Bankless - SotN#8 - PUMPED, Introducing: $BAPs! (ETHSCAPE SHIRTS, ETH2 COMING, BULL MARKET MENTALITY)

Episode Date: August 5, 2020

STATE OF THE NATION #8 - Tuesday, August 4, 2020 Watch on the Bankless YouTube Channel The State of the Bankless Nation is....PUMPED! The bankless boys discuss why. Plus a special announcement...introducing $BAPS ----- GO BANKLESS WITH THESE SPONSOR TOOLS: ⚔️ GODS UNCHAINED - TRADING CARD GAME - you own the cards - start a free account, play and trade! 🧙‍♀️ POLYMARKET - BET ON CRYPTO - bet your beliefs! - use it to bet on DeFi outcomes!  🌈 AAVE - LEND & BORROW YOUR CRYPTO W/O A BANK - earn some interest! 💸 AMPLFORTH - MONETARY EXPERIMENT FOR BASE MONEY - learn about this experiment! ----- Covered: ETHSCAPE SHIRTS TOPIC ETH2 COMING TOPIC BULL MARKET MENTALITY We show:  The democratization of value (article on scarce product tokens)  RAC launch of $TAPE Introducing Bankless Apparel Bankless Apparel Season 0 - Ethscape Shirt Bankless Apparel website Delphi Digital Ethereum report --- Episode Actions: Grab one for the first 50 BAPs! Also...subscribe to Bankless YouTube to watch State of the Nation every Tuesday! ----- Don't stop at the show! Subscribe to the Bankless newsletter program http://bankless.substack.com/ Visit the official Bankless website for resources http://banklesshq.com/ Follow Bankless on Twitter https://twitter.com/BanklessHQ Follow Ryan on Twitter https://twitter.com/ryansadams Follow David on Twitter https://twitter.com/TrustlessState Follow DeFi Dad on Twitter https://twitter.com/DeFi_Dad ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time we may add links in this channel to products we use. We may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. We'll always disclose when this is the case.

Hello everyone. Welcome to episode eight of State of the Nation. David, nice shirt you got on today, my friend. Hey, likewise. Lots of colors in there. Yeah, you know what? We're going to talk about these shirts in just a minute. We're going to talk about the announcements in just a minute as David gives you a tour of what's going on. Let me give you, if this is your first state of the nation, here's what we do. We talk about what's going on in the bankless nation. We relate it to the big picture stuff, and we always like to drop some insights and action items. This episodes, these episodes release every Tuesday on YouTube. So make sure you subscribe to YouTube to catch them, and they release on Wednesday on the bankless podcast. So you can check it out there, too, if audio is more your thing.

We're going to get into announcements in a little bit. But, David, we should talk about our sponsors first. we've got a new one. Why don't you start with our new sponsor we're super excited about. Yeah, yeah. This sponsor is absolutely fantastic. God's Unchained for those that are into like alternative like instead of like investing in tokens and all this crazy defy stuff, there's also this other world going on where like digital scarcity and digital tokens can be leveraged for like a really awesome purpose. And so for those people that have played like hearthstone or magic the gathering, this is that same concept, that same type of game, but layered on.

to like Ethereum and using the Ethereum backend to manage your cards. And so the cards in God's Unchained are tokens like all the other tokens on Ethereum, except they represent cards in the God's Unchained game. And so it's absolutely fantastic. I've put in like 50, 100 hours into God's Unchained and they keep on iterating and making the thing like even sexy or even smoother. The graphics of that game are absolutely fantastic. But what I love about it is that like with my cards in my Ethereum wallet, my little tokens, I'm playing against somebody else's tokens on Ethereum through the gods Unchained game. And so what's pretty cool about God's Unchained is that you have provable scarcity of your

cards, right? So when you open up a legendary card, you give, like, you have assurances on the blockchain that there's not only going to be, like, any more than like 200 of these cards, right? And like, that's not true for Blizzard's Hardstone. That's not true for Magic the Gathering. And they can print them endlessly. But with God Unchained, you have assurances to how scarce your cards are. So if you are into a trading card game and you want to have that experience on Ethereum,

check out Goss Unchained, download the game. You don't have to buy cards to get started. You get started off with like the basic starter pack and then you win games and then you get more cards and it's fantastic. So check them out at Gauze Unchained. Yep, godsunchain.com. We will include a link in the show notes. Also, longtime sponsor, friend of bankless Avey, I want to tell you about Avey a little bit.

They are climbing up the leaderboard. I looked the other day and they were at something like number three in terms of total value locked in DFI. So they are a really interesting lending and borrowing protocol. So you can deposit die into the protocol. You can deposit other tokens into the product protocol and start receiving interest on those tokens. You can also take out loans. They have fixed loans, fixed rate loans, in addition to variable loans. And fixed rate loans are pretty unique in DFI.

They're also like fast movers. So they're rolling out a ton of cool things. They're rolling out a credit type system pretty soon. And they've just released Avanomics, which is just wild. So this is their liquidity and token incentive model. And one of the things they're adding with Avanomics is this safety feature. So a portion of funds and ETH is actually going to secure the contracts and provide sort of an insurance for holders in the event of catastrophe.

So check out Avanomics. Check out AVE. Start using it. Try it out at AVE.com. That's A-A-A-V-E-E-D-C-O-C-D-G. David. Let's get to announcements real quick. So we had Eric Forgey's on the podcast.

It episode came out. Yeah, it was so good. Guys, just go check out that episode. Fantastic. And then tomorrow, we actually have a first. I think this is not just a first for bankless, but this is like a first for crypto, maybe for podcasting in general.

What's happening tomorrow, David? Yeah, tomorrow we're getting Andre, creator of the Yearn and Yiffy Protocol on the Bankless podcast. And why this is so crazy and so unique is not only exactly why YerN and Yiffy are so unique in the sense that they launched in like the most fair and equitable way possible,

but that Andre, the creator of this project, who didn't pre-mine any of the Yiffy tokens, which have done the first like, you know, 10,000 X out of any token ever, He didn't pre-mine any for himself, and he's letting the tokens, the token owners, govern whether he goes on to a podcast or not. And so as he made this announcement, he tweeted out, like, I've gotten a lot of requests for people, for it to come on people's podcasts.

And I'm only going to do it if the token holders say so. And so when I heard, when I saw that tweet, I immediately rushed to the year and finance governance page and submitted a proposal for, for Andre to come on the bankless podcast, which passed in like flying colors, like, nine. 95% voted yes. And then Andre messages me and says, so I'm told I'm enslaved to you. So let me know when and where to show up for the interview. And so that time was tomorrow, is tomorrow in the morning. And so we're recording with Andre, creator of the yearn protocol tomorrow morning, which is- Well, I wonder, I wonder if he even wants to. Like, it's like he doesn't have a choice. This is the first. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. By a coin vote, he has to show up for the interview tomorrow, right? It's pretty, it's pretty, it's pretty funny how that works. And I do think this is the first like interview podcast episode by coin vote. So we'll see how that goes. We've got a lot of interesting questions for him.

