff. We had another sale for 60-something-Eth. All the rare sell for at least two or three EF commons are starting to increase in value. This is the Genesis collection. You can extrapolate, right, if this is the platform, that kind of leads the charge in the next bull run, like these things are valuable. So when you said meme sync, right? Jordan, you're referring to basically the ability of meme to essentially take memes that are

going on in the crypto and DFI space and essentially create products like cards out of that, collectibles out of that. And that can be kind of your end product, but you're able to tap into all of the popular memes that are happening right now across crypto and DFI, but later in other places and sort of capitalize on that. That's what the product is. Now, is there like an organization kind of, you know, that I guess a rudimentary skeleton kind of organization? Like, do you have graphic designers that you pay? And do you have developers that are, you know, employed or contracted or like, how is that shaping up? So, yeah, that's been probably one of the more interesting things is that early on we created the Citadel, of course, right? And in order to join the Citadel, you needed to possess 100 meme, 100 mean tokens. At the time, it was easy to get in. Buryd entry was low.

Now, at the, let's just say, token price of $15,000, it's $150,000 just to participate. My God. But anyways, this is like the, it's like a Dow, it's like the Diet Dow, right? For now, it's just a tokenized, a, there's proof we're using, we're using this bot collab land that allows you to monitor a telegram group and really gate it to only users that possess a certain number of tokens. So that's the Dow. And there's 80 members now. We're locking up at least 100 meme.

This is what you quoted. Oh, that's from the 16th. So there's probably more now. Yeah. Things have adjusted, you know, for some people, we've hit Moon. So people found their moon. and right now it's around 50 or 60. But as a product guy,

and there may be some, you know, contention here, but it's decentralization is a sliding scale, as is another meme. But so certain things get up, put up for vote, other things, especially as it relates to the product. I would like a little bit more input being that that's my background.

I feel I can provide a lot of value. creating products and doing that in my face. And I'm one of the only non-anonymous people in like a leadership role. So I need to make sure that it matches my standards. So certain things, we make, you know, small teams make the decisions. Other things we put up for a vote. It's just been in a few weeks, experimentation in NFTs and defy, in governance, in memes, in like the personalities of multiple people coming together all at once.

It was a, this gets used a lot, flash mob token distribution. And, and I think we stopped like it's, it's a joke, right? Like this is a huge amount of money that now our market cap for silly memes. If you look at the surface, this is why I think it took so long for you to respond to my telegram messages, Ryan. Yeah. It looks like a joke on the surface. I would not fault you for thinking and it's a meme coin.

First product, it looks like CryptoKitties for Defi. I would not fault you for looking down on it. We missed a whole section there, the third pool, which is the Sven pool. He's this amazing graphic or 3D fine artist that we found, who we got connected with. And he's doing more than just like caricatures of Twitter personalities. He's actually doing fine art, things that you might find on super rare or rarable or sites like that. Yeah. It memes itself into fine art. This is Sven right here.

I think I'm sharing my screen. Artist drop zero. That's the next thing. So this was another experimentation. Okay, so we kind of catered to the defy folks. What if we went after the NFT folks, the collectors, the art enthusiasts? So if you click on explore, you'll see some of his stuff. Wow.

And these are all animated works. This is like legit people in this space are... I like this one. There's about four million USD locked up at first glance. And this is just another thing here where you're earning pineapple points. Anyone now after a couple of days, they can go mint that first one. By the way, Jordan, is there a market for pineapples too? Not yet.

Okay, but there probably will be or there could be. It's just an E.R. C20 of some sort, right? Lots of ideas. It's not yet tokenized. Okay, it's not too nice. Digits in a smart contract. Okay, so if I want this bottom one of like a pineapple smashing into a wall, this gift if I want that, then the way to get it right now is either someone mince it

and I buy it on a secondary exchange like OpenC or I start staking my meme, collect enough pineapples. It looks like I need 60 pineapples. That's going to take a lot of meme. you know, in a while. So it'd be like, you know, 60 days with one meme or something, right? To get that to farm 60 pineapples and then I could mint one. And then I'd have it in my wallet.

Is that right? Exactly. Yeah, once you hit 60 pineapples, you'd be able to claim. Now you're probably out of luck at the moment because people, because we did this like timed release on Twitter and we teased it. And people were lining up for this thing. So a bunch of people got in early, which means that they'll have more pineapples once, you know, once the time has elapsed. Oh, wait, maybe I was missing.

