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SotN#27: Is ETH Money? w/ Ryan Selkis (2020 Recap & 2021 Horizon)
Every year, Ryan Selkis does a round-up of the themes that powered the industry as well as some predictions of the year to come.
It covers the movers and shakers that steered the industry for the year. Among Ryan's list are people like Hayden Adams of Uniswap and Danny Ryan from the EF.
Yet, Ryan Selkis is still pessimistic on ETH as Money, and believes the tailwinds of the industry point elsewhere.
We bring on his points to the show, and go through them to discuss!
Ryan's Crypto Theses for 2021:
https://messari.io/crypto-theses-for-2021
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https://bankless.cc/monolith
🤖YEARN - YIELD-SEEKING MONEY ROBOT THAT FARMS DEFI FOR YOU
http://bankless.cc/yearn
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SotN#27: Is ETH Money? w/ Ryan Selkis (2020 Recap & 2021 Horizon)
------
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
-----
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
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 David Hoffman? Some basic yearly wrap questions such as like, you know, on January 1st, 2020, how do you think the crypto thought that 2020 was going to go? And then what are the big changes that it actually went? And then things like, who or what were the rising stars that captured the moment of 2020? And then how will 2020 be remembered from the perspective of the crypto industry? What's the legacy? What's the crypto legacy of 2020? And then we want to, before we get into debate, parameterize it. Like, what are we actually debating? Like, what are we? What are the significant points to walk away with from this debate? So, pretty straightforward.
0:41 David Hoffman? Alright, let's see. That tweet should have just gone out. So now me and Ryan are gonna do some tweeting.
0:49 David Hoffman? Nice.
0:53 David Hoffman? Ryan, the YouTube link, I'm gonna throw to you in Discord.
1:01 David Hoffman? Yeah, you want it in Discord? Okay.
1:09 David Hoffman? Oh, I shut Discord down.
1:21 David Hoffman? Okay, so we have a five-minute countdown window. I'm gonna put that up, which means we are committing. And then we're gonna have a round of sponsors, so like, two minutes of sponsors. We already have it recorded. So that means that we are seven minutes out from going live.
1:45 David Hoffman? Is that, is that, three is one hour from now? Perfect, that's great, that's great. Yeah, I don't envision us pushing up into that.
1:58 David Hoffman? Really?
2:00 David Hoffman? 198?
2:03 David Hoffman? Oh, we touched 19... We...
2:07 David Hoffman? Yeah. Well Bitcoin touched 19800 like a couple of weeks ago.
2:14 David Hoffman? Yeah, I was about to say, what was the real purpose of this comment?
4:05 David Hoffman? The.
6:42 David Hoffman? If you are looking for the front page of DeFi, look no further than zerion.io. Zerion is your home base for managing your DeFi portfolios. Zerion offers a central place for you to engage with all of the DeFi protocols and assets that you engage with on a daily basis, but all in one central spot. Here you can see I've loaded up a wallet and Zerion is giving me the portfolio performance of all the assets in this wallet over time, as well as a breakdown of all the assets that I own, as well as all of my transaction history that I've ever done in an easy-to-view fashion. Zerion also lets you invest right into DeFi's best yielding financial opportunities right from their homepage.
7:23 David Hoffman? Zerion also makes it super easy to access interest in DeFi using applications like Compound and Aave in the background. And you can also exchange your assets using the Zerion app, using an exchange aggregator in the background to make sure that you always get the best rates. You can even use the Zerion mobile wallet to add your MetaMask or Argent or another Ethereum address right into your mobile wallet, so you can see your portfolio and engage in DeFi on the go. Here I just loaded up my Argent wallet and now I'm going to load up my MetaMask as well. And Zerion will do the same thing. It will add all of my assets and wallets together, all in one space, and give me a portfolio summary of what's going on. Adding wallets is trivially easy. If you already have a MetaMask, you can get it right into the Zerion app and it can sync
8:08 David Hoffman? with your desktop app as well. And the best part is you can also buy Ether right into the app itself. Use the Invest tab to look at all the things that you have invested in, as well as other opportunities. And coming soon to the Zerion app is the ability to buy and sell your assets straight from your mobile device as well. So download the app. It works on iOS and Android. Go to zerion.io, plug in your wallets and get a historical report of your portfolio over time, as well as a comprehensive breakdown of all the assets that you own and how much yield they're generating for you. We're also brought to you by Monolith. Monolith is your cool new DeFi account, your DeFi savings account, your DeFi checking account.
8:50 David Hoffman? Except the cool thing about the Monolith DeFi account is that it gets software updates, right? You actually get to increase the usefulness of this over time. So here are some of the features. Monolith is a smart contract wallet with a lot of the features that you would expect if you've come to know DeFi and what it is. You can, you can add money to it. You can put that money to work in Compound and accessing yield. But you can, and you can also swap through Uniswap. What was cool with Monolith is that they will send you a very sexy Monolith Visa card that connects to your smart Monolith smart contract wallet on Ethereum. So it's a really awesome tool to live a bankless life with a savings account that gets software updates. So this is something that you're never going to find out in the real world, but you can
9:34 David Hoffman? still do real world things with, you know, real money and like buy your groceries. So that's just fantastic. Coming soon to Monolith, actually already here to Monolith, is now you can buy, die, and get it sent to your wallet directly, 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.xyz.
10:05 Ryan Sean Adams? Hello, Bankless Nation. Welcome to another episode of State of the Nation. This is episode number 27. I've got David Hoffman here. As usual, we have a very special guest. We brought in Ryan Selkis, who we will introduce in a little bit to talk a little bit about his ETH report and thesis and his thoughts on whether ETH is money or not might turn into a little bit of a debate. But before we do that, David, how are you doing today, man?