Also releasing tactics on bank lists. So there's a D-Y-D-X tactic that you'll find that was released this morning. Check that out. It's about an ETH perpetuity. That's going to be pretty fun, I think, in this upcoming bull market that we've been talking about so much. Last thing I'll say is, Do you know what August 27th is, David? I don't know. Tell me, Ryan. All right. So August 27th is when bankless first started. So bankless turns one year old as a as kind of a newsletter and kind of the genesis. And, you know, I'm hopeful we can share some stats that days.

But one of the things, you know, when I started the newsletter with bankless is I wanted to, by the first birthday, get to 10,000 subscribers, 10,000 people on the bankless journey as part of the extended bankless nation. So we're getting close, but maybe we'll reveal some stats on that pretty soon. So tell your friends about bankless. I'll see if you can hit those numbers and celebrate bankless's birthday. David, got to ask you the question. I ask every single episode. You've been right on for the past seven episodes. It's been scary, accurate, actually.

So what is the state of the nation today, David Hoffman? The state of the nation is pumped. We are pumped. in so many different ways. Ether Price has pumped. It has just blown past expectations. People are pumped for that. The Ethereum phase zero, right before that we're recording this,

the TestNet just went live. So people are absolutely pumped for that. I'm pumped about these shirts, which we're about to talk about after this. There's just a lot of pumping going on. People are stoked, prices are pumping. Pumping's all around us. It's a fantastic time.

Wait, wait, wait, wait. Pumping is a bad thing, though, sometimes. So are you saying like pump as in a good thing in this context? Yeah, pumped as in like prices are going up and we're all stoked about it. Yeah, so sometimes pumping could be viewed badly, but not this time. Yeah, so it feels like to me it's like we've been talking about this for a long time. Honestly, we've been talking about this not just for months. We've been talking about this for years.

That at some point, the market would actually catch up with what's going on in Ethereum and what's going on with defy. and a huge portion of this just feels like the market catching up. Like it's 2016. We haven't even seen 2017 yet. Still the people coming into bank lists, the people watching this today are mostly people that already know about crypto. We've got a whole new fresh crop of immigrants into the bankless nation to start onboarding.

They haven't even shown up yet. So I do feel like this is just a lot of catch up to all of the things we've been talking about over the past months and years. Yeah, totally. So I've been getting text messages from. from friends, like, who are getting back into DeFi, back into Ethereum. But they were there with me back in, like, 2017, 2018. These are the friends that I made back in that cycle, who, like, kind of went on and did their

own thing. Yeah. But it's easy for them to come back, right? And they know who to talk to. Like, we're still waiting for that wave of, like, people that have never touched anything before. That hasn't happened yet. But, like, as you were saying, there is no ever any fair value for Ether for Bitcoin.

No one knows what these things should be. And over time, I think it's, it's fair to claim that like the price of these things on the secondary market oscillate around what they should be. Like 2017, Bitcoin and Ether were priced way too much. 2018 and 2019, they were priced way too low. And now it seems like we're kind of coming back to that mean, to that average. Yeah. And like the theory is like all previous bull markets, like you pass that average where you think it's about fair value, but then you just keep on going. And that's what like a bull market mania is.

Guys, we said this before. These are fractals. people are like oh there'll be nothing like 2017 again like that was a one time no it's not a one time I mean it happened to multiple cycles with Bitcoin it'll happen again things will get over extended to but right now we're not there we're just approaching probably more lines along the lines of what the value should be it's just a bit of catch up over the last two years of everything that's happening David first topic man I know you are burning to talk about this the shirts what's going on What are these things? What are we wearing today?

These shirts have been an idea of mine that I've always wanted to pull off in a while. So I made this graphic forever ago, not this exact one. I kind of tweaked the size of the Ethereum logo, but it's debuted. This graphic debuted in my article, Ether, the Money Game landscape, where I talked about like all these applications on Ethereum are little games, like Uniswap is a game, compound is a game. And largely it's a game about stacking ether, right? Like at the end of the day, Ethereum is a landscape for humans to compete.

with other humans as well as computers to compete with other computers, as well as humans and computers to compete amongst themselves for ether, right? And so Ethereum is like this money game landscape where Ethereum, ether, the asset are the points. And so this is that. We have like a little outrun style like graphic with like it's a landscape, right? It's like a grid and there are mountain ranges, peaks and valleys. And then there's the ether logo in the background. So it's all about the Ethereum as a physical landscape of competition for ether the points. And that's what is resembled in this fantastic shirt. Dude, I just want to, I want to take a minute just to admire the shirt, the craftsmanship

of the shirt. Like, these things are like, like, the fit is awesome. So I got mine on Thursday, David, and I opened up the package, right? And, you know, you'd hyped it up. You said, look, this is a good shirt, but like you didn't tell me too much. I opened it, I put it on. It just felt like, it felt perfect. Like, the fit is exceptional.

Like, what material is this? I have no idea. I have no idea. It's just like, it's not, obviously it's not cotton. right? Like this is a super high quality shirt. Where did you first see these types of shirts? Yeah. So the first time I saw these types of shirts where I got this idea came out of the East Denver conference where they have very similarly graphiced up shirts, right? And so I found out who the manufacturer was. I reached out to them, got the details. Then I, they handed over them

the graphic and then that was, you know, it all fell out of that. And so we got 50 of these shirts produced. So there's only 50 of them. And two of them are already taken because me and Ryan got ours. We pre-mined. We pre-mine two shirts. So now there's only 48 left. And this is where we get into the concept of bankless seasons, bankless apparel seasons. Ooh, okay.

Yeah. And this is season zero. This shirt is season zero. And so bankless apparel seasons is a like a regular occurring release of some really cool piece of clothing, right? This shirt being the first one. And so this is going to be a reoccurring. campaign because what frustrates me is that in the crypto world, there's,

there's not really cool swag. Like we don't, we have these fantastic futuristic, sci-fi, crypto-economic, like protocols. And we don't have any good way to like wear them. Like people want to have like wear a totem. They want to show their colors. They want to express themselves and their interests. And like I just went on like a five-minute tangent about like the metaphor behind this shirt. And I think that the banquet's apparel seasons is like a vehicle.

for expressing these really complex things like in a shirt that you can wear and people can ask you about and say hey what's that shirt and like oh let me tell you about it you shouldn't have asked that question because now like 20 minutes of things to talk about and so oh they're gonna they're definitely gonna ask you're definitely gonna ask like yeah yeah you can't go outside without being asked about this shirt specifically it's a statement it's a statement it's super unique like the design is awesome um it's definitely like but and you can basically wear your colors is what you're talking about where your culture, everything we talk about in the Ethereum Bankless, you're going to take that outside of your house if we ever get outside of our houses again.

Okay, so the way that this is going to work is this is a sale. And so we're posting this video up on YouTube later today. We also have a release going out on the Bankless newsletter. And all those things are going to go out at once. And then one hour after that, after all these things get released at once, We are supplying all remaining 48 BAP tokens, BAP, bankless apparel, so BAP zero for season zero. We are going to supply all remaining 48 BAP tokens to the Uniswap exchange. The links will be in the show notes for this video, also for the newsletter.

And then you can go to Uniswap and purchase a token. All right. So we should get into this a little bit. I'm going to share my screen as you're talking, but keep talking. Yeah, so you purchase a token off Uniswap, and then you burn it. You can burn it by sending it to the Genesis address. of Ethereum, that's 0x000-000-000 or you can also, some wallets don't let you do that, so you can just change the last zero for a one and that counts. But once you burn a token, that is you redeeming a

token for a shirt, right? These are redeemable tokens. This is how you get one of the shirts. And again, there's only 48 left because Ryan and I already have to. And so you purchase a token, burn it, you email that transaction hash to apparel at banklesshq.com. And then we will coordinate with you about how to deliver your shirt, wherever you are in the world. And so this is how we're distributing the BAP tokens. So again, they're on Uniswap, and this is like the redeemable token scarcity mindset. We're really into this idea of scarce apparel. And we're using the tools of Ethereum to enable like this scarce apparel project.

So back to scarce apparel really quick. We ran a couple bankless posts on this. Jacob from Zora wrote a post about redemption tokens. redeemable tokens, we'll include in the show notes to give you some context. And there have been these sort of scarce product releases a few times within Ethereum that have caught some headlines. Most notably, our friend, RAC, right? So he did a friend of the nation.

He's actually in the nation. So he is a bankless member now. Here he is repping the bankless swag, wrapping the bankless shirt. and he released a token called tape, right? And this was a token specific to a new album that he dropped. And it did really well. I think it was really successful. But basically he dropped the token, issued it on uniswap,

and you could read this post for kind of what happened next in the details. But it's really similar to that idea, right? So you release a scarce token that represents some sort of real-world item, and then people can purchase it on Uniswap. They can purchase it with ETH. And then once they have the token, they have the ability to redeem that for the item itself. Yeah, I really think that these scarcity tools on Ethereum, like ERC20, and then also the infrastructure like Uniswap, balancer, et cetera,

that go also into the ecosystem are really going to enable artists to do cooler things, right? And so RAC was able to kind of produce value for, produce value for his fan base, his clientele, using Ethereum and using non-fundurable tokens. And I think that like, and the future of bankless apparel seasons includes, like, the ability for future artists to contribute designs and they will be rewarded with percentage of the tokens. So like, I'm not a designer. I have basic Photoshop skills. This, this is actually a relatively easy graphic to make. Some designer who knows Photoshop better than me or however you make these graphics

can produce even cooler, even better designs. And then we are going to let the bankless nation decide on which design will be in the next season. And then the winning artist who has their designs chosen will receive a percentage of the token. So it's a way for artists to like monetize to receive value from their value that they produce. And they don't have to like in the case of RIC, they don't have to get ripped off by a record label or on case of bankless seasons, like all of this stuff has managed for you. I think it's a really interesting way to return value back to artists with scarcity tools on Ethereum. Yeah, absolutely. And spread the culture, right? That's what this is all about. I mean, we've, we talked so much

about bankless and crypto being a cultural movement. A lot of people have seen it as a technology in the past. I mean, it's a social technology. This is a cultural movement. This is about, like, representing what you're doing and the journey that you're on. And if nothing else comes out of this whole experiment that we're doing, David, we've got this picture, which is just let me say, it's amazing, sir. Is that you in front of the Seattle skyline there? Yeah, that's a Seattle skyline. That's a couple blocks away from my house. I was thinking about perhaps a different word for the state of the nation was proud because we're proud of all how far we've come. And I think that picture represents that. So when you wear your bankless season apparel, when you wear your BAP's euro, you should be

crowd because we're all here together. We've built something incredible and we're taking it to the market. All right. We're here to stack BAPs. This is kind of what you're saying, right, David. We're here to stack BAPs. All right. So this is the post. I'm actually scrolling through the post that's going to be sent out. This is the, you know, you'll receive this post by the time we publish the video. And this includes some more details about the BAP zero sale. So again, all of these things are redeemable tokens. So they represent these shirts. And here's some details about the supply. Maybe David, you should say just something about how we're doing the liquidity because so we're putting 48 of these things in, right? But with with those kinds of low numbers, Uniswap has a pretty steep curve where like it, by the way, these shirts start out like expensive, right?

This is this is scarce apparel. This is not regular bankless merch. They cost money to produce in the first place. Yes, they cost money to produce. this is not regular bankless merch. We'll have a separate merch store for non-scarce apparel with bankless stuff. I know a bunch of people have asked about our bankless T's that we typically wear in these. We'll have a separate store for that.

But what happens when you deposit things into uniswap in small quantities is the curve gets pretty steep. So it gets more and more expensive as more of these BAP zero tokens are taken out of the market. So what are we doing to kind of dampen that liquidity? Can you talk about the... Yeah, totally. Yeah, so the first thing that we're doing is we're supplying all tokens to the Uniswap market. So we're giving the entire supply to the to the market. So they're with some like some defy tokens or ICO tokens like they only give out 10% to the market and then they have the remaining 90% like non-circulating. No, they're 100% circulating, 100% in the market,

which is one way to like soften that curve, that incline of price go up when somebody buys a token. But then we're also committing to selling all of, of our available BAPs at a certain level, right? So when 50% of the BAPs are purchased, roughly 50% 23 out of the 48 leaving 25, when 23 are sold, they will be roughly selling for 5Eth a BAP. And what we're doing at that point

is we are going to withdraw liquidity from Uniswap in order to sell BAP tokens back into Uniswap to keep that price suppressed until we have no more. Like so David and Ryan are going to do our best to like keep that price at five ETH per BAP or lower until we have no more in our hands. Anyway, we have no more to sell. And then at that point,

bankless won't be making any more money. And all the tokens will be in the ecosystem. And we will have exited and all tokens will be available for either redemption or selling back into Uniswap. So we're getting out of BAPs early as early as possible at what we think is a fair rate so that the remaining BAPs on the market can price themselves. Yep. and we're not trading these things.

And the tokens, so the tokens that we have, the two shirts that we have, we actually, we went through the process, right? So we took those two tokens. Here's the address. You know, like you can see all this stuff, obviously, on chain. Here's the BAP token that I have in a bankless test address here that I received. And this is me sending it to that ETH address. to burn it. So it's burnt. It's gone with fire. It's gone. 48 left. 48, just 48 left. So,

and yours is gone to you. So it's just 48. And, you know, we're just supplying the liquidity. We're not going to be trading these things. We have redeemed them. Now, what's super interesting is, like, people don't have to redeem these things, right? Yeah. So they can buy them on uniswap. And like at that point, it's kind of theirs to do with what they will. They have an option to redeem it. in which case we talked about how they do that, but they don't necessarily have to redeem it, which is interesting. I have no idea how that's going to play out.

Neither do I. That's why markets are fun, right? Yeah, this is a fun experiment. It's why we're calling it season zero, not season one. Yeah, exactly. So, you know, another thing, though, is when Jacob wrote that Redeemable tokens post, he talked about the utility of these tokens potentially, in virtual worlds, right? So, for instance, I don't know how much time have you spent in like

crypto-voxels or central Android? Yeah, very little. So I haven't spent a ton of time either, but like, like we're both gamers, right? So like we know the potential of those types of virtual worlds. And what I think is really interesting is with NFTs, you have the ability essentially to represent a digitally scarce good. Of course, you can redeem it for a physically scarce good, the Eastscape itself, but you can also like rep the shirt in crypto voxels or in Decentraland. And I feel very much like these virtual worlds are just a shadow of what they will become. It's very possible in the future that like the most value that comes from these sorts of scarce tokens, not these, not these, but like maybe these, but other sorts of scarce tokens will actually come in virtual worlds, in-game

experiences where you're doing it for the same reason. You're doing it in the physical world, right? It's it's kind of wrapping your colors. It's, you know, you've mentioned the word, you're proud, right? It's something that you've earned and that you've purchased and that you want to showcase to the world. It's kind of a human, it's in human nature to, like, put on these sorts of displays and these sorts of social signals. So I think it could be really interesting in virtual worlds as well as that expands. Yeah, totally. The, the, The virtual world side of Ethereum is very much kind of like the L2 world where there's a lot of them and there needs to be some sort of like settling or some sort of convergence upon like which virtual world is going to be the thing that everyone on boards into. Maybe it's not even the ones that we currently have available to us.

I wouldn't even say that the virtual worlds on Ethereum are even closely to the point that like L2s are. But that doesn't actually for what this means, it doesn't actually matter because if you redeem a BAP token, the, the vision of this system is to create a virtual version of these shirts in the virtual world that emerges right and so we're going to have to do this after the fact but that's kind of where our heads are at like if you're redeeming token you get the actual shirt in real life and then you get the virtual shirt for whatever virtual world comes to Ethereum and so if that world does ever indeed come we will be issuing virtual versions of these shirts in the virtual world that comes absolutely so you sort of get the best of both now maybe the last thing to say is when we think about

additional seasons, David. And again, this is just season one. So we're seeing how it goes and we'll use information to iterate on whatever season two is. But we're also thinking about tiers of scarcity for some of these items, right? So this first, the Eatscape shirt is a legendary shirt, right? Because there's only 50 of them. It's only 50. So what are the other classes? Yeah. So those who are gamers will find themselves very, very familiar with this system. So it's just like finding loot on the ground or loot in like a chess box or some some random loop box or whatever there's legendary epic rare and commons right and so legendary has got 50 items epic's got 150 items rare has 250 items rare has 250 items and then common has 500 items and so as we go through these different seasons

each season will have like a different rarity right like one will be a common item and it'll be like a hoodie that's mostly black or something relatively simple and then you know in the future there will be future rare items as well that look as dope as this one, right? And so there's different tiers of scarcity because there's different like kind qualities of goods that you can produce with different like values in in how the graphic looks. And I think that's pretty cool. Absolutely. Yeah. So we will see how this experiment goes. David and I are super excited about it. You know, maybe only a couple cell on uniswap in which case, look, dude, I'm still excited about this. You know, we'll see what happens.

I know when we originally talked about, you know, the curve, having one ETH, like, equal, one shirt, that was at a time when ETH was a little less expensive than it is today. That was a $200. Right, right, right, right. So, guys, one thing, the last thing I'll say about this is this is kind of one of those things that's not for everybody, you know, in the bankless nation. This is sort of, you know, scarce merch. It's expensive, right? These shirts are super high quality. so it gets you out of kind of the fast fashion motif of buying cheap shirts from like a gap or like

an H&M or whatever. So there's that, but they're still expensive, right? So there's going to be a certain group of people who are really excited about that and drawn into that. And there's others for which we'll launch like a merch store, a bankless merch store, and you'll have a way to buy other bankless swag and represent the nation that way. But we hope you enjoy this fun experiment, guys. Just like have fun with it.

that's what I think my favorite thing about crypto is is there's something new every single day like to do it feels like one giant video game anyway right like or you're like Mario and you're like here and you're leveling up and you're collecting the coins and my parents have no idea what I do like how I spend my time but but you guys do because because you're in this space to David anything else you want to say about the BAP and about the ethers, the eathscape shirt. Yeah, yeah. So you talked a little bit about fast fashion. I don't really want to go into that here, but there is two posts that's going out. There is the introductory bankless seasons post, which talks about fast fashion what it is and how scarce apparel

can fix that. And so I kind of walk through the narrative there. And at the end of it, it forwards you off to season zero launch, which is the second post, which is also going out. So there's two separate things to read. One's kind of like the explainer of the whole the whole Bankless Apparel Seasons Campaign and then the other one is specifically Season Zero and all the details to go in with that. So that's in your inboxes and in the show notes. So check them out. All right. Well, here we go. That was topic one. David, before we get into the other things we want to talk about and the nation, we should talk about our sponsors first. Do you want to start with Polymath or Polymarket? Poly Market, yeah. So Polymarket, another new sponsor of the state of the nation. Polymarket is a

prediction market platform on Ethereum. And for those that don't know, prediction markets are markets where you can go to to an express an opinion about what you think is the most likely outcome of the future. Right. And so sports games, presidential elections, future crypto prices, these are all like viable contenders for being able to express an opinion for what you think will happen. So like there's the market gives you odds based on like, Will Donald Trump or Joe Biden win the presidency? And if you think that the odds that the market is offering you from Polly Market are off from what it should be correct, you can go and express an opinion and take a bet.

And then in the future, as more and more people to do this, you can just go to Polly.commarket and look at the bets just for your own information. It's like, okay, the Polly Market is gauging that coronavirus will be over in four months. And so I can plan my life based on that because the people that are, betting have skin in the game. They are going to win or lose money based off whether they're incorrect or not. So they have a really elegant UXUI. It's pretty simple, pretty easy to understand. If anyone's gone to Predictit.org, it's very much like that. So if you are into betting on the future events of the world, check out, check them out at polly.markets. You can send an email with bankless in the subject line after you make a bet and they will cover all of your gas costs.

And so go to poly. Not market, you know, check out the available markets there. Tweet out if you make a trade. And then again, email them at hello at poly dot market with the subject line bank list to get your gas cost reimbursed. They've also got some pretty cool defy markets in there, if I remember correctly. But David, dude, you're on a roll. And why don't you just take the second sponsor to you?