So why couldn't I enter now? It's because there's only a certain amount of- You totally could enter now. You totally could. I'm just saying there's a lot of attention here to earn that that they'll just earn faster because they started earlier. Yeah, the farm is saturated. The farm economics, just like other farms. And now it becomes this Nash-Equalification.

equilibrium or whatever you want to call it where do I go mint like the lower rarity cards because I can lock that in do I hold out and wait for this legendary or this one of ten card but if those all get bought up if I'm not if I don't happen to be like f-fiving the site at the time I earn I may miss out completely or like I don't pay enough gas so because I call it the pineapple dilemma where you may need to just bank it, you know, cut your losses, go forward. There's the 1 in 100 instead of the 1 in 1 in 10. So it's just fascinating.

I can't wait for more and more people to realize what's going on here. But again, after launching, stop me if we're going too long because I could talk for hours on this. After launching this fend stuff, some of the top NFT artists lined up, hit me directly. Like, I'm not going to say names because I want to release those. but some of the like the top five people on rarables in terms of sales like hey let's collad hey let's do this they see this as distribution basically that you're giving it's more than just it's distribution but it's also engagement right so so the most fascinating thing about this is its bottom up nature right and like Jordan like tip of the hat for either like for accidentally

or on purpose like creating a literal meme token. And like there is, we all know there's energy in memes, right? Like memes have been a thing for like almost a decade now. And like now on, and I'm sure that you are not, or many people are not the first people to try and like, hey, let's try and tokenize memes, right? Let's try and turn a meme into a token, right? Except that doesn't work from a top down perspective. Memes aren't top down. Memes are bottom up, right? And so the only way that anyone could ever tokenize a meme is it is by accident, right? There's only, because that is the meme. The meme is that it accidentally tokenized itself.

And now the meme token is this shelling point for this meme community. And so if you tell me that you have like the top five NFT like creators coming to say like, hey, let's collab. Like I want to get in on this. Like that is the best most successful case study of like how this whole entire industry operates, right? It is a bottom up industry. It's by the people for the people.

And memes are something that we as a. a collective unconscious, like all organize and, you know, adhere to. And so, so Jordan, like, congratulations on creating the shelling point of memes. Like, that's just fantastic. I'm just a humble pineapple farmer. This is an amazing community. You guys really got to get in this community. Look past the craziness of the, of the general Genpop telegram group. But this is, it's just an amazing confluence of skilled people that kind of came together and didn't sell right away when they totally should have stuck it out, continuing to just, just believe in this, in the silliness, believe in each other.

These devs are amazing. The artists are amazing. We haven't yet worked through the economics of how do we automate and like build into the contract payment, royalty payments to the artist, but that's coming soon. We're partnering with other brands, other protocols in this space that when I want to reward their users or engage or create their own branded NFTs. The long-term vision, and I think you'll identify with this, but the road to mass adoption in Defi will be built on memes. So this is how we bring in community-generated value. Bottom up.

Yeah. We should, Jordan, we should maybe do something. talking about doing something with the bankless P-O-A-P token and memes. That would be a really interesting cross-section, especially. I feel like David and I, and maybe the bankless community, just have to wrap our heads around what's going on with these NFTs, right? So we just did our first NFT podcast and we put it out. That made me more bullish.

I think, like David, I'm seeing nod his head, yes, too. Andrew goes on your podcast. He's amazing. Yeah, he's amazing. That's coming out on Monday. And then honestly, I felt like kind of a boomer like in trying to understand what was going on with memes. Right. There's a comment in the YouTube saying the guy with glasses looks like is talking like a boomer.

Yeah, exactly. See, they can smell it. Yeah, it's just like maybe, look, I'm millennial, but maybe just born too late. Maybe this is a zoomer thing. But after this, Jordan, you've given me hope. I feel like I understand what is going on with meme. So, you know, boomer no more. the glasses come off. I'm now with it.

There we go. Can't see, but... NFTs. See the future, but you can't see IRL. Exactly. Yeah, I mean, what you said is spot on. It's like, it's funny just in the last couple of days, it's taken over crypto Twitter, right? And you see certain people, even like hardcore Ethereum people

just like cannot see this. And a lot of people just bash on them. I'm trying to take the approach that like, hey, there's a tipping point for everybody. Not everyone got crypto right away. Not everyone got Bitcoin right away. Even those of us that are like waist deep in this thing, it took a couple times, a couple people telling us that this is a thing. You guys got to check it out.