10:31 David Hoffman? Doing really good. December is my favorite month of the year for a whole bunch of reasons, and particularly because crypto prices seem to do interesting things in December, which is what we are seeing. And, you know, the holidays are right around the corner. You know, feeling good. Good time to be in crypto.
10:46 Ryan Sean Adams? Absolutely. We will see if Bitcoin hits all time high this month. It's been edging for the last few weeks. We'll see what happens there. But if this is your first state of the nation, what we do here is talk about what's happening, relate that to the big picture stuff we talk about on the newsletter and in the podcast. We hope to drop some insights and action items for you. This comes out on YouTube every Tuesday, 2pm Eastern. We try to start it around that time and also on the podcast if you want to consume in audio form as well. Speaking of the podcast, David, we dropped a killer episode with Dimitri Kofinas, who has one of my favorite podcasts out there, Hidden Forces. And he took kind of a crypto
11:29 Ryan Sean Adams? outsider, crypto skeptical type view. At least he's not fully convinced of crypto. We had a conversation about that. What were some of your takeaways? Why should folks tune into that?
11:38 David Hoffman? Yeah, it was one of the few podcasts that I edited and then when it was released, I actually tuned into it, tuned into my own podcast because it was so good. Yeah, Dimitri Kofinas, really salient, really sober, really secular thinker about things. He understands our industry. He understands what crypto is, yet he doesn't fall into like the religious thinking that a lot of us do, which I would totally say that I and you do as well, Ryan, kind of, we definitely have that religious sort of thinking. It's really important to get out of that bubble sometimes, and that's what we did with Dimitri. He's one of those people that believes that, you know, at the end of the day, like these internet-based entities like Bitcoin and Ethereum still have to interact in meat space, and therefore
12:22 David Hoffman? things like governments and community consensus and community and like human management overrides the power of these systems. And it's really going to be an interesting way for these blockchain crypto economic systems like Bitcoin and Ethereum to manifest in the world when they are going to be under the subject of the nation state. So that's the perspective that Dimitri brought, and it was a really, really valuable conversation for me.
12:47 Ryan Sean Adams? Speaking of the nation state, we're also having Rohan on who is maybe set crypto Twitter abuzz with some of his commentary. He's one of the primary authors of the recent Stable Act and we're going to maybe spar a little bit with him, but also hear his perspective on why the Stable Act exists and the reason it is good for both the United States and the world. I bet there'll be some back and forth about that, but he was recently on Dimitri's podcast too. So there's some crossover there and in ongoing conversation, I think that's super useful. What are you hoping to get out of that conversation? We're doing that Thursday, right?
13:27 David Hoffman? Yeah, we're recording on Thursday. We'll probably release it on Friday. I actually think the crypto space generally misunderstands Rohan and I actually have a lot of respect for the guy. I do find like a lot of commonalities with what you and I are doing, Ryan, with what Rohan is doing. Like Rohan understands money as a public institution that needs to be protected and cultivated and steward and have stewards. And I think Rohan sees himself as a steward of public institutions, mainly money. He just has a different opinion of where money comes from. He thinks the money comes from the state and we on Bankless think that money is like this kind of bottom up, every money for themselves kind of environment.
14:11 David Hoffman? And so, you know, starting, I think we actually have a way to start with Rohan with common ground and attack the conversation from that angle. And I think that's going to be a very interesting conversation.
14:25 Ryan Sean Adams? I think it'll be super interesting. I may be a bit more pessimistic because I totally believe that both Rohan and the crypto community and us, we start from a set of common goals, but then we come to diametrically opposed conclusions, right? And that's that conclusions, those conclusions where things get sticky. So we'll see if he's open to protocols existing outside of the nation state and humanity's ability to marshal those into a financial system. It'll be an interesting conversation. We are also doing an ETH Bull series. So if Ryan Selkis gets you down a little bit about his ETH is not money conversation today. Don't worry, we will have some ETH bull conversations in the future on the podcast.
15:07 Ryan Sean Adams? I think that wraps up what's new. So I'm going to start with a question I ask you every state of the nation. David Hoffman, what is the state of the nation today, sir?
15:17 David Hoffman? The state of the nation is debating. We are debating. We're going to bring Ryan Selkis on. But ultimately to have an ETH is money or not debate. We're going to ask him about 2021 and the crypto industry at large over the last year, of course. But ultimately, we're going to get into a debate. Then we're debating with Rohan on Thursday, too. So there is some debating going on. One thing I've noticed lately, especially in the latter half of 2020, is that the Bitcoin and Ethereum like ecosystems have kind of diverged recently, like Bitcoin's kind of doing its own thing. Ethereum is doing its own thing. And all of a sudden, we kind of like have stopped to care about each other very much.
15:55 David Hoffman? But I still see that conversation coming to a head when it comes to like, you know, things like MicroStrategy, putting their treasury into Bitcoin. And then also things like Ether Capital and 3IQ, putting treasuries into Ether, right? And so at the end of the day, while these ecosystems are doing different things, they meet in the real world in the same place. And so there shall be debates to be had.
16:18 Ryan Sean Adams? At some level, like crypto is just one long debate, all the way from inception, all the way from Satoshi's white paper up until now. Both debating with the rest of the world and debating internally as to what the future of money should be. All right. Well, let's get to it. Let's bring on Ryan Selkis. Ryan is probably, he's the original Ryan in crypto media. So I'm more the newcomer. But he's been around for a very long time. He is the founder of Messari, which is like a crypto Bloomberg. It's absolutely fantastic. They just released a facelift and the tools that they're putting out weren't available in 2017.
16:59 Ryan Sean Adams? It makes me bullish just seeing what Messari has produced and the rigor of analysis that is now present in crypto. He always puts About a yearly wrap up report and he didn't fail to deliver this year. He put like, I think 134 page report together. Uh, we're going to talk a bit about that report. We're also going to talk about a section that begins on page 43 about Ethereum specifically and whether ETH is money or not. Ryan, fantastic to have you on State of the Nation today. How are you doing, sir?
