SotN #51: Pioneering Crypto Culture, w/ NEW BANKLESS HOST
22 Jun 2021 · 58:36
Bankless DAO design guild lead Sinjun Wesson joins the show to unveil a cypherpunk-inspired merchandise line and preview an incoming new cohost for the program. The conversation covers crypto culture, the community-run Bankless DAO's creative work, and how governance decisions get made inside a decentralized media collective.
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welcome bankless nation to a very unique episode of state of the nation i am joined by my buddy michael wong while ryan sean adams takes a very well deserved vacation so we got chief culturist over at bankless llc michael wong taking the shoes of ryan while he is taking that well-deserved vacation we are happy you are joining us uh we are joined by you michael wong and again we are very happy that the bankless nation is once again watching the state of the nation michael wong how are you doing today what's up banquets nation i'm doing good um this is my first time using a mic like this so i'm gonna try not to talk like this into it but uh nice to be here thanks for having me if this is your first state of the nation
we are coming at you live on the youtube every tuesday at 11 a.m pst 2 p.m est and then it goes out on the podcast wednesday morning we are talking about what's going on in the world of crypto talking about what's going on in the news cycle and what's going on in current events except this week is a little bit different because we have two surprise announcements one of them is why michael wong is here in the first place and another announcement out of a designer from the bankless dao and so our announcement with michael wong here is going to come in the second half of the show in the first half of the show we're going to talk about how bankless dow is propagating cryptoculture with apparel uh and really changing what it means to uh participate
and proliferate cryptoculture michael wong what do you uh tease the first half of the show for us a little bit listen guys um this dude's engine we got on here for you uh you've never met someone like this before by the way his name is sinjin if you're in the dao you know the boy i'm about to bring on here um and you guys are about to hear from the horse's mouth what culture sounds like and going to look like uh in crypto moving forward we're all part of it right if you're listening to this to your part of making crypto happen or excuse me cryptoculture happen um we're just putting it into threads and and pixels and stuff you know what i'm saying so i'm excited to show you guys who shinjin is and his background um this is how we bridge the real world with our crypto world
right until until they're all one cope aesthetic world so yeah excited to bring shenzhen on excited to talk about what's going on in the second half as well yeah the second half of the show i think is going to uh really change the game with regards to a crypto content but i won't tease it too much here uh before we get into it we want to let you know about ledger has recently integrated a paraswap it through the ledger live app and so ledger is continuously uh equipping the bankless nation with financial tools it it kind of feels like a tesla where where tesla's they they uh get software updates and the car actually gets better well ledger's the ledger hardware wallet allows you to be self-sovereign about your money and finance allows you to live a banquet
bankless life and now has the power of paraswap which is a defy aggregator at its at your fingertips and so not only do you keep custody of your money but you also get the best rates in d5 so if you don't know about paraswap it's a dexter aggregator that allows you to exchange all the ethereum native tokens at the best rates and compares rates across all decentralized exchanges your private keys never leave your hands when you exchange your crypto assets self-sovereign financial assets with defy power tools at your fingertips check it out if you have not used the ledger live app before it is continuously becoming more and more powerful as defy becomes more and more powerful uh michael since i am in
ryan's shoes and you're in my shoes i'm going to ask you a question my old apartment if your watchers hadn't had include into that yet uh i'm going to ask you the question that ryan asks me every single episode michael wong what is the state of the nation today sir oh guys we are we are coping right now i'm just joking the state of the nation is propagating folks the state of the nation is propagating it's spreading if you can feel the culture right now it is changing under our feet in the best ways people are asking you about crypto your uber driver is talking about crypto um and they're excited about it too they're not they're not as destitute as some of
us so it's propagating guys and we're going to talk to you about the different ways we're helping make it propagate and permeate into this world all right guys we are going to get right into what is coming out of xinjian and bankless dao just after we get to some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible balancer is defy's most powerful automated market maker typical amms just have two tokens inside of one liquidity pool which can lead to fractured liquidity across the many pairs in devi with balancer you can access the full power of multiple tokens inside of one single amm which unlocks an entirely new playing field of possibility this makes balancer an awesome building block for so many different use cases balancer pools can make asset indexes but instead of paying fees to portfolio managers balancer lets you collect fees from
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tokens and eth i'll choose a variable interest rate because it's a lower rate than the stable interest rate option but i could choose the stable interest rate option if i wanted to lock that interest rate in permanently one of ave's v2 features is the ability to swap collateral without having to withdraw your assets trade them on unit swap and then deposit them back into ave ave does all of this for you all in one seamless transaction so you don't have to repay loans in order to change the collateral you have backing them check out the power of ave at ave dot com that's aave dot com all right bank list nation we are back with michael wong and sinjin who we are going to get to in a second just for those who are a little bit confused in
the youtube chats no ryan sean adams did not go anywhere he is taking a well-deserved week off uh for what is worth oh yeah doing family stuff for what it's worth the bankless world has never missed a podcast or state of the nation and so ryan gets to go on vacation and we do not miss in the world of bank list and so the show must go on uh michael wong is filling in for ryan's in for this week but next week ryan will be right back at it he's not going anywhere um but also michael wong isn't going anywhere either and so we will that is for the second half of the show but for the first half of the show we have shinjin here um michael wong t up sinjin uh who who is this guy you know what i was wondering the same
thing about two months ago and if it looks like we got him from the forest is and it's not it's not it's not it's not a coincidence sinjin um awesome name mr sinjin wesson we are so grateful to have him here and working for the dao um this he was uh connected to david and i before the dow existed and i'm gonna let him give his own uh background here for a moment but the things that this gentleman can do and the way he thinks totally aligns with i think the way you listener are thinking about how we need to be perpetuating cryptoculture beyond crypto twitter beyond crypto youtube um sinjin is the guy david knew it as soon as he saw his application in the email he's like we got to get this guy on video now
we're giving you guys the video of xinjin i'm happy to have you here sinjin and off at discord i'm happy to be chatting with you today man thank you so much for that intro and and all the love and thank you for having me on the show it's been a pleasure working with you guys working with the dao working with the culture building it and you mentioned propagating earlier man yeah we're growing you know i'm out here with the trees we got that everything is growing but it's springtime it's summertime it's lush it's you know people are popping off on all these new ideas all this crypto that's growing around us so uh it's good to be here thank you oh we're happy you're here man um you have quite the background um and that's kind of my first intro to you is hearing like
hey first and foremost you guys should take me seriously because i i am these things and i have done these things and now i'm trying to deal with crypto so why don't you give us a little bit of that background and give the bank station uh some color into your life yeah sure uh yeah so i started in design when i was really young i actually wanted to grow up and be a cartoonist i like garfield he was more edgy than snoopy ended up making my own clothing line while i was in high school and in a small town in missouri and i kind of like had a mid-life crisis when i was 20. you know i realized like if i stay here i'm not going to be able to do the dreams that i want to do and so that actually ended up leading me all the way
out to los angeles where the fashion institute of design and merchandising and there i mailed majored in apparel manufacturing management ended up getting student of the year for that work and while there researched fashion and technology and like you know at the time there was this really cool project by phillips called luma live and they were doing leds on uh on clothing so if you could imagine our clothing evolving to having like you know wearable art that moves around it's programmable and like i i saw this uh in like 2007 and it's still coming guys like i i don't i don't think people know like like this it's it's still just getting started in
this world so uh and and it's great to have like like there's so much resonance with bankless and this uh merging of creativity technology and and creative expression and culture so um finding lots of resonance here and uh yeah if you'd like here i'll uh i'll do a screen share some of the works yeah and talk about like what you did right after fit them yeah that'd be dope yeah and uh just for for context for the bankless listeners we are talking all about culture today and so sinjin he's a designer uh and while we typically talk about crypto assets uh you know decentralized money internet money capital assets uh defy tokens you know exchanges all these financial terms what
we want to do ultimately with crypto as an industry and as a technology is change the world we want to change the world and it starts with technology and it starts with money but if crypto doesn't change culture and it doesn't change how we act uh amongst ourselves and literally at some point in time the clothes that we wear then we have then we won't actually change anything and so the the bullish case for crypto is that a new financial paradigm exists but the really the the the the end result that i'm focused on is how do we change how do we change the people in the way that we engage with each other uh and so that's why we've brought on uh sinjin out of the bankless dow to to you know just tackle the apparel side of things and the design side of things and so uh sinjin before
we go into what you are equipping us out of the bankless style talk us a little bit more about your work history and what you have designed in the past yeah so i want to share this with you when i was at fitm we did uh some some research into this uh this philips luma live technology and so this is kind of what it is you can see this on youtube and like imagine this evolved with you know much more modern technology and soft fabrics and it's totally washable and um so yeah so that that's kind of like that's what i've been playing around with uh you know and and we've uh we're going to be doing some really cool stuff so i also started working with a screen
printer to understand like how uh graphics work on clothing how to how does you know what what are all the things that we can do what are the limitations i worked for this awesome company for many years called life clothing in los angeles and you know we did we did all kinds of things uh sublimations uh collections and lots of work for uh buckle topshop you know christmas all your all your like you know halloween costumes all the time thankless christmas sweater that's dope um yeah so logos you know all kinds of graphics and uh women's men's uh you know really paying attention to what's the pulse of the
culture as large and how do we make uh meme-worthy t-shirt graphics apparel clothing that speaks to what is resonating with people and this one right here i want to highlight this one space flag this is what i did for urban outfitters and this was a top seller for a couple summers and even at one point we had like uh dj tiesto was like wearing that one and i would go out on the streets and i could see random people wearing it you know that i didn't even know um so yeah there he is he's like djing with it um and so so like this is what i'm thinking too you know for for bankless you know
what what can we do that is this like you know next level uh designs that you can wear that you that resonate with the culture you know so this is this is what we're thinking about and and what's great too working with bankless is like it's not only myself we have you know a mind and hearts of so many people that are on the same and ready to create ready to collaborate and uh this this was also another one here that i did for uh a company called beta brand so the idea here was to do a uh uh it's called chalkboard genius and i took like the ten formulations the most popular formulations of science and put them on a repeating pattern and we made a button-up print with this and i
actually seriously got out a chalkboard and i literally you know did every one of those in a chalkboard so this is like the level i just want to show like the level of quality of what we're trying to do here we're not just trying to like open up canva and take an icon and you know throw it on there and that's the end of the day that's what i did for the bangla shirt bro don't hate the bakeless box love is sick though yeah i appreciate that sinjin thank you so much man yeah i'll tell you what back here yeah i'll tell you what guys when i saw sinjin's work for the first time um and what he's doing for urban outfitters tilly's buckle um i was like hey this is the bridge we need to cross right now he was talking about can we throw an nft on the like inside
the jeans and stuff like that and i was like hey let's get this guy in the freaking discord right now um he's talking about the right stuff so when i when i hear sinjin talking about culture in general um i like the idea that he's just using apparel as a vector as a vehicle to kind of propagate the cultures that he's working with so him jumping into the bankless cohort um that's where you guys are that are in the dow that have seen the designs that sinjin is working on and that we're releasing today by the way um they're different they're huge they're pushing the boundaries they're helping people understand crypto in a different way um so thank you for that sinjin i think is dave what do you think about showing the uh the shirt that we're dropping today uh
first let's get into a conversation around the intersection of crypto values and crypto tools and uh apparel in the the you know trad fi apparel if you will or legacy apparel um i think both of you are pretty privy to um some of the problems i would say about the legacy apparel world which we are now trying to infiltrate as a community um and so michael maybe maybe you could tease engine up as to what we are trying to fix in the world of apparel yeah good question or a good point so um we hate h m we hate forever 21. uh fast fashion is is clothes that are ruining the environment this does not go with our eth2 uh clean um you know philosophy in in work in the world so
you know as far as people aligning ourselves with that vision trying to do apparel that's why syngen's helping us figure out okay what's the most sustainable way to make this stuff happen um in ways that aren't creating a lot of waste right so first and foremost i'll let sinjin talk to some of this he's helping articulate some of our ethos around you know printing on demand um people are talking about the quality of the bankless box logo that they're just receiving now listen you're he's about to talk to you guys this is not the guy putting guildens on your back right now okay we are working hard to try and find the the best quality stuff um and we're scaling up put it that way and so for for our listeners can you define fast fashion as well because i think that does a really good job of
illustrating what the problem really is i'll i'll let the fitting guy do that go ahead cindy yeah thank you uh and i'm really glad that you're speaking to this i read your first post about uh bankless apparel and uh this was i think it was around the time i sent my first video over to you and i was really impressed by your your articulation of this issue and you know even even noticing it because a lot of people don't you know a lot of people are just trying to make a much you know items and money as fast as possible without really thinking of the the long-term consequences and we uh you know we're actually trying to do something next level that is sustainable that is long-term and um so with fast fashion yeah fast fashion you could call
it uh the race to the bottom it's really like the cheapest price and like the lowest quality you can get away with and charge the most for and this has been an ongoing thing like there's also like been the people are owning and purchasing a higher number of clothing items per year than ever if you go back to like the 1920s 30s 40s people bought less clothing items but they actually spent more money on them compared to their overall budget because they lasted longer you know it's fine to wear that same awesome winter coat for six years uh because it's quality and that's like things were made to last and we've gotten away from that because it's all about it's called neomania this this like oh
it's new so it's better that's not always the case like new isn't always better and um so so we're we're trying to actually speak to that and and like one thing that can be sustainable is making something really high quality you know regardless of whether it's like organic or polyester or recycled polyester whatever like if you take that same item you care for it and you treasure it and you know you wear it multiple times over years that is like that's way more sustainable than buying you know a new organic shirt every time you put one on you know what i mean like so um i i really you know like a lot of people don't catch that that that sustainability is also like the quality it's not even sometimes it's not even
about the organic or you know what it's made of but it's like you know or it's like taking your jeans and you don't have to wash them every time you know so uh but but we're trying to create something that's quality long-lasting long-term and fast fashion is like it's really the opposite of that and how how do you think that um of all of which you just mentioned about fast fashion how does that go along with your ethos as a designer um and i think we got a little bit of when i first met you with david um just speaking about your ethos as a designer to produce unique quality peril that is not wasteful yeah and i think that comes to really making something that resonates that hits that you treasure and that you want to keep and you know rep and wear many
times um you know that's and and that's like kind of the north star that i try to aim for um and and yeah this this is a very important point there's much to to evolve on this topic um i used to also volunteer with a company uh organization beyond the label and if you guys ever if you're interested in this topic watch the documentary true cost and they'd spell all this out and it's like a whole world in front of your eyes that you don't even know exists with fashion but you never see it the same after that so um you know we're trying to solve a lot of things with crypto and and it's dna and and like it should be part of everything that we do and so that's why
it's in you know the apparel that we're doing that's awesome yeah let's talk about the the overlap between crypto scarcity and the apparel that we're producing bitcoiners are actually uh i gotta give credit where credit do is credit is due bitcoiners are really tapped into this conversation uh they talk about uh long-term time horizons um having low time preference and and as in it's basically another way of saying delayed gratification right but uh they they also talk about the way that bitcoin dematerializes a lot of the value in the world because when you have scarce scarcity when you have hard money that's hard to print all of a sudden you have a lot more of incentive to hold on to your money which means that you are it's it's
more difficult to you know part with your money because you have harder money which means that if you are buying something you are buying something that you definitely absolutely want because you are partying with your bitcoins to get it and it's not the same as partying with your dollars because a dollar today is not the same thing as a dollar tomorrow uh and so the the very cerebral the very brainy uh type of of thought or or you know any of the bitcoiners are really good at this they will they will connect the money printer the printing of 29 of all us dollars came out in 2020 and they will connect that to um fast food fast fashion just what they call fiat goods like goods that you know you uh that was made in china and it breaks after three
uses um the the jury you know this is a very like hard thing to to prove is there an actual connection here but i'm 100 like uh behind this idea that like poor quality money generates poor quality goods in a society and that's how cryptoculture and the value of and of just appreciating scarcity as a part of your life can actually change the way that you live um sinjin anything you want to add to that yeah that's a great point um and i think that goes back to to how fashion before it was fast fashion it was more scarce there were less items made but they were higher quality um and and you know
just having having a closet with more items but lower quality you know it creates more more trash to create you're spending more money um and you're getting less in the end you know because you can't wear that item multiple times you can't pass it on you can't recycle it the same way um yeah and i and i think that's a point in the uh apparel sustainability that doesn't get a lot of focus but it's it's really vital and i think it's it's growing we're figuring it out more so um thanks for bringing that up it reminds me of you know this intersection excuse me reminds me of unisocks yeah like this is this is um crypto
users native crypto users clueing into the idea that they're scared there's apparel uh obviously drawn in by the fact that there's a token behind it and a bonding curve but similar ideas right where i'm trying to tap in me singing david here we're trying to tap in to what's going on there like people want to wrap this stuff i mean think about like supreme if you're listening right now you understand the street where streetwear world sneakers supreme um that's artificial scarcity right like they only want to release so many so that the resale price goes up so that you know um so that they have a brand around scarcity right that's not necessarily what we're trying to do right we're you know by you'll see when we talk about the droplet today we don't want everything to be super
available because you know we're all on this philosophy this ethos of valuing scarcity but also we want to like we said we want to propagate culture right so there's a lever to pull where maybe some of the shirts that we release are um open to everybody but some of them are a little bit more um scarce and then people will seek those out that are uh interested in those so i think there's a if you're thinking about your stocks if you think about the bitcoin hackie sack even crypto punks cross over with some of the merch that they have or wearing your own board ape on your chest that stuff is right here where we're talking about we're just getting started on the bank list out of it too and as somebody who saw multiple people wearing uniswap socks at bitcoin miami uh it was
it was hot like everyone knew who was wearing the uni-swap socks right and so if you actually add scarcity into your apparel you actually open up a complete design space of just to some degree like gossip or just like chit chat or just open conversation about like yo that person's wearing uni socks like those those are 60 000 socks right there like what the hell's going on [Laughter] yes it's pretty it's it's a flex too right if and also if you see me wearing my bankless shirt outside you're you're like bro right and then we want more of that as we get to the 10th 12th 20th drop there's gonna be a lot of that going on right or oh he's wearing the defiant shirt even just give a shout out to
whoever it is it doesn't even need to just be bankless right like i want to see more of that on the street just like people who wear supreme or sneakers they do that with each other like oh yeah or even a rolex or you got a rolex same vibe let's put that into the stuff that we're putting on our backs which is also scarce real estate itself right absolutely all right so should we actually go right into exactly what we are dropping today because if we haven't said this enough we are actually dropping apparel today and so there is a drop of three units going out uh i've already bought mine because the bankless dow gets early access to this michael can you uh share with us a little bit about these sale details oh dude i'd like to do that right now let me share my screen
stand by take a look guys paying homage to cypherfunk history um off the bat i if you're thinking right now about the box logo t-shirt that you saw saw me wear bought saw somebody else buy that's fire that's iconic right we did no cap release on that we sold hundreds of units of it um and i'm happy about that i want people to be able to have that if you're wondering first and foremost yo mike why was that ninety dollars like i got the shirt it's it's a great shirt but why did you i don't know if it's ninety dollars with the shirt hey it's not about ninety dollars with the shirt it's about the fact that you want that you are now part of that iconic
piece of history that we have and only a couple hundred people a few hundred people have that with them think about that as i show you what we're doing here i'm not asking every single person to buy these things but if it's interesting interesting to you you better do it because there's only a few of them so first and foremost we have the cypher funk shirt i'm gonna let sinjan give some color here but i'm gonna quickly show you the three things we're dropping and we're gonna do this once a month if you remember last month we did the box logo shirt thank you for everybody who got one and i'm sure you're stoked about it this time we're doing three completely different things two of them are capped one of them's open so everybody will have a chance to get one of them but the other one you
better act fast i'm about to press publish on this thing during this during this live stream right so first and foremost is this uh cypher funk shirt which pays homage to all of our um founding fathers and and folks for those of us that listen to the uh before bitcoin podcast that we did about two months ago uh where i read the before bitcoin series from peter pan this was largely inspiration out of uh that series from uh from peter pan who i also considered this is a sinjin original sorry original sinjin um i'll let him give some color there you're going to get a floppy disk with this thing what you're going to get a floppy disk with this thing i'm not going to tell you what's on that thing let's engine do it
all right so cypher funk shirt cyber punk shirt with the with the floppy disk bruh check check this check this tapestry i wish i could zoom this this is a velvet tapestry i have a picture of the actual thing but just imagine this being a velvet feeling tapestry can go in your wall it can go on your couch your body wherever you're feeling like you need to put this tapestry it's very soft okay so this tape is going out very limited and then the t-shirt i'm wearing right now this bankless tattoo that's look at the look at that design dude pretty fire with the with the lightning bolt the little bang situation hit the back hit the front long sleeve so year round especially if you live in
socal and want to wear the oakley's with it all right sinjin why don't you tell us a little bit about the the cypherpuncture yeah the cypherpunks like david said totally uh inspired by the people who created the technology that's at the foundation of blockchain that we use every single day and this is uh this is our our call our our kind of like flag that we're planning saying like look we're about culture like we are doing bankless uh logos you know bankless inspired designs but we're also doing designs for the whole culture and uh this this drop right here this design cypherpunks these guys helmet diffie merkel finney cohen gilmore chomp
uh i highly recommend to listen to that podcast day where david read the peter pan article read the peter pan article we've got a link to it there um i mean that could be like an entire hollywood movie right there just the story of how this stuff is made and you know these cypherpunks like they went up against the us government to really stand and say look we want the public have access to these encryption technologies and the you know the public key encryptions that we use today at the root of all blockchains is is made possible by these guys so we can't pay enough respect you know they and they always say like you know we stand on the
shoulders of giants and like these are the giants that that we're standing on um and tell us about the floppy disk tell us this floppy disk is actually the original pgp software that uh that they used like they had secret meetings and they'd all have this floppy disk like handed out and it would have this pgp software and uh it was this encryption software and um this is what we're literally taking floppy disks and we're going to send them out to you if you purchase this shirt it's going to have pgp on it i swear if you get a usb floppy reader which you can get online get one pop this in get it ms-dos
emulator and you're going to be able to pull it up on your computer yeah this is sinjin guys i told you we i ain't putting gildans on your back this is the guy i got breaking shirts for us and we're so excited thank you look he even had the bankless down on that joint bankless dial you've seen this i hope you're buying this right now you guys are getting stuff you're part of the bank was now you have the early you have the early links why don't you tell us more about this you zoom in on those uh yeah if you zoom in on the on the design on the numbers those codes there that's going to be yeah those are actually public key encryptions taken from old cypherpunk uh emails so they've released they have they have
docs where they've recorded like the first years of uh the back like emails going back and forth about developing this technology and that those those numbers are not just random they're actually taken from those original emails from the 90s thank you sinjin thank you for doing that on the on the shirt we appreciate that you guys talking about gildan in the discord right now this don't buy it then somebody else i swear to god somebody else gonna buy this this is great i appreciate this engine this is dope um let's look at this tapestry real quick i told you i'd have the image you can see the velvet situation going on right i think you guys you're gonna want this on your bag this is by twisted vacancy twisted vacancy great work thank you so much for this super dope um this
is a huge wall tapestry okay um and then last but not least oh i caught a link that i need to fix um but right here is this bankless tattoo long sleeve situation it's on a heavier shirt than the one i'm wearing y'all like we we got a bunch of samples in for meta factory wanted to make sure it all felt good on on every part of the body um this one we're asking for heavier items more premium feeling things so this is going to be available for everybody today after i press publish on this thing awesome guys and so the reason why we are talking about this in addition to getting into the details of what
bankless dow has been up to um uh we want to also talk about what it's like to work for a doubt because this is coming out of the bankless dow and so uh sinjin maybe you can tell us a little bit about your experiences uh your experience being somebody a part of a bank list out and working with the dow to to produce some of these apparel also um if people don't know this apparel is being uh worked in collaboration with bankless dow and meta factory dial which is a subject i also want to get into what's it been like to be a dow to dow like collaborate a collaboration environment but but first engine um i think people want to know what it's like to work for a dow can you kind of share your experiences with that yeah uh i was thinking about this like
what my experience was like and i remember first coming in and like realizing i've never experienced anything like this is literally like a beehive i don't know like there's all this chaos there's things going on every channel and like all this like bubbling action creativity ideas and like honestly at first like for me it was a little like like i was like standing you know like almost nauseous because like there was so much but once i started to like tune into it i could figure out like the potentials here are unlimited really uh it's been cool because like i've been able to talk about my ideas that i want to do people listen uh people are like taking initiative like we we're really in there just
creating whatever we want really whatever ideas are best is what wins it's like a real meritocracy um and so yeah from the beginning we started with uh when i joined um there was much more like openness kind of like chaos and it's become like more organized into different projects there's some really awesome uh nft projects going on uh and this apparel with meta factory working with their dow things get done and move really quick there's like multiple eyeballs on things multiple ideas so um i could rap on that for a while it's like there's there's there's a lot to speak about it's like trying to talk about a 4d object and you only have 3d words
that's an interesting way to put it that's definitely been my experience as well is that the the dow world seems to be people think that decentralization is slow and it is right like bitcoin is a slow um a slow way to send money around it takes you only have so much block space the the through line of decentralization is things slow down but what's really been amazing for me is in the in the dow with like the segregation of talent into different buckets some things move really really fast like we got a guy to make a a just a design for an interim period between a live stream just a 20-second graphic in five hours right uh and that's going to come for the stanford dow summit that is coming on the bankless stream on the
30th next week so stay tuned for that um and then also as well uh the meta working with meta factory dao bankless dow couldn't produce this stuff without meta factory dao and so there's a lot of dow to dao collaboration that that is adding new value into this world and and we we as bankless dow feel very aligned with meta factory dao because they are also directly going after culture and saying hey crypto's tight and we're going to change the world of culture yep yep they want to put nfts in your jeans guys and you know what's cool we had uh this twisted vacancy the whoever did the the artist who did the velvet tapestry design that you all saw
that artist came through us through meta factory so that was another dow like hey we have this talent over here someone made this for you guys boom looks like it's a drop for us so are you a designer that uh are you listening to this right now bank was listening there and your designer and you can do something like and you don't really you're just learning about crypto and you're like well i don't know how my skills work with the crypto world i don't really know how to make smart contracts or anything are you seeing what we're doing right here like we need you too like you can find a spot at any of these any of these protocols that you like they want this too we want this to obviously we're we're doing it super hard right here at the dao so yeah i want you to if you're
listening to this and you have skill sets especially design you make pixel art you make art you paint let's let's figure out a way to make it happen right let's propagate the culture together yeah this is about a movement this is about creating a culture and that's everybody and you know the finance part is one piece of it i literally just did my first unit swap just like last month and i'm still like learning so much so you know yeah if you're a designer you feel like you want to contribute to this jump in we we we have a space for you we can we'll create something together that hasn't been created before all right guys that and that was the apparel side of the show for and we didn't uh name it but all of the uh the
revenue from the apparel shows that actually goes to a bankless dow we're a big fan of on-chain cash flows uh and then there's also token sharing between meta factory and bankless dow we get the robot token so dow to dow token swaps absolutely crazy we're on the absolute frontier of what's going on here uh so sinjin thank you for coming on and showing us how you are going to outfit the bankless nation and the crypto industry at large with some dope swag that really changes the way that the world approaches apparel um guys we are going to be back with the second half of the show where michael wong and i debut something brand new on the bankless show but first before we get there a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible
bankless is proud to be supported by unit swap uniswap is a new paradigm in asset exchange infrastructure instead of a cumbersome order book system where trades are matched with other humans uniswap is an autonomous piece of software on ethereum which is what ryan and i call a money robot 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 the uni-swap 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 dows 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 a uni grant at unigrants.org and help steer unit swap in the direction that you think it should go that's exactly what we did to get uniswop to be a sponsor for bankless and you can do the same for your project thank you uniswap for sponsoring bankless gemini is the world's most trusted cryptocurrency exchange i've been a customer of gemiini since i first got into crypto in 2017 and it's been my main exchange of choice to make my crypto buys and sells gemini is available in all 50 states and in over
50 countries worldwide and on gemini there are markets for over 30 various different crypto assets including many of the hot defy tokens and it's one of the few exchanges that has liquid dye markets gemini just launched their earn program where you can earn up to 7.4 interest on 26 various crypto assets if you're tired of paying fees and defy or you don't want to worry about defy exploits but you still want to earn interest on your crypto assets gemini earn is the product for you another product i'm stoked to get my hands on is the gemini crypto back credit card which gives you three percent cash back on all of your purchases but paid to you in your preferred crypto asset when i get my gemini credit card i'm going to make sure that i get my cash back in east so
whenever i buy something i get a little bit of eth bonus back to me at the same time you can open up a free account in under three minutes at gemiini.com go bank list and if you trade more than a hundred dollars within the first 30 days after sign up you'll be gifted a free 15 bitcoin bonus check them out at gemiini.com go bankless all right guys we are back in the second half of the show where we have something brand new out of the bankless ecosystem uh but before we specifically go into it we know that out of bank list we produce an absolute mountain of content sometimes it's even hard for me to keep up with the defiant produces content the block write articles coin desks write articles you know if you want to get
ahead and stay ahead in this industry to some degree you have to consume as much content as possible people actually like inform themselves and consider content work in this space where if you are not listening to podcasts if you're not reading articles you're actually falling behind and you know to some degree that that's actually a really interesting thing about this industry is that you know we are a industry of of blogs articles in in podcasts and youtube videos um but that's also i can imagine extremely tiring right how and we don't really have it as an industry have a way to unwind um we bankless is very proud to be an informational leader in this space but it's also time to expand crypto content
onto new frontiers in the same way that we are changing the game of apparel or at least we're trying to we also want to change the game of what crypto content is like cryptoculture is being established under our very noses and it's time to produce content that allows the crypto community to turn off relax and be entertained and so banklish bankless is not only on a mission to inform you everything you need to know about you know ethereum bitcoin and defy but we are also on a mission to establish crypto culture and we are doing that with a brand new show michael wong what is this brand new show hey everybody the show is called top signal top signal the newest show crypto comedy
show variety show from bankless it's an experimental show though i just want to make that clear it's experimental um and i want to define it once again it's it's a variety comedy show in the style of like jimmy fallon uh sportsnation if you remember that show um where we're gonna bring on the top crypto personalities uh on stage and allow them to kind of take off their builder hat and put on their [ __ ] posting hat for everybody to enjoy um it's it's it's when i say variety that's kind of what i want people to think about i want people to think about there being different types of segments first and foremost there's there's no fact checking on the show we me and david we're not gonna be fact
checking on the show yes we're gonna have sponsors and sorry sponsors thank you sponsors but we're not gonna be fact checking this is about not about alpha more than it's about talking about crypto it's it's where we're gonna go you ever seen ryan sean adams cope on state of nation no he might do it on stop signal though he might do it on top we're going to talk about the state of our zapper who knows what's going on we'll talk about some of the stuff we're going over uh but i want to talk about why this is important i don't think there's a place and you know this bankless listener there's no place for us other than the friday live stream with sas crack open a beer to kind of like you know lean back i don't want to talk about what's what's getting uh
um pushed next on the on the sushi swap road map but i do want to see ox maki do some do some funny computer games and i think we all would like to commentate on that so that's the idea of top signal you know culture's our priority not the markets we're trying to engage with the with a cast of special guests people that you all love especially from crypto twitter uh in an ever-changing variety of sketches and i think that this is really going to help people understand there's more to co there's more of this crypto thing especially on the youtube side there's more to this crypto thing than just a bunch of dudes trying to make money toxic energy i mean it's not going to be not toxic but it's going to be fun it's not going to be about money so that's top sim guys i hope you i hope
you uh you want to come tune in if you are on crypto twitter or you are inside of discords in my opinion uh we are really a really funny industry or at least maybe i'm just patting myself on the back as part of this industry and the content producer but no i think we have some of the best jokes in the absolute industry a lot of it is on crypto twitter and we want to put some of those jokes into a youtube forum into a a comedy and entertainment focused show so we have little bits and gags lined up we uh one of my favorite gags that i think we're going to get into is pitch to me a 2017 ico uh and michael wong and myself as the drew carey of the show we shall award points or not to the the best 2017 ico pitches we also have
some some you know one-off special shows coming coming up as well we are talking with alexandre botes the chess streamer who is now producing ethereum content and we're going to see if we can rally the four best chess players in the crypto world to take on alexandra who's absolutely going to wipe the board with us but it'll be fun every step of the way we also have trivia lined up and ready to go uh and uh this is a way to actually play trivia on your phones with an app and actually play trivia on the actual stream it's going to be actually fantastic but this is the cool thing is uh this is another product out of the bankless dao is the bankless dao is going to get access to the zoom webinar and so the
the link will go into the bankless dao so if you are a dow member you get to be a part of the audience and so when we call on the audience for inputs or just for prompts or or participating in trivia that's going to be a a part of the bankless dow so dow members get access to the stands to the audience and get to direct some of the direction of these shows yeah let me add some color to that one um david and i were thinking about how can we get down involved um and he had this brilliant idea of like giving the dow the front row seat in the web in the zoom webinar room that's the only comment section we're going to be you know involved with pretty much i know a lot of you are going to be chirping in the twitter comments and the
youtube comments i'm laser focused on dow stuff so if you are a dow member we're trying to create more value for the dow um just being part of the dow right not only for the for the for all the revenue that's going to help fund the dow treasury from the apparel side but also creating clout around the membership around being a dao uh member um by having a front row shoot the top signal it's gonna be super fun and it'll be the number one show to be on uh in the audience of at least in crypto in the crypto land that's for sure let me hey dave should i introduce myself real quick just i don't think people know who i am um my name is michael wong you might have seen me on twitter probably not um i'm obviously friends with david here um my claim the famous i hired
david into crypto old man style um i uh this wasn't this is back in 2017. um and that's how david and i uh came to be friends and came to be working in crypto it was at an ico firm and david was the only one who was just talking about ethereum the entire time kept his eyes on the prize and thereby help me figure that out too so thanks david um i've been in the game for as long as a lot of you um shorter than longer than some of you uh but i you have never heard me talk about crypto on this podcast but you're gonna help you're gonna hear me talk about it on on top signal um we're going to have fun though i'm going to have fun obviously if you can't feel my vibe right now i'm trying to have fun um i'm not trying to get bogged
down um in market stuff on a friday night i don't think you are either so that's the kind of vibe that we're bringing david said he's trying to play chess with alexander botez i'm trying to play like uh you know uh tic-tac-toe with vitalik you know i'm saying that that's kind of vibe where are you going to see that happen other than top singing that's the place right let me give you another example david's talking about crypto comfort food on on top on top signal this is stuff that's easy to take in again easy to cope with easy to have fun with um imagine imagine a veteran police sketcher okay for a moment imagine a veteran police sketcher 25 years in the force drawn perps all right we're going to bring dude on
and we're going to have him draw your favorite anon crypto twitters uh accounts we're going to have them draw dj spartan bro just figure out who dj spartan is and we're going to leave a little bit breadcrumbs of tweets all over the place we're going to take get a police uh sketcher to figure this out who this guy is he's going to he's going to be so shocked by how accurate it is that he's gonna come live on top signal to corroborate it for us that's the vibe that's the top signal vibe come watch it we got our first show almost lined up and making sure that i got the the schedule down but we have kevin owaki anthony cesano and defy dad coming a week from today tuesday night uh for the first ever top signal show we are going to generate a
fantastic agenda where the bits are going to come hard and fast and they're going to be funny uh and then we are also working with uh ledger crypto bobby and udi wertheimer uh is trying to corral those boys into another show as well uh it's going it's going to be a good time uh and i i'm actually really stoked for trivia personally i have 40 questions 40 trivia questions hard questions not easy questions and we're going to figure out how to source a prize for the winner of the trivia game again only accessible if you are a bankless dow member because that trivia room is going to fill up very fast there's only 50 slots i think there's 300 slots in the zoom but 50 slots in the trivia yeah it's gonna be first come first serve for dow members
only yeah see guys who knows what's gonna happen next week that's that's what you should come to feel about with top signal like holy moly that was wild style i just watched hayden adams do some crazy stuff on top signal what's gonna happen next week that's the vibe content no matter the weather oh that's that's a great way to put it and if we do our job we can host an environment where it took us forever to get hayden adams on and we have absolutely zero conversations with him coming on top signal so do you know that but it took us forever to get him on bank list but what happens when the top signal vibe is just like no you don't have to come as hayden adams the founder of uniswap you come as hayden adams the the ship poster on on crypto twitter yeah dude
no alpha hey i don't i don't want the alpha bro like okay sure give me the alpha but i'd rather see you acting a fool for everybody because we're having fun that's the jimmy fallon vibe right somebody will come on jimmy fallon or whatever the late night vibe is have fun and then the last thing they'll do is hey guys like you know we're shipping xyz or my new movie right so that's the vibe of top signal um you don't need to be freaking 300 iq to understand this this stuff either you know i mean you don't need a debrief episode hopefully there's no debrief episodes about this stuff you know what i'm saying so yeah that's that's hopefully the vibe is connoting over the over the mic we're gonna open up with the same intro every single time there is no fact checking on
a top signal everything is a superposition between a ship post psyops a factual statement just deadlines or the world's greatest alpha we don't know it could be all of those things at once uh that's not the point and so you won't you do not come to top signal to find out what to invest in you come to time top signal to turn turn off and chillax and have a good time because crypto is hilarious we just need fine to find ways to broadcast that hilarious hilarious city that's not a word i'm not saying hayden adams is not going to come on to announce a v4 i'm that's just it could happen but you're not coming on to find out if that's happening or not and i think this is definitely a time in
the market where people kind of need this content we are going through i think people's a large number of people's very first uh emotional roller coaster when it comes to financial markets yeah mike i i remember you and i went through our first uh you know episode of pain when uh ether dropped from fourteen hundred dollars down to six hundred and sixty dollars and i'm like guys i'm going all in uh and then this was in 2018 and then the next stop for ether was eighty dollars um i do not at all think that we are repeating that in any way shape or form i think just the market right now really wants to take people for a ride uh and so i think people could use some content that you know still allows them to talk about their favorite subject which is of course
crypto but again it allows them to relax and turn the charts off and turn top signal on yeah it's it's hard to be down 60 percent and try and learn about um my inner attractable value i get it guys i get it so let's i've been there so let's try and figure something else out i wanna i want i want you to find out what uh hayden adams eats for lunch i'm just gonna stop using his name but i'll stop invoking him but listen guys it's gonna be good time i i want to go through old facebook photos and tag photos of metallics facebook like i'm gonna help us figure that out we'll find out if you wanna if you wanna see what's in between the lines of crypto in between the charts and what goes on past that kind of stuff come watch top
signal we'll figure it out and who knows maybe some good insights do actually come out of talk signal no guarantees um but uh the show is called top signal called top signal for a reason absolutely um let's see uh michael wong anything you else you wanted to share about top single shall we wrap this up yeah i know i'm excited for you guys to uh thank you for for having me on to talk about it um you guys got to see this show um you got to be inside of the webinar uh room if you can uh figure out how to get part of the dow if not um but yeah i'm so thankful for the opportunity and excited about top signal come join us and this this show is an experiment we are kind of flying by the seat of our pants we have our sponsors are really really good
ideas uh but uh we'll see how they actually land uh but i also think there's a ton of talent in this space uh kevin uh um there's a member out of the uh uni-swap uh unit swap dal that hit us up and say hey i used to do stand-up in a previous life so please bring me on so we got we got people like that uh once again invoking hayden adams hayden adams uh is a rapper first and foremost uh if we can get hidden atoms to wrap on top signal i will call it a like i will be freestyle quite a bit i will freestyle with hayden adams i will do whatever he can beat me eminem style i'll be the other guy um however you want to get it done hayden i'm excited well it's a tall show we'll have a talent show one week bro
come on and do you do your silly little talent well i want to see someone knit something live on tops and what's happening you know i mean so thank you for the idea that's a good one i think you guys are already getting a little bit of a taste as to what this show will look like what happens when ryan is out for the week we go rogue and we launch a new show like i said ryan will be back next week for next week's state of the nation but uh i think people kind of wanted to uh get a different vibe because the market is giving us a different vibe right now and so we also want to give a different vibe to the listeners of bankless as well yeah it's gonna be fun um and it's been it's been a crazy month and i'm happy
you're still listening and with us um there's a lot more to come let's let's let's buckle down and learn some learn some stuff all right bankless nation that is it for the show today as always ether is risky crypto is risky d5 is risky top signal hopefully it's funny it's very very risky though very risky you could lose we you could lose what you put in we are headed west we are on the frontier it isn't for everyone but we are glad you are with us on the bankless journey thanks a lot get a hardware wallet right now to develop your crypto investing skills and learn how to free yourself from banks and gain your financial independence we recommend
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