Once you get into the rabbit hole, though, like you realize it's more than just silly, silliness, right? There's real value we saw with Andre and tokenized insurance. One of one of one new thing that we'll be announcing shortly is a pool, a brand new pool that allows you exclusive access to an online virtual summit, virtual blockchain summit that's coming up soon. So by by staking and then holding these NFTs you're able to you have the utility of accessing VIP groups of attending certain closed Zoom calls. So like this it's there's so many things that beyond this cute graphic we can now tokenize and distribute and put on chain all sorts of activity and value it's it's it's super exciting jordan

and it's also like it's also fun that's what i love about it right it's just it always comes back to the memes man absolutely if it wasn't fun there would be no value it's it's fun well guys um of course None of this is investment advice, of course. It says don't buy. Look, yeah, exactly. You don't argue that. But if you're watching this video, we are so early in the NFT space

as a subset of kind of everything that's going on with defy, right? So I feel like NFTs are almost what defy was in 2019 or 2018. And it's going to use the defy rails to propel itself. So anyway, it's super early. you haven't missed anything, but just start immersing yourself, I'm going to, more in the NFT space. I think bankless listeners will find some opportunities there as we go. Jordan, it's been an absolute pleasure to have you on, my friend.

Thanks for educating us. I'm no longer a boomer when it comes to meme token. So mission accomplished. I did my job. We appreciate it. Take care. Bye guys. Take care.

All right, guys. Well, that was fantastic. That was crazy. Yeah, what do you think, David? Do you get it now? Maybe. Maybe. I generally understand the pattern. But, like, again, my fascination is just how it organically just coalesced around itself. Like, no one person had any particular idea. Like, no one person could contribute anything.

No one person had the plan. The plan, it felt like there's that old, I can't remember the name of the cartoon movie, but it's like the Wallace and Gromit, where Gromit, the dog is on the, little toy train and he's laying the tracks as the train is going. That seems to be what the meme culture is doing. They're just like, all right. So like where does this track go? Like, like, let's keep on laying the tracks. We don't know where it goes, but let's keep on laying tracks. And it turns out those tracks led to a $30 million market cap. Crazy, right? But also those tracks also like bootstrapped the entire thing. So it really was nothing in the very early stage.

But the community made it something. And then actually created utility on the back of that. Now it's like, it's turned into like a meme production house with actual NFT products that it sells. Bootstrapped from a tweet. Crazy. Came into existence. It memed itself into existence. Crazy. All right.

David, David, let's talk about something. We do understand a bit more. It's the second topic today. Yeah. And that's EIP 1559. Yeah,

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Check them out at unstoppable domains.com. All right. We're back. David, we're here to talk about EIP 1559. But we also have to address something that I think is closely related. And that's, are you feeling like the bearer is still out there, like in the rearview mirror? I mean, it still feels like we're in a bull market, but we can't shake the bear right now. Yeah.

What's your take? It's like when you're trying to escape the black hole and you're like just on the cusp and you don't know if you're going forward or backwards. Yeah. Feel like we're going forwards. But like you said, like the bear is in the rear view mirror, but he's still in the rear view mirror, right? He's still right there. Right.

And, you know, as much as DeFi Fun times is, as much as yield farming has been fantastic, the low liquid, low market cap DeFi tokens are not the market cap of ether, right? And at some point, like, we need the market cap of ether to go up to validate the bull market, right? Like, number needs to go up and it needs to be ether and Bitcoin needs to help. But unless ether can keep on, like, churning out the number go up, like, you know, you can still see the bear market and it's still like right there. That's the way I feel, too. Like, defy's had a fun summer, like a really good.

fun summer, but now it's time to get back to school, right? And like now we're down 40% for the past 30 days on defy tokens. Some people are saying like the bubble has popped all of these things. I don't believe that for a second. I mean, I think we're still fundamentally in a bull run. These kind of pullbacks, these kind of drawbacks are totally normal. We see this in every single bull market cycle. But at the same time, there is a point. Like all of these defy tokens, including things like mean, it's all so far appealing, most of the same. to people who are already here, right? It's kind of the defy crowd, the insiders,

the people who stayed after 2018, 2019. That's who's using these, like doing the farming and pursuing these assets and getting the uni drops. We still haven't found that fresh crop of mainstream users to come aboard yet. And I do think the price of the somewhat reflects that too. But like, I guess the question is, David, what do you think?