17:29 Speaker 02 Thank you for being so brave. To see you guys.
17:33 Ryan Sean Adams? Right back at you, my friend. Right back at you. I don't know if David is the neutral party or if he's going to lean more Ethereum here or what? What's, what's your, what's your status, David? You got to declare before you come in here.
17:45 David Hoffman? Yeah. Oh, well, I mean, if you're making me pick sides, I'm obviously on the ETH side, but I think one of my big advantages, I can all, I tend to be able to see where Bitcoiners are coming from, which is actually why I think I'm so good at debating this subject. Uh, but, uh, that will be up for Mr. Ryan Selkis to decide.
18:01 Ryan Sean Adams? Well, very good. Before we begin, before we talk about the ETH is money conversation, that debate, let's talk a little bit about the, the thesis that you put forward and just the high levels. Cause Ryan, this is a 134 page report. Like it's super meaty. Uh, we will include a link in the show notes, guys. Just download this. Go look at it. It's a fantastic summary of the year and looks at the, the next year moving forward. But on January 1st, like a year ago or so, um, how do you think the crypto industry saw 2020 play out? And how, how did it actually play out? Like, what were, what were kind of the differences between what everyone expected and what actually happened?
18:47 Speaker 02 Well, I think the things that didn't change were some of the projects from the 2017, 2018 variety finally come to market, uh, and, and introducing their, their main nets. We saw that with Okada, with Filecoin, uh, a number of other high profile projects. We saw some maturity in the stablecoin sector. We saw some maturity, obviously in the DeFi sector. I'd argue, um, that's the innovation. You could argue, uh, that was initiated by Synthetix in, in mid 2019, but, but really kind of came into vogue with compound liquidity mining, uh, in mid this year was maybe the most important. Development of the year outside of what was going on in the macro picture.
19:28 Speaker 02 Now, you can't talk about 2020 without talking about the coronavirus and just the incredible impact that COVID and subsequent lockdowns and monetary and fiscal responses had on Bitcoin and then by extension, all other assets in crypto. And the fact that a lot of this happened right around the halving, when Bitcoin's inflation rate finally dipped below 2% target inflation rate for the Fed. I think it was incredibly fortuitous from a narrative perspective. And of course, you know, the trillions upon trillions printed and the record-setting, you
20:12 Speaker 02 know, negative yielding debts has certainly played a large role in that narrative taking off. With Ethereum, it's really all been about when is 2.0 going to come online? And, you know, are we actually going to see this anytime soon? Has the developers actually got a credible path to bringing this upgrade to fruition? And how smoothly is that transition going to go? Because we are talking about essentially a brand new blockchain in Ethereum 2.0. So in some respects, I'd say the year is ending about where most optimists would have put us at the start of the year in terms of development, in terms of Bitcoin kind of
20:55 Speaker 02 leading the charge from a macro narrative standpoint and Ethereum actually hitting its first milestone, Bitcoin chain launch.
21:00 Ryan Sean Adams? How about DeFi, Ryan? Was there a surprise there? You kind of alluded to it a little bit when you're talking about synthetics.
21:06 Speaker 02 I don't know that there was a surprise. The surprise was the velocity at which it took off. And unlike ICOs, which were really kind of manufactured bubbles to a certain extent, there are some similarities. But I'd say unlike ICOs, liquidity mining has a credible argument for pulling forward demand versus just creating a bunch of speculative fervor, right? The problem with Compound, the problem with some of the other DeFi applications that were early to embrace liquidity mining, is that participating in those protocols
21:45 Speaker 02 As a user was kind of like picking up pennies in front of a steamroller. Because you're taking all sorts of idiosyncratic risk, you're taking principal risk with the underlying assets. And for what to turn a couple of points of marginal return, you're better off just waiting for the market to play itself out and and and for the speculative assets to to hit their next cycle of growth. And it's kind of this chicken and the egg problem. DeFi, I think, exploded because you were able to give people a credible path towards these protocols and their native tokens actually capturing value in the form of fee markets.
22:25 Speaker 02 And so you you kind of had your cake and ate it too when you're actually participating in these protocols, both from a yield standpoint and then from a stock option standpoint, almost, if you're to kind of make the make the analog to to public companies.
22:41 Speaker 02 And I think that sweetener, that that returns juicer was the difference between slow and steady growth and what we saw over the summer, which was a tremendous pop.
22:51 David Hoffman? Ryan, I'm curious because I know you pay attention to the coronavirus more than the average individual. And and you already said that, like, you know, that one of the big legacies of 2020 is the coronavirus and specifically the relationship between the money printer and Bitcoin and just the cascading effects of the value of Bitcoin increasing as a result of the money printer and the net positive effects for the rest of the ecosystem. Taking that variable out of the equation, do you have any opinions as to how the coronavirus impacted the Ethereum ecosystem?
23:22 Speaker 02 Honestly, I I don't think it had much impact at all. You know, there was there was three primary narratives of the year. There was coronavirus and Bitcoin's entrance in the macro scene. And it is almost 100% Bitcoin at this point. We'll talk about why the limited institutional interest in Ethereum is is kind of manufactured. It's not organic. The the second was just would Ethereum get to phase zero, which they did. So I think that's the biggest milestone for Ethereum. And then along the side that which other blockchains came online that had credible pitches for siphoning off some demand, some applications from the Ethereum blockchain.
24:08 Speaker 02 And then, and then the third was, was DeFi. I would put everything else into like the, the very distant fourth, fifth, sixth place like also ran category. So those interesting things going on in non-fungible tokens. And, and you know, some of the early web three applications and the like, but far, far behind those three mega trends for the year.
24:31 David Hoffman? Who or what would you say captured the moment of 2020 in our industry? Either in the greater industry or maybe specifically inside of Ethereum.
