84 - Defining the Metaverse

This is a classic Ryan-and-David only episode. With no guest, we dive into David's recent article "The Metaverse Emerges." What is the Metaverse? Raoul Pal described it as digital fluidity on our recent episode with him. Composable digital objects, a network economy, scaling social structures... whatever it is, Nation States aren't ready for the incoming metaversal explosion. Are you? ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/ 🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/ ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum 🍵 MATCHA | DECENTRALIZED EXCHANGE AGGREGATOR https://bankless.cc/Matcha 🔐 LEDGER | SECURE YOUR ASSETS https://bankless.cc/Ledger 🦄 UNISWAP | DECENTRALIZED FUNDING https://bankless.cc/UniGrants ------ 📣 TracerDAO | Perpetual Pools are now Live on Aribtrum! https://bankless.cc/Tracer ------ ------ Topics Covered: 0:00 Intro 7:00 Cryptoeconomic Nation State 10:45 Seeing Like The State 18:50 Humanity’s Faustian Bargain 23:30 Seeing Like The Protocol 28:45 The Metaverse 32:00 Metaversal Objects 35:40 Centralization 39:21 Neutrality & Density 46:10 Slowly Manifesting 54:00 Avatars & Identity 59:41 Fluid Value 1:06:25 Ethereum’s Role 1:10:33 Blockchain Taxes 1:15:45 ETH as Metaverse Money 1:22:35 It’s All Metaverse 1:27:43 Closing & Disclaimers ----- 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 I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/bankless-disclosures

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Welcome to Bankless, where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance. This is how to get started, how to get better, and how to front-run the opportunity. I'm Ryan Sean Adams. I'm here with David Hoffman, and we're here to help you become more bankless. David, this is the part of the show where I usually introduce our guests, but our guests are going to be ourselves on this show. So how are you doing today, man?

• 0:30David Hoffman?

  Oh, good. I am in Colorado. So a weird show in a weird place, but it's going to be a really fun topic today.

• 0:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  You know, you say it's a weird show, but we used to do a lot of these types of shows in the early days of Bankless. So for context, guys, we're going to dig deep on a theme. That theme is the metaverse. David wrote this fantastic article. I think it's the best article I've ever read on the metaverse. It's called "The Metaverse Emerges," and we're going to discuss that in depth. But we used to do this in the old days a whole lot, David, where it would just be like, before we had guests, before anyone wanted to come on the Bankless podcast and say hello, it was just you and I digging through a topic together, something we'd given a lot of thought to. And I know you've given a lot of thought to the metaverse. So this is almost like a throwback to our roots and the episodes we used to do, where we would deep dive on a given thesis, like the Protocol Sync thesis

• 1:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  came out of this, Digital Nation, Ethereum is a Digital Nation, ETH as money came out of this. Even the Bankless meme came out of some of these early conversations. So I feel like this is a throwback to our old days.

• 1:32David Hoffman?

  Yeah, absolutely. We say behind the scenes of Bankless that Bankless is a thesis-driven media company. And when we stumble upon a thesis that I think, we think is valid and deserves to be like shared and propagated, it's time to make a show about that. So it's been a while since we've come up with a new thesis, where I just listed a bunch of them off. But every now and then, I think we have some good ideas. And so we are going to explore this thesis and see how it can predict how the metaverse emerges, hence the title of the episode.

• 2:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think this is like, so this is also another lens through which you can see crypto, right? The lens of seeing it through like a metaverse, essentially. I tweeted this out recently, it's like, just super simple, right? So, one, if you believe everything is going digital, right? Most people believe that. Two, people like to own things, right? They like to own their own property. Everything going digital, people like to own their own property. Well, number three, they're definitely going to want to own their own digital property, right?

• 2:39David Hoffman?

  Two plus two is four.

• 2:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's the entire thesis of crypto, right? Humanity's going digital, people like to own things, people are going to want to own digital things. That's crypto in a nutshell. And if you believe that's true, then like crypto's got to have a bright future. And I think that the metaverse sort of fits into that because what we're doing in crypto is like, I guess the metaverse is hard to define, maybe we'll get into some definition of it, but what we're doing in crypto is we're layering kind of this object permanence on top of it, this digital property rights system. Raul Paul, when we had him on the episode last time, David, he defined the metaverse as digital fluidity. And I really like that concept too. But what are we going to be diving into today? What's the high level here?

• 3:24David Hoffman?

  Yeah, exactly, extrapolating on what you said. Once we have digital objects, and objects that exist only on the internet, then it's up to the internet and the things that we do on it to build a world around those objects. Because we're not going to build a physical world around those objects, we already have a physical world with physical objects. Now we have digital objects, but what we are missing is a digital world. But I think this whole digital world, of which people have started to call the metaverse, begins with a base of digital objects. And so the fundamental thesis about this whole idea is that the metaverse emerges out

• 4:03David Hoffman?

  of a shared registry, a shared state of truth, a single source of truth of all known objects in the digital universe, or the metaverse. So that's like kind of the skeleton for the whole entire. Thesis and then the other concept is that like the metaverse is rendered at the periphery. But the objects are stored locally, right? It's stored centrally and we've seen historical anecdotes for this historical references. And that's also kind of why I think this thesis has a decent amount of like foundation to stand on. Is that we can look back into history and see a similar pattern emerge with regards to, and this is where we were talking about with the emergence of like the whole bankless nation.

• 4:44David Hoffman?

  Digital Leviathans crypto Bitcoin Ethereum. These are digital nations in the clouds. But they are just extensions out of like these same social scaffoldings that we've seen come before them, hence the nation state. And what does the nation state do really, really well? It provides like numbers and serial numbers and like a business tax IDs. It like it also likes to serialize and account for things that are inside of its domain, inside of its borders. And once the nation state knows what's inside of it. And it serializes all valuable objects inside of it, then it actually starts to build a civilization around that. And that is kind of how the nation state has in, you know, there's many different ways to describe how the nation state emerged.

• 5:27David Hoffman?

  But that is one in my mind, how nation states were born is like they discovered that they have valuable things inside of them and they started to account for those things. And build a world around that.

• 5:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right. So if that sounds interesting, guys, that's exactly what we're going to be talking about today. How the metaverse emerges, how crypto is playing a key pivotal role in the emergence of the metaverse. David, I feel like since the beginning, when we started bankless, it's really been a quest of us trying to figure out what crypto is. Trying to figure out what Bitcoin is trying to figure out what ether the asset is and what Ethereum is. And we've used many different analogies and many different mental models, and this is yet another. But I think it's going to aid the listener in sort of understanding this space and also understanding. A where to spend their time because that's a valuable resource, but we be where to invest their money as well. Right? So like I recall kind of early definitions of.

• 6:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Of Ether, even in 2017, some people weren't saying it's money, but they're saying, well, maybe it's money in a limited use case for ICOs, like ETH as ICO money. Then DeFi came about and it was ETH is DeFi money, then NFTs made a big splash and it's ETH as NFT money. And we talked about ETH's supply scarcity in the future with the EIP 1559, ETH is ultrasound money. And now maybe ETH is turning into metaverse money. That is kind of a tantalizing conclusion that I hope we get to at the end. But David, let's zoom back out to the 20,000 foot view here and talk about some of these bankless concepts that we've talked about before.

• 7:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  You kind of hinted at them a little bit, but I think for people who aren't familiar with some of our previous episodes, some of this stuff maybe bears some recap. But you talked about crypto economic systems as a nation state and we put out a bankless podcast called The Bankless Nation, all about this. Can you talk about that mental model for things? Why do we refer to things like the bankless nation? Why do we talk about Ethereum being sort of the successor to the nation state? What's the concept there?

• 7:40David Hoffman?

  Right. So Bitcoin, Ethereum, crypto economic systems, they take a lot of responsibilities that nation states have. And they take them and say, hey, we can do this better. Not all of them. You know, if your house is on fire or if you have a robber in your house, you are calling your nation state services, right? Ethereum is not going to save you, but many, many other things largely to do with property rights management is something that we can actually outsource to Ethereum, to a digital ledger that exists on the internet and especially for our digital goods. And so certain roles and responsibilities, we can actually take away from the physical nation state and add it to the digital nation state, which is a ledger in the cloud, which is Ethereum.

• 8:24David Hoffman?

  And the best thing about these digital protocols, Bitcoin, Ethereum, crypto, is that they don't have borders, right? They are on the internet. And so we have seen this trend over time of society going from Larger and larger and larger social scaffolding structures. Nick Zabo calls it social scalability. It started with hunter gatherers, moved towards feudalism, then moved towards religion, then towards nation states. And now we have these crypto economic states. And so we see humans adopting more and more scalable social structures that have less and less restrictions, less and less censorship positions, more and more credible neutrality. And operate at larger and larger scales. And so the whole concept of the bankless nation is that, well, nation states used to make the money.

• 9:08David Hoffman?

  But now the crypto economic protocols can make the money. Nation states used to account and have a property rights system. And now we can give that role and responsibility to the digital nation states.

• 9:21David Hoffman?

  Physical nation states have a court of law and metaverse nation states have smart contracts. And so some of the almost most significant parts of what a nation state does. In my mind, Ethereum does better. And the more and more that we can allow Ethereum to do that, the better, the larger of a global civilization we can become.

• 9:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's just it too. It's like, I think a big realization for me was after I read the book Sapiens. I know we've talked about that a number of times on Bankless by Yuval Harari. And he talked about the major distinction between sort of, you know, animals and humanity is humans have the ability to share stories and coordinate. Right? That's what all of our technology allows us to do is to scale coordination. That's human beings' superpower. We're smarter than animals, but like, not by a lot, right? It's really when human beings kind of combine and form groups and create these shared narratives. The legal system as a shared narrative, an LLC, a corporation, these are shared narratives. Money, fiat, all shared narratives.

• 10:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  That allows us to scale essentially our civilization and our coordination endeavors. And that's what blockchain, that's what crypto is allowing us to do too. It's a new social scalability technology that we've unlocked. Maybe we could spend some more time contrasting this with the nation states. There's a book I know you've told me about that I haven't read yet, but I want to read it, but maybe, maybe if I don't get to, there's a lot of books on my list. Give us the TLDR of this book. So it's called Seeing Like the State. And what's, what's this book about? What's, what's it saying? What were the takeaways for you after reading this thing?

• 11:06David Hoffman?

  Yeah, the, the book is about trying to illustrate a perspective of what it is like to see like a state, as in take the perspective of a nation state. If the, and this also alludes to one of the articles I wrote called The Digital Leviathans, or straight up Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes. Thomas Hobbes illustrates the nation state as a composed body, a single body, like a gargantuan titan, like walking the earth. Like that is the concept of the Leviathan. And the Leviathan, it's made up of all the people of a nation state, and that gives power and control to like the executive branch, which is like the head of the Leviathan. And so what is the, the book Seeing Like a State is like, okay, what if you were actually the eyes of this Leviathan? Like what if you were the brain?

• 11:51David Hoffman?

  And he talks-

• 11:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  By the way, before you go on, before you go on, David, what's so interesting, I think people don't think a lot about this, but the nation state is totally a human invention, right? So like, when did Thomas Hobbes live? Is this like 1700s?

• 12:05David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I think he wrote this in 1781. I hope that's right.

• 12:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  And this was kind of like the, at the, the conclusion of sort of feudalism and aristocratic type powers and the beginning of the nation state era, right? 1700s, then 1800s?

• 12:21David Hoffman?

  1651, I was a little bit, yeah, really early.

• 12:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, 1651, right? So like, he was an early, I guess, thinker-

• 12:29David Hoffman?

  Philosopher, yeah.

• 12:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  -philosopher on the nation state, but before that, like, nation states didn't really exist, at least not in their, their present form.

• 12:38David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 12:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  And so he was using this metaphor, the Leviathan metaphor, to talk about what? The citizens, the body, kind of giving, giving up some of their individual sovereignty in exchange for some basic services from the nation state, like- Military.

• 12:55David Hoffman?

  In exchange for coordination.

• 12:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  Property rights, these basic services that the nation state could give it. But there's a sacrifice involved too, right? We have to, as individuals, we have to give up some of our self-sovereignty to this Leviathan. So it can like, kind of conquer our enemies and help solve some major problems for us, right?

• 13:14David Hoffman?

  Right. Yeah, and it also has its own aligned incentives with itself, which isn't necessarily aligned with the people that compose the nation state. There's a friction there, like you have to give up some of your rights and the Leviathan has its own desires, right? And so that has what I called in the article, nation state desires. And the nation state desires are to extract as much value out of the land that it holds as possible. And so this is where it's like some of the things that we all abide by on our daily lives have come from. And as a, and nation states, if they want to extract the value out of their domain, their dominion, they need to understand what's actually in it, so they can actually figure out how to extract it.

• 13:56David Hoffman?

  And that's where some of the, like, these registries and accounting systems that nation states have come up with have been bestowed upon us as individuals. If you live in the United States, you have a social security number, you have a telephone number, you, the government knows where your physical address is. If you have a business, you have a business tax ID number, so you know where like, where your taxes are going to come from. And these numbers are like the more modern versions of these things, but they started even earlier, according to the book, where like, nation state, like, land assessors would go out and evaluate the land of landowners and say like,

• 14:34David Hoffman?

  "Hey, this land is really fertile and it can grow this much crops, six by six rows of aspen trees for lumber. And that, this land will net this amount of yield on a yearly basis, therefore we can tax this land this much." And it's kind of, if you extrapolate that out, you see like, you know, nation states form, maybe on like a little settlement on some land somewhere, and it grows and grows and grows, and it grows into nature, and it homogenizes. Nature, it orders nature. Nature is chaos and nation states are order and then nation states need everything ordered perfectly so they can account for everything. And that's why we

• 15:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  He wants to give all the trees, all the livestock, all the animals a serial number and enter it into its centralized registry, right? It's ledger, if you will.

• 15:22David Hoffman?

  And the more effectively you can do that, the more it can tax the land and the more it can tax the land, the more it can fund the military, the more it can fund the military, the more powerful the nation state is. And if it's the most powerful nation state, then you get to order the whole world, right? Like this is an empire, like a quest to be like an empire, right? Like maximally growth.

• 15:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's what you mean by seeing through the eyes of the leviathan. That's what the leviathan sees. If you're inhabiting that body of the nation state. It wants to kind of grow, colonize things. It wants to, you know, register things so that it can tax those things, so that it can continue to grow.

• 15:56David Hoffman?

  Right. Yeah. And that's where I put in my article, this clip out of the the Matrix movie where Neo is like pulling the stem out of the back of his head as he's birthed out of the Matrix. And then he looks around and he sees fields and fields and fields of humans as they are just being like sucked dry of their energy from like these robotic overlords. Like that is like that art, that piece of art is illustrating the same point.

• 16:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  All of these humans have serial numbers, I'm sure.

• 16:23David Hoffman?

  Right. Yeah. Like column number like 13, like row 34, like unit 7. Like, oh, there's Neo.

• 16:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wait, doesn't doesn't Neo, and it's been a while since I've seen the Matrix, but I gotta like review because the new Matrix movie is coming out. I definitely want to see that. But like, doesn't Neo have some sort of barcode on his arm as well? Like in his real body?

• 16:43David Hoffman?

  Totally. I think I think that's right. Yep. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Right. I don't think that that was on purpose by the by the actual director of the Matrix, but like it's a one way like artists know what's up.

• 16:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, so that's what the book is saying. If you're seeing like a state, you're trying to serialize everything, enter it into your registry, tax everything so you can grow. Is that sort of the theme of the book? What were the takeaways of that book? Is it like, is this a good thing? Is this a bad thing? Or is it just a thing that nation-states do?

• 17:12David Hoffman?

  It's just a thing that nation-states do. My biggest takeaway was that like, nation-states and nature cannot live harmoniously, right? Like, nation-states need to impose order upon nature, and nature is inherently chaotic, right? And this is why indigenous cultures of the world have witnessed oppression from whatever nation-state like they encounter. Nation-states don't like indigenous people because they're nomadic. They don't like use the local fiat currency. The value they produce is like undefined and nebulous. And so like, especially inside the United States, the United States of America have confined its Native Americas into smaller and smaller and smaller plots of land because like, we can't figure out how to account for them. And so we just like give them their reservations,

• 17:57David Hoffman?

  and then we just order everything around them. And this has caused a lot of strife in the world. The desires of the nation-state are fundamentally misaligned with the desires of the human. And one of the core theses of the Metaverse Emergence is that Ethereum, as a digital rights management system, a nation-state in the clouds, fundamentally improves upon that misalignment between protocol and individual, and allows the individual to live more harmoniously with nature because it doesn't impose nation-state desires. Because it's a protocol. We have algorithmically removed the misaligned incentives out of a nation-state by putting everything into code and saying, "Hey, you can't be evil anymore."

• 18:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, let's get into that in a second because I think you've maybe unlocked an interesting, like, an interesting quest there. But like, I want to ask the question. Don't you think that, is there some level of this? This is sort of a Faustian bargain that humanity has made, right? Like, we are seeking greater order to improve our technology, to grow further. Therefore, we have to create order. Order out of nature and there are some detrimental effects in like doing that. I mean, we could have stayed as a species back in sort of agrarian societies or even prior to that, like hunter gatherer societies. Would we be any happier? I don't know. That's a very difficult question to answer. It's an existential question.

• 19:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  But like, that definitely has not been the trajectory. We have moved in the trajectory of more society, more civilization, more order out of nature. And on the back of that have developed some pretty astounding things, some wonderful technology. Also invented some terrible technologies. But quality of life wise, right? You ask yourself, would you rather live today, having this conversation, talking about the metaverse, with all of the benefits of technology? Or in a hunter gatherer society? I mean, for me, like I would not last, I would not last a week in an ancient society, I think. But yeah, what are your thoughts there?

• 20:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Is this just not a trade off that we've had to make as a species in order to achieve these advances and these unlocks?

• 20:11David Hoffman?

  Yeah, absolutely. It's the United States. People, humans have been making trade offs as, technology is a trade off, right? Like, we moved from hunter gatherers to like the agricultural world. And we moved from being like upright, athletic, like, you know, hunters, to bending over back breaking like farmers. And now we all have back problems, like our backs aren't meant to like bend over and pick stuff up. And that's, and also like grain is as a fundamental like part of the human diet. Not actually the best thing that's aligned with us. Yet it gave us the calories that we needed to make civilization, to do things like learn how to like have hospitals and like, you know, mend broken bones and cure cancer and like make vaccines.

• 20:56David Hoffman?

  So there's always trade offs. But also, new technologies can impose better trade offs than old technologies. And so while we do are capable of making trade offs that like do kind of suck, we over time can iterate on improved technologies that allow us to make better and better trade offs. Hey guys, that was all about seeing like a state and now we are going to get into the seeing like a protocol side of this conversation, which is of course the beginnings of what a metaverse is. Before we get there, we have to take a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible. Living a bankless life requires taking control of your own private keys, not your keys, not your crypto. That's why so many in the bankless nation already have their Ledger hardware wallets,

• 21:40David Hoffman?

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• 22:24David Hoffman?

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• 23:07David Hoffman?

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• 23:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, so now let's look through the eyes of a protocol, right? So we saw through the eyes of the Leviathan and what that looks like. And you're starting to get into it. But what does it look like to be organized by a protocol? How does the protocol see things? Isn't a protocol sort of trying to do the same thing? At some level, we've talked previously, David, about the analogy of Ethereum being sort of like a black hole. And it's just sucking all of this capital into it. Ethereum itself wants to organize the world as well. It wants to serialize everything, right? The whole idea in the early days, when we talked about Ethereum, is everything will be tokenized.

• 24:28David Hoffman?

  Tokenize the world.

• 24:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, tokenize the world. This is Ethereum as sort of a different digital Leviathan, if you will. But it is pulling all of this economic activity into its ranks. It is trying to serialize everything, give everything like an ETH address, a contract ID, a serial number on Ethereum. It wants to take your bank account and serialize that as well. What's different between the nation state and a protocol like Ethereum?

• 24:54David Hoffman?

  Right, it goes back to what I said, is that like it's all these digital items. And now, because they're digital, now we can start to talk about having sort of nation state in the clouds. But also, it's a lack of desire for growth, right? Where the nation state, the physical nation state, is a top-down empire. The Ethereum nation state, or the Ethereum neo-nation, whatever you want to call these things, is actually an opt-in nation, as in we grow it, rather than it growing itself, right? So we choose to make Ethereum larger by taking our capital and putting it into Ethereum. We choose to make Ethereum larger.

• 25:33David Hoffman?

  By figuring out how to tokenize maybe real world assets or just like create new on-chain assets. Right. So because Ethereum is inherently an opt-in system, like you are not born with your Ethereum address. You are not born with like your favorite NFTs, but when you are born in the nation state, you are given your social security number. You are already like, no choice.

• 25:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  You had no choice what your citizenship was, what your social security number is. You have no choice about kind of the geographic limitations of your physical presence. That's just assigned to you at birth.

• 26:05David Hoffman?

  Right. And so like while Ethereum is on this same trajectory in the sense that it wants to like envelop the world, it's because we choose it to do that. We only will allow it to envelop us of what we want to be enveloped by, because that is our choice, because we are the people that are actually shaping Ethereum, rather than like the physical nation state actually shaping us. And so it's where the cart and the horse are related to each other. And in my mind, when we have these protocols working for us, rather than dictating to us how we work, we are more aligned with the world around us.

• 26:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  What's nice, you know that portrait of the leviathan? I think it was in your article, but it actually has like a weapon in its hand. Is it like a saber or something?

• 26:51David Hoffman?

  It's a sword, yeah.

• 26:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  I can't remember. A sword. Okay. So it's got a sword in its hand. That really symbolizes a primary weapon that the nation state uses, which is violence.

• 27:00David Hoffman?

  The carrot, or excuse me, the stick.

• 27:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  The stick. Eric Boerhees has been on, you know, talks about all the times like, you know, the ability to throw people in cages, the ability to kill an individual, the ability to take violence on an individual. That is a right that we've only given to the state. It's illegal for a citizen to do any of these things to imprison another citizen, for example. But the state has this ability, has this license over violence. The nice thing about something like Ethereum, these digital nation states is no violence. They don't even have the power to instantiate violence. The worst they can do is like slash you for like breaking a protocol rule, right?

• 27:41David Hoffman?

  Which you opted into, by the way.

• 27:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  You opted into and they're fairly enforced. It's completely 100% transparent. You know exactly what you're getting into. And it's the collection of capital. So it's not actual physical violence. So the protocol leviathan, the digital nation leviathan, has kind of a different... He has no sword in his hand. I don't know what he has. Maybe it's code and algorithms.

• 28:04David Hoffman?

  Oh, no. He has tokens. He has incentives.

• 28:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right.

• 28:07David Hoffman?

  Right? And so...

• 28:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 28:08David Hoffman?

  Take out the sword.

• 28:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  Carrots. It's all carrots, no sticks.

• 28:11David Hoffman?

  Exactly. Take out the stick, replace it with a carrot. When I made this image for the bankless DAO and I photoshopped out the sword and I replaced it with a bankless token. And DAOs are their only mini leviathans. And they have... The one power that DAOs have is the ability to mint their own token. And that's the one thing that they get to do. And they get to use that token as incentives, right? And so it's incentives only. And that's why there's, in my mind, going to be a lot less oppression under a metaverse world that uses opt-in incentives versus nation-states, which control and coerce you.

• 28:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, so we've gotten to the state where we've, I think, established what a digital nation is and how a protocol sees things in a different way. It still wants to coordinate, still wants to serialize. It doesn't use violence to do that, only uses incentives, only uses carrots, no sticks.

• 29:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  So far, we haven't really talked about the concept of the metaverse, right? And the metaverse is something that's very hard to define, right? A lot of people might define it as kind of like the entire, you know, human digital experience. Like, the internet is part of the metaverse. But in your article, you talk about objects, object permanence, being a key attribute that's required to manifest the metaverse. Maybe a ledger of object permanence? Can you talk about what you mean by that and how crypto fits into that?

• 29:37David Hoffman?

  So we created digital scarcity with crypto. That's what Bitcoin created. And that's not actually enough to create the metaverse. Because BTC and ETH and fungible currencies are... The fungibility doesn't allow for unique objects to form. Because they're fungible, like if you have two dollars or two single dollar bills, we actually have two dollars, right? That's the one thing that you have. And so the fungible nature of currencies can't allow for digital objects. And when we talk about the metaverse, we're talking about a version of a universe that behaves like our physical world. And so we need non-fungible assets.

• 30:19David Hoffman?

  And there's no surprise that this whole metaverse phenomenon is coming on the heels of the two NFT manias that we've seen over the last year or so. NFTs or whatever, non-fungible tokens can represent digital objects that can actually interact with each other. And that's really, really important. In the same way that I have these two objects here. I've got a coffee mug and my phone. And in the physical world, they collide, right? If they were fungible, the atoms in these objects would just mesh. They would just come and form like a blob. They would just come together. But since they're separate, each one is like unique. Each item I have is non-fungible. Now that we have non-fungible objects in "the metaverse" on the Ethereum ledger, we can have objects that collide.

• 31:02David Hoffman?

  And so I have a handful of ERC 721 items in my wallet. They're in the same place. And my wallet is like my Ethereum wallet is like my Ethereum address. But in the same way that my nation state address, my home address is my address. My Ethereum address is like, oh, these objects are in the same spot. They're owned by the same individual at the same address, at the same location. And so these objects are allowed to collide, right? And so these objects on Ethereum, these ERC 721 tokens, are going from address to address to address, interacting with each other. And that is kind of the very bare bones of what creates a metaverse. That goes from just having internet currencies and an internet ledger

• 31:47David Hoffman?

  into having an actual metaverse. That is what unlocks the metaverse, is having digital objects with digital properties that are able to interact and collide with other digital objects and their digital properties.

• 32:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  So you had this line, I think, in the article, "The metaverse," you said, "is the "shared registry of metaversal objects," which is kind of a different definition than I've heard before, right? So, most definitions of the metaverse are somewhat vague, right? Like, we don't really know what exactly they mean. But you think this shared registry is really important, and this idea of object permanence with, like, registered items is very important. Can you get, like, talk about that a bit more? And can you get a bit more concrete in terms of what you actually mean? So, when people, I think, the clearest representation of maybe the metaverse is like the Ready Player

• 32:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  One movie where we all put on our VR goggles, and we're in some completely digital world, surrounded by digital objects, and, you know, digital avatars and all of these things. Is that what you mean when you're talking about the metaverse? Is just having something like Ethereum be the registry, the property rights layer, of all of those digital things? Or, help us understand this.

• 33:11David Hoffman?

  Sure, yeah. It is really important that there is a single, shared state of truth, and this alludes to, like, kind of, there kind of needing to be one, one single shared state of truth, right? Like, we have a lot of conversations about, like, all these different blockchains out there. Each blockchain offers its own metaverse, but the objects in one blockchain, one L1, can't go on to a second L1 because they operate on different codes. They are on different protocols, and those objects can't interact. And so, objects on Ethereum, because they're all on Ethereum, they can interact. And Ethereum having the most, like, you know, diverse and rich landscape of non-fungible tokens is kind of why we're talking about Ethereum. It is where all the tokens lie. And now, you talked about, like, the Ready Player One.

• 33:55David Hoffman?

  Now, imagine, and we just came out of this whole, like, loot phenomenon thing, right? Where loot tokens are these tokens with eight properties in them. And now, people are making, like, websites that you can load up your loot bag with all of the eight items inside of it, and then... A character emerges on that website, holding like your scimitar and your chest plate and your boots and your robes or whatever. And so like now that these tokens actually have properties, uh, they can be bestowed upon a character on a website. And then that character can go and interact in like whatever world is created on this website. Based on the properties that they have, right? And so like, say there's this website that has this game and like, in order to get to like level two,

• 34:37David Hoffman?

  you need to be an owner of a, a scimitar, like that's what unlocks level two. And this portion of the metaverse can understand and acknowledge the existence of an object that is inside of your Ethereum address. And then change the state of the, of the world based on the objects that you have. And that is kind of the early primitive of the metaverse. And so like, if we're talking about like a Ready Player One, say something, we have like this massively successful ecosystem. And like, you can have like, ma- maybe you have a digital car and it's inside of your digital house. And like, you have your digital CryptoPunk as your avatar. So you have your CryptoPunk in your car, in your house, and all these objects are assigned to you because you own them,

• 35:19David Hoffman?

  because you own the private keys that owns the address at which they are, at which they lay. And so now, now that all of these objects exist inside the same plane of existence, which is the same shared state of truth. All of these objects can relate to each other and we can actually recreate the properties of the physical world in the digital world, which is what the metaverse is.

• 35:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, so a que- a question there, right? So what, what we're talking about is really a digital registry of objects, okay? But you can have that in two forms. So you can have that in the form of a, a centralized database registry of objects. Or you can have that in the form of something like Ethereum, which tries to preserve decentralization, censorship resistance, you know, immutability, no one can arbitrarily change the rules on you. Do you think that there is going to be a place for a centralized registry of objects?

• 36:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  That exist alongside of something like Ethereum, which is sort of a decentralized registry of, of these metaverse objects? Will they, will they kind of coexist? Are there some cases where decentralized is, is needed? Are there some other cases where centralized is needed?

• 36:39David Hoffman?

  Yeah, and this gets into like people's loosely defined ideas of what the metaverse is. When people say the metaverse, like just think of this Ready Player One thing. But like, I think what's what people are coming to understand is the metaverse is going to be, it's not going to be one central place. And so while there can be like central databases that have, you know, a central registry of objects, if that if that database is siloed from Ethereum, then we just have like the World of Warcraft database or the Fortnite database, and that's what we already have.

• 37:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  Or the US government database, or, you know, the China digital property management database, for example.

• 37:16David Hoffman?

  Totally, right. As soon as these centralized databases become more interoperable with Ethereum, and honestly, that's what rollups are for. Because what is a rollup? Like Arbitrum, I'm pretty sure this is right, has a centralized sequencer, right? And so, you know, Fortnite can spin up their fork of Arbitrum, have a centralized database of which they control. Then you can play your shooty shooty Fortnite game, come out, winning an item, and then you can take that item back to Ethereum. And that's what creates it, the metaverse. Your ability to take that item away from one part of the metaverse, and then take it to another part of the metaverse. And so there are like two domains in Ethereum right now that that I'll bring up. One is Axie Infinity, the other one is Gods Unchained.

• 38:01David Hoffman?

  The tokens in these parts of the metaverse, and the reason why they're part of the metaverse is because they're on Ethereum, do not interact with each other, but they can, value can flow from one to the other, right? So you can play your Axie Infinity games, make a bunch of money, take it over through Ethereum, through the liquidity layer of DeFi, and then take that over to Gods Unchained. And then you can, the state of the games that you played on Axie Infinity can actually allow you to buy other cards on Gods Unchained. We can take this even a step further, where like, maybe, for some whatever reason, Axie Infinity and Gods Unchained decide to collaborate, and they actually acknowledge these same tokens. And so like you have a token that works in Axie Infinity that gives your Axie character some item, some gift,

• 38:46David Hoffman?

  and then you can take that same token over to Like God's Unchained and it also impacts the way that you play that game over there. And so now this is where that shared state, that shared registry of items becomes really, really important. Because it allows any ecosystem which wants to freely and openly plug into Ethereum to answer to the same registry of objects. And so we can all acknowledge these objects that we all share together and have the metaverse acknowledge them rather than like having a central metaverse. We have the metaverse just opt into acknowledging all of these digital assets.

• 39:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  I guess blending a couple of other thoughts that we've talked about on Bankless into this a little bit. Like maybe there's two concepts that kind of come to mind, right? Because so my take on this, David, is that we will have like centralized registries of property as well as like these decentralized registers of property, settlement layers of property.

• 39:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  But the decentralized ones will essentially accrue the highest amount of economic value. Because these are the most, you know, trustless layers for us. So if you get to a situation where let's say China had a digital property management system and the US had a digital property management system, right? And those two countries, for whatever reason, no longer trusted one another, you know, broke some treaties, something bad happened, right? Then how do you arbitrate those disputes? Well, you've got this intra-national thing that's outside of the purview of the nation state called Ethereum, where you can settle higher stakes disputes.

• 40:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's more credibly neutral. Either China or the US can use the same system and be treated in a fair way because neither of those two countries own the system, right? So one concept we've talked about before is the Protocol Sync thesis, where basically the most credibly neutral, legitimate, most decentralized settlement layers, property settlement layers, kind of start to sink to the bottom and form the basis. They are the most dense. Material and other more centralized, I guess, property management systems rest on top of these things. And so then you also get, to the extent that becomes true, then you also get another

• 41:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  like concept that that comes in here, which is like the concept of economic density, right? Where one trade off for decentralization is like lower throughput, fewer transactions per second, right? Things like Ethereum are scaling, but they're never going to scale at the rate something like Amazon Web Services does in a centralized way, right? So like, it'll always be a fraction of the scalability of a centralized service. But like, what you can do when you preserve, you know, the trust, trustless nature of something like Ethereum, the trust guarantees, is you can settle very high stakes economic transactions. And so what we'll probably see

• 41:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  is for every single transaction on something like Ethereum, or even even a roll up, more and more value will be like compressed into that transaction space. So if the average transaction like today on Ethereum is, you know, $10 in Ethereum transaction, right? Like, maybe 10 years from now, maybe, you know, 30 years from now, maybe that'll be like millions of dollars, maybe billions of dollars. Maybe it'll be the entire economic activity of a roll up, which is like an entire nation state GDP rolled up into economic transactions on Ethereum. So do these two ideas fit into what you're talking about as we, as we think about like decentralization versus

• 42:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  centralization, the idea of critical sync, the idea of economic density and, you know, collapsing toward the most trustless layer?

• 42:44David Hoffman?

  Yeah, and we can see that play out in the current NFT markets right now. But I'll start with credible neutrality. And that's why Ethereum has had such a strong emphasis on credible neutrality and the crypto space as a whole. And why projects in the space that sacrifice credible neutrality don't see the adoption that they do. And I think people have in the back of their minds that like, When you sacrifice credible neutrality, you sacrifice like almost the entire metaverse, right? Because it has to be an open source software that is the metaverse is built on. Because no one wants the metaverse by Facebook, right? I'm sure it'll be like really fun and easy to use, but like it'll also be just like a complete dystopia and top-down control.

• 43:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  We have to have fair rules, right?

• 43:30David Hoffman?

  Fair rules.

• 43:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  We have to have the, I mean decentralization to me is like an anti-corruption technology, right? And Facebook is very corruptible. All you have to do is know one person, there's majority shareholder rule over Facebook and you can corrupt that entire system, right? So anti-corruption technology has to be at the root of these things.

• 43:53David Hoffman?

  Right. And that's why Bitcoiners are all like very, very strong about like, don't change the rules of the system. You can't change the rules. And if you change the rules, then then like the whole idea about Bitcoin is that it offers very, very strong foundations. Ethereum has those same principles. Like, we need to figure out the best way to make the long-term sustainable foundations. And once we do, we make those foundations rock solid. And free open, the ethos of free open source software on Ethereum is, I think, one of the reasons why the metaverse will emerge on Ethereum. A, because it adheres to the credible neutrality of the whole entire system. It's also Turing complete, which you have to have Turing completeness in order to build the metaverse. And like the combination

• 44:34David Hoffman?

  of those two things, like foundations that don't shift, permissionless building upon a shared state of truth, and inherent credible neutrality in the whole entire system, those are the ingredients for what creates a metaverse. And that goes back to what I was saying where like, the metaverse won't actually be one thing. It'll be rendered at the periphery, as in like the metaverse will look different based off what part of the metaverse you're on. Are you in the Fortnite metaverse? Are you in the Axie Infinity metaverse? Maybe you're in the Zoom chat metaverse. But so long as like the, and it can be built as as needed by like by local servers, local centralized servers, so long as the valuable things that are in the metaverse are adhering to the concept of what you were saying, economic

• 45:18David Hoffman?

  density. And where the valuable things, so long as the valuable things adhere to credible neutrality, the periphery of the metaverse can be rendered, however, it doesn't matter. Like if a GPU crashes, it doesn't like, you know, mess up your objects.

• 45:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  So let's say you have like, you know, $50,000 loot robes. I have no idea how much these will cost in the future, of course. You have no problem bringing those into a virtual universe like a World of Warcraft or something to that effect. Because you still own that object, but it's fine if the universe you visit World of Warcraft, like, everything else is centralized, so long as your, you know,

• 45:57David Hoffman?

  Items.

• 45:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Your $50,000 item does not rest on Blizzard Entertainment and their shareholders and kind of that as its property settlement layer. That's what you're saying, right?

• 46:08David Hoffman?

  That's exactly right. That's exactly right.

• 46:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  So, David, like, all of this transformation, maybe we're in the metaverse like right now or we're on our way toward the metaverse. Maybe crypto is kind of the, like, the opening shot of the metaverse and how we'll describe it in future generations. But like, everything you're talking about, how long is this going to take before we're fully inside these virtual, you know, worlds? Do you think in like five years' time, in 10 years' time, we're going to be inside of these? Or do you think it's going to be so gradual that we just like won't even notice?

• 46:46David Hoffman?

  Right. So in the article, one of the things I wrote is that there will not be a specific genesis moment or location, but rather the metaverse will slowly manifest all around us. The metaverse will be a composable universe whose objects are shared and interactive. And so like, the genesis moment of the metaverse, was that like the internet? The internet itself, was that the first moment of the metaverse? Or like, but like, when did the internet actually even come about? Was it when two computers connected? Was that the first moment of the internet? Or like, was it when like Bitcoin was, the first Bitcoin block was mined? Was that the genesis moment of the internet? Was it when the first NFT on Ethereum was minted? Like, when does it actually begin? And so like, to answer your question, the metaverse exists already.

• 47:29David Hoffman?

  No one knows when or how it started. I think we can all agree that like it's in its very, very nascent form. But like, it's becoming more and more real as more and more technology. RPGs answer to a single shared source of truth of objects, it becomes more and more real. And I think your question implies like, when is the metaverse gonna be here? I think like, everyone in their mind goes back to that Ready Player One, like, when can I put on my VR goggles?

• 47:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 47:54David Hoffman?

  Exists an alternative universe?

• 47:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I think that's what people mean when they ask that.

• 47:58David Hoffman?

  Right, so like, I mean, at that point, we have to go talk to VR experts and say like, hey, when is this gonna be ready? When is there going to be an MMO RPG inside of VR? That also answers to objects that I have on my Ethereum address? And like, I'm on Kathy Wood's side of things, in the sense that like, the future is coming way faster than people think it is. And the best thing about the metaverse is it has an inherent financial incentive to build it. Everyone, there's financial rewards to building it, and that's why this NFT mania has happened so quickly. And, and so like, the financial compensation for helping this come about is absolutely massive.

• 48:38David Hoffman?

  And there are definitely teams who are working on video games that are digitally asset-powered. And I, I think, I don't know, I'm gonna go ahead and say like, there's going to be asset-powered VR games within five years.

• 48:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  But maybe, like, maybe to your point, the whole VR thing is a distraction, right? We're all looking towards like, eventually, it's gonna be Ready Player One, and then that's the metaverse. And that's when the whole thing starts. But like, if you just measure as a proxy, the amount of time over your lifetime that you have transitioned from spending it on like analog things, real-world things, versus like digital things. I bet you'd notice just a massive increase, right? Like, the time you spent in front of a screen, for instance, is one measure. Has that gone up or down? Like, throughout your life, right? Is it to the point where like, people don't even go to the bathroom without like, having a screen like, really close to them? You know what I mean?

• 49:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like, it's just, we're always on screens, and so that's one measure. And how about like, your economic activity? What are you, what are you actually producing? Well, like, we've gone from a- A society that has actually like produced real concrete things and spending our time doing that sort of labor to like all of my output is is completely digital, right? You know, we talk about communication, how that's transitioned. I mean, when's the last time you wrote a letter to somebody? Right? Like, but all of our communication, I communicate more than I ever have.

• 50:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  And to more people than I ever have, but like the proportion of that that's turned digital, it's like 99% now.

• 50:21David Hoffman?

  What about, what about your financial portfolio? Is that nation state bound or how much of that is non nation state bound and actually on Ethereum instead?

• 50:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, that's another flippant, right? And it's like, um, nation state bound versus like not nation state bound is is one dimension, but like if we just talk about digital. Right? Man, it's already digitized, right? I, I just like, I keep a $20 bill on me in, in like in my pocket, just in case somebody needs cash for something. Right? But like every once in a while, but, um, actual like physical dollars fiat currency. I almost never use anymore and I haven't for a long time, right? So like this is the trajectory. Everything is becoming more and more digital. And so we probably won't even notice as we enter the metaverse. There are definitely these milestones, right?

• 51:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like birth of the internet, birth of digital scarcity and crypto, just like creation of like the first NFTs and tokens. But, uh, you know, maybe the mobile phone is is definitely another, you know, piece of that puzzle, but like, I don't know if we'll really notice as we, as we enter and as we transition. Unless we look across like decades and kind of measure how we're spending our time and our, where our outputs are going.

• 51:34David Hoffman?

  Well, the probably the thing that we're going to notice the most is that like our kids are way more into the metaverse than we are. It's like they, they found corners of the metaverse. We didn't even know existed and like, that's kind of when we'll really know. It's like, oh yeah, it's for sure here.

• 51:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, absolutely, for sure. Well, David, we've got some more things to cover. I want to talk to you a bit more about identity and how identity can be a metaverse object. And also talk a bit more about items. Maybe we'll hit on the loot phenomenon. And we got to end by talking about Ethereum, what this means for Ethereum and ETH as an asset. As I said at the outset, the metaverse is another way of looking at what Ethereum is actually going to accomplish, what it's going to do in the world. So we'll link that in. Guys, before we do, we need to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible.

• 52:20David Hoffman?

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• 53:01David Hoffman?

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• 53:45David Hoffman?

  No human counterparties or centralized intermediaries, just autonomous code on Ethereum. Input the token you want to sell and receive the token you want to buy. Something brand new in Ethereum. The Uniswap ecosystem is the Uniswap Grants Program is now accepting applications for grants. We have been saying this for a while and we'll say it again. DAOs have money and they are in need of labor. If you think that you have something to contribute to the Uniswap DAO, apply for a grant to Uniswap. Just look at the size of the Uniswap Treasury. It's almost $3 billion. This mountain of capital is looking for labor. Do you have something of value to contribute to the Uniswap DAO? No matter how big or small your idea is, you can apply for

• 54:27David Hoffman?

  a UNI grant at unigrants.org and help steer Uniswap in the direction that you think it should go. That's exactly what we did to get Uniswap to be a sponsor for Bankless and you can do the same for your project. Thank you, Uniswap, for sponsoring Bankless.

• 54:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, guys, we are back. David, man, we're talking all about the metaverse, how it emerges, what it's going to look like, and talking about how we would transition into the metaverse. I think one thing, if you watch Ready Player One or something like this, you see this concept of an avatar where an individual might be a certain way in their physical life, but they actually get to select their own identity in the metaverse and be sort of a different character, a different person. I think this concept of identity in the metaverse has some implications. So what are your thoughts on this? And what did you write about it? Is this one of the objects that need to manifest and have permanence as an individual's identity?

• 55:25David Hoffman?

  Yeah, and I think this is actually useful if we back up and go back to the nation-state concept of identity, just to set this stage once again. If you pull out your ID on your like nation-state driver's license or ID card, like it has your physical properties on it because your physical properties are really, really good for identifying who you are. So like your skin

• 55:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like age, height, weight.

• 55:46David Hoffman?

  Age, height, weight, eye color, skin color, like gender. And then, so this is the, like, this is just your physical form, right? These are, and you can't change these things. And that's why, like, it's a representation of your actual DNA. Ethereum doesn't know, nor does it care about any of these things. It doesn't care about the physical manifestation of your body. It just cares that you are an actual individual. And so after that, you can kind of become anything on Ethereum, right? You can actually lose connection with your physical form and choose to manifest yourself on, in the metaverse however way you see fit. And this actually kind of goes into the same kind of concept of like mindfulness meditation.

• 56:28David Hoffman?

  Mindfulness meditation is about learning to discover the entity inside of the body, inside of the mind, that's actually separate from the body itself. So when you go and look in the mirror, you see your reflection, but that's not actually you. That's just your body. You are something else. And on Ethereum, it doesn't care about your body. It only cares about you. And so with Ethereum, and then like this definitely gets started with like the NFT avatar movement, but I definitely think it gets more rich and diverse from there. You can pick a representation of yourself that you actually feel on the inside. And so like when I was perusing for my CryptoPunks, I was scrolling through properties of CryptoPunks that I resonate with, right?

• 57:13David Hoffman?

  I didn't pick the CryptoPunk that smokes cigarettes because I don't smoke cigarettes. I picked the CryptoPunk with a hat because I thought it looked cool. I actually don't even wear hats. I just thought the hat looked cool. So I guess my metaverse version of myself does wear a hat. And it can get even crazier than that. Like you don't have to actually carry any of the properties of your body into the metaverse. It can be a complete blank slate of identity on Ethereum. And you can use these NFTs, these ERC 721s as representations of who you are. And it also importantly, doesn't actually have to be a profile picture NFT. Like it doesn't have to be a Penguin. It doesn't have to be a CryptoPunk. All identity on Ethereum is?

• 57:53David Hoffman?

  Is specifically ERC 721s located inside of a specific Ethereum address. That's all identity is, even if it's just Fidenzas or like art blocks, one of ones. Any sort of NFT distinct from ERC 20 tokens, right? Because like if I have a wallet with like MKR, ETH and uni tokens in it. There's like 10,000 other wallets out there that have that same permutations of ERC 20 tokens. But when it comes to ERC 721s, that's how you actually make a unique address on Ethereum by having unique tokens represented inside of that unique address. And so by curating a collection of ERC 721s, which represents your taste, because these

• 58:37David Hoffman?

  things are unique and therefore culturally significant, you can actually dictate your taste out to the rest of the world. And so it's kind of like a black box of like, we don't know who the person is, but we can see their taste, their digital representation of their unique assets in their Ethereum wallet. And maybe one of them is a profile picture NFT, but like really according to Ethereum, there is no difference between a profile picture NFT and like an art block. They're just ERC 721s. It's when humans view these things that actually bestows like an identity layer on these things. All right, so this Ethereum address has like three Fidenzas and an Ether Rock. They don't own any profile picture NFTs, but they're clearly somebody that really likes high status NFTs.

• 59:21David Hoffman?

  This person only has like a single pudgy penguin. That's who they are. And so these entities, we can, while they can't actually, like the spirit of a human can't actually be on the blockchain, like it can instead choose ERC 721s to actually manifest itself on the blockchain.

• 59:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's so interesting, right? Because like this idea of avatar is far older than Ethereum, right? Like any chat room you enter, like even on Twitter, you can create an avatar based on any JPEG, any image that you can find and it's all free. But what's interesting about what you're saying, this idea of object permanence is of course like NFTs aren't. Free. They are unique and they have some economic value associated with them. And you mentioned the term signaling, right? And because of that tie to economic value that's associated with them,

• 1:00:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  because of this like ability to select and trade and because these avatars actually cost something, they send a completely different social signal than a free piece of clip art that you might find somewhere on the internet and that anybody can replicate. And that's not verified in the Ethereum registry. And I almost wonder if it's like these kind of like social signaling dynamics that are key to instantiating the metaverse as sort of a more organic type of structure? And why we haven't, why crypto is going to foster its emergence? You remember that conversation we had about memetic desire, right?

• 1:01:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like you can't really get mimesis, memetic desire, the desire to copy another human being for a free piece of clip art that doesn't have any digital scarcity. But you can when you see something like a CryptoPunk and you're like, wow, that's a flash in that CryptoPunk. That like means something. And so I wonder if the ERC 721 helps to instantiate these sort of like basic human like needs and desires and social signal and creates like the status hierarchy, I guess, that we have in the real world and we see without even knowing it. And it replicates that into the digital. Because that's what I've been thinking of as you're talking about.

• 1:01:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like, what's the difference between an avatar that you have to pay for that's registered to Ethereum? And like a random piece of like clip art? I mean, you could be a, you know, I don't know, a sausage if you want in your avatar for free. Or like a peanut, human peanut or something. You could be a frog. You'd be whatever you want, not have to pay it. What's the significance of the ERC 721?

• 1:02:07David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I think really the answer is that, and you touched on a really important point where like you have to actually pay for these things. And when you pay for something, you are signaling to the rest of the world that you value that. And when someone takes a peek into your wallet and they see all these 721s, they are getting a glimpse of what you value. And so what is your identity other than what you value? What we value kind of impacts who we are. And so like, it's a very pure form of like, okay, this individual really values these things, these NFTs. And these NFTs have these properties. Maybe once a CryptoPunk, maybe an NFT is like a credit for like donating towards some charity or some public goods. And that is indicating who you are.

• 1:02:51David Hoffman?

  So going back to like removing like the meat space atoms and DNA around a soul. When you, a soul, a spirit like chooses NFTs to represent them, they are choosing to communicate who and what they value to the Ethereum community, to the Ethereum blockchain. And so you take a peek at their NFT portfolio, you're taking a peek into their values, what they choose to value. And I think there's also something to say about just like how like the color of your skin or like your background, the country you came from. So much of society unfortunately bestows values upon accidental properties like the color of your skin. That that does not work in the world, in the metaverse, right?

• 1:03:36David Hoffman?

  Like just because like white people have like an accidental positive bias. Like that actually doesn't translate over to the metaverse because that doesn't work. You don't have a white colored skin Ethereum address. And so we are actually able to rid, get rid of our biases that aren't actually communicating anything of value. And instead we get to and bestow our Ethereum address with things that we actually value that actually do communicate to the world what we value.

• 1:04:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, that's interesting. And that's a, that's definitely a very hopeful explanation. I do also wonder if we'll like just create new biases in the process, right? Maybe some of these biases will be based on like wealth and capital. And so, wow, you have a CryptoPunk? What does this mean about this person as an individual? Definitely, it means that they're wealthier than the average individual, for sure. But yeah, that's, I guess it's super emergent. I guess maybe what's interesting about it, too, is we just found a way to replicate the social signaling that we have in the real world, now in the metaverse and in the digital world. We haven't had the ability to do that before. And I think that is, that is definitely a meaningful milestone in humanity's transition

• 1:04:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  from the analog world to the metaverse, for sure. Let's talk about this. Oh, you want to say something on that?

• 1:04:55David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so there's also the topic of just like, you can actually have more than one identity. You can spin up multiple Ethereum addresses and like each have them represent different sides of yourself, which is something that you can't do in the physical world, like you can't put on a new face. And like, I'm reminded of our podcast with the Josh Rosenthal about the crypto renaissance, where like, in the Renaissance, we had, pre-Renaissance, we had these like, planer 2D profile versions of art. And then after the Renaissance, we had these 3D photorealistic versions of art. And I kind of think there's going to be a similar paradigm shift with identity. Because not only can we choose our identity by choosing what represents us, but we can choose what represents us at different times.

• 1:05:39David Hoffman?

  So like, I've gone back and forth between my CryptoPunk avatar and my Pudgy Penguin avatar and my Cool Cat avatar, just how I feel, like, what is my mood today? And I can like, create a digital identity for myself that is more aligned with my current state of mood, or context of what I want to be in, right? And so like, maybe I choose one Ethereum wallet, which has no association with another Ethereum wallet, to represent me for my professional business on goings. And like, the suit and tie, David. Or I'm like, in video game mode, and I want my CryptoPunk on. And so I'll choose that identity. And so like, having a fluid identity where we actually aren't fixed into one specific version of ourselves, I think is going to like, be a zero to one moment in the world of actual like, identity.

• 1:06:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  And back to Ethereum's role in all of this, it's to serialize all of these objects, right? So you're talking about loot earlier, and it's serializing all of the items and objects. But it's also going to serialize all of the identities as well, including if an individual has kind of multiple identities that they want to portray, in addition to serializing all of the assets. So maybe we get to kind of the final discussion point here, David, which is how Ethereum fits into the mix here as a system. And you called it the economic foundation for the metaverse. You said a metaverse requires at least three things. Number one, an asset registry. Number two, a layer of financial applications, a banking layer.

• 1:07:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  And number three, an economic engine. And you say that's what Ethereum is. It's a registry of tokens. It's a composition of DeFi applications. It's a native money, an economic system. And when you compose it together, it becomes essentially the economic foundation of the metaverse. Can you get into that in a bit more? Like, how important is Ethereum to this whole emergence of the metaverse? Is it the core thing? Is this what's going to cause it?

• 1:07:41David Hoffman?

  I think so. With the current state of the metaverse and Ethereum, going back to like what I was talking about with like, we have the Axie Infinity realm of the metaverse, and we have the Gods Unchained realm of the metaverse. These are disparate, discrete, separated parts of the metaverse, but what connects them is their underlying association to Ethereum. So like I said, you can go and do a bunch of gaming in Axie Infinity, make a bunch of money, pull it out, and take it over to Gods Unchained. But when I say take it over to Gods Unchained, like, you got to sell your Axie, like, money, your Smooth Love potions or your Axies, and you sell them using DeFi, DeFi applications,

• 1:08:22David Hoffman?

  using the financial banking layer, and then you can translate that value into Gods Unchained tokens, Gods Unchained cards. And so it's this underlying financial layer, and no wonder Why DeFi came first in the progress of Ethereum before NFTs is because you have to build objects on top of financial applications, because that's how we value the objects. And so DeFi is like this early financial primitive, this financial backbone, that allows the metaverse to be built on top of it. And so more and more realms of the metaverse will just get appended onto Ethereum, because Ethereum is a permissionless, open source piece of software. And so different areas of the metaverse will be built. And before we figure out how to make assets seamless in all of them,

• 1:09:06David Hoffman?

  they will be made seamless by their integrations into DeFi. So DeFi will be the coupler, the initial coupler behind all of these separate parts of the universe, where like maybe the tokens aren't interoperable, but the value is. And so labor can actually get translated from one part of the metaverse to another using DeFi. And of course, that is facilitated by Ethereum's economic engine, proof of stake, and also EIP1559. And that supports the financialization of so many different things and the tokens in the financial layer. And then that is what then creates the ability to have a metaverse on top of those things. And so ultimately, everything collapses down deeper and deeper towards,

• 1:09:49David Hoffman?

  again, the protocol stack, got the NFTs and the metaverse on the top, got the DeFi in the middle, you got the Ethereum L1 at the bottom. And that's why Ethereum has always been so focused on security, security, security. Like, we are going to secure the whole entire metaverse. And so no, like, we can't have proof of work, we can't have wasteful electricity spending. It has to be the most secure consensus protocol possible, because think of how incredibly valuable the metaverse is going to become. We have to optimize for security. And that is why so many of the developers of the Ethereum protocol, when they are working, they are working to make the strongest economic foundations for the metaverse possible. And that has been like the Ethereum R and D effort over the last like six years.

• 1:10:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  I really feel like Ethereum as an economic engine for the metaverse is going to be a narrative that takes hold, not this year, maybe not next year, but definitely in the years to come. We're a bit early on some of the other Ethereum narratives, like ETH is money, DeFi, all of these things. I really do feel like the metaverse is going to be sort of the next unfolding. People recognize that this is the property rights and settlement layer and economic engine of the metaverse that we're creating here. And God, how much value is going to be poured into the metaverse in the coming years? So I guess listeners, like, prepare yourselves. One other thing, as we talk about this, David, this kind of comes full circle as well to our concept of the nation state. Remember, we established that

• 1:11:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  the nation state earlier is an entity that likes to serialize things, like serialize objects and individuals and people and identities and all of these things in order to collect taxes, in order to grow. What's interesting here is I see a similar dynamic with Ethereum. So it's serializing all of these things in order to collect taxes, in order to grow. Now, we don't often call gas fees taxes, but we have on Bankless before. In fact, that's kind of an interesting model to think of. All of the network fees, all the transaction fees you pay for on a chain on Ethereum are actually taxes. These are taxes on the

• 1:11:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  objects themselves. And these are, I guess, utility taxes, excise taxes. So like, when you spend something, when you do a transaction, you have to like pay the toll. So it's kind of a consumption-based tax. But also with EIP 1559, some of this transaction fee gets burnt and gets sent to who? Anybody, effectively, that owns ETH in the form of reverse dilution. It's almost like sort of a dividend, if you will, only it's kind of burnt to any ETH holder. Can you talk about that a little bit? Do you see this relationship between

• 1:12:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  the nation state and taxes and Ethereum and taxes in how it charges for its gas fees?

• 1:12:45David Hoffman?

  Yeah, totally. And when EIP 1559 came out and I wrote that article, "The Final Puzzle Piece of Ethereum's Monetary Policy", that is exactly how we illustrated it, is that these are how Ethereum collects taxes. All economies need to have some sort of value capture mechanism in order to secure itself. It just so happens that nation-states don't have a stop for that. And so nation-states are like, "Oh, we need to collect taxes so we can fund the military, but we can collect more, and then after that, we can collect even more, and after that, we can collect even more."

• 1:13:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, and by the way, we've got these other hidden taxes called inflation, like, we could just increase the supply and not even tell you about the tax.

• 1:13:25David Hoffman?

  Right, totally. Ethereum, on the other hand, it taxes you based off of your consumption of a public good. It is a pay-per-use. It doesn't tax you if you're not using it. And so Ethereum has a public good, it's called BlockSpace. We can't have too much of it, otherwise it wouldn't be decentralized. And in order to use this BlockSpace, you must pay the going rate as determined by the market, which is the same rate that everyone else is paying at that one moment. But it's inherently fair, incredibly neutral, because you aren't paying, you are, by definition, paying your fair share. And so, in my mind, it's a very elegant mechanism. You also talked about what happens when all of these objects in the metaverse...

• 1:14:08David Hoffman?

  Objects is actually, I have very limiting coding knowledge, but I do know that "objects" is a code-relevant term, that is a technical term in the world of code. When you, like, I heard the coder say, like, "Grab..."

• 1:14:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  Something that has state, basically.

• 1:14:20David Hoffman?

  Right, something that has state. Like, you grab an object. On Ethereum, now that we have all these objects, and like we said, the metaverse is a shared state of objects, and importantly, that shared state allows objects to collide and interact, right? So like, my armor also has properties that might help out my sword in World of Warcraft, and these objects interact. When objects, and like, objects on Ethereum, they have like, contract calls. You can call an object, and that means that two objects are just colliding. And when the metaverse has tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, hundreds of millions, hundreds of billions of objects... Floating around in the metaverse, A, that each one has its own serial number because each one had to be like manifested in Ethereum by a transaction.

• 1:15:03David Hoffman?

  But now every time an object collides with another object, that is also another transaction on Ethereum. It's likely going to be on a rollup. That's what rollups are for. But like all of this economic activity, this vibrancy of objects interacting with objects, interacting with objects, creates an economic engine. It is the heat of the economy. And then EIP 1559 captures a portion of that heat to recycle it into the Ethereum economy to make sure it's secure, make sure it's going, make sure the engine is fluid. And that is the model of the metaverse. And that is, in my mind, really, really bullish.

• 1:15:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's really bullish. Look, it's so cool. I mean, so like, I guess maybe the last piece to talk about before we get to sort of, you know, summing this up and concluding this is we've talked about Ethereum as sort of the, you know, economic engine for the metaverse. And we've always differentiated Ethereum as a network from Ether as an asset, Ether as a money that is, you know, an asset within that system, within that, within that network. And so why not talk about the ramifications of ETH? At the outset, we talked about the different narratives of ETH over the years. Starts as ICO money, then it becomes like DeFi money.

• 1:16:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  More recently, it's been NFT money, you know, reserve currency for NFTs. And now maybe this, this new narrative moving forward, this new use case is for ETH to become metaverse money. What's so interesting about Ethereum as a digital nation as opposed to like real nation states is all of the taxes that it collects, there's no nation state on earth that actually like burns a portion of the tax revenue and returns it to citizens in the form of reduced supply, right? But with a crypto economic system where you don't have to pay for like an expensive military and massive bureaucracy and people in offices and buildings and all of these things.

• 1:17:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  You actually can operate much more efficiently. And so with EIP 1559, of course, whenever any of that economic activity happens, the taxes are collected and a huge portion of those taxes are actually burnt and passed back to the citizens or the, I guess, one form of citizens. Anyone who owns ETH is passed back.

• 1:17:24David Hoffman?

  Well, almost everyone must own ETH, right? In order to exist in the Metaverse, you have to do anything. You have to own a little bit of ETH at the very least.

• 1:17:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  And this is kind of the, I guess, the bull case back to Ether as an asset. I want to ask you about this. So is there the possibility that ETH as an asset becomes kind of the trifecta money for the Metaverse? A medium of exchange, a store of value and a unit of account and becomes sort of a reserve asset for the Metaverse? What's your take there and what would that mean for ETH as an asset in the future?

• 1:17:58David Hoffman?

  Yeah, whether or not it's a medium of exchange, I think is up for debate. I think Ether as an asset is fundamentally going to be a very low velocity token. I do think there's going to be higher velocity tokens on top of Ether that use Ether as collateral. RAI comes to mind if we want to talk about like non-state level currencies, but even RAI actually is kind of collateral optimized. But other than that, like Ether is going to be like your collateral in applications inside of the Metaverse, inside of games. It's going to be how you actually engage with games. When there are applications on rollups that don't require ETH, that you do a bunch of economic activity, well, by proxy,

• 1:18:42David Hoffman?

  that rollup is using Ether for you every time it makes a transaction to the L1. And we've been talking about this lately ever since we had our interview with Arbitrum. It's like, we kind of think that rollups are going to be the biggest ETH burners, right? So all of these rollups are going to have a ton of economic activity on top of them and then they're going to collapse them down to a single transaction and then put that transaction on the Ethereum main chain. And that transaction will be a big bundle of transactions and that will burn a lot of ETH. And so like, it's just, Ether has like brute forced itself into a massive bullishness by utility. And like when Ether can do anything in the Metaverse by nature of what it is, having so much in utility means it can do anything. It can be a medium of exchange if you want it to.

• 1:19:27David Hoffman?

  It can be your collateral in your Metaverse if you want it to. It can do anything.

• 1:19:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  The other thing as well is if the metaverse does emerge in the way that we've been talking about today, right, you have to ask yourself, what is going to be the reserve money, the reserve currency for the metaverse? And I think it's pretty safe to say it's not going to be a fiat currency.

• 1:19:50David Hoffman?

  Oh, 100%.

• 1:19:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's not going to be US dollars. It's not going to be, you know, the digital RMB. It's not going to be the yen. It's not going to be the euro, right? That is a foreign currency inside of the metaverse, whereas

• 1:20:05David Hoffman?

  Foreign invader.

• 1:20:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right. Ether is a native currency of the metaverse and has a specific set of properties and rights and has higher status, right? So like, if you believe in the metaverse thesis and that this is essentially how humanity is going to evolve over the next, you know, decades to come into this, into this digital age, then you have to ask, what currency, what store of value asset is the leading candidate to become the reserve asset of this space, right? In any list that doesn't have ether at like number one, first place, from a probability

• 1:20:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  perspective, other things could happen, other, you know, currencies could emerge. This could play out in kind of a different way that we don't foresee. But it seems so clear to me that ether is like the number one most probable asset to to take that, to take that rule and to be that reserve currency. Ain't going to be fiat. Unlikely it's going to be something like Bitcoin. Bitcoin does not have the surface area to host or support a metaverse. And all of the ETH killers that I've seen to date, David, have made trade offs that make them much more centralized and less likely to become the settlement layer for the metaverse. So kind of full circle here a little bit on Bankless where, you know, from the outset,

• 1:21:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  we've been looking at different lenses to view some of these crypto assets. We've long recognized that Bitcoin and Ether are some of the most important, but I think this Lens that Ether is going to be the reserve currency of the Metaverse is is something new. And I think could give a could give this whole thing even more legs, right? Like 10K, 20K price of ETH. You know, that ain't nothing, right? Compared to what this could become and what this could be.

• 1:22:04David Hoffman?

  Right. During the 2020 NFT phenomenon, during like the the fall, winter, there's that meme that came out where like art is priced in ETH. And I think that was actually early premonitions of what came out of the second NFT phenomenon, which is ETH is Metaverse money. The fact that when people when people value like CryptoPunks or art blocks, they don't price them in dollars, they price them in ETH. And I think that's just indicative as like the rest of the Metaverse will be priced in ETH.

• 1:22:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, sum this up for us, David. I think your article ends with this this interesting kind of table. Maybe maybe it's a meme, but maybe you can describe this for the podcast listeners. And this looks kind of simple, looks kind of cute, maybe dumb. But you also say that there's a lot of nuance here. So why don't you describe what we're looking at and talk about this?

• 1:22:55David Hoffman?

  Yeah, it starts off, it definitely is a meme, but like I actually think it's really, really profound. And like we always say on Bank, this memes are representations of the truth. And so the the title of this chart is Technology Terms Used in Startup Descriptions and Tech Articles. And it has two columns. It's like a pre-post, it's like 2021, 2020 versus 2021. And so in 2020, we had multiplayer games. But now in 2021, we call it the Metaverse. In 2020, we had virtual reality experience. In 2021, well, it's just called the Metaverse. 2020, augmented reality filter, Metaverse. 5G cloud connection, AR cloud, digital avatar, digital event, Metaverse, Metaverse, Metaverse, Metaverse. It's all the Metaverse. And so like when I talked about like the Metaverse will be rendered at the periphery,

• 1:23:39David Hoffman?

  it's because all of these things are different like representations of the Metaverse on in their own domain, like a multiplayer game. Well, if you hook it into Ethereum, now it's the Metaverse. Virtual reality, if you hook it into Ethereum, now it's the Metaverse. Like a 5G connection on your phone, well, there's assets on there. Now it's now it's part of the metaverse. And so while this was a facetious meme of just like people trying to hype up their product by saying, "Oh, we're a metaverse company." They're right, like they are a metaverse company. All they have to do is integrate with a digital shared state of global assets. And right now that's Ethereum.

• 1:24:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, absolutely. That's a good way to end it. So what are the what are the takeaways here for people? I guess if I'm talking, you know, thinking of the top of my head, one of the big takeaways is, you know, don't miss this, right? Like the metaverse is here, the metaverse is coming. If you believe this, then you should be on a quest to collect all the metaverse money you can, buy and hold, right? That would only make sense to go invest in the crypto assets that you think could be reserve currencies of this new metaverse economy. You definitely want to understand how the metaverse financial system works. So you can operate in it in the future, maybe teach your kids because they're going to be brought up in this metaverse as well. So you want to understand DeFi.

• 1:24:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  You probably want to join the metaverse economy in some meaningful way. Maybe work for a metaverse native entity like a DAO. And you probably want to immerse yourself in metaverse culture just to figure out what that's all about. Maybe invest in metaverse culture where you can because culture is humanity and if humanity is transitioning into the metaverse, that's where our culture is going to reside as well. In fact, all of this seems like advice that Josh Rosenthal told us at the end of the Crypto Renaissance episode where we talked about humanity transitioning into this new crypto Renaissance. Maybe another word for that is transitioning into the metaverse. These are some of my takeaways. Do you have any others to add?

• 1:25:42David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I happen to be in Denver for the MCon conference, the Metacartel conference, and there's also a lot of MetaFactory people here as well. And Ryan, I have to say, I thought that you and I were at the top of the game when it comes to understanding the Metaverse. I think we're about a year behind some of the people that I'm talking to at this conference right now. The Metacartel and MetaFactory teams, those DAOs, which are DAOs by the way, they know what's up. And some of the art and stuff going on here is really, really blowing my mind. And the big takeaway here is that who do you think is going to build the Metaverse? Is it going to be the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world, the Zuckverse?

• 1:26:22David Hoffman?

  Or is it going to be DAOs? I think a significant part of the richness side of the Metaverse is going to be built by DAOs, because they are internet-native organizations. They are Metaverse organizations. And so the Metaverse, I think, is going to be built by these organizations. And so if you want a part of these things, it's another call to action to find a DAO that's building the Metaverse and join that effort as well. And then also in my article, I leave a few notes that quickly came to mind as I was trying to tie this off. And I said, "I can only leave you with the same lessons we have learned over and over again throughout crypto. Fair launches work." That's one. And so the Metaverse needs to be built, and it needs to be built with credible neutrality foundations, credibly neutral foundations,

• 1:27:06David Hoffman?

  and that's what fair launches are. So different pockets of the Metaverse are just going to explode into existence via fair launches. I think that's a decent prediction to make. The other one is that leaders matter. This is just a fundamental truth. We need leadership. And so when we talk about fair launches and aping into fair launches, we also need leaders to take the mantle and actually guide us into the Metaverse. So there's an action item there. But ultimately, and this is the last one, we are going to ape into everything until we figure it out. And so the Metaverse is going to be built no matter what. It's just a matter of how efficiently and quickly can we do it.

• 1:27:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  We only see it like dimly through a mirror right now. So I don't know, 90% of the things we say in this episode might not turn out to be true. Have like no idea, but it's

• 1:27:55David Hoffman?

  Hey, previous Bankless episodes hold up pretty damn well, Ryan.

• 1:27:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  They've held up pretty well so far, I've got to say. But we also, I anticipate, I guess another way to say that is like, I anticipate 10,000 things that we never would have predicted to come about. I think broad strokes, this is kind of a very broad thesis that the metaverse is coming, you should get involved and that Ethereum will be the center of this thing, but there'll be so many other things that we're not able to predict, that you just have to keep your eyes peeled. And we will, of course, try to update you on them as they arise. That's what Bankless is for. Guys, thank you so much for listening to today's episode. Some action items for you. Number one is read the article we've been referencing this entire episode. That is, "The Metaverse Emerges." We'll include a link in the show notes.

• 1:28:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  Number two, some previous podcasts that we've referenced. Of course, "Welcome to Bankless," it's kind of a canonical Bankless introduction that you should listen to if you already haven't. Also, "A Bankless Nation," where we talk about crypto as a nation-state and the Protocol Sync thesis. We'll include links to those in the show notes. Also, we never say this, but another way to level up on the metaverse is to become a Bankless Premium Member. We never talk about the the perks of being a Premium Member on Bankless, but now's maybe an opportunity to do that. A Bankless Premium Member gets a number of things, including a full market opportunity report, what's going on in crypto every single Monday.

• 1:29:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  We publish that on the newsletter. Bankless Premium Member also gets an Inner Circle Discord chat. This is a group in Discord of Bankless sojourners that meet and talk about everything that's going on in crypto. It's fundamental for the journey. Also includes a debrief where after every single Monday episode, David and I give our thoughts on the Bankless Premium RSS feed. So you get a premium podcast feed with it. Also included is Alpha Alerts, where if there's a big Opportunity in crypto, we try to publish that to you so you know about it first. And a 2021 Bankless Badge NFT that could be a valuable property in the metaverse as well in the future.

• 1:30:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  So if you're interested in any of those things, we will include a link so that you can become a Bankless Premium member as well. Guys, that's been everything. Of course, none of this was financial advice. ETH is risky, DeFi is risky, so is the metaverse. You could definitely lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the Bankless journey. Thanks a lot.

• 1:30:30David Hoffman?

  Hey, we hope you enjoyed the video. If you did, head over to Bankless HQ right now to develop your crypto investing skills and learn how to free yourself from banks and gain your financial independence. We recommend joining our daily newsletter, podcast, and community as a Bankless Premium subscriber to get the most out of your Bankless experience. You'll get access to our market analysis, our alpha leaks, and exclusive content, and even the Bankless token for airdrops, raffles, and unlocks. If you're interested in crypto, the Bankless community is where you want to be. Click the link in the description to become a Bankless Premium subscriber today. Also, don't forget to subscribe to the channel for in-depth interviews with industry leaders,

• 1:31:11David Hoffman?

  Ask Me Anythings, and weekly rollups where we summarize the week in crypto and other fantastic content. Thanks everyone for watching and being on the journey as we build out the Bankless nation.