What's it going to take to, get that next crop of mainstream users, what's it going to take to get the next leg up on the price of eth? Right. Well, so we evaluate these defy tokens and the reason why we think that they're valuable is because of the cash flows, right? Like the protocols have cash flows. The tokens govern over the protocols, therefore the tokens govern over the cash flows, right? And the tokens give you upside access, and the upside access, the outside exposure is because of the cash flows. Cash flows. Cash flows, cash flows. Have I said cash flows enough times? And so like, and this is what is missing with ether. EIP-1559 is the cash flow mechanism towards ether, right? And where is it? Where is it?

Well, okay. So what do you mean? For people who don't know, EIP 1559, what is it? Why does it provide some kind of cash flow or maybe a cash burn? Right. To ether the asset. Right. And so, okay, so EIP 1559 changes the way that we pay gas on a I am, right? And so when you've been farming, you've been opening up MetaMask and you've inputted the gas number, you know, slow, medium fast, or maybe you go to the advanced tab and put in the actual Gway number, right? And, you know, that's inefficient, right? We know that these markets are, like, relatively inefficient. People overpay for gas when they don't need to be, and a lot of people underpay for gas because we don't know how much gas to pay, right? Like,

it's a constant auction. Right, so like I do that all the time, right? So I see like a a way price of 205. And I'm like, well, I want to make sure I get in, right? Because this transaction is super important. So I put 220. Right. You bump it up instead. But you didn't need to because probably 180 could have done it.

And you didn't know. And neither did your wallet. Like your wallet is just estimating the right gas to pay too, right? And so like your wallet is kind of doing this estimation for you. And it could also be wrong. And the reason why this is so difficult is because like each 12 second block is an auction. Right. So every 12 seconds there's an auction.

And blocks have different things inside them that can make them more or less valuable, right? And so wallets have no way to predict this, right? And so what EIP-1559 does is it formally instantiates how much gas you need to pay to get into a block into the protocol, right? And so the Ethereum protocol will develop a number saying like, okay, you need to pay this much gas to get in the block. And then you pay that much gas and then you get in the block. And so like there's no more auction anymore. And so this number is generated in a similar way to Bitcoin's difficulty adjustment, right? And so if and so it uses a variable block size.

And so if a lot of people pay the gas fee to get in the block, the block gets bigger. And then it targets a lower smaller block size into the future to balance that out. And so variable block size to accommodate for a variable load. And then as block size get too big, price of gas goes up until the block size comes down, right? And so that's how gas fees go up in the future. Okay. So what we get from that is more efficient. Like, you know, I'm not overpaying for gas.

Users are not overpaying for gas. So that's good. That's bullish. And that will actually also make gas fees come down to a decent degree. Because like in these gas markets, like there's been models that have estimated that we are overpaying for gas by two thirds. Two thirds. And so like just as a more efficient mechanism, gas prices could come down by two thirds.

Minors are getting wealthy. money's going to wealthy for sure because we are overpaying them we don't need to be paying we're just like overtipping overpaying them yep okay so but what about the the part that you're saying which um makes cash flows or cash burns what were you talking about there right and so in the current form we pay the gas fee and then it goes to the miners right and that that's that that's their reward in eip 1 555.9 the gas fee gets burnt right all like almost all of it like 95 97 percent and the reason for that is to control for some game theoretic moves. If it went to the minor, then the miners could do things to congest the chain so that everyone's paying more and that's a rational thing for them

to do and then that wouldn't work. And so instead of paying with the miners, we just burn it. We just burn it. No one gets it. Send it to Vitalik's address? That's a good joke. Good meme. And so, okay, so we delete it from the supply, right? And so instead of paying the miners, what you're doing is you're paying. everyone basically. You are paying everyone in equal commensurate amount to their eth holders. And when I say everyone, I mean all eth holders, right? And so this is reducing the supply of ether. Because essentially you own a greater percentage as an eth holder. It's reverse dilutions. You own a greater percentage of the network when eth is burnt. Yes, yes. And so, yeah, sorry,

I accidentally hit the starting soon button, but now it's done. And so yeah, so, so every block, if we are paying like miners two eith, three, eith, four eth, and fees per block, that means instead per block, two, four, three, I don't know, ether is getting burned per block, like it's getting deleted. And the way that we incentivize miners in Ethereum, we have the social contract of issuance. So miners get paid regardless. They just don't also get the fee on top. Who gets the fee on top instead is all the remaining fee holders. So every single block, the demand for Ethereum block space is producing a basically an ETH buyback for ETH holders, right? Like it's a buyback and burn program, right?