24:41 Speaker 02 Well, I think if we're, if we're going to go off of those two or three mega trends, I'd say we put out a list of 10 people to watch. On the Ethereum side, it's, it's Danny Ryan, as much as it is Vitalik and for, for being the, the central coordinator and, and, and really kind of the figurehead that's, that's led this massive upgrade so far and, and helped to shepherd the, the right resources and, and actually hit the milestone before year end. I'd say on the DeFi side, it's, it's got to be Hayden and Rob Leschner, Hayden from, from Uniswap and Rob from Compound. And then Andre from, from the Wi-Fi.
25:22 Speaker 02 I'd say those are, are probably the, the big three in, in terms of entrepreneurs that, that really hit the accelerator and, and, and got DeFi where it is now and, and where it spiked over the summer. I think maybe the craziest thing is that the pace hasn't really let up. I think when we saw the dip in September and October, I kind of felt like this was the beginning of a bear market that would be protracted. And the, the vicious kind of rebound in, in terms of volume and in terms of how, how, how quickly things turned back around was, was, was pretty impressive and certainly took me off guard.
26:02 Speaker 02 And then I think on the Bitcoin front, you know, there's a hodgepodge of people that I think helped to risk it. You know, things like the Wyoming blockchain initiatives that came from long spearhead. Spearhead started to pay dividends this year in the form of not only clear state regulations, but up to building a special purpose depository institution, which is kind of like a Bitcoin bank. Banking was probably the biggest risk for a while to the industry, certainly was last year when we wrote about. Brian Brooks, former chief legal officer at Coinbase, now the OCC, opening the door for
26:44 Speaker 02 banks to not only bank stablecoin issuers, but open the door for actual crypto custody, probably through M and A, was big. And then I think what Michael Saylor did, and maybe more importantly, what Square did with their corporate treasury purchases of Bitcoin will resonate for quite a long time. And then there's probably a dozen or so macro money managers that had a pretty big impact on the Bitcoin side. But it was really just about the digital gold narrative on Bitcoin, herding cats on Ethereum, and getting this DeFi ecosystem really bootstrapped for the rest.
27:25 Ryan Sean Adams? You know, what's kind of interesting, I think, about the list that you guys put out, Ryan, is a lot of folks on the Bitcoin side are all kind of wearing suits, right? These are almost like Bitcoin bankers, essentially, right? Even, you know, you mentioned SBF, who like came out of nowhere with an entire new custodied exchange with derivatives, all of these things. On the Ethereum side, it's these DeFi protocol developers who, if they are successful, essentially remove themselves from the protocol entirely, like Hayden Adams, whom you mentioned, right? Like the goal for Uniswap is that Uniswap Turns into a protocol and we don't need Hayden anymore. It becomes completely decentralized.
28:10 Ryan Sean Adams? What are your thoughts on this kind of dichotomy? It seems like Bitcoin these days is kind of wearing a suit. And Ethereum is taking the flag of, no, let's build a intermediaryless financial system without banks in the middle. I'm sure we'll get to more of that when we talk about the ETH's money debate. But are you seeing that as well, even with the choices of, you know, the standouts of the year that you named?
28:36 Speaker 02 Well, who's the most important developer in Bitcoin?
28:40 Ryan Sean Adams? I mean, I, it's probably some member of Bitcoin Core, I would say. But like, at some level, the project is already finished, right? And, you know, it's at a different stage of completion.
28:52 Speaker 02 Exactly. So I'd say that the fact that it's ossified means that being very difficult change allows people to create their own image of Bitcoin, right? For some people, it's going to be a Swiss bank account in your pocket. For others, it's going to be an uncorrelated asset that fits in a portfolio. For others, it's going to be a hedge against inflationary pressures coming out of this next, out of the most recent recession. And, you know, that's, that's a positive because I think Bitcoin is at a different phase of the game than Ethereum or any other protocol or ecosystem right now, right?
29:32 Speaker 02 Bitcoin is on to the final boss and with the final boss, you don't want a ton of attack vectors available to crack down upon, you know, different developers, development teams, or mandate certain types of activity or non-activity in the Bitcoin blockchain. Once we see the Taproot activation, that adds another layer of pseudonymity to the Bitcoin.
30:00 Speaker 02 Ecosystem, I think that's probably about as private as it gets and it's probably the last major upgrade for a while that we'll see. But Ethereum is just getting started, right? You know, there's, there's no end date in mind for when the beacon chain becomes accessible. You're basically just relying on the availability of this synthetic ETH, beacon ETH, on an ongoing basis, as the new kind of reserve of record that people can lock in DeFi. The major players are very well known, right? If you asked anyone in the world who they think of when they think of Ethereum, it's our philosopher king, Vitalik. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, but again,
30:41 Speaker 02 it opens up some pressures in terms of, you know, his influence and ability to dictate how this ecosystem matures and what the roadmap looks like going forward, because his opinion carries so much clout. I, you know, I, I don't think, I think it's like, it's apples and oranges comparing Bitcoin and Ethereum at this point, and that's fine. But this is why I wrote in the thesis that, you know, it's, it's plenty good to be powering the financial internet infrastructure that Ethereum is. That doesn't mean that it's at the same phase as, as Bitcoin. They're almost, you know, two entirely different markets at this point.
31:21 David Hoffman? So when Ryan brought up the fact that the Bitcoin cohort seemed to be represented by suits, would you say that that's a, a symptom of Bitcoin's maturity and extended lifespan? Is that's kind of just where Bitcoin is in its life cycle? And maybe Ethereum will be wearing suits in the future too?
31:38 Speaker 02 Yeah, I mean, you're, I think the fact that Bitcoin has been successful means that it's available and it's liquid enough for larger investors to actually access it. But every single retail investor, every single minnow has had 12 years to front run JP Morgan. They've had 12 years to front run Paul Tudor Jones and Stanley Druckenmiller. So it's like, that to me is such a non-issue because obviously if something moves from a billion dollar, a million dollar asset, billion dollar asset, hundred billion dollar asset, trillion dollar There's going to be larger institutions that are interested in it. So, you know, the flip side of that is, you know, the bankers are buying our bags right now.