Take this home? Let's do it. Maybe it's your shirt. You're on a roll. All right. So our last sponsor of the state of the nation is Ampleforth. Ampleforth is a base money. experiment on Ethereum. It's a pretty unique token where instead of the price going up and down,

the supply goes up and down. And so it's a variable supply asset on Ethereum. And they're marketing themselves as a base money currency, right? An M-0. And so I think the most interesting thing about Ampleforth is that you can denominate debts in this thing and be comfortable paying it back because the price never goes too far away from a dollar. It's not a stable coin, but it is a, is a trustless M-0 to denominate debts in. So you can check them out at Ampleforth.org. They have a cool dashboard where you can learn more about the economics. Do your own research.

I think it's a fantastic experiment, but be careful. All right, man. All right, topic two. We want to talk about ETH two, I think. So, all right, so we're in the bold market now. Heath is, it charge past that, you know, 353. price so I got unlocked from jail. It charged past some, you know, pretty, um, pretty difficult. Previously very strong resistances. Exactly. Exactly. And it just charged through it. It hit almost

400. And it did have 400. It got up to 415 for a hot time for that. Wait, it did? Yeah, 415. Oh, I was supposed to tweet something out at 403. Oops. You missed that one. I missed that one. But, you know, it should sustain past 403 for a while before. Yeah, it didn't do that. Yeah. It didn't do that. Yeah. didn't do that. Okay. So, but we haven't even seen Eve too yet. But it's coming. Let's talk test nets, man. What's going on there? Yeah, the morning of this recording, the Medasha test net just went live. It sounds like it had a small little hiccup out the door where not very many validators found the test net, but it turns out that solved itself over time. Wait, so it's Medasha. It's not Medalla. It's spelled Medalla. It's pronounced Medasha. Wow. What language is that? I think it's Spanish.

Okay. And I think there was some game of telephone where we lost the original spelling or original pronunciation. I don't know, but Mariano Conti pronounced it, Madasha. And so I trust. Oh, he's the pro. Yeah, I trust. He knows.

He knows. And so that is live right now. And so what this means is, is that if no hiccups happen, if no bugs happen between now and three months from now and what is it, it's August 4th. So August, September, October, November. Did I do that right? November. Yep.

So in November, if after three months of this test net running, if it's still running without any bugs, then phase zero goes live. And so you can also check out on our sponsor, polydot market, that people are giving odds, two to one odds that no bugs happen currently. Wait, so they're betting two to one odds that ETH will ship this year. ETH phase zero will ship in November. Yeah. In 2020, yeah, in 2020. Right. Interesting.

Right. And so people are starting to price in. it's excessive phase zero, right? And we have the final test net up and running. And again, if everything goes according to plan, which the market is giving two to one odds that it will, phase zero launches this year by the end of this year. That's weird. I was told ETH II would never ship. Yeah, I mean, I sold that too. I sold that every single day for the last five years. All right. Well, you know, maybe some some people are like, let's believe it. I'll believe it when I see it. So what about folks who've been kind of sleeping on this for a little bit? They're just now kind

waking up to D5 Ethereum and probably Price got their attention. Look, everyone's lives are busy, right? So before I was doing crypto full time, right? Like, I mean, I had other stuff going on. I wasn't constantly monitoring the status of test nets, crypto test nets, right? We should just go a quick recap of the various phases that we're talking about in ETH II and explain what it is really quick. So I'm going to show a roadmap, David. Maybe you could kind of start by explaining what this initial phase is. Yeah. Absolutely. All right.

So what we're really talking about is not the full EF2 in its final form. What we're talking about is phase zero. First I'll show this one. This is a more simple roadmap, I think. And we'll get to the other. Okay. So yeah, we are currently at Ethereum 1.x. That's the Ethereum 1.x.

X stands for the fact that we constantly update it. We add new things because both Ethereum 2.0 is progressing, but also Ethereum 1 is also progressing separately. They both have progress. However, for ETH II, the first is phase zero, the beacon chain. That's like the heartbeat of the whole entire system. I kind of like to imagine this thing as like an organism that is growing and it grows from the center out. And the heartbeat is at the very center, right?

Once the heartbeat is stabilized and predictable and able to be depended on, then the heartbeat turns into more complex things like, you know, extremities, arms, legs, whatever, more organs. But first off, phase zero is the heartbeat. That's where the beacon chain gets the entropy, which is really important. important in the rest of the phases because you need entropy to make things ungainable. And then this is also where the deposit contract lives, right? So at some point when if this test net succeeds without bugs for three months, this deposit contract opens up.

So people on the ETH1 chain send their either to this deposit contract, and it gets redeemed on phase zero beacon chain, which makes it ETH to ETH, right? Then that's up and running for a while. Then we introduce shard chains. shard chains. And this is where we start to get scale, right? And so not just do we have the main beacon chain, but we also have the shard chains that are, there's going to be 64 of them, and they all connect back to the beacon chain, and then they also crosslink. And so that's where we go from just having one Ethereum blockchain to having 64 of them. So like increasing throughput by like

a theoretical 64x. And I think it's actually even more than that. But there's 64 versions shards of Ethereum running. And then the beacon chain coalesces them into one. And the, uh, That's great because that's kind of the issue of gas today. That's where we solve the gas problems on the L1. But we don't yet have contract execution. So we can't actually do defy things on phase one yet because there needs to be a virtual machine. And that's where phase two comes in.

Phase two brings in the Ewasim virtual machine. We currently have the EVM, the Ethereum virtual machine running 1.x. And the EVM runs on solidity, which is great, but it's also limiting. and that's where EWASM comes in. So we have a secondary virtual machine which runs on contracting language that is more common. There's more people, more developers out there, like your Google devs, your Amazon Debs.

EWASM is probably going to be the virtual machine that brings them in. It makes it very easy to build on Ethereum, which is great because Ethereum needs development and Ethereum needs developers. And we all of a sudden have way more developers available to Ethereum. And so in that phase, that's like the final phase.

there's more innovation that goes on, but phase two is basically all of Ethereum 2.0. And once that's here, we're done. Yeah, absolutely. Get over a bit. You know, so the Delphi digital, the Delphi folks, they're kind of an analyst group, and they talk primarily to sort of Wall Street institution types. They put out a fantastic report on Ethereum's birthday last week that will include in the show notes. You should absolutely check out. But there's this image.

in the report that shows exactly what you're saying with those phases, David, and then also kind of timelines too, right? So what we've been talking about, the TestNets, the Medasha test net that we were just talking about, that's kind of a Q4 ETA, and that's that phase zero, right? And then we're looking at a shard chain in, you know, the phase one, which is probably 2021-ish. And then this is really exciting. So this wasn't in Preston's slide that you just showed, but this is a phase 1.5. That's kind of in between phase 1 and phase 2. And the reason this is exciting is because what it provides is essentially a migration of the original ETH1.0 chain that David was just talking about into Eith 2.0. So it moves ETH1.0 into a shard on Ethereum 2.0.

And what happens there is super important from the perspective of ether, the asset. Because at that point in time, we can get rid of proof of work. So proof of work, Ethereum, ether issuance is about 4% per year right now. And that's going to continue. That's even going to continue into phase one where we institute and start doing proof of proof of stake. There will be some inflation there probably around the 1% range. So ether issuance will increase briefly from 4% to about 5%, you know, potentially somewhere around that timeline.

But when we get to phase 1.5, the entire Ethereum ecosystem, the entire Ethereum nation becomes secured just by proof of stake. And issuance drops like off a cliff. So it drops to about 1%. It's variable based on the amount of people staking and also based on what we've talked about a lot, which is EIP 1559, which could actually burn a portion of the ether based on usage. But so all of this leads to is at the end of this, when you get to one, phase 1.5, which could be 22 or so, you've got a very low issuance Ethereum that offers

higher security than the original eth main chain. And I think that will enshrine ether, the asset into a store of value, right? The monetary policy will become much more widely known. There's no doubt, right? This has always been the plan and it's finally being executed. You know, in fact, I think there's somewhere in this report where they talk about that. Let me find that in just a minute, but what were you going to say, David? Yeah, so ETH 1.5, the phase 1.5 is where the Ethereum L1 chain,

The current chain starts to be secured by Ethereum 2.0. So it's where these chains start to get melded. And so that's when we are able to strip away miners. And maybe there's some small miners left on the chain. But the point is, is that very quickly does the ETH one chain become verified by the ETH2 chain, by the proof of stake consensus on ETH two, which means we don't know, we no longer need minors, which means we no longer need that extra issuance to pay the miners,

because security under proof of stake is much more inexpensive. And so both chains will simultaneously be verified and validated by the ETH2 stakers. Yeah, absolutely. And the other thing we get in phase 1.5, of course, is a migration of all of DFI, all of the apps. And then we also get some pretty large scalability benefits, not the full scalability of ETH2, but in layer two, we can actually start storing some additional data. So if folks listening are familiar with all of the layer two tech that's being built out for Ethereum today, specifically there's been a slew of new layer two options as Reddit kind of put out a request and said,

hey, Heath Community, can you help us out? We're trying to scale on Ethereum. We want to do tokens for all of our subredits, but we need it to be super fast. How could you do that? And the Ethereum community came back with a ton, like 30 different answers to that. All of them have high potential. them are good answers. Yes. And those become ultra-powerful when we get to phase 1.5 because we can start storing some of that data in the secure ETH2 chain itself. So super exciting. You know what's

exciting to me when I saw this report. I've honestly never seen a report like this, like a report from an analyst who's talking to institutions. Get it right. They've never gotten it right. Like they've never understood what Ethereum is. This is the first report I've read. which is like, cool, you got it right. And you're actually explaining this in a way that institutions can understand, right? So they talked here about ETH2. Proof of stake, what does it bring? Proof of the stake is more economically feasible, enhanced monetary policy.

Minimum necessary issuance is something we talk about, often to describe Ethereum's monetary policy. It turns ether into a staking asset. Well, that's triple point asset. That's what we've been talking about here. It burns. a long time. It burns transaction fees. I mean, the analyst probably reads bankless, I'm going to say, right? And anyway, these sorts of things that we've been talking about in the bankless nation are starting to get translated into language that quite honestly, like, I don't, like, I'm never

going to write a 30-page analyst paper like this, right? It's just, it's boring to me. But you helped. Sure, like, right? So some of the ideas that we've talked about in the bankless community, form the bottom layer of these sorts of analyst papers. And these analyst papers are now getting translated into a language that institutions can start understanding. And now they can understand ether as an asset. And now they can understand what the hell's going on with theorem two better. So I'm also excited because of that. It took three years of bear market memes to generate those those memes. And now they're finally being leveraged, right? Like partly when I see the ether

price run to $400. I'm like, oh, great. Like the world's finally pricing in the memes we've generated over the last two years. Kind of, right? And, you know, people, I think people, like you and I, when we talk about memes, we take a very high view of what a meme actually is. It's not just a, you know, a gift somebody puts out on Twitter that sort of goes viral. Yeah, it's a, it's a, exactly. It's a shared story that social groups start to believe and it becomes the forming narrative

for what the, you know, what, in this case, what the particular asset class is. So these memes really are the base layer. And this is how those memes get translated into regular language. Yeah, like Bitcoin's meme is a non-sovereign, uncapped store value asset. And it becomes that if everyone believes that that's what it is. And it's going to do a great job at doing that. If everyone believes it will do a great job of doing that, and that's how it becomes reality.

And so with like burning ether in the EIP-1559 or as a capital, asset or as a store of value, it will become that because we all think that it will become that. Right. Absolutely. And it gets tested through the fires. Like good memes get tested, right? So, you know, it's not enough for a meme to be out there and for a bunch of people to believe it. It has to pass through the fires, right? So an example of Bitcoin passing through the fires. Well, it held up relative to other crypto assets in the bear market as sort of a reserve assets. It's sort of like we passed through the fire. There was a time. where people thought that Bitcoin was going to be peer-to-peer cash.

Like a money system, a payment-type layer system, and that was the meme, right? I can send you Bitcoin. No one can stop me, David, peer-to-peer basis. Yeah, it decentralized PayPal. That was a meme back in 2013, right? Pay for my coffee and Starbucks. It didn't pass through the fire. And so the meme actually died. So these memes actually get verified.

They're based on fundamentals, right? They're based on fundamentals because they have to pass through those fires. In the same way that like speculation on something is speculation on its fundamentals. You don't get speculation for speculation's sake. Speculation is built on something and memes are built on something in the same way. Absolutely. All right, David. Last topic.

This is kind of a fun one. So we've switched into full bull mode, right? So I wrote a post about this on my day. The entire ecosystem has, yeah. The entire ecosystem, the switch has been flipped. We're in bull mode now, bull market now for crypto. Eric Voorhees called it even in our podcast Monday. Joey Kruke called it the week before.

Chris Berninski hinted that. He was the first one in my mind. Absolutely. So like it's not just us saying this. We're kind of reaching consensus and prices kind of showing you breaking through these walls and showing you bull market. So bull market meme is on. Bull market meme is on.

So how do we get in? to a bull market mentality and like what is that because there's a bear market mentality that you need to have right and understand it just for but there's also like a bull market mentality and I've seen people lose more in the bull market a lot more in a bull market than in a bear market like bull markets can be way more dangerous than bare markets can you talk about what the bull market mentality is and how we should be thinking about this yeah and markets are a reflection of the participants participating in them, right? And so when we say it's a bull market, what we're really saying is that everyone who's

participating in price discovery around ether, price discovery around Bitcoin, has a bull market mentality because it's the mentality that creates the bull market, not the other way around, right? So it's the mentality that comes first. And like one of the core characteristics that differentiates a bear market from a bull market is that like in a bull market, good news moves the price. In a bare market, good news doesn't move anything. Depressed.

Like, people are depressed. Literally, the word depression means that, like, good news doesn't mean anything to you. In a bull market, good news doesn't only mean something, but it probably means more than what it actually means, right? In bull markets, good news really moves the price. And that's because it's reflected in our mentality. And so everyone who's participating in price discovery, which means you are buying or selling or trading anything, your mentality is shifted.

You are no longer a bare market mentality. You are now a bull market mentality. And you need to account for this because who you are changes in a bull market. Your personality changes based on the mentality that you have. And so there's a couple things that's like it's really important to remember as we go through this bull market. Because like the biggest thing that is going to cost you is you got too greedy. Right. The biggest thing that is going to cost to you is your hubris, right?

You need to be modest. You need to be humble. And you need to accept that you're not going to win all the game. all the gains, but in order to, and if you were to chase all of the gains and trying to get the maximum amount of gains possible, that's how you lose everything, right? That's how you lose everything. And I'm speaking in general terms, but like there's a couple of lessons that I learned that I want to share. And starting from last cycle, right? And I feel like I'm coming full circle to like where I started in crypto, where I came in after the first major run up in 2017. So ether went

from like $50 to $400 back to $170. And then it floated up to $300. And then it floated up to $300. that's what brought me in. And that was like relatively late into the hype cycle, right? Like I CO, the ICO boom was already in full mania. And so, you know, and so I buy ether. I start investing in tokens. All that happens. And then my blockfolio number goes up and up and up.

And I think like I'm a fucking genius. David, when you bought those tokens, like, how much did you know at that point in time? I mean, so little. So little. So little. Like I couldn't have told you anything about the qualities of ether as an asset. that I know today. Zero things. But also the ecosystem didn't know them.

But like I... For sure. I had, I was, I was months old when it comes to the crypto world. So you're like, prices going up. This thing is hot. I don't fully know what it is. But like... I'm playing the game.

I'm playing the game. I'm in the game. I know there's something here. And I'm putting my chips on this. And I'm risking it, right? Like I'm headed west. These are my chips. I don't exactly know what I'm doing.

But I'll figure it out once I start investing. Yeah. It didn't take me a first. few months to figure it out. It took me like three years and counting. Like I'm still figuring it out. I'm still figuring it out. So then what happened? Yeah. So I'm watching my blockfolio go up and up and up and like for a kid that was previously a broke student trying to get into physical therapy school. Like I made more money than I ever thought that I would at that age. Right. And like in hindsight it wasn't it wasn't all that much. But at the time, like each person has their own number as what means to them. And my

mistake was that I started spending more without paying off my credit card. Right. That was my big mistake. You saw those numbers going up in Blockfolio and you're like, net worth going up. That means I am richer so I can spend more each month. Exactly. Which is a true statement if you sell. You don't get to spend more without selling your profits. If you are making profits and then you are going to Amazon and buying a boat,

like you need to sell because that's where you're getting the money to fund your endeavors. Right. And so you don't get to have both. You don't get to have number go up and also I buy more things. Like you need to choose one. Okay. Are you saying like basically you can't treat those blockfolio numbers as real numbers? Like they're not real.

They're not real. It's just not like ignore your feelings. Ignore the euphoria. You're going to be checking price like 20 times a day maybe. But you have to ignore that. You're not any wealthier until you sell. Is that what you're selling? Yeah.

You don't get to spend more until that dollar shows that dollar sign shows up in your bank account. Like that until that moment you didn't have any more money than you did previously. It doesn't matter what your portfolio says. Okay, so here's another mistake. I feel like people make in the bull market. That's a huge one. I'm so glad you said that. So another mistake is sometimes they sell too early.

Yeah, to be honest. Yeah. Right. So people are like, oh, my God, ETH just went from 200 to 400. I'm out. Deep flies in a bubble. This is like, I'm calling the top.

And they call the top. And then a week or two later, they're right because ETH drops down to, you know, 300. They're like, see, I told you. And it's, It's on the upside in the bull market that so many people miss out on all of the gains, all of the opportunity costs that could have been theirs because they also sold too early. So how do you prevent that?

So you're saying step one is don't live like it's real money. Just keep your standard of living the same as if it doesn't even exist until you sell. But also like how do you prevent not selling before like this whole thing has been realized, the full cycle plays out. Right. And this is this is really, really hard, right? Because this partly involves timing the market. There are signals if you are really looking, paying attention to them and you're doing your research as to how like market cycles work. There are signals that you can tap into. But again, it's all subjectivity at the end of the day. And what also makes this really hard is that every time a token pumps, it looks exactly like the last time it just pumped,

right? And so ether goes from 50 to 300. And it goes from a hundred. And it goes from a to 450. Then it goes from like 300 up to 700. Then it goes from like 500 where it dropped up to like 900. Then it goes from 900 to 1400. Turns out 1400 was the last time that it pumped. But it could have been any of you. If you were there, it didn't feel like that. Didn't feel like it. Like when I saw a $1,400 ether, I was thinking $2,000 ether like the next week, right? That's how psychology works. That's how it works. That's how it works. And so like you don't know the all pumps look exactly the same and you don't know which one's the last one because this is a game. at the end of the day, a mania, a bull market, a bubble is a game of musical chairs, right?

And so at some point, the music stops and it looks like all the other times at a pump, but you just don't know, right? And so this is fun because you get to play musical chairs. Like you get to, and it's a game of chicken. It's like a game of how long can you go before you sell, and if you sell too late, you lose. And so at some point in time, you have to, you don't really want to play the market. Like, don't, like, ether goes from like 200 to 400 and then you short it and it goes from 400 down to 320 and then you're like, I'm a genius.

And then it runs up to $600 and you're out. And then you're bitter and then you never get back in. You lost all your money while there's this bear market or bull market. Like, you don't want to be that guy. However, you also don't want to be the guy that, you know, like sells too late, right? And so you have to answer to yourself. Like, does the money that I've just made in this bull market meaningfully impact my life? if I sell right now, how much better is my life?

Do I pay off my credit card? Pay off my mortgage, pay off my car, whatever. Like, I leave the weight of debt. If you have the option to, like, remove all debt from your life at the middle of the cycle, that might be a good time for you to get. And I'm sorry if that cuts off, you know, 2x, 3x, 4x gains after that. But at the same time, you locked in a meaningful life change. And you're never going to forget it.