It's like if Apple generated a bunch of money and they decided buy back their shares and then stock price goes up. Or even the Fed. Imagine if the Fed was like, hey, your taxes this year because we've had this big inflation problem. When you pay your income taxes this year, we're just going to take that money and burn it. Yeah. We're going to remove it from circulation.

We're not going to reissue it. We're not going to reissue it. that's supply going down. Right. And so if that happens, you're like, hmm, I'm going to keep some more dollars in the bank account because they have more dollars proportionally.

Right. So you're, you want, then you want to hold dollars and then inflation could go down. This is what deflation is. By the way, the Fed will never do that. But that's what we can do with crypto economic systems. Okay, so,

so we've got that. Issuance, by the way, is about four and a half percent on Ethereum right now. So four and a half percent new supply gets issued every year. If EIP 1559 was active, we've, you know, done some analysis in bankless articles about this, but we could even get to like negative issuance,

right? Absolutely. Especially demand like we've had. Right. So that would mean, that would mean like lower like 1% issuance per year or possibly negative issuance. So it would be a big deal. So okay, all of this sounds awesome, improve usability, improve scarcity of Eath. Why don't we have it? Yeah, that's a really good question. And this is kind of why this is part of the state of the is because, like, from my tentacles in Ethereum, like, who I talk to, there's been some grumblings about, like, all right, like, who has ownership over this project, right? Like, who is responsible for getting EIP-1559 out the door? And that's kind of like the problem.

I don't really think that there is any one particular problem or one particular person that is responsible for getting EIP-1559 through, right? And so, like, that's kind of the current state of the conversation is, like, who's going to do it? Like who, like the, the, uh, core devs, uh, are like somehow in the, in the most recent, um, core dev meeting, like Prague Pao was a bigger topic than EIP 1559. So, you know, the community doesn't like that. Community likes EIP 1559. They hate Prague pal, but somehow like a decent amount of the core devs are still interested in Prague pal and not EIP one 559, right? So this, there's this friction between the core devs and what the community wants. Like, Ethereum is a meritocracy, right? And so the core devs have been there,

because they are stewards of Ethereum, but that doesn't mean that they are in a completely in complete alignment with a community, right? We don't have the same priorities. And so that's, and when the community gets frustrated, they start to speak up, right? And so lately, the community has been getting frustrated and they've been speaking up.

This is DC investors speaking up. It will take years before ETH II will fully deliver the scalability we desire. So we have to keep ETH one a top priority. Top priority, according to DC, is EIP 1559. When's it coming? Hsu, as well, a research analyst, who's written a lot about EIP 1559. We've had him on bankless. And he's tweeting support for ETH, for EIP 1559, how that will mean there's always utility to holding ETH. You know, I've tweeted about this. You've tweeted about this. It's really the conversation.

Like if not having EIP, this is Harry Glenn, not having EIP 1559 is costing ETH holders millions per day and burning. It really is. We're leaving money on the table. Why are we not funding 10 teams to get this done ASAP? And it's a rational thing to do. This is kind of like a coordination failure of the Ethereum hive mind, right? Like what? Okay.

Well, here's a core dev right here, Justin Drake. Feburning, his tweeting support of EIP 1559. He says fee burning would have burnt. half a million eath over the past five days half a million eath that's you know half about half a percent of eth supply or for the past 50 days right yeah that's a core dev speaking about this right and so and so yeah this is kind of kind of where we are okay so um I guess one thing that's important to to realize is when we talk about core devs there are kind of two groups of core devs right there's sort of the the core devs that are still maintaining each one dot oh and then

there's the core devs that are pushing eith 2.0.4. Right. Those seem to be in separate, like, separate camps. Yeah. One is more conservative than the other. Yeah. Like, naturally. Yep.

But, like, there's no, there seems to be, there doesn't seem to be a core contingent of ETH one, core devs really pushing EIP 1559. And we've been talking about this for, like, 18 months to 24 months, right? Absolutely. Yeah. Okay. So do you know what is going on?