32:19 Speaker 02 But so, you know, of course, they're going to, but that doesn't mean that Bitcoin is now beholden to the banks. It just, it just means that this is a phase where that's a new audience of users and a new ecosystem of buyers that have materialized.
32:37 Ryan Sean Adams? Okay, I feel like we're bleeding into the next section where we want to talk about whether ETH is money or not, or even the definition of money. But let's kind of parameterize the discussion, Ryan. So we kind of led this with, we're going to have a debate on whether ETH is money or not. And you put on page 43 of your report that basically ETH is not money. And that's, that's fine. It doesn't need to be money, but you made that claim. But I think there's a question of what people mean when they say ETH is money, like what is money? So if we're to maybe open up the question or open up this conversation, right?
33:20 Ryan Sean Adams? I guess I would have the question to you, do you think Bitcoin is money? And based on that, we can probably define what we mean by ETH being money or not. So is Bitcoin money in your mind?
33:34 Speaker 02 I don't think either of them are money in the traditional sense, right? They're commodity stores of value that are used for two different things right now. Bitcoin is primarily about the store of value, use case, secure financial settlement of large savings accounts, basically, right? So I think the Swiss bank account in your pocket is true for better or for worse. For Ethereum, most of the usage is going to come in these experimental protocols and these experimental financial applications. And that's fine, right? The transition to proof of stake, when it does happen, still not there, but you know, when it does fully happen, will also make Ethereum a defensive asset.
34:17 Speaker 02 You're going to need some minimum price for Ethereum to back into a minimum market cap for Ethereum that will actually ensure that the network is secure if it's going to be processing trillions of dollars of transactions and settlements. All that's fine. But by and large, this is not about whether, you know, every token can be money. Every stock can be money, right? If you just loosen the definition enough. But ETH is money versus not. The question there is, let's be clear about what we're talking about. We're really talking about which is the ultimate and best form of digital money? Is it Bitcoin? Is it Ethereum? Is there any chance that Ethereum is going to flip in Bitcoin for that use case? And the answer is definitively no. Not anytime soon.
35:02 Speaker 02 And if it does, there's something very systemically wrong, I think, in the industry. So like, that's, that's the, that's the headline, the catchphrase. But really what we're talking about with money and a narrative is this is a winner take most market with power law type distributions and returns. And is Ethereum going to come close to Bitcoin in that part? I think the answer is no.
35:26 Ryan Sean Adams? So I think that I agree with that definition going into this conversation. So the way you defined money, we're really talking about monetary premium, essentially, when we say is ETH money? And what we're talking about in this, in this conversation is whether ETH can accrue a monetary premium that exceeds Bitcoin's monetary premium. But of course, both of these assets are not money in the traditional sense, where they are used as a universal, you know, medium of exchange and unit of account, and then also a store of value. They're more on the store of value side, and they're dipping into the unit of account, medium of exchange portions.
36:06 Ryan Sean Adams? So I think with that as the foundation, the context, we could get into, into the, into the conversation. And you're like 10 points about whether ETH will actually flip in Bitcoin. But before we do, we should get to some of our sponsors that have made this State of the Nation episode possible.
36:25 David Hoffman? 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 using the Ledger Live account as well. Ledger Live is like your home base for managing your Ethereum, DeFi, 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 talk about
37:10 David Hoffman? with the Bankless Skill Cube 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 Skill Cube. 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, where 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.
37:55 David Hoffman? I personally like the Ledger Nano X, 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 of the Nations are brought to you by Wyarn. Wyarn is DeFi's first self-building, community-run project, which I just get really, really excited about. Why earn is a system that seeks out yield in DeFi 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 and different DeFi experts will come in and generate a strategy
38:38 David Hoffman? for what to do with your deposited token, right? And so it'll go find ways to get yield in that deposited token in DeFi. For those who want to just earn yield on their stable coins, the earn system is for you, where you can deposit your preferred stable coin and why earn will go and figure out which money market on DeFi and DeFi is producing the best interest rate, whether it's DY, DX, it's compound or Ave. It looks around DeFi to see where the yield is coming from and it directs stable coins automatically. So you don't have to check them out at why earn dot 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 Ryan Selkis. We are going to get into the 10 points that
39:23 David Hoffman? Ryan brought up in his year ending theses for 2020 and 2021. Ryan brought up 10 unique points and we're going to go through them one by one, starting with history. And Ryan, I've summarized your point in this section as Bitcoin has killed all of its competitors, yet Ethereum has not. And there are still plenty of ETH competitors around. Meanwhile, Ether Ethereum is kind of going through this like transitionary period from ETH1 to ETH2. And if we're using like a metaphor to talk about, you know, apex predators of money, then like Ether is like in this this vulnerable weakened state while it's doing this transition
40:04 David Hoffman? while its competitors exist without having to worry about that transition. Would you say that's a fair analogy of what's going on here?
40:11 Speaker 02 I'd say that's true. I wouldn't go so far as to say that it's in a weakened state, but it is certainly not in as strong a state as Bitcoin, particularly with with Polkadot and Definity and some of these other new protocols coming online that really have massive balance sheets and you build it essentially coordinates different attacks, if you will, or just, you know, marketing schemes to siphon off demand and develop ecosystem from Ethereum.
40:43 David Hoffman? All right, Ryan, my co-host Ryan, what do you have to say about that?