And you're always going to thank yourself that you did that. Yeah, that's it. Yeah, it's a great point. So I, you know, I think there are a couple strategies that, you know, people can use. So we've talked about dollar cost averaging into crypto, right? We just take, you got a paycheck. You take a slice of that paycheck. You're like, this is allocated to crypto price. You can also dollar cost average out. So you do the same thing, except in reverse. And you can do that in two ways. You could do that one on a time horizon. You say, okay, bull market mode every month. I'm going to sell a little bit, right? Percentage out. I'm going to take money off the table. You can

Also, some people have seen, even very sophisticated investors do the same thing. It's not a, you know, it's not a play just for, you know, retail and, you know, simpleton. Sophisticated investors do this where, you know, every time ETH doubles, I sell a portion. Every time Eth doubles, I sell 10%. Make that your rule. Another rule you can have for yourself going in. Okay, so going into this, you need to have your rules. You need to have your game plan established, like now.

Because as David was saying, in the moment, you're not going to, like, the euphoria is going to take over. And when you see a thousand, you're going to be like 10,000's on the table, right? And like you're going to know that in your heart. Right. And if you make rules while Ether is like going from $5,000 to $10,000, they're going to be different rules than if you had made them at the very Genesis when you were fucking sober. Yes. Yes.

Bull drunk, I guess, is maybe the term. Yeah. So that's what you have to do is establish those rules getting in. Another rule you can establish is once it hits this amount, right? I'm going to sell. I'm going to sell some portion. But I also want to frame this. Okay. So we started bankless, the entire principle of what this is in the bankless movement, in the bankless nation is at some point, if we're right, here's the thing. You don't have to sell. Okay. I want you to park that, right? So everything that David just said about, look, if you got credit card debt, if you get student loans, make a meaningful amount, like, and things are going crazy, you know, don't lean in. Everything that David just said about, look, if you got credit card dead, if you get student loans, make a student loans, like, and things are going crazy. You know, don't lean in. Everything that David's, everything that David's, said is true, right? But the thesis is also true that, like, we think the bankless thesis, the bankless belief is over time, you want to start thinking about your denomination for what wealth is, right? Right now, everyone's denomination for wealth basically is U.S. dollar

denominated, you know, a million dollars, right? U.S. dollar denominated because we pay for things in U.S. dollars. But when you start to get into the bankless world, you're not going to be, you your bottom like denominator starts to change. And you're like, well, is it, what if US dollars actually isn't the reserve currency in this bankless country? But what if what if US dollars weakens as a reserve currency for the world? And then what you need to find is what are the reserve currencies in this parallel universe that we call crypto, right? And that's really been the thesis of the bankless program from day one is you want to find what the crypto monies are. And you want to build into what the crypto monies are.

In crypto monies in, you know, in crypto are very clearly ether and Bitcoin. At least it's clear to me. Some people don't believe the first. It makes sense to be. A lot of people believe the second. They don't believe the first. And look, it's possible some other contender could rise up the ranks and be crypto money. We're not, I don't think we're close to that yet.

So the way I think about these bull markets is not just in appreciation of U.S. dollars, right? That's just one denominator, but that's not the bankless nation denominator. the bankless nation denominators, ether and Bitcoin, right? Is that increasing? Because that might be long-term wealth over time. And when you start thinking about these things in cycles, like once we've done a couple cycles, like Eric Forhees, 2011, that's how he thinks.

All the cycles? Oh, I'm going to tell you, he thinks like he thinks in decades now. Right. And he's like, what do I care about US dollars? I'm only taking US dollars out that I need to spend immediately. Like, I'm not speaking for Eric here, but I'm pretty sure this is how he thinks. like the majority of my wealth.

Yeah, I'm going to keep in crypto-native reserve currency assets that are going to continue to appreciate. Yeah, over these cycles. So think about your denominators. Your denominators should be crypto-lining. Even if you're doing things with like defy tokens, these other things and doing narrative plays and that sort of thing, come back to what's your denominator? Is it U.S. dollars? There's also these reserve currencies.

That's how you start to make long-term bets in this space and last through these cycles. Yeah. Sorry, that's a helicopter. So, yeah, defy tokens are not going to trade against dollars. Like SNX, the Synthetics network token, Yiffy, like the Yiffy token, their main trading pair is Ether, right? And so they are going to appreciate or depreciate versus Ether, not versus U.S. dollar.

And all these things are going to appreciate versus U.S. dollar, but they trade against Ether. Like, Ether is the base currency. And so, you know, I don't have too much evidence. to support this, but like when, especially Yiffy, which 98% of all trading volume is between Yiffy and ether, or excuse me, it's Wi-Fi and Ether. When Ether goes up, Wifi will also go up. When we, when ether goes down, Wifi will also go down because it's denominated in ether. And more and more of these things, I think, are just going to choose, like, we saw this in

2017. Like, say what, like Bitcoin is, maybe this is a contentious, say what you will. But the 2017 ICO mania the 2017 bull market was because of Ethereum because of the ICO mania. And ether, the asset, went through the roof because everyone had to buy ether because the ICOs were denominated in ETH. Defy tokens are the same thing. You know, it's a safer link, which I think it's the majority of its volume from US dollar. Like defy tokens, the mania that we've seen already, mania, quote unquote, this coming out of depression is denominated in ether, right?

And so if you are trading your defy tokens, denominating in dollars might be a mistake. Like you might need to be denominating in the bankless monies, which are ether and Bitcoin. Yeah, I've seen a lot of the people who are saying things like the defy could moon without ether have been strangely silent over the past week and a half. Weird. So some of these things, look guys, some of these things, you know, you're just making bets, right? You're thinking through the fundamentals and you're making bets. and anyone could point to any time horizon or data point and say,

yo, David, what you said is a lie because here's wifie going up and ether's going down, right? So what you said is not true, right? And they're looking at a two-week time horizon or something. Zoom out, guys. That I think is the last maybe piece of the advice we have for the bull market mentality is you have to zoom out and look at the long run. And, you know, a couple weeks, a couple months, even, sometimes, depending on the cycle you're in, a couple years of data, doesn't tell you much.

You got to zoom out. This is a decades-long journey and process. Lifetime long. Lifetime long. And think about it in those terms of time horizons. And I think you'll do pretty well in this space. Everybody who has had that long-term outlook has done really well, has done really well, right? And it's just, it's about, David was said it earlier.

It's about staying in the game, right? marathon, not a sprint. The thing you don't want to do is do stupid stuff like, you know, go in debt, take margin, that sort of thing, and face the prospect of like getting totally destroyed if there's a sudden crash. Because that eliminates you from the table. Staying in the game. Stay in the game.

You know, stack the reserve currency assets. Stay in the game. Maybe stack some baps while you're at it, right? Back some baps. Backs and baps. All right, David. I think that's probably it for the show. That's it from us, yeah.

That's it for me, sir. All right. So action items, we will put a link in here to the Uniswap Exchange, and there'll also be a link to the post that explains what we're doing with these EtherScape shirts. You can pick one up and be wearing like David and I are today. This has been State of the Nation, Episode 8. Thank you so much for hanging with us.