Like, do you have kind of a latest of, um, what's being implemented because I read an AMA just late last week with some people who are working on 1559. Yeah, and I don't want to suggest that like no one's working on it or people are being lazier, right? There is work being done, right? And so like the latest I've heard is that like Dan Finley put out like an EIP for wallets like in the Metamask category, right? Because, you know, wallets are going to have to like rebuild their product in order to fit this new, like, changing a very deep thing about the Ethereum protocol. So like EIP-1559, it's not like this trivial thing. And so like a lot of infrastructure will need to change. And so the latest I heard is that like

things like that are happening. And there's also a bunch of like testing and audits that need to happen. But that's kind of what I've been hearing for a while. Yeah. So I think what we're going to do at Bankless is dive more deeply into this. So Spencer Noon had a fantastic AMA on Telegram, just kind of a private AMA that he does on Telegram with some people who are actually working on it. First of which is Tim Beko. Am I butchering his last name? Sorry, Tim, if I am. So Tim is a developer at consensus working on an ETH one client as well as an ETH2 client.

And he has been, I guess, kind of almost volunteering the role of central coordinator lately on EIP 1559. and Hasu and Georgios, this other person in the AMA are like analyst contributors as well, kind of weighing in. And what I took from this AMA, we'll include in the show notes, is I guess a couple of things. First, there is actual work being done on two clients. The first is the Bezou client, which is essentially the consensus ETH one client. And the second is, oh, sorry, am I confusing that? Oh, yeah. No, the first is the Bezzi client, consensus client. It's not where it says this. But the second is Geph.

And a team called Vulcanized, the development team called Vulcanized is contracted to work on that. So that's the first thing. Actual implementation work is getting done in TestNet on EIP 1559. In this AMA, when pressed for dates and timelines, Tim said, look, timelines are tricky. He's personally aiming for the fork after Berlin.

So right now there is a, I'm not sure if Berlin, is scheduled as a fork, but there are hard forks with Ethereum. It is in February? Question mark. Okay. Maybe February, right? So let's say that fork happens early next year.

Tim says, well, the one after that could be the EIP 1559. You know you're in Ethereum maxi. When you type in Berlin into Google and it autopopulates this Berlin hard fork. Yeah. That's hilarious. Also, Google knows a lot about you, David. Oh, man. Yeah.

So, I mean, possibly that means next year, right? But, okay. I mean, it just, and anyway, the answers in the AMA were great. They also talked about how the question came up of how would this look in Metamask, right? Is this going to totally change the user experience? Someone actually threw up screenshots of how this would look in Metamask, which I think you're kind of great. No hard time on Berlin hard fork. Okay, so we don't have time for that. Oh, wow, that is really cool. Yeah, so that this, that graph that goes up and down. That's what I was talking about with like how EIP-1559 is similar to Bitcoin's difficulty adjustment. Like what you are seeing is a protocol. Block sizes. The protocol knowing the demand for its block space, right?

Like this is kind of what EIP-1559 does is like it informs Ethereum the protocol of the demand for its block space, which is pretty cool in and of itself. Exactly. Exactly. So I think, you know, the message for wallets is you have to implement some things, but the user experience shouldn't really change. In fact, it should get easier if you're a user because you don't have to kind of guess what the price will be in sort of this auction and risk overpaying, which you're doing right now is essentially it'll be more like buying something on Amazon.

Like, here's the price. You pay it. Maybe you'll want to tip some to get it done faster. Right. But that's it's it. Yeah. Yeah. So the UX will be better.

Anyway, there's a lot of wins here. this is the biggest change that's probably ever occurred to ETH one. And I think there does seem to be some momentum building for it. But just, again, per these tweets, and I think some of the reaction on Twitter, it's just for the amount of value it provides to the ETH community and the ETH economy, it doesn't seem like it's weighted it correctly. Right. Yes, yes. And also as a community, we are rationally incentivized to fund this way more than we have been, right?

because like if you're an eth bag holder, then you should be, it would be rational for you to like give up some of your eth to fund the EIP 1559 so that the rest of your ETH is more valuable. Exactly. Exactly. So I think it's going to happen. But, you know, how long will it take is kind of the question.