40:48 Ryan Sean Adams? Yeah, so I think it's an interesting point, right? So you'll find this in a lot of maybe the counterpoints to what Ryan's saying that I do definitely believe that Ether, the asset, and let's separate Ether the asset versus Ethereum the network because they're different things. Ether, the asset, is probably a full market cycle behind Bitcoin, right? It is Bitcoin 2016, okay? So like with that as a backdrop, I do think the point that Ryan's raising that Bitcoin has no like predators, no competition, but Ether has many is much overstated. So there aren't actually competitors to Ether. There are a lot of ETH killers who say they're competitors to Ether.
41:33 Ryan Sean Adams? Their marketing says that they're competitors to Ether. But Ryan even raised the point of marketing and centralized war chest. It's that centralization that makes them weak competitors to Ethereum. Because the thing that Ether has, just like Bitcoin, is credible neutrality. It was not VC funded. It was not pushed out to only accredited investors. It's already crossed the gauntlet to become a decentralized network. Even the CFTC said the two crypto assets that are commodities are Bitcoin and Ether, and they haven't weighed in on any of the other flock of ETH killers. So what's actually happening are these ETH killers, these smart contract platforms,
42:15 Ryan Sean Adams? are competing with each other, and they're competing with Ethereum's Layer 2, and they're not competing with Ether as an asset for money. That's what I see is actually going on, though, from like it could look, if you're looking at it from a high level, it could look like there's all of these competitors and Bitcoin has slayed its foes, but Ethereum has to slay its foes. I'm just like looking a couple of years in the future where Ethereum has already won this contest. It is the only credibly neutral monetary system apart from Bitcoin, and really it's just kind of the only smart contract platform standing. That's my take.
42:53 Speaker 02 Well, no proof of state network has been proven at scale yet. No protocol of this size has migrated to an entire new architecture at this time. No one has gone through a multi-year transition like Ethereum is proposing to do. And no one has tried to do that at the same time as billions of dollars worth of competitive spend is heading their way. At the same time, most of DeFi's killer apps are getting very expensive to run on Ethereum. And if you're going to need to set up infrastructure to support Ethereum rollups or layer two applications,
43:33 Speaker 02 there's going to be a lot of teams that spend the same amount of time and energy on interoperable solutions to other base layer chains. So the infrastructure is going to be built. You know, you said Ethereum is a market cycle behind Bitcoin. The truth is, all of these other Ethereum-like platforms are not a full market cycle behind Ethereum because Ethereum is in some cases running in parallel as the established lead horse and as a brand new blockchain that's unproven.
44:03 Ryan Sean Adams? I think, well, maybe we'll get into the second point in a minute, but I just want to draw the attention of the distinction between Ether, the asset, and Ethereum, the network, because those are two different things, right? And so Ether, the asset, as a money system, right? As a sovereign, non-sovereign store of value is different than Ethereum, the network, right? And so these other alternate blockchains don't just have to compete with Ethereum, the network, in terms of trustless transactions per second. They actually have to compete with the monetary properties of Ether as an asset. But maybe we can address that in kind of the next point, Ryan, where you talk about Ether, the asset, being sort of this reserve currency.
44:48 Ryan Sean Adams? And maybe David, you can kind of articulate the point here.
44:53 David Hoffman? So famously ICOs largely in 2017 required Ether to participate in, right? Making Ether, like as it is Ether, the native currency of Ethereum. Ether was really heavily used during ICOs to make investments, right? And that was kind of the big thing about why Ethereum was so cool in 2017. The claim here is that, you know, the reservation demand in 2017 for Ether was really, really strong and that's why Ether was able to pump up to $1,400 in December of 2017. And Ryan, I believe what you're claiming here in number two, reservation demand, is that, you know, the ETH leverage in DeFi doesn't have that same sort of like reservation
45:35 David Hoffman? demand coefficient where ICOs really needed Ether to participate. Modern DeFi applications don't necessarily need Ether to participate, therefore the reservation demand is less. Was that a fair analysis of your take?
45:49 Speaker 02 Well, I mean, let's be clear. Bitcoin was the reserve for crypto exchanges as well in 2017. Both lost their reserve status for applications that would be better suited with stable coins. And in fact, stable coins were five times this year to, they're close to 27 billion now in total supply. So whether you're talking about DeFi, whether you're talking about exchange settlements or any payment application, stable coins have really eaten into that reserve demand for both assets, to be fair. What's different is that Bitcoin has basically entered the institutional conversation as an uncorrelated asset and a speculative sort of value that should outperform gold in a
46:34 Speaker 02 gold investor portfolio. So there's a new reserve demand for Bitcoin. It's from a new market. You might not like that it's bankers and institutional investors, but there is no such demand for Ethereum that replaces its previous reservation demand for ICOs.
46:53 Ryan Sean Adams? Yeah, I think that's an interesting point, and I totally agree with your characterization of both of these assets competing at some level against stable coins. But I think that Ether as an asset on Ethereum is still irreplaceable. Even if you had stable coins, and you know, stable coins really took off and went mainstream. The reason is because Ether, the asset, is the only trustless, trust-minimized form of collateral on Ethereum. So Coinbase, Circle, they can do a timeout, they can do a pause, they can stop USDC.
47:36 Ryan Sean Adams? They can't do that with an Ethereum-native crypto asset like Ether. So if you want to build something that is trustless, a protocol that is maximally, credibly neutral, if you're trying to build a Uniswap, you can't have the reserve currency of Uniswap be something like USDC. You could maybe have it be a stable coin that is Ether-backed, right? And have a pure, kind of, you know, stable asset, you know, bearer instrument on Ethereum. This trustless collateral of Ether, like on Ethereum, is the part that I think a lot of folks miss, and it's why Ether is irreplaceable on Ethereum.
48:19 Ryan Sean Adams? And I do, I think we'll get back to that point about outside banker demand, right? Where, right now, institutions are clearly demanding Bitcoin. Again, I think Ether is just a cycle behind, right? This idea of Ether as an internet bond is going to take off. I think the same companies that are putting Bitcoin on their balance sheet will put Ether on their balance sheet eventually. And in the meanwhile, I do think Ether's reserve status as 8% locked in DeFi right now, you know, 5% to 10% in the future are going to be locked and staking. It has a lot of sinks native to its own economy that will propel scarcity and price forward. Thoughts on that?
