Bankless - SotN#23: Crescendoing! w/ Eric Conner (Community Culture, & Staking, War Effort, Propaganda)

Episode Date: November 18, 2020

🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: http://bankless.substack.com/ ✊ STARTING GUIDE BANKLESS: https://bit.ly/37Q17uI ❤️ JOIN PRIVATE DISCORD: https://bit.ly/2UVI10O 🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/ 👕 BUY BANKLESS TEE: https://merch.banklesshq.com/ ----- 📢 DEFI BUILDER? APPLY TO FILECOIN ACCELERATOR FOR $20K GRANT http://bankless.cc/filecoinapply ----- GO BANKLESS WITH THESE SPONSOR TOOLS:    ⭐️LEDGER - BEST HARDWARE WALLET TO SECURE YOUR CRYPTOhttps://bankless.cc/ledger-20 🚀 ZERION - INVEST IN DEFI FROM ONE PLACE (download it now!) https://bankless.cc/zerion 💳 MONOLITH - GET THE HOLY GRAIL OF BANKLESS VISA CARDS https://bankless.cc/monolith 🤖YEARN - YIELD-SEEKING MONEY ROBOT THAT FARMS DEFI FOR YOU  http://bankless.cc/yearn ------ Eric Conner, co-Host of the EthHub Podcast, Formerly Product at Gnosis, and Ethereum’s Unofficial Community Manager We ask Eric, does he accept the title of 'Unofficial Community Manager'? Eric has called the the 2018-19 Bear Market period as ‘the time that User, Investors, and Builders of Ethereum all came together’ - Why is this important?- What was the Ethereum community like in 2015-17? - How has the Ethereum community developed, changed, matured over time? Did Eric ever have doubts that we would ever get to this point? Then, Eric and David discuss the merits of a 'patriotic duty to Stake ETH' - Is it someone's patriotic duty to stake? - Or is ETH staking just another yield-farm?- How does the role of feeling politically aligned play in Staking ETH?  Finally, we turn to the Bull Case for Ethereum  - What is Eric's perceived 'win-condition' for Ethereum? Tune into the video! https://youtu.be/BtPOpRzx6NQ ------ Don't stop at the video! 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 video 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.

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right? So it's also being an on-ramp. So you don't have to go through your centralized exchange, like Coinbase or Gemini or wherever. You can just go straight from your bank account right into your Monolith checking account smart contract wallet. So check them out at monolith.com. This is wise. This nation, welcome to another episode of State of the Nation. This is where we go through what's happening for the week and talk about the most important things. We have a special guest today.

He was recently back from his Twitter hiatus. That's Eric Connor. Super excited to talk to him today, David. It is War Effort Week, my friend. So what does that mean? Why are we bringing Eric Connor on? What are we going to talk about? Yeah, we are bringing Eric Connor on because Eric Connor has been in the Ethereum

community since day one. I kind of have given him this label, which I don't know if he accepts or not, so we're going to ask him, the Ethereum's unofficial community manager. He's the guy, to me, he's the guy that, like, kept the campfire lit during the darkest of nights during the 2018 and 2019 bear market. He was the guy that kept us focused, kept on beating the same drum about, like, what were we here to do? Like, what is Ethereum here to do? And regardless of the price action, the same message came out of Eric Conner's Twitter the whole way through. And so I think that's a really valuable add to the ecosystem. And I kind of want to get Eric's take on how the community has progressed and developed.

And now that staking is here, what that means for Ethereum and its community. Because me and you, Ryan, we definitely have our takes as to what staking means when it comes to the relationship between people and code. And I want to get Eric's take on that as well. All right. So what happens when you get three Ether megables together? for a conversation. We are about to have, we're about to find out. So if you're new to state of the nation, this comes live to you on YouTube every Tuesday at about 2 p.m. Eastern, a little bit after sometimes we try to do 2 p.m. And then it's also released on the podcast. You can catch it in

audio form as well. As David mentioned, today we're talking about staking the war effort, ether's community and culture. And also, before we get into this, Dave, we should talk about some things that are happening in the bankless nation at itself. So we had Michael Sonnstein on from Grayscale, which is not a 100% bankless product, but it is bringing billions of dollars right now into crypto, into both ether, the asset, and into Bitcoin. That was a pretty hot interview. That dropped on Monday. What were some of your takeaways? Yeah, absolutely. The Grayscale, the whole institution of Grayscale is what we call like the bridge to crypto. right. It is how value gets onboarded into the crypto world. Grayscale is just acting as the bridge

onto the arc, right? We are building the system to get everyone onboarded. And so that was pretty valuable. And in getting gray scales, like the take of what gray scale is for retail and how it is serving the needs of the industry was really valuable to me. We are also having Balaji on. I think we're recording tomorrow, David. I am locked and loaded for that conversation. Lots of cool things, including, I think, some announcements maybe from Balashi. The theme is going to be, of course, crypto, defy, but also this idea that we've been playing with so long is digital nations and how crypto empowers that.

So do not miss that episode coming out next Monday. I can't tell you what's going to be in it because we don't know yet. We haven't recorded it, but I know it's going to be hot. I know it's going to be a good one. Also, David, we've got our mega meme post coming out tomorrow. We issued a call to action around ETH staking to, to join the war effort on Monday. And Wednesday is going to be a continuation of that.

We're dropping some propaganda. We're dropping some memes. David, while you're talking about this post, should I give a quick tease? Yeah. You got it already? Do it. All right. I'm going to do some teas.

You set us up, though. What is this conversation? What is the post going to be about? Yeah. So this is a concept I've been chewing on a lot. And it's another topic that I want to get into it with Eric here in a second. But it's the relationship between the values of the blockchain and the community that it garners around it, right? And so each, there are values baked into each and

every blockchain protocol that we know of. Like, there are values in a 21 million proof of work hard cap currency that attracts a certain cohort of people, right? There are also values in maximally lowering the barrier to entry for blockchain validation. And that is what Ethereum strives for. And so I want to, I use a thought, I use this article to like peel back the layers on that and trying to understand how these values of Ethereum impact the community that it generates around it, right? And it all comes back to the ability to stake your ether. And that's the call to action that we're going with in this, in the article. There's a bunch of these graphics and gifts that we're going to just dump all at once to be spread and shared amongst the community, kind of as like a

community rallying cry, like a community totem to share and just, you know, have a shared narrative that we all believe in. And, you know, pictures are worth a thousand words. So we made a bunch of these graphics. So we're going to dump them all out on the bank list newsletter tomorrow. This is one that's coming out tomorrow as well. I think there's going to be like half a dozen of these. I want you, Captain America, to buy ETH bonds now. It fits with that whole ether as an internet bond theme that we've been talking about for so long and the digital nation theme. So on Monday, we ask you to stake your Eith. And I think tomorrow we're going to ask you to meme your stake, right? We want to spread these memes far and wide as well to get the community

fired up for staking. David, I think that's what's going on right now. Should we get to the question I ask you always? I'm ready for it. I'm just going to do that. All right. What is the state of the nation right now, my friend? The state of the nation is crescendoing. We are crescendoing. And you can see that like all states of the nations that we come up with, there's so many different ways to see it playing out. You can see it in the crypto price actions in the crypto markets. The price charts are just painting a big fat crescendo. Nick Carter recently tweeted out back when Bitcoin was like 14K or 15K, that this was the quietest bull market ever.

Now Bitcoin is at like 18K-ish, and we see it on CNBC. And so we're starting to see the trend like Masey Williams, Arias Stark tweeted out about Bitcoin the other day. We're starting to see like the bubbling in... She's cool again now after that disaster of a season. She's cool. Okay. Meanwhile, we're watching the green bar of the East deposited into this deposit contract. moving faster and faster towards the finish line.

There's a lot of things that just feel like crescendoing. And I can't wait for that gong to hit at the very end when there's the big bang. And so that's something that I'm looking forward to. And that is what the state of the nation is. crescendoing up. And you mentioned Nick Carter. David, is Nick Carter your favorite bit coiner? Be honest.

Yeah. He's my favorite bitcorner because if you ask him, am I a bitcoiner, he makes you define your terms first and rather than just puts on like the bitconer caps. Yeah, I'm a bit cobbler. You know how I know too. is because we've invited him on the show so many times. And we're actually going to have him on the show on Tuesday next to the nation to talk about Bitcoin and price and all the cool things going on from an adoption perspective there.

But today's show is not about Bitcoin. It is about Ether. It is about rallying the troops. So we have Eric Connor, who I'm sure you guys know, if you've been in the bankless community, long enough, have you been in the Ethereum community. He is the co-host of the Heath Hub podcast. He was formerly product at NOSIS. He is, as David said, I don't know if he'll accept this title,

but we think of as Ethereum's unofficial community manager. Eric, thank you for joining us back from your Twitter hiatus, just in time for the launch of the ETH2 network. How's it going, man? Hey, hey, hey, hey. It's going good, guys. How's it going? I know this is my first bankless appearance,

which seems strange given how many episodes have been put out between, you know, the two of all three of us, but I'm very excited to be there. Yeah, absolutely. I think we were afraid to put too many Heath Bulls on one show because, like, I mean, who knows? It is. Yeah, it is dangerous. We were saving it for now. We're saving it for such a moment as this. All right. So, you know, first question, Eric, what do you think of that David's title he's given you, Ethereum's unofficial community manager? I feel like you, like, much like David and myself, kind of like don't really. have a traditional job. Like you don't work for a company, but like you almost work for the protocol or like a set of protocols. What do you think of that title?

Do you accept? Yeah, I guess. Yeah, I'll accept it. I think it's a title I couldn't give myself, right? It has to come from other people. And I think there's multiple unofficial community managers, right? But yeah, I definitely agree. What's funny about that is it's also a niche I never thought or expected I would fall into, right?

It just kind of like happened. Like my backgrounds in finance and I found Ethereum. I was interested in building dexes. That's how I got initially interested in Ethereum. And then like all of a sudden I saw this, you know, I've been in it kind of since the beginning and I saw this wave of euphoria through the first bull market. And Ethereum didn't have a bear market, right, until 2018.

So we went like years without having a real bear market. We had the Dow hack and like the DDoS attacks. And it went from like 20 to six or what. whatever, but we never had like a prolonged bear market. And you saw this like euphoria fade and the community like kind of going to shambles and people disappear. Just like price went down 90%. It felt like the community shrunk 90%. And then there was just this like relentless fud from other communities and whatnot about ETH and Ethereum. And then yeah, just kind of like fell into this odd niche. I never thought it would around like education and rallying the community and stuff. So,

you know, accept it. But I will say I think there's there's multiple of us out there. I think you guys are included in that as well. And yeah, no one's like paying us per se to do this, but I think we all share a similar passion. You know what? I never expected to be doing bankless and like what I'm doing today. I think probably David feels kind of the same. But like your story, you're an Anthony's story around Ethub is I think similar to the story

of bankless. It's just like he started bankless because I was pissed off to be honest. Like I was mad that. all of this amazing stuff was going on in Ethereum, this whole side of crypto. And I saw that Ethereum was not going away. It was actually getting stronger. And like no one was talking about it. But I felt like the roots of this movement and the value system of this movement I most

resonated with was alive and well in the Ethereum community. And I just wanted to like start that down that path, right? And I think that's why, you know, David's doing this too. But is that why you kind of fell into it? It's basically like no one was, no one was doing it. You just found a gap that you could fill and you stepped up and you made things happen. Yeah, you know, it's interesting, right? Like if you thought of Ethereum as like a company, there would be PR teams,

there would be marketing teams that doesn't exist for Ethereum, right? And Ethereum started very dev and tech heavy. And honestly, like the first few years were a little weird. Like, I don't have a dead background. It was not hostile, but weird to be like a financial background that didn't know how to code in this space. Yeah. So it took a while for people that weren't, didn't have a dead background to kind of find their spot in the community, right? Beyond just being an investor or, you know, using the network or whatever.

So normally, if Ethereum was a company, they would have people kind of backing them up, fighting off misinformation, marketing. And that just didn't exist. And it felt like a pretty easy hole to fill, right? it definitely comes out of these wars between different chains. Like at the time, it was Bitcoin and Eith. Now I kind of see Eith as fighting off quote unquote Ethereum killers or attempted murderers, as I call them. But at the time, it was a lot of misinformation between the Bitcoin and Ethereum community,

which is slowed down a little bit now. But yeah, there was just no one doing it. And if you're passionate about something and you see it being attacked, especially with a lot of misinformation, right, your natural instinct is to kind of want to defend that. And at the same time, no one was really doing like education, right? And I consider like ethub and the documentation and all the podcasts we do and what you guys are doing bankless. That's education.

But at the end of the day, it's really like fighting misinformation, right? Which could also be grouped in the marketing and all this stuff. And I'm glad this side of the community has been built out. And one of the coolest things I've seen over the last few years in the theorem community is this shift from just a dev-heavy focus to appreciating people with a bunch of different backgrounds, investors, educators, you know, people with marketing expertise, operations expertise, product management, project management, whatever it is, right? I think that's helped us mature as, you know, a protocol in a space. I feel like, like, Eric, that one thing is that, I mean, Ethereum needs to be primarily dev-focused, right, in terms of like attention,

like technology. And you were one of the first people that I saw in the space talking about monetary policy and issuance policy. And I found like that's so refreshing because I couldn't get my head wrapped around just the pure tech focus in Ethereum's culture. Like tech is important, but at the end of the day, what we're building is a social movement. What we're building is not just a computer or a database, but an economic computer, an economic database. And there was like this complete lack of discussion around the economics of the thing. Like I remember you were one of the first people to actually like map out ether's issuance policy long term like taking into account things like eth too so um you know that that is so important and the bitcoin communities had this down

for like years right in fact like their technology is stagnated but i would argue their their social movement and um like they're writing uh talking about bitcoin is that the narrative layer yeah exactly David, that's really been thriving over the past five years while technology has been dormant. So I'm glad you stepped up to the plate, man. It's super useful. Now we've never had that going to a bull run, right? Like Ethereum has not had a strong narrative layer. And now I feel like we do. And I wonder where that's going to take us. Yeah, absolutely. It's interesting looking back, right? Like early 2014-2015 Ethereum community was, hey, it was basically we know and we want to do more than what Bitcoin is willing to do.

And Bitcoin had cemented into their narrative, but they weren't going to like really expand beyond that. Right. So there was this group of people that said, hey, we want to do more. And it took a while to decide, A, what that is, right? We started like world computer, which I still hate that. I know something like it, but it's too broad, right? For me, it was always defy that attracted me.

And I'll fight to the end of the day, like when I first read the white paper for Ethereum, I saw and thought of defy, right? And so we went into this like weird, rural computer narrative. And I think we're going to decentralize Facebook kind of thing. Yeah, exactly, which I just don't personally see happening. Maybe someday once we get scaling and all that. But, you know, the community was just kind of messy and no one was talking about the monetary policy.

And I just got to thinking like, okay, everyone wants to work on this, be funded to work on it. We need to make sure there's a monetary premium so that the underlying asset goes up, right? Or at least tries to go up or has it can narrative. it for going up because we all want to kind of work on this and you know developers want to get paid to work on it and we can't just have a willy-nilly monetary policy and really the only thing was like there's a blog post from joe lubin in like 2014 that there's just like a graph of eth inch issuance or if it's five eth per block what does it look like and no one was talking about okay how much do miners

really have to be paid let's look at the fee side of things as well which you know 1559's a part of now but Yeah, it was interesting that no one really thought about that for the first two or three years, but I think it also proves just how early we are in this stuff. The monetary policy is a fascinating conversation. And like Ryan said, it's because of what you've done at Eth Hub that it got pushed into the forefront. And I want to return there. But first I kind of want to talk about what the Ethereum community was kind of like at Genesis, right, at 2015, 2016, before we kind of really figured it out, right?

And I remember a tweet from you, Eric, that came out a while ago. or some messaging in some capacity that was along the lines of like the, the 2018-2019 bear market was the time where the Ethereum community, the users and the investors and the builders all kind of came together, right? These used to be separate groups and now they are kind of having one, they're moving as one units. Can you kind of talk about what was it like before that transition? What was it like after that transition? Why is it getting everyone on the same page important at all? Yeah. So I think early on it was all these grand ideas with no idea how to really execute them, right?

So I'll take like I was thinking about building ether X, which is the first stab at like a decentralized exchange. And we had this great idea, but like the tech was nowhere close. We didn't know how we were going to do the incentive side of things where we're going to do a token, where we're going to take fees. And so you kind of saw these like huge ideas, but you already saw this fracture in the community. So first of all was all on Reddit, right? Like there was no Ethereum Twitter at all. So it was all on Reddit. At the time, it was ETH trader and our Ethereum.

So you already had this split of investors and the tech side, right, and the devs. And I remember, and it still is kind of like this, but all price talk is banned on our Ethereum, right? And I'm thinking like all these people on our Ethereum are talking about building these great ideas. They want users. They want to make a lifestyle of this. But they're not even considering price or investors, right? You need people to invest in this thing for it to be sustainable long term. And in fact, like, it's core to the economic security, the security model of the entire system.

Like the price of ETH matters for security reasons to prevent double spends, to prevent attacks. And it's still almost to this day, I think as a community we're getting better. I still kind of see a neglect to this today, but it was totally separate in the back, kind of like, why do we care about price? Let's put this to the side. So I think what we, so also it was very just dev focus where, there wasn't really, you know, developers did build this protocol. They've helped more than anybody kind of get us to where we are today. But I think what the community realized after the

ICOs in 17 are, hey, we also need like product people. We need operations people, marketing people to actually build products that people want. Like we can just think of these products and build them for ourselves, but do people actually want to use them, right? And so I think what we've learned through the bear is, hey, this is a community effort. Like, we need to need expertise. Like, it's not like abnormal that the rest of the world works in groups of expertise. We should probably follow us in their suit. Yeah, totally. And how would you characterize the community now? Like, what problems have we really solved that we kind of figured out? Yeah, I mean, I think Ryan just kind of hit it on the head is I think we've come to realize

the importance of the monetary policy and securing the network. I think that's been the biggest breakthrough we've had. We've gone from five eth per block to two and the network's still secure. I mean, obviously when eth price went from $1 to $1,400, we should be thinking about changing issuance, right? We don't need to be paying miners, you know, 50 times more than they deserve to make. And so I think we've realized that investors are important, developers are important, all these different groups are important. And I don't think, I don't see that split anymore. I think most debates we see, every side is considered anymore. And I think we even see that on the E2 launch, there's been a lot of, you know, it's very tech heavy, but we've also seen a lot of discussion

about what the issue and should look like. What does the rewards curve look like? How much eat do we need steak to get there? You know, how is the merge going to look? So we're considering all these different aspects. And, you know, it doesn't surprise me. It's taking years and it's going to take more because it's just a more complex system than a Bitcoin, right? Bitcoin kind of just has to focus on the monetary policy and the simplicity. And when you start adding all these other variables, it takes time, especially in a decentralized community, right? It takes time to figure this stuff out.

And how about the community's relationship with staking? Because staking has been in the ethos or the commitments of Ethereum since day one. But what the community has perceived staking to be has changed. Like once upon a time, you used to need 1,500 ether to stake, right? that used to be the number and before it got lower down to 32 and there were different attitudes. My God, I almost forgot about that by the idea. Really high number, right?

Do you remember that? Yeah. I was like, oh, I guess I'm only ever using staking pools. Like, damn. So, Eric, like, how has like the community changed or understood staking to be whatever it is? Like, has that changed over time? You know, I think the social contract has always been there. It's funny to me still when I see people, like, concerned about minors.

POW at this point on Ethereum because it's not even it's never been part of the social contract. We've always known that we're going to proof of stake. I, you know, I get some heat for this. I don't know why we even consider the feelings of minors at this point. It's just not in my interest. They're being kind of weighted out. And that's been part of the social contract. So, you know, I think that's always been there. But yeah, you know, it's shifted a lot. One of the more painful moments was, I think like early 2018 when like the proof of state roadmap as was was completely scrapped and kind of rebuilt into what we're getting now, which is the beacon chain and the different phases we're seeing. You know, that was definitely a painful moment as an ease investor

because we've been waiting, you know, four, five, six years now for this to happen. At the end of the day, it paid off, right? And I talk to you guys all the time offline about this, but this is a long game and it always fascinates me how short-term people think, even though they know it's a long game. This is a multi-decade game, right? And I feel like I have hands of diamonds at this point holding onto my bags because I feel like some people flip flop back and forth every week. So, you know, we're getting there. I think we're weeks away from Genesis block launch and huge props to everybody, but that's been building that. But yeah, seeing the shifts is interesting. And, you know, you mentioned the 1,000 to 32 each change. Like, it's amazing what changes with price,

right? Like price goes from 1 to 1,400. You start rethinking your issuance policy. You start rethinking how much you need to stake, you know, and it changes rewards too. Like staking rewards are way different at a eth price of 100 versus 10k, right? So all of these things need to be considered and all chains, even Bitcoin in a way, I know they're not going to, but price determines everything as far as security of the chain, how much you need to stake and all that. Was there ever a moment in Ethereum's history where you were like, fuck, what if we never get to East 2? I don't know if I ever thought we might not get to East 2. There were definitely some, I would say the hardest as like a long-term investor at this point,

it was like after the Dow just in general sentiment about Eath, because you had like, you had just gone through this huge rally from three bucks to 24. Everyone was hyped. But like on the other side, you know, Bitcoiners and people in other coins were saying, hey, smart contracts will never be secure. This stuff's impossible. You guys are crazy. Next day the Dow gets hacked.

And you're kind of like, okay. You know, you have that doubt in the back of your mind. Like, this was our first experiment. It got hacked. So I don't think I've ever had a moment where I didn't think E2 was going to happen, but there's been a couple days, especially like after the Dow where you're questioning your sanity on the overall vision, right? But I think DFI is totally stomped out any of those.

You know, we can't trust any smart contract fears at this point. Yeah, David and I commented recently that just like the success of uniswap alone. Okay, so like 24 months from zero to over $4 billion in weekly volume, right? And you're telling me smart contracts don't work and defy is not going to be. Here's a system made by one guy with a less than $100,000 grant, his first development project. And within two years, he's doing more volume than Coinbase, right? Like, sorry, guys. Like, defy works, smart contracts work.

And like, we have data. We had a belief back in 2017 about Defi, but now we have actual data and use cases, and like, we see the success. And I'm almost surprised, Eric, that this doesn't have mainstream attention. So it's funny to me because I see even at the start of the cycle, and we are in a bull market. By the way, I love the seasons of crypto, right? That's maybe why, like, I love Southern California, perfect weather all year around, right? But I live on the East Coast, and it's nice to have the seasons. And we get these seasons in crypto where we get the bull season, we get the bear season.

And I enjoy the bear season, to be honest, because there's builders, there's narratives. The tourists are all gone. There's friends. You've forged like the real community in the bear market. But now we're shifting to summertime again, right? And it feels good. I like that transition too. I'm excited for the bull market.

But like, what's it going to take? Because I feel like at the start of this bull market, Bitcoin is going to be. going to have the narrative for a little bit, right? But like, what's happening with Defi is so incredible right now. The Unoswap story alone and no one's really telling it. What is this going to take to go to get into the mainstream narrative where we start seeing this thing on CNBC and is that going to happen in this bull cycle? Yeah, it's amazing how fast people just like shift, right? Like a year ago, it was, hey, Ethereum has no users. Now it's like, okay, well, we're doing billions in volume a day on D5.

There's billions locked to DFI. And now everyone just like shifts the goalposts constantly, right? And I think, you know, how I see this playing out is Bitcoin probably going for all time high and breaking it. But, you know, the Bitcoin narrative to me is boring. You look at Twitter right now and it's literally just, hey, number went up. Number went up more than two years ago. Hey, look, how many days has number been this high?

And it's like, okay, hey, that's great. Are you stark, R. you start talking about Bitcoin is not like. Exactly. It's a big development. Yeah, exactly. So I think, you know, that attracts mainstream media potential. The big difference this time for Eath is going to be that we have something tangible to

use. It was a lot of promises last time. You know, CryptoKitties was kind of the thing people caught on to. I think people investing now after, you know, say Bitcoin breaks all time high and kind of gets this mainstream media attention, retail investors start looking for alternatives. now they hop into Ethereum and they say, oh, wow, okay, they've built stuff. You know, I would argue the UX of defy is better than traditional finance now. So hopefully gas fees aren't too crazy as people are kind of running into this stuff.

And they're going to be kind of blown away, I think. You know, of course, it's still going to be a small subset. Like I said, I still think this is a multi-decade play, not like a multi-month play. But people are going to realize the power of an alternative financial system and start to play with it and tinker with it. And you're going to capture some people. And I think a uniswap and AMM is very unique to defy. I think it's one of the products that traditional finance is going to be a bit blown away by. Hey, you can just have this like pool liquidity and all this stuff.

And that's a unique product offering when it comes to, you know, D5 versus traditional finance. Dude, just like real quick. Like, yeah, your point about UX right after this, I actually have to go to my local bank and I have to appear in person to like send a wire transfer. right and I have to present my card and I have to fill out like actual physical paperwork and be there and say hi my name is Ryan and I just want to transfer the money that supposedly I own to somewhere else but I have to ask your permission pretty please do it and by the way you're

going to charge me like 30 bucks for doing that it sucks and also you're going to be wearing a bankless shirt while you do it too yes I got an email from my I've gone all defy basically and I got So my savings account is pretty much moved on to defy just because of the yields over there. And I got an email from my bank two weeks ago and said, hey, your balance is too low now in your bank account. We're going to start charging you. Please come back, Eric. We'll charge you money until you come back. I think one of the things that makes me so incredibly bullish and Uniswap is involved in this conversation and Maker is involved in this conversation is back in 2017, 2018, we had nothing sticky on Ethereum.

Like ICOs were fleeting, right? Like you come in, you put your token, you put your money into the ICO, you get your token, you hope the token pumps. If it doesn't, like, you're out. But then we had Maker come in in December 2017, and Maker was a place for value and capital to be sticky, right? Like you could put your capital in Maker and leave it there. You could leave it there, and it would do stuff.

And same thing with Uniswap. And one thing that makes me particularly bullish about this cycle is how many more sticky things we have this cycle than we did last time. Like you we have reasons and incentives for you to come and also stay. And we've never had that before. So I'm really excited to see what happens in this bull cycle when people find that there's actually, you know, a land out here that people have settled on and there's actually like a sustainable way to live a life out here. Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, the, you know, the amount of liquidity out there now and kind of the composability between all these apps. I think to me,

what's going to capture mainstream the most is the ease of moving these funds around, right? Okay, say you open a high yield savings account the next week, the bank cuts it from 1% to 0.75% you want to transfer that out. Probably requires an in-person thing. It requires multiple days. That doesn't exist, right? I hop my yield farms around in 15 seconds. And there's no monopoly.

No one has like a say on what I can do as far as hopping my or moving my money around. And I think that's going to resonate with people and just the ease of how easily you can trade in and out in things. And I think that's going to be what captures people the most, just that, you know, it seems like a 10x improvement to the traditional finance system. Absolutely. Okay. So, Eric, now that staking is quote unquote here, like knock on wood, it's like seven days away. And like we've made it, right? Like the staking, we can basically see staking, it's like right there.

How does that make you feel as somebody who's been here around since day one where we've come. committed to staking and we kind of thought that it was going to be here a lot sooner. But now it is actually here. Like how does that make you feel now that it's actually arrived? Yeah, it's great. I mean, I think what I'm most impressed by, and I think people underestimate this, is how hard it is to coordinate this effort. It's not necessarily like the tech that was built and like what's out there smart contract wise and how the beacon chain works. It's coordinating people across the globe to build this and getting, you know, agreement from the users of the network of, hey, this is what we should build. I think we're even seeing this in like smart defyphi projects, how hard governance is, how hard

decentralized governance is. And we're getting buy-in from the community of, hey, this is the path. And I think E2 struck this perfect line that I liked early on in Ethereum, ETH1, of a bit centralized. You've got a couple like central players that really know what they're doing. But also, like, there's a couple other teams out there and you're getting buying from the community. It's just like pseudo decentralized governance that I think protocols need early on. I don't think I'm scared of just going 100% hands off decentralized start. So I'm impressed that the E2 team teams that are building this were able to pull it off first and foremost because it's not easy.

Right. And a lot of people have made the analogy of what if like Apple was building the iPhone in public, right? On like GitHub and they were asking for input across the nation and stuff. like it would be a disaster. It would take years. And so stuff like this is just going to take time. You know, it's cool. I'm still cautiously optimistic myself about staking. I put out a tweet a couple days ago, hey, just for now treat this as another yield firm, in my opinion. Don't like ape in 100% of your because there's a lot of opportunity costs there. Your liquidity is locked up. It's new code.

Who knows how long it's going to take until, you know, phase one comes in. You can move stuff around. But, you know, I'm excited. It's the day that Genesis Block goes alive, I mean, it's one of the biggest steps for Ethereum since the original ETH1 Genesis Block. Yeah, so even though there's three ETH Maxis on this live stream, there's definitely some diversity. I'm not an ETH Maxi, David. Okay.

That's what you say. David, I thought you were Bitcoin Max. Yeah, Closite apparently, allegedly. But there is some diversity of opinion. I guess there is a diversity opinion here. But Eric, what you just said is that, you know, treat, staking as another yield farm, right? But me and Ryan are hammering this drum as like, it's your patriotic duty to stake. Like, this is a political statement. And so I kind of want to get

into that topic. But before we get there, we have to take a quick break to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible. If you want to live a bankless life, you need to get a hardware wallet. There is no alternative for storing your crypto in a self-sovereign fashion. That's why I have four ledgers that I use to manage my different crypto assets. You using the Ledger Live account as well. Ledger Live is like your home base for managing your Ethereum, Defy, and crypto accounts. It does a really good job of aggregating all of your different Ethereum wallets

if you are the type of person that uses more than one, but you can also add other cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin or Cosmos or whatever your preferred blockchain is, and then it will display an aggregate portfolio of all your accounts at the main page. One thing that Ledger is doing a really good job of is enabling all the money verbs that me and Ryan talked about with the Bankless SkillCube enabled in the Ledger Live app. So right now in the Ledger Live app, you can buy, sell, lend, swap, and stake your crypto

assets, which is doing a really good job of fulfilling all of the money verbs in the Bankless SkillCube. Something that's new to Ledger Live is Ledger Swap, where you can swap assets one for another directly inside the Ledger Live application, ensuring trustlessness in your financial activity on Ethereum and on Bitcoin. If you want to learn more about what you can do with a ledger, go to the blog post The Power of Ledger Live on the Ledger website. Or they share some of the more advanced things that you can do with your ledger that you might not have known about. There's a link in the show notes that will take you to the ledger shop where you can get your preferred ledger hardware wallets.

I personally like the Ledger NanoX, but I also have both. They're both great options. When you own a ledger, you own your own assets in the way that they have been designed to be held by the user. and the user alone. So go get your ledger today to make sure that you are as self-sovereign as possible. The bankless state in the nations are brought to by WIREN. WIREN is DFI's first self-building community-run project, which I just get really, really excited about. Wynne is a system that seeks out yield in DFI, and it does that in a number of different ways. A very aggressive way is with the vaults where you can deposit your preferred asset of choice,

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it looks around DFI to see where the yield is coming from, and it direct stable coins automatically. so you don't have to. Check them out at y'earn.com finance to get started. And also check out the stats page to see what other people are doing as well. All right, guys, we are back with Eric Connor, and we left the conversation off with the difference of opinion as to whether it is your patriotic duty to stake or whether you should just treat staking as another yield farm. And so the bankless community probably already understands what Ryan and my opinions are with staking. But Eric is offering an alternative view where you

kind of just treat it as like a profit maximalist. You just try to treat it as a yield farm. Eric, you want to elaborate on that take? Yeah. So I don't think altruism really exists when it comes to this stuff or I don't think it should, right? And I think I would be a bit of a hypocrite. I've been calling out Bitcoin for their monetary policy not being sustainable once the caps hit. And the argument I hear back a lot is not a lot, but like one of the arguments back is miners will be a bit altruistic. And I don't agree with that. I think in, incentives run this world, this crypto world that we're in. And I think if we're not seeing enough stakes, it's because we got the incentives wrong. And I will say, I don't think the incentive curve

has been revisited since the defy craze. And the reality is, people are earning, maybe not on straight e-staking, but you can put your Ethan compound, draw stable coins with a very safe liquidation price, and net 10 to 15% on your capital at that point. So I don't think the incentive, curve was really thought about post-defi yield farming era. And I think that's something as a community we need to think about. You know, what is the ideal target for Stakey? I'm not really sure. It seems like the devs and researchers think it's around like 10 million long term, but, you know, it's kind of hard to say. I actually recently submitted an issue on the ETH2 GitHub today, the spec GitHub, that I think we should put a max date in and just kind of bypass this minimum threshold because

It seems a bit arbitrary to me. But, you know, I'm personally thinking about this is just another yield farm. I want to experiment a little, you know, it's complicated. Like running this stuff isn't easy. You need to generate your own keys. You need to know what you're doing. You need to have uptime. So I want to give it a little bit of time and see.

I'll run a validator too early just because I want to be a part of the Genesis block. But that's kind of where my head's at. So, Eric, in summary, you don't want to miss Genesis block. You're going to be there for sure. But you don't think that ETH2 staking. in general should rely on any form of altruism or any sort of like patriotic duty to the theory of nation. David, maybe I'll play the role of moderator a little bit here. So like David, do you agree with Eric's stake there or like what's maybe a counter take to that?

Yeah, I 100% agree that you have to start with incentives. Like this whole, this is a crypto economic system. And so if you don't get the economics right, then you don't have the system. And And so the first and foremost, you don't, there's no such thing as a meme secured blockchain, right? You are secured by just facts, by science, to whatever degree that you can be secured by that. And that means incentives, right? So, you know, show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome. If you have incentives that secure blockchain, then we have a secure blockchain. However, once the incentives are placed, that is actually the substrate in which a political statement can emerge out of, right?

That is where the meme comes from. A lot of people will comment on like how Bitcoin is just a meme coin. But Bitcoin is a meme coin because they have everything else right. Like the meme is allowed to emerge out of that, out of that success. And if it starts to, if that success starts to falter, if the incentives start to become misaligned, then the meme pops. But the idea, the purpose is to grow like the social layer around staking. And so once we do have the staking correct, we get to rally the flag and say like, yo, we got staking nailed. Like we got the incentives down.

Now we get to generate like a social hype layer, the narrative layer around staking, saying like it is your duty to stake. Because the eth devs and eth researchers figured out the right balance of incentives, we get to carry that banner. They figured it out. We have this perfectly secure blockchain. Everyone should stake because it is because we figured it out. And now that we figured it out, you know, you can access that upside, right?

Like part of the ethos of Ethereum is to spread out decentralization to everyone and allow blockchain validation by everyone. Would you say, David, that part of the ethos in the Bitcoiner community is like it is your duty as a Bitcoiner to hold. Yes. You hold. That's why the 300 meme is so strong with Bitcoiners, right? They are always about like, you know, hold the line. Don't sell, stack the stats, right? And I feel like an equivalent social layer for Ethereum could be about staking, right?

Like you should stake. You did say something that might get back to Eric's point about like once it's right, once they get it right. Yes. And maybe that's a distinction, Eric, that you're trying to make. Or how would you respond to what David's saying there? Yeah. So I'll go back a little bit to like the social contract comment I made of we've always expected this, right? But one of the aspects of the social contract, I don't think many of us thought about are expected was this unknown lockup period.

Right. So this throws a huge wrench into the incentives. So I agree with you, David, totally. Once, you know, the lockup's gone and we're kind of like, ETH ones merge in E2 and staking is a little more vetted. At that point, I plan to stake all my ETH. This lockup, this unknown lockup is a wrench in the system, right? And I personally think that the incentives should probably be a little bit higher early on

to incentivize people to take this potential opportunity cost loss. I mean, you're talking, put it this way, right? What if this is not financial advice? ETH pumps from 480 to 5K while your ETH is locked up, right? Now, everyone knows when this Ease can unlock someday. What if the market just goes through a full cycle and dumps back before you can unlock your ETH on staking? You lost out on a ton of money, right? Yeah, maybe you got your 15 to 20 percent yield, but the opportunity cost is just amazingly high.

And I think that's why we've only seen 100K ETH stake isn't there. That, you know, I'm not going to say that the financial incentives behind. and ETH II were more neglected than they were on the initial ETH one, because I don't think they were. They were thought about, but I still don't think they were thought about enough. And I think as a community, we should start having this conversation. And I think they should change every phase. So before David replies to that, another, I guess, nuance. I want to get your take on, right? So you gave the example, Eric, of the opportunity cost of ETH going to say $500 or something per ETH. But I've also, $5,000, excuse me. Yeah, we'll be at $500 at the end of this

episode, right? It's happening right now. All right. So 5,000. So, but there are other opportunity costs, I think I've heard you argue about, which is like on ETH one right now, this wasn't the case in 2017, but on ETH one, you can do a hell of a lot with your ETH, right? Like there are yield farms, there are defy opportunities, there are ways to generate.

Now, you have to take like risk into account here, but I guess my question is, do you think that defy opportunities on Ethereum are almost a little competitive with ethos staking at least at this point? Yeah, I would say absolutely yes. And this is not something that was even considered, I would say, a year and a half, two years ago. So it needs to be taken into consideration. I mean, I'm currently yield farming. I have almost all of my eat deploy at yield farms, earning on average about 15 to 18% any given week on my capital, why would I take that ETH and put it into ETH too, lock it up for a year and earn the same amount, right?

So I think we need to just be like real about these conversations and understand what the competitive landscape looks like. And yeah, sure, defy yields have come down from 100% to 15, but I see them staying in the 10 to 15, 20% range for a while. And the real question is, what are, what is the sweet spot on E2 staking? I haven't really seen this answer. You know, is it $3 million? Is it $5 million?

Is it $10 million? You know, what is that sweet spot? And then kind of like tune it around that point. And I think that that was attempted. But I don't think it was attempted considering D5. So, you know, are you going to lock up your ETH for 15% in DFI? Are you going to lock it up for 15% in E2? People are going to answer that different ways, right?

If you have more technical expertise, you're probably going to take the staking side, more financial background. You're going to take the defy side. But this wasn't even in consideration, you know, when we were first talking about staking. So, David, what's your response to that? Eric is describing a very like methodical investor type take on opportunity cost here. You almost sounds a little bit like more like a Raoul Paul, right? When you had that conversation with Raoul was like, yeah, but like, what's my ROI?

What's my yield for taking these sorts of risk? What's your response? Yeah, and again, we always have to take that perspective first, right? Because if you don't have the incentives, then you don't have anything, right? Everything is layered upon correct incentives. And so I think, like, if you are voicing these concerns, then, like, the rest of the Ethereum ecosystem should be paying attention that these concerns are being voiced. I do want to take a little bit of a side quest and talk about, like, defy competing for

East for staking competing for ETH, because, like, if you focus in and on this very narrow viewpoint, you're like, oh, that's bad because, like, DFI is stealing security from Ethereum, and Ethereum is stealing ether collateral from DFI. This has actually been in the ether triple point asset thesis since day one. Everything competes for ETH. Like, it's a massive tug-of-war in all in every direction, right? And so I think what Eric is a fan of that I think would really offend Bitcoiners would be tinkering with incentives, like tinkering with the right numbers, the right metrics.

And that's kind of been the division between Ethereum and Bitcoin. That's kind of where we draw the lines. Like, Ethereum is okay with tinkering to get the most optimal outcome. And Bitcoin is like no tinkering ever. And what it is is what it is. And so there's obviously values into both sides. And I think what Eric said is once we get to phase 1.5, where ether staking on the phase zero beacon chain can merge with the rest of Ethereum,

that's when we actually start to hit that drum a little bit harder, which is like, you know, staking is for you. Like, you can stake at home. Like, it's, you protect Ethereum by doing that at home. And, and I kind of see this one and a half two year period where we are, it's an experiment. We are learning how to stake. Like, people are learning how to run a node. People are learning how to stake at home. Clients are learning how to make their clients easier to use. Staking becomes more, you know, more accessible. Because right now, staking is not easy. Like, and almost intentionally so, because it acts as like a filter to make sure that only the technically competent can get to that point.

But that filter and that barrier comes down. And I think that's what I'm going to do over this next year and a year and a half is, while it gets easier and easier to stake and the barriers become lower and lower and lower, I'm going to try and build up the memes to get better and better and better. So more people can get convinced that staking is for them at the point where it becomes right. Yeah. And here's something interesting too, right? Let's go on the total other side.

We're at phase one and a half, you know, maybe phase. to it's one-click staking on Coinbase on your local computer, whatever. We also don't want to overpay, right? So again, what is that number? We need to find what are we okay with from a security perspective of East staked. The curve should get us steeply to that and then drop off because if there's no value to 50 million e-staking, why are we incentivizing it, right? There should be zero incentivization up there and we should push that back down to a lower number. So I don't want to also, So it might seem hard to get there now because the barriers are high, the opportunity cost is high. But once it becomes easier, we don't want to go on the other end of the spectrum where we're overpaying for security.

And we're just repeating, you know, the block reward drop from five to three and three to two. And we're back at square one. So I think getting it right on both ends is very important. Now, Bitcoiners will say that you actually don't know how much security is the adequate amount of security. And therefore, you should try and strive for as much security as possible at all times. How would you respond to that? I mean, I agree. I actually agree on proof of work.

It's very hard to do. Like, you know, when I wrote the EIP 1, 2, 3, 4 to reduce the rewards from 3 to 2, it was very hard, like, to come up with an analysis of what is proper security. I compared it to Bitcoin in my, like, EIP and my analysis. I think that changes on proof of stake, though. Like, it's easier to know, like, how many validators you need, you know, I'm not going to get, I can't get into the details, not technical enough, but for a malicious attack to take over, and you can better understand economic impacts of an attack and slashing people and stuff

like that. So it feels to me like it would be easier to come up with this number. And again, I've seen floated around like 10 mil or so. But I agree with you on proof of work. But I do think it starts to change once you get to proof stake. I think it's a little easier to quantify. It's funny to me that you would say that that's the Bitcoiner position too, a little bit, David, because that may be what they talk about, and I hear that. But like, if you look at their issuance policy and their security budget, it doesn't match, right? If you just said that Bitcoiners

are trying to optimize for security, right? And they're cutting security in half every four years. The thing that Bitcoin is strongest in, which is not the market for its own block space, Ethereum even surpasses Bitcoin there. But in the market for its asset, and they're choosing, to cut that in half, that to me doesn't jive. And that's why we're here in Ethereum. Right, maybe we'll talk to Dick Carter a little bit about that. I think we have before next week. All right.

Well, so that to me makes sense. So I think you guys are both playing as both Ethereum Patriots, playing at kind of different sides of the risk spectrum here. And Eric, even though you're not going to kind of go all in day one, which is like prudent investing. And by the way, guys, like, we've said it before, but there are a lot of risks to staking ETH at this stage. This is the frontier.

It's not for everyone. But there are some whales out there, right, who have tons of ETH. And they could be doing something, right? Like, they don't have to put it all in, but they could be doing something. Try to fire up a node. Try to go down this path. And I think you guys are agreeing there. But over time, Eric, I bet you will be just as patriotic as David is over here on the,

on the Eith staking memes as, uh, you guys. kind of phase one draws to a close when we get into like these future phases. Let's let's talk about the ethel bull case, right? Because let's see what happens when you get three bulls in here. If Ethereum's bull case played out to say the nth degree, if it was maximally successful, let's talk about that scenario. What would that look like, Eric, to you? like a maximally successful Ethereum and Ether over the next say,

bull cycle to the next three to five years. Yeah, I mean, for me, it's that Defi starts to truly threaten the traditional financial market, right? So basically how I've always envisioned it is I don't really see Defi as, you know, directly usurping the traditional financial system. I see them running in parallel and then people seeing the benefits of it over the traditional financial system. So to me, the mega bowl case for ETH, you know, next five years or whatever is this realization of, hey, maybe I don't need my bank.

Maybe defy is fine. I can manage, you know, it's not hard to use a ledger, use metamask. Like it's easier than logging into Chase or whatever bank you use and a large amount of money starting to come over. And that starts waking up the traditional finance market, right? And then they start saying, okay, well, what's going on here? And they start looking into it. And it's kind of this like positive feedback. loop at that point. Okay. What's funny is I think that's kind of like your personal story too,

right, Eric? Right. Like you're just, I think, projecting your personal story and saying, hey, I'm going down this path. I've been down this path. And I think there's going to be a lot more like me. We talk about in bank lists like two points of flippinging, right? There's there's one sort of flippinging where suddenly you look at your net worth and you're like, oh my God, I have more crypto net worth than I have like Fiat existing traditional finance system network, right? That's flippening one. And then Flippinik 2 comes later when you're like, oh my God, I don't even use my bank account anymore. Like, I don't need it. I just have a few bills that I pay from it.

But my banking services have largely shifted over to crypto. Have you passed both of those hurdles? I have, yeah. It actually took me, it was very first to hurdle one. Hurtle two took me a while. So I just the last couple years, right? As DFI has developed the last years. Yeah, hurdle two was actually just the last six, six, nine months, 12 months, something like that.

So recent within the last year. And the difference was the yields, right? Like, why do I have my cash sitting in a savings account earning 0.4% or whatever when I can put it in defy? And now I will copy out this with there are still risk, obviously. Like we still see defy protocols getting hacked. I personally diversify across like eight different defy protocols. So yeah, if one goes down hacked, you know, it's not the end of the world. There's also Nexus mutual insurance you can buy and cover and all this stuff.

But yeah, I've taken the plunge on both. And I just, yeah, I mean, I use my traditional bank account just to pay bills. I keep all my stable coins now in different vaults across DFI and, you know, the interests earn. Maybe I'll put back in traditional banking to pay some bills. But other than that, it's to me, I feel comfortable. Like, why keep it in traditional finance? Eric, you've been around crypto for a long time, like before Ethereum. I'm like, wasn't this the whole freaking vision for the whole thing from the very start?

Do you remember back in 2013, we'd see like Olaf Carlson Wee, and he was like, I'm going to live on Bitcoin for a year, right? And like, he stopped doing that because it sucked so bad because of volatility. But now you are actually living banklessly without a bank on crypto. And like no one's talking about it. That's crazy to me. Like mainstream hasn't caught onto this yet. But this is the crypto, has this been the crypto dream from inception? Oh, absolutely. I mean, this is what initially attracted me to Ethereum. So like I was day trading Bitcoin in 2013.

Mount Gox happened. Everyone lost their money. I was in IRC chats where a bunch of people lost their money. And we said, okay, wait, why are we trading centralized assets on decentralized exchanges? And that led me into the wormhole. So yeah, that's what I've always been here for. It amazes me the reliance on centralized. services that come from the Bitcoin. You can't, you cannot live in a bankless community on Bitcoin.

You just can't. So, you know, Ethereum is offering that and it's powerful. And yeah, yields aren't always going to stay up where they are now. But for the medium future, I think we're going to see much higher competitive yields because a lot of it's driven by speculation, right? And that at the end of the day is one of crypto's strongest use cases right now is speculation. Yeah, especially as the greater macro world falls into, zero in negative interest rates. Like just the juxtaposition there is insane. Eric, you started this conversation talking about how when you said, when you read the Ethereum white paper, you saw defy. And so I want, I want, and part of this take is that this is a little bit of semantics.

It's like, what is defy? What is Ethereum? But to me, the entire point of Ethereum and crypto at large is to produce defy. Right. Like Ethereum is defy. And if we get any value out of this whole entire, whatever this whole entire crypto thing is, it's defy. And the reason why Bitcoin itself is valuable is because it is an instantiation of defy, right? It's all defy, defy, defy, whatever that is. That's the whole point. Do you agree with that? Yeah, no, I totally do.

I even think that, you know, we're seeing like an NFT craze on Ethereum. I kind of say that's an extension of defy. I mean, the composability of defy and using ETH and using dye in the NFT markets is defy. But yeah, that's how I've always seen it. I personally don't really see long-term other use cases. I know a lot of people disagree with me on that. There's a lot of people that still believe in vision. I'm just not there.

I think when I heard about the ability to program your money, it just clicked. And I don't think, so Ryan, you've mentioned a lot like, why hasn't the mainstream picked up on this? You know, I think this idea of programmable money really only just, it has to click with you. I don't, I've struggled explaining. it to people. But then once I've shown it to people recently, it's slowly started to click with them. And I don't think until people really see the benefits, it's almost something like you can't force on people, right? So until you kind of have that aha moment, you start using it and say,

wow, the benefits are truly here of this system. You know, we might not actually see that mainstream media until then, which might take some time. Yeah, that's a good take. All right, Eric, we're going to conclude with a couple of like just quick hit questions. Right now, I'm looking at the ether launch pad. And when David and I put out that post yesterday, it was kind of a call to action, right? So we are at about 100,000 each staked in the contract. We need about 424,000 more if we're going to hit the December 1st date. And we need that within the next seven days, because a week out, the date will start to be pushed out further and further potentially. Do you think we hit it? we get to that mark and we launch December 1st or not?

I don't think so. I think it's going to come a week after because people are going to realize what the yields will actually be and start to flow in. I don't think we're going to hit it on that day, but it's going to be shortly after. Okay. So whatever, it's always going to be afterwards. It's not going to be before because there's no incentive to go in early, right? You also kind of want the information.

You kind of want to be fashionably late, right? You're not too late, but you're definitely not early. Yeah. That makes sense to me. you think there's a chance, Eric, that it could come down to you. Do you remember the great Yam migration where suddenly it was like this rush the last like three to, you know, four hours? And then everyone kind of piled in at the end. Do you think something like that could happen as well? It could. I mean, I definitely think because there is no incentive to go early, people are waiting

until the last minute. But in like the Yam situation, it was like, hey, let's save the protocol. It's not quite like that on, you know, for this. It's, it's more optics than anything. So, I think we're going to see, you know, what happens if we don't hit it, right? Okay, now we know how much we need and people will start quoting APIs. Hey, you could earn 30% because there's only X amount in here. And that's going to start, I think, attracting people. And kind of right now it's like a game of chicken, I would say. Who's going to go first?

Who wants to go first? We'll get there. I think it'll just be slightly after. What is the best way that you've found to stake so far, Eric? Is it just, you know, you go through the guides that are available. You watch maybe Hudson Jameson's video and you stake at home, or are there other avenues? Yeah, Hudson's live stream was pretty good. I've just, so I've been running multiple test nets to this point.

So I've pretty familiar with Prism. Their discord's very helpful. So I've just become comfortable with that. I am very excited that ledger today just announced that they're going to have support for E2 staking keys on ledger. So one of the things I felt uncomfortable with personally is generating keys in terminal. I just, I'm not a command line terminal guy and the fact that I'm like generating these keys and just like copy pasting code in and like I'm trusting this process with a lot of my money.

It feels very foreign. Exactly. And like if I can do that through a ledger, I'll personally feel more comfortable. So I'm excited for that. And just a quick note on Ledger, David, before you go, is thanks to Ledger for sponsoring this show. of course, as always, I think they're going to be running some Black Friday deals. And what Eric is talking about is not their nano product, right, but their newer product that they offer stake on.

The Ledger S. The Ledger S. The big one. The big one, X. And that is going to be available possibly for some Black Friday deals next week. So if you're looking to pick some of those up next week, it might be the time. So Eric, when the. the Genesis of a phase zero actually kicks off how much ETH will be in it at Genesis? I mean, 528 or whatever, right? Well, so here's the weird caveat is if my issue I submitted goes through.

Okay, I'll talk about that. Yeah, yeah. So basically, what if we don't care about the minimum deposit amount and we want to put a hard date in? So I put December 15th. It seems to be getting rough consensus. Like who knows how we actually do this stuff, right? but if that goes in and we just say hey this date no matter what i would say like 300,000 but if that doesn't i think at genesis it's going to be at the very minimum of 520 and but then i think though we're going to see a larger infox so if you think about this from like game theory right you kind of want to know who's going in how much is in there and once like the genesis happens if you're like a profit maximalist right then you're like okay well if i go in now i know i know exactly what my yield's going to be.

As opposed to now, you're not quite sure. You could be, like, what if 10 million coming at the last second? You could be anywhere between 25% and 5% return. And to clarify, the EIP you submitted, it's basically removing the 528K threshold, basically, right? So that would lower that down, which means that there would be higher rewards, essentially, a higher interest paid out if it was lower than that. Why did they put a, why was a threshold? put in place to begin with.

Yeah, so there's a couple attack factors, one being like a gatekeeper attack. So like if the stake is too high on the E2 side, there can be some censorship. Like if it's too centralized, there could be some censorship that can happen. But it seems like the state going over so far is pretty decentralized. And like that's an economic analysis that happened when ETH was, I think, 80 bucks. So not as relevant anymore as well. So yeah, this would basically say, hey, if we didn't hit it and we hit this date, instead, just go with it.

So, you know, if you're at 200K, you're talking, I think, like 30, 35% return, which would be nice for those that are doing it. We're doing it live. Fuck it. Doing it live. Exactly. All right, Eric, so you've been through the cycles before. And so we couldn't let you go without asking you the classic question of when are all times high,

when are all time highs for ETH price and at what price will it be? December 2021, $2,500. Ah, so you know this. It is known. How did you come to those numbers, if you don't mind me asking? I think one thing people underestimate is every cycle you go through, it gets harder to pump higher market caps, right? So everyone expects the same, you know, crazy 10,000 percent. And yeah, Bitcoin's done that. I just think it becomes harder to push this market as shorting options are online. There's more liquidity. There's more access to all this. stuff. I don't, I personally don't see an insane target for the next run like a lot of people do. I know a lot of people are calling for 10K. You know, I'm going to, I've learned my lessons. I'm going to exit a little bit earlier than people are anticipating this time. Fair enough. Fair enough. And I've also recently heard a take where I compared Ethereum's

curtain cycle to Bitcoin's last cycle, drawing the metaphor that Ethereum is just one cycle behind Bitcoin. Does that resonate with you? Or is that kind of just, is that that, stale data. I think it's more about like the maturity of the market as a whole, to be honest. I mean, I think we just saw this with Defi. Like even in 2017, when ETH was pumping, there were really no options to short it. The liquidity was pretty low. Institutions weren't involved. If we look at what DeFi just went through, we went through an entire market cycle in like three weeks because there was more liquidity. There was access to shorting. I think, you know, larger players were involved. So I think, I don't think you can really compare.

East current cycle to Bitcoin three years ago because all this exists for now that didn't exist three years ago. There's futures, all this stuff. So I don't think the market is that simple. I think it always throws a, you know, kind of throws something different at you. Who knows? It could go to 80 tomorrow. It could go to 50K tomorrow.

I'm going to stick somewhere in between at my 2,500 number. Fair enough. Hold prediction, though. That is 2,500. year, which would be a 2x, I guess, is all-time high. What's interesting to me about the 2016 last bull market comparisons is I remember entering 2016, entering 2017, rather, and Bitcoin price was around 400. Different market cap to ETH, but like ETH prices floating in that 400 range, and it did run up to 20K. Totally different numbers, because obviously the market caps are wildly different,

but it is interesting. We could have a lot of play here for Ether. Eric, it has been a pleasure having you on. Thanks for guiding us through the culture, through staking, through our patriotic duties discussion, and through the investor mindset as well. Really appreciate everything you are doing. And welcome back to Twitter, sir. How long are you going to hang out with us?

Thank you. Yeah, we'll see how crazy the bull market gets, right? But yeah, I know I'm going to stick around this time. But I appreciate you guys having me. This is a lot of fun. All right. It's been great to have you. All right, guys, risks and disclaimers.

As always, ETH is risky. So is crypto. Defi is too. If you choose to stake with ETH, keep in mind that it is especially risky in this first phase zero. But we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone. But thanks for joining us on another episode of State of the Nation.