And I do think by the way, this is implemented, um, off the bat is going to be implemented off the bat in ETH 2.0. So that's like the worst case fallback. correct right for eth economics it will happen in east 2.0 if it doesn't happen in eth 1.0 already but that's in like two years yeah happens and then also it's there's also sharding right and so there's more scale until there's less burning it would be nice to have it now right like totally nice to market's on like let's let's let's keep this bull market going like this is why we started off

this conversation with like you know the bear is still in the rear view mirror like what is the thing that slays the bear like it's exactly what's our weapon it's EIP 1559 Well, we asked that in the podcast, the NFT podcast that's coming out Monday, right? It's like we're talking to Andrew and Jake about ETH price predictions. They basically said, well, here are our price predictions, right? And they were fairly conservative. But if EIP 1559 comes, then like blow that out of the water, right? It's a catalyst for the bull. So anyway, I guess the message is it is being worked on not as fast as we would like. It's still definitely an area that the bankless will continue to come. cover and wherever possible lend support to the developers who are actually taking action on this. So we're going to have Tim on an AMA, an upcoming AMA, and get his take, have him give us an honest assessment of where EIP 1559 is and where the bankless nation can help with that. Yeah, I expect that to be a very popular AMA. Yeah, so we just got to get Tim on.

So he's writing a post this week, and we'll get him on shortly after that. David, we've gone a little long on this as we are want to do, my friend, but we've got one last topic to cover, and that is the Uniswap AirDrop. Now, you wrote a great editorial on Monday of this week talking about the, you like theirdrop and comparing that to the Corona Stimulus Package. The $1,200 each American received in air dropped money from the Fed for like Corona damages, I suppose. and you compared the uniswap airdrop to that what was like what was going through your head with that comparison how are they similar yeah yeah so there is like this trifecta of things that are going on right like there is universal support for universal basic income right both inside like the united states and in greater in europe as well like people like universal basic income for obvious reasons like do you

want free money? Like, yes, yes, I do. And so, like, that's, that's obvious. And the, having it go from less like not being a known thing to being a very well, like a household named, like, like phenomenon. It's that happens so quickly. Like, the people of the world are hungry for a, a wealth distribution event, right? Like, and hopefully reoccurring, right? And, and meanwhile, the conversation behind that is just the extreme discrepancy between, like, the capital-owning elite and the laborers of the world, right? Like, in my political opinion, like, it's not left and right. It's like it's capital versus labor. Like, it's always been capital versus labor, right? And so what UBI is is saying like, hey, let's get all the value,

all the money that the capital is sucking up and like, let's redistribute it out to the people so that they can actually live their lives and then end up supporting like all the capital in the beginning, right? And so that's kind of like, the conversation outside of crypto. And then the uniswap airdrop happens, right? And like in stark contrast to what is going on in the real world, in the defy world, in the crypto world, there is an intersection of capital and labor, right? And that's what the uniswap air drop was, right? The unitoken is a irdrop of a capital asset that was distributed to the people that provided labor to the protocol. Now, supplying liquidity to uniswap doesn't feel like supplying labor, but that is what

that niche is. Like if you supply liquidity, you are the laborer to the protocol, right? And so then you got this free capital asset. And you also got trading is labor too. Right. And so like this is like if Uber air dropped a bunch of equity to its Uber drivers and then also a little bit of equity to Uber riders, right? And like that is just like blurring the lines between capital and labor. And like that's something that I feel really passionate about. And that's kind of how I think this world is going to like overcome this like this very chaotic very like class warfareish type times right we're going to we're going to need to like reintegrate capital and labor together and this is something that chris brunisky talks about a lot as well who i also really respect and so i think there's a theme going on here

and i think uniswap is like kind of the first to really get this going and so this went to Unitokens went to about 180,000 users of the Uniswap protocol. So not an insignificant amount. Hey, David, are you there? Yeah, I'm not. I've lost you. No, I still have you, but your video is off. I think your computer's a little sluggish and your video's off.

Okay, yeah, I think Zoom slowed me down. All right, so, yeah, so it went to 180,000 users of the Uniswap protocol, which is absolutely amazing. and it's not an insubstantial amount, right? So you compare this to the stimulus package. It's about $1,200 at current uni prices, $1,000 to $180,000, potentially people. Of course, these are all accounts. So some people are in more than one account.

Not an insignificant amount and comparable to what the Americans received as part of the Corona stimulus package. So, I mean, I guess pretty amazing from that perspective. But like, what did you do with? with yours, David. So there's this discussion question we threw out last week about, so should you hold your uni? Should you sell your uni or should you buy more? What side are you on there? I'm on the hold. I have not bought anymore. I haven't sold any. I'm on the hold side. Why are you holding? Well, the screen up to $8 was nice, but then it has fallen back down to like

$4 because we're in a little bit of a local bear, right? That's what the topic of EIP-159 was about. this is uniswap dude this is like the most beloved protocol of all time with like the most insane amount of cash flows with the most insane amount of token distributions right and so like i'm holding right like i why would i ever give up my my ownership over uniswap right that's that's mine i don't want to give that up no way it does feel like uniswap is a blue chip um and so if we're in a wider bull market if you believe we are then um maybe not the time to sell your blue chips uh but who knows i mean maybe maybe something could happen from a macro perspective and turn us back into a full bear market. So I guess you're hedging your bets there.

I mean, when a bunch of people just received like $1,200, and actually now it's $1,600 because Uniswap's trading around $4 now, so four times $400. Like people could receive the minimum $1,600. Some people received way more. Yeah. I feel like a lot of people were kind of quick to the trigger to sell, right? Because, oh, free money. Let me lock in my profits.

I kind of feel like that to you. And I know you read this book, right? You remember that book, Red Notice, Bill Browder? Totally unrelated to crypto and defy. So if you're into that, don't read it. But yeah. But here's how it is related. So it talked a little bit, of course, not the only book to talk about this,

but it talked about the privatization of former communist Russia companies, private companies. So like everything was state owned, communist Russia in the early 1990s, like energy, gas, all the sectors, every industry was state owned. What they did is very popular at the time. was they issued vouchers. These are actual like stock certificates to citizens. And 98% of Russian citizens received vouchers. So they got airdropped, essentially, capital assets

in the same way Uniswap is air dropping its capital asset. So to double down on this, what the voucher enabled you to do, so Soviet Russia was going through its reorganization, right? Like it figured out communism wasn't going to work. And so it was going to hand over the basic, because the state owned everything, like every single thing, right? and it needed to turn it into companies so that the free market could take over. And they needed to figure out how do we get all the state-owned assets into the hands of the

people, right? And so they gave people vouchers that would allow them to trade in for ownership over companies and businesses, right? And so they air-dropped ownership, like something that you could redeem to own part of Russia, right? And so it was like very, it was one of the maybe the most fair air drops of all time, except I think what you're about to get into is that at the end of the day, it wasn't that fair in result.

Yeah, so what happened? And this didn't take very long to happen, a period of like 18 to 24 months to maximum of three years, is most of the citizenry, like the vast bulk of them worked like poor, Hungary, didn't understand fully what they received. And capitalists, the large capital pools, came in and essentially bought them from the citizens at like,

super low prices. Right. They're like, do you want like, do you want like a free weeks of pay? And people are like, is that what this is worth? Fuck yeah. Give me free weeks of pay.

Exactly. Yeah. They had no idea what it was worth. They didn't. Remember, they had been in communism for the past 40 years. Like they were not educated about how capitalism works. Right. And so they were like, yeah, free free meals.

Fuck yeah. Yeah. Popular air drop. All the citizens received it. But then immediately just took a couple years. it was consolidated back to these large capital pools. And the plutocracy rain that we've seen until today kind of, you know, kicked off at that point in time. So, you know, again, this is a little different, of course.

But part of, part of me wonders if some of the uniswap sellers, like I saw a lot of trades going through and it would be like 400 uni to a wallet that has just purchased, you know, 10,000 uni, right, with ETH. I'm like, okay, well, you know, some of these capital pools are taking big bets and these whales are taking big bets on uni at these prices and expecting that to pay off. So anyway, it reminded me a little bit of that. And it's also why air drops are hard, but this is probably the most widely distributed in Defi today. And one of the Ferris launches, I think we've seen as a result of that.

So pretty cool stuff. I think what is different about this one versus like the 1980s or 90s reorganization of Russia is that it was airdrop to people that are like seeking profits, right? Like if you used Uniswap, you were trying to. trying to trade in for a profit, right? So, like, you're probably a capitalist. You probably understand how these things work.

So, like, on an educational level, way better off than, like, the average, like, I don't know, Russian surf or whatever. Yeah. And for sure, because, like, using Uniswap prior to September 1st, 2020 took a little bit of, you had to know some things in DFI in order to do that. So, but anyway, there's an element of that. Certainly an echo of that. David, I think that's kind of what we have time for today, man.

this is the state of the nation. So it's certainly feeling very meamy, but we don't think the bull run is over. So, you know, maybe don't rush to sell those DFI tokens. That's what you're doing. But this is not financial advice. Definitely not. All this stuff is risky.

And we always end with this. Eat is risky. So is crypto. So is DFI. You can absolutely lose what you put in. But we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone.

But thanks for joining us on another episode. This is episode 15 of State of Nation.