49:01 Speaker 02 Well, I mean, it seems that the market is speaking that the best collateral asset for DeFi is actually Bitcoin. If you look at the wrapped Bitcoin chart, I don't think that Ethereum has got the special position that you think it does as a reserve asset for these ecosystems. And you know, the market is more or less spoken in the beginning of the year, there was less than 10 million in wrapped Bitcoin. On Ethereum, now there's two and a quarter billion. And since yield farming started earlier this year, it was about 35 million, again, two and a quarter billion today. So that's about 100x depending on what your starting point is. Ethereum's price certainly hasn't appreciated that quickly and the Ethereum collateral locked in DeFi hasn't been anywhere close.
49:45 David Hoffman? Hang on. I can tell David wants to jump in here. The BTC on Ethereum and the BTC in DeFi are different metrics. And I don't know the details or the nuances behind the metric that DeFi Pulse puts onto their front page. But according to DeFi Pulse, Bitcoin in Ethereum and DeFi specifically capped out at $173,000, which is a very low number. So BTC tokenized on Ethereum as maybe using Ethereum as a ledger of sorts is not the same thing as BTC pushing out Ether as collateral in DeFi. And those are telling, those numbers are telling very different stories.
50:20 Speaker 02 Yeah, I mean, well, we can put two together, right? If that's where all the value is coming, that value is coming from Bitcoin blockchain in search of yield. And where's that yield going to come from? It's going to come from either making markets on decentralized exchanges or in providing liquidity for lending and derivatives protocols. So, look, you know, we're talking about months here where this is going to come to fruition. But you know, the fact that there is that much of a collateral asset coming onto Ethereum is no different from the ERC 20 stable coins. So if you're going to say that Ethereum is the only You know, incredibly neutral permissionless assets that is available for collateral. That's simply not true, or at least it's not going to be true in a matter of months going into the new year.
51:05 Ryan Sean Adams? Of course, like, you know, Bitco can press the stop pause button on anything that's WBTC, right? But but that aside, I actually think that what you just said, Ryan, is uber bullish for Ether the asset. Because if Ethereum is maximally successful, if it becomes the gravity well for all assets all over the world, and they all end up on Ethereum, that is uber bullish for Ether the asset. When we start talking about like Ethereum scarcity engine EIP 1559, where every single Bitcoin like WBTC wrapped Bitcoin transaction on Ethereum actually makes Ether the asset more and more scarce.
51:47 Ryan Sean Adams? The the, I guess, the concern for Bitcoin is essentially what if it ends up with a chain that is kind of empty of its assets, right? Like low transaction fees, what's that going to do for for security? So some of these like, I guess, weaknesses that you're seeing, I actually think are are strengths on the Ethereum side. But I'd love to get to your your your third point, because this is really interesting. I will not dismiss the fact that now Bitcoin has had massive amounts of institutional demand this year. It absolutely has with MicroStrategy, Paul Tudor Jones, all of these things. It's being stacked on on the balance sheet.
52:30 Ryan Sean Adams? But you called Ether demand in institutions a mirage at this point. What makes you say that?
52:38 Speaker 02 Well, almost all demand from institutions right now for Ethereum is specifically related to the Ethereum Investment Trust at grayscale. And the reason there is staggering demand for that product right now is because there is a mismatch between where institutional investors can purchase shares of the trust at the net asset value on a given day according to 4pm time. And where they can resell it in six months due to the illiquidity of the rest of that supply. So where the real demand is, it's in retail investors wanting to
53:16 Speaker 02 put their 401ks and IRAs into a publicly traded security that maps to either the assets. Maybe because they're too lazy or too scared to to set up a coin based account.
53:30 Speaker 02 But but the institutional interest there, like there's there's no there's no missionary or or real longevity status to to those investors, because I haven't seen anything to suggest that they'll still be around once that premium declines.
53:48 Ryan Sean Adams? That's interesting because so I think there is more institutional demand than meets the eye. So Dave and I just did a podcast with a publicly traded company in Canada called Ether Capital. They have 30,000 Ether on their balance statement. They have since 2017.
54:06 Speaker 02 Of course, they're called Ether Capital.
54:07 Ryan Sean Adams? Well, and they're buying 125 million more, right? And that demand has got to
54:12 Speaker 02 They're called Ether Capital.
54:14 Ryan Sean Adams? Exactly. They're publicly they're a publicly traded company. Also, I3Q is another Canadian, it's a grayscale of of Canada. I think that what what is happening here is, again, back to that idea that Ether is just one cycle behind. We didn't see any of this institutional demand back in 2015, 2016. It was kind of where Ether is today. And Bitcoin is being like a great big brother and introducing digital scarcity to the masses and to the institutions. Once they get their mind wrapped around like digital scarcity in this concept, they're going to come back for more and they're going to come back for Ether as a monetary asset, particularly
54:55 Ryan Sean Adams? when they they start to grasp this idea of an internet bond, a productive yield bearing instrument that is also digitally scarce. So I think what we're seeing is just a a, I guess, a snapshot in time and that this will play out that, you know, Bitcoin has already done all the hard Work and now Ether, by the way, the only other asset that the CFTC has ruled as a commodity, we'll just ride those rails into institutional adoption and that'll start this cycle. By the end of this cycle, there'll be a lot of institutions with Ether on their balance sheets.
55:29 David Hoffman? Right, yeah, the thesis, the idea is that Ether is one cycle behind Bitcoin, but it's it's actually at an accelerated place in comparison to where Bitcoin was last cycle, because it's already having the balance sheet conversation. Although it's being forced by Bitcoin, it's we're still having it.
55:46 Speaker 02 You know, Ethereum is a capital asset getting bonded to the proof of stake chain. It's not actually that interesting to investors that like bonds, nor is it that interesting to investors that like cryptocurrency exposure, because they can get the uncorrelated asset in Bitcoin. And if they're going to look for yield, they're not going to want to take principal risk in an asset that's as volatile as Ether. So, you know, really, yes, is it important that this proof of stake transition is happening? And that there's some rewards and some seniorage for the investors that are going to take that financial risk and do the work to actually process these transactions? Of course, but it's otherwise inferior on both other axes when it comes to institutional money managers and their interest in accumulating the asset.
56:30 Speaker 02 Said another way, once the premium comes down for the Ethereum trust, I'll believe it when I see it when it comes to institutional demand. And maybe there will be some, but it's not going to be anywhere in the same ballpark as Bitcoin anytime soon.
56:42 David Hoffman? Fair enough, Ryan. Let's move on to probably the last point that we'll be able to get into. I know you have a hard stop in at the top of the hour, which is in three minutes, but this one's important in my mind. Narrative complexity, which I summarize as the Bitcoin thesis, the Bitcoin narrative is really easy to grunt out, doesn't take too many words. But the Ethereum thesis, the Ethereum narrative takes some explaining. Maybe you can elaborate on that.
57:05 Speaker 02 Well, Bitcoin is digital gold that is secured in a global censorship-resistant ledger, and it's much, much easier to self-custody than physical gold. One sentence, if you're talking to a macro money manager, you can say this is an uncorrelated asset that has outperformed every single other assets, and it belongs in every portfolio, at least a 1% to 2% allocation. Fine. With Ethereum, you're really talking about technical innovation. You're talking about all the experimentations happening on Ethereum, all of the financial applications that can drive value and, you know, long-term growth in, you know, these money protocols. But, you know, it's much more abstract because
57:49 Speaker 02 you're talking about replacing banking and lending and, you know, all of the legacy markets infrastructure. And then you throw on things like new asset creation and digital assets and ownership over data and all together kind of emerging Web3 applications that are part of the same pitch. And yes, a settlement layer for value sounds interesting, but again, you can do that with the protocol. It's not asset-specific. The asset is used to secure this protocol that's going to displace a bunch of traditional applications. Whereas Bitcoin is really all about the asset and just the tech and the game theory behind it that makes the asset work.
58:30 Ryan Sean Adams? I guess my response...
58:31 Speaker 02 Go ahead.
58:31 Ryan Sean Adams? Oh, go ahead, David.
58:32 Speaker 02 Do you ask that?
58:33 Ryan Sean Adams? Oh, yeah.
58:37 Ryan Sean Adams? My response to that is, like, to ask the question, what can you do with Bitcoin? Right? What can you do with it? You can hold Bitcoin. That's what you can do on the Bitcoin blockchain. And maybe you can transact it, right? But when all of the whales and the Bitcoin banks start using Bitcoin, you're not even going to be able to transact it for a fee that that makes sense, right? Those are the two verbs that you can do on Bitcoin. On Ethereum, it has, like, so much more surface area, so you can hold.
59:10 Ryan Sean Adams? You can transact, of course. You also have an economy of stablecoins, an entire trading economy built up over the last year on Uniswap. You have NFTs. There are all of these different, I guess, vectors for people to enter Ethereum that Bitcoin simply doesn't have. Bitcoin does have a better meme, like, I'll grant you that, right? Digital gold, okay? If I, like, I buy Bitcoin to hold, I get that, right? But you've got an entire digitally scarce economy that's building up over on Ethereum right now, and all of these various ways to enter. We're just talking to the Gods Unchained CEO and founder. And, like, people are buying
59:52 Ryan Sean Adams? Gods Unchained cards that have no interest in crypto, but they're gaining exposure to these Gods Unchained cards, and then Ether. So, once, once, once society and once mainstream starts to understand the idea of digital scarcity, thank you Bitcoin for that. And once this decentralized economy gets unleashed, right, it's going to feed into you demand for Ether as an asset. So, the surface area that you're talking about is, I think, a strength of Ethereum, because it allows all of these various places to enter. Sorry, David, I jumped in before you could. I don't know if you-
1:00:27 David Hoffman? No, go for it. I know Ryan, Ryan has to run to a meeting here, so I'll let him get the last-
1:00:32 Speaker 02 Well, most, most of the applications that you just mentioned actually aren't really that compelling to do on Ethereum right now because of the state of the fee market. And most of the scalability is going to come on L2 chains, same as Bitcoin. So, you're, it's, it's really no different. I would say the diversity of applications that are tied to Bitcoin, anytime soon, anytime period that you're talking about, I think it's going to be much lower than Ethereum. But in terms of scale applications, money is the biggest market that you could disrupt in the world. Bitcoin's got the lead there. Ethereum, plenty of other opportunities. It's just never going to be money.
1:01:10 David Hoffman? Well, Ryan, thank you for coming on the show and sharing your theses with us. If you guys are looking for a way to understand all of 2020 in just a short 70 plus or 130 plus page report, check that out at Mazar. I will get that linked in the show notes. Ryan, thank you for coming on and giving us some of your time.
1:01:29 Ryan Sean Adams? Thanks, Ryan.
1:01:29 Speaker 02 Thanks, guys. It was fun.
1:01:31 David Hoffman? Cheers.
1:01:32 Ryan Sean Adams? Take care. All right, Bankless Nation, that is the end of our episode. As always, risks and disclaimers, ETH is risky, so is crypto, so is DeFi. You could lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone. ETH is money. See you later, guys.
1:01:50 David Hoffman? Are we adding that to our sign off in the future?
1:01:55 David Hoffman? All right, goodbye.
Previous 43 - Crypto from the Outside | Demetri Kofinas Next ROLLUP: 3rd Week of December Page updated October